More Somali fraud in Minneapolis, Democrats have always been at war with Hamas, the Caspian Sea is no longer safe for Russian assets, Texas tops the U-Haul destination list (again), MST3K gets sold, and Scott Adams departs this simulation.
FA phase: “Somali Suitcase Stash: Feds say $130 million moved from Ohio airport to Minnesota on way overseas.”
Federal agents investigating a Somali immigrant operation that moved massive amounts of cash in suitcases from the Minneapolis airport to overseas have uncovered a new leg of the courier journey: the Columbus, Ohio airport.
Homeland Security Department officials told Just the News that Transportation Security Administration officers tracked and flagged about $136 million in bulk cash in outbound luggage at the passenger checkpoints at John Glenn Columbus International Airport since November 2023.
The cash movements were made by U.S. citizens of Somali origin who flew out of the Columbus airport en route to either the airports in Minneapolis or Atlanta, and the couriers always declared the cash as legally required on documents, officials said.
“Typically, when they go to Minneapolis, they drop off the cash and then a subsequent courier travels abroad from Minneapolis to Dubai through Amsterdam,” one official familiar with the investigation told Just the News on Tuesday, speaking only on condition of anonymity.
The officials said they appear to have uncovered a massive cash movement operation that gathered money from multiple Somali immigrant communities in the West, Midwest and South that eventually brought luggage filled with currency to Minneapolis for flights overseas.
Just the News reported exclusively last week that TSA detected nearly $700 million in cash in luggage leaving the Minneapolis airport in 2024 and 2025, frequently headed on a route to Amsterdam and then Dubai where U.S. officials lost the tracking. The TSA agents routinely alerted investigators during the Biden years, but there was little interest in probing the money movements further until President Donald Trump took office last year.
Find Out phase beginning: “Congress moving quickly to investigate cash-in-luggage exodus from U.S. airports. Sen. Rand Paul also revealed that federal agents are probing the massive cash transfers that move through a network centered in the Minneapolis airport.”
Federal agents investigating a Somali immigrant operation that moved massive amounts of cash in suitcases from the Minneapolis airport to overseas have uncovered a new leg of the courier journey: the Columbus, Ohio airport.
Homeland Security Department officials told Just the News that Transportation Security Administration officers tracked and flagged about $136 million in bulk cash in outbound luggage at the passenger checkpoints at John Glenn Columbus International Airport since November 2023.
The cash movements were made by U.S. citizens of Somali origin who flew out of the Columbus airport en route to either the airports in Minneapolis or Atlanta, and the couriers always declared the cash as legally required on documents, officials said.
“Typically, when they go to Minneapolis, they drop off the cash and then a subsequent courier travels abroad from Minneapolis to Dubai through Amsterdam,” one official familiar with the investigation told Just the News on Tuesday, speaking only on condition of anonymity.
The officials said they appear to have uncovered a massive cash movement operation that gathered money from multiple Somali immigrant communities in the West, Midwest and South that eventually brought luggage filled with currency to Minneapolis for flights overseas.
And the fraud isn’t limited to Minnesota: “Two scammers plead guilty to $68M Brooklyn adult day care fraud scheme.”
Two Brooklyn scammers pleaded guilty on Thursday to defrauding a whopping $68 million from the state’s controversial Medicaid home care program by paying health care kickbacks for services they didn’t provide at three Big Apple businesses.
Manal Wasef and Elaine Antao, both 46, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit health care fraud for referring Medicaid recipients to two Brooklyn social adult day cares and a home health company in exchange for illegal kickbacks and bribes, the US Department of Justice announced on Thursday.
The latest iteration of the Democratic Party’s color-revolution-style operation was on full display in recent days as tensions erupted following the fatal shooting of a left-wing activist by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent during a federal enforcement sweep in Minnesota. This incident demonstrates that the protest industrial complex, funded by left-wing billionaires, has been on standby, waiting for a catalyzing event to ignite mass mobilization.
MSM, the Democratic Party, and left-wing nonprofits are working hard to manufacture another ‘George Floyd’-type protest or riot by omitting key context about the woman shot and killed by an ICE agent. They conveniently left out her social justice “warrior” role in Minneapolis, including her reported involvement with “ICE Watch” and other operations to disrupt ICE raids in the sanctuary city. These details matter because MSM attempted to manufacture an outrage news cycle, while nonprofits create artificial multi-city protests aimed at shifting public opinion on ICE operations nationwide.
More find out: “Trump Threatens To Invoke Insurrection Act As Left-Wing Chaos In Minneapolis Spreads.”
This is a good question: “Why did all the Dems suddenly become anti-Hamas over the weekend?”
Something very weird happened with the Democrats this past weekend.
I first noticed when I saw this post on X from Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois which was, let’s just say, not exactly subtle.
Apropos of apparently nothing, we’re getting a Shabbat Shalom from Pritzker on a random Friday night. That by itself that would be odd, but whatever.
A whole lot of Democrats followed suit in their 180:
Videos like that are a dime a dozen. If you’ve followed the anti-Israel campus protests over the past 2 years, you’ve seen leftwing mobs openly supporting Hamas proudly and loudly. Democrat politicians, meanwhile, have unequivocally supported the Palestinian Authority and Gaza Health Ministry, which are controlled entirely by Hamas. The support was so strong and so unanimous that Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania made headlines for breaking party lines with his support of Israel!
Legal Insurrection on a similarly mysterious flip. “Having Flipped Against Hamas, Dem Pols In Unison Now Back Iranian Protesters.”
Something’s happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.
We covered how Democrats politicians in unison and contrary to every message they’re sent since the October 7 Massacre, declared that public support for Hamas was unacceptable and antisemitic. We asked, What’s Behind the Democrats’ Sudden Pivot on Hamas and Antisemitism?
The talking points just dropped.
Now they’re condemning Hamas.
The Democrats are pure phonies. pic.twitter.com/TUzc1ocsAJ
— Gina Milan (@ginamilan_) January 10, 2026
I think it’s an election set up, they are going to use the “Woke Right” against Republicans not only in the 2026 midterms, but particularly if JD Vance is the Republican nominee in 2028. His proximity and friendship with Tucker Carlson and the Groypers will be a major Democrat theme, but that can’t work unless Democrats switch gears from their anti-Israel, pro-Hamas — and yes antisemitic — persona.
So they are up so to something. No one believes they had a change of heart.
And now Democrats have come out supporting the protesters in Iran, despite doing everything dating back to Obama to keep the Mullahs in power.
Snip.
Little history on AOC and Iran:
-She condemned Trump for killing top Iranian regime terrorist Qassem Soleimani
-She condemned Trump for blowing up Iran’s nuclear facilities
-She co-sponsored legislation to prevent the U.S. military from taking action against Iran
Did Iran’s check to Soros bounce? Or does Iran’s hyperinflation and currency collapse mean that they can no longer keep paying off useful idiots?
This account from a Venezuelan security guard loyal to Nicolás Maduro is absolutely chilling—and it explains a lot about why the tone across Latin America suddenly changed.
Security Guard: On the day of the operation, we didn’t hear anything coming. We were on guard, but suddenly all our radar systems shut down without any explanation. The next thing we saw were drones, a lot of drones, flying over our positions. We didn’t know how to react.
Interviewer: So what happened next? How was the main attack?
Security Guard: After those drones appeared, some helicopters arrived, but there were very few. I think barely eight helicopters. From those helicopters, soldiers came down, but a very small number. Maybe twenty men. But those men were technologically very advanced. They didn’t look like anything we’ve fought against before.
Interviewer: And then the battle began?
Security Guard: Yes, but it was a massacre. We were hundreds, but we had no chance. They were shooting with such precision and speed… it seemed like each soldier was firing 300 rounds per minute. We couldn’t do anything.
Interviewer: And your own weapons? Didn’t they help?
Security Guard: No help at all. Because it wasn’t just the weapons. At one point, they launched something—I don’t know how to describe it… it was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside. We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move.
Interviewer: And your comrades? Did they manage to resist?
Security Guard: No, not at all. Those twenty men, without a single casualty, killed hundreds of us. We had no way to compete with their technology, with their weapons. I swear, I’ve never seen anything like it. We couldn’t even stand up after that sonic weapon or whatever it was.
Interviewer: So do you think the rest of the region should think twice before confronting the Americans?
Security Guard: Without a doubt. I’m sending a warning to anyone who thinks they can fight the United States. They have no idea what they’re capable of. After what I saw, I never want to be on the other side of that again. They’re not to be messed with.
Interviewer: And now that Trump has said Mexico is on the list, do you think the situation will change in Latin America?
Security Guard: Definitely. Everyone is already talking about this. No one wants to go through what we went through. Now everyone thinks twice. What happened here is going to change a lot of things, not just in Venezuela but throughout the region.
Judicial Watch sued in 2025 to clean up Oregon’s voter rolls.
Confirmed by Portland’s Willamette Week, Secretary of State Tobias Read is now cleaning up those records, and the scope of the clean-up is HUGE.
That process could lead to the cancellation of as many as 800,000 registrations. That’s the number of voters Read says are currently classified as ‘inactive’ on the voter rolls. To be clear, inactive voters do not receive ballots, but their names remain on the rolls.
The cleanup comes as Oregon’s first-in-the-nation vote-by-mail system is under intense scrutiny. President Donald Trump, who blamed mail-in ballots, among other bogeymen, for his defeat in 2020, has amplified historical criticism of Oregon’s system.
There’s nuance here. Essentially, because these voters haven’t cast a ballot in a certain number of years, they no longer get a handy-dandy mail-in ballot sent directly to their home.
That doesn’t mean, however, that they can’t vote, or that they haven’t been involved in some level of electoral shenanigans.
There are reportedly 167,000 people who haven’t voted since 2017 and will be taken off the rolls beginning this month. Another 640,000 are classified as inactive and will be reviewed after that.
Remember that in 2024 President Trump only lost Oregon by some 320,000 votes…
For the first time in 50 years, the U.S. experienced negative net migration in 2025 because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal border crossings and heightened deportation efforts, an enormous victory for the White House as it faces renewed backlash against its heavy-handed enforcement tactics.
The U.S. had net migration of -10,000 to -295,000 due to a combination of deportations, self-exits, and a significant drop in illegal immigration resulting from increased border security measures, according to a new Brookings Institution analysis. Those numbers represent a significant victory for President Trump, whose successful campaign focused primarily on his vow to reverse the record illegal immigration numbers facilitated by President Biden’s lax border policies.
Brookings observes a decline in green cards issued, refugee inflows, temporary visas, paroles and notices to appear, and entries without encountering a border official in 2025 due to the Trump administration’s stricter approach. Those trends will likely continue in 2026 as the administration tightens green card eligibility, further limits visa issuances, and continues to reject applications for asylum or refugee status.
The State Department announced Wednesday that it would pause immigrant visa processing from 75 countries “whose migrants take welfare from the American people at unacceptable rates,” the latest in a series of moves designed to decrease immigration from impoverished countries.
Funny what you can do when you actually obey the law and implement the desires of actual citizens rather than Democrat Party elites…
President Donald Trump put another dent in the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement, withdrawing the United States from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and 65 other international organizations dedicated to climate and social justice.
Trump’s order caps a recent trend in which many corporations have also canceled their decades-long commitments to left-wing global alliances, undermining what had been a highly influential worldwide movement that once included the world’s largest nations and companies.
According to a White House statement, Trump’s Jan. 7 executive order directs “all Executive Departments and Agencies to cease participating in and funding 35 non-United Nations (UN) organizations and 31 UN entities that operate contrary to U.S. national interests, security, economic prosperity, or sovereignty.”
On Jan. 8, the U.S. Treasury Department announced it would no longer provide funding to the Global Climate Fund, which financed many of the U.N.’s climate initiatives. The United States originally joined more than 190 other nations in the UNFCCC in 1992, when the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty.
This was followed by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, in which countries committed to CO2 limits and reduction targets, and the 2015 Paris Agreement, which accelerated national governments’ commitments and spending to reduce global temperatures. The U.S. Senate did not ratify either of these subsequent accords.
Thereafter, a number of net-zero corporate alliances emerged to align the private sector with climate initiatives. At its peak, this network included financial and corporate alliances, such as the Net Zero Banking Alliance, the Net Zero Insurance Alliance, the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, and others.
These alliances operated under the umbrella of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, a U.N.-backed multi-trillion-dollar coalition. The Glasgow Alliance focused on financial institutions because they were not only financiers but also dominant shareholders of publicly traded corporations, and thus a critical means of leverage over the private sector.
Net Zero Asset Managers members, for example, included BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, the world’s largest asset managers. These three firms alone are collectively the largest shareholders in more than 40 percent of publicly traded U.S. firms, and 88 percent of the S&P 500, according to a study by George Mason University business professors Sebahattin Demirkan and Ted Polat.
Over the past several years, however, members have begun to exit these organizations amid a conservative backlash and allegations of conflicts of interest and collusion. Much of this backlash occurred in conservative U.S. states, where Republican lawmakers, treasurers, and attorneys general launched boycotts and antitrust investigations of banks and fund managers accused of colluding against oil, gas, and coal companies and of violating their fiduciary duties to investors.
Vanguard quit Net Zero Asset Managers in 2022, and BlackRock quit in January 2025, after which the initiative announced it was suspending activities. In 2023, half of the Net Zero Insurance Alliance’s members quit en masse, facing risks of antitrust prosecution.
“Huge Missile/Drone Strike on Atlant Aero Drone Factory in Taganrog.” “This has been hit twice before.”
They hit the Nevinnomyssk Azot chemical plant with drones, and it’s been hit before. “It has the only units in Russia for the production of methylacetate and high purity acetic acid.”
Ukraine attacks four tankers with drones in the Black Sea. One wonder how much of Russia’s shadow fleet is even left…
Cargo ship Rona, possibly carrying weapons from Iran to Russia, sinks in the Caspian Sea. Looking at that rust bucket, you can well believe it sank without any help from Ukraine. Also, shouldn’t the mullahs be saving those weapons to use on their own people?
Despite breathless headlines warning of a robot takeover in the workforce, a new research briefing from Oxford Economics casts doubt on the narrative that artificial intelligence is currently causing mass unemployment. According to the firm’s analysis, “firms don’t appear to be replacing workers with AI on a significant scale,” suggesting instead that companies may be using the technology as a cover for routine headcount reductions.
In a January 7 report, the research firm argued that, while anecdotal evidence of job displacement exists, the macroeconomic data does not support the idea of a structural shift in employment caused by automation. Instead, it points to a more cynical corporate strategy: “We suspect some firms are trying to dress up layoffs as a good news story rather than bad news, such as past over-hiring.”
he primary motivation for this rebranding of job cuts appears to be investor relations. The report notes that attributing staff reductions to AI adoption “conveys a more positive message to investors” than admitting to traditional business failures, such as weak consumer demand or “excessive hiring in the past.” By framing layoffs as a technological pivot, companies can present themselves as forward-thinking innovators rather than businesses struggling with cyclical downturns.
In a recent interview, Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli told Fortune that he’s seen research about how, because markets typically celebrate news of job cuts, firms announce “phantom layoffs” that never actually occur. Companies were arbitraging the positive stock-market reaction to the news of a potential layoff, but “a few decades ago, the market stopped going up because [investors] started to realize that companies were not actually even doing the layoffs that they said they were going to do.”
When asked about the supposed link between AI and layoffs, Cappelli urged people to look closely at announcements. “The headline is, ‘It’s because of AI,’ but if you read what they actually say, they say, ‘We expect that AI will cover this work.’ Hadn’t done it. They’re just hoping. And they’re saying it because that’s what they think investors want to hear.”
“Trump greenlights Bill proposing 500% tariff over Russia oil trade. US Senator Lindsey Graham said the Russia sanctions bill will allow US President Donald Trump to punish countries that ‘buy cheap Russian oil, fueling Putin’s war machine.'” This seems aimed at India in particular.
The struggle over control of information, censorship, and economic dominance in the digital space is increasingly becoming a fundamental civilizational question. That the European Union now sees not only the EU Commission but also national governments and security apparatuses siding with information diktats, against the fundamental principle of free speech, sends a dangerous signal to the world. The EU has effectively withdrawn from the circle of freedom-oriented state actors.
Into this picture fits a recent report from Italy. A tweet by the founder and CEO of the internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, has caused a stir.
Yesterday a quasi-judicial body in Italy fined @Cloudflare $17 million for failing to go along with their scheme to censor the Internet. The scheme, which even the EU has called concerning, required us within a mere 30 minutes of notification to fully censor from the Internet any… pic.twitter.com/qZf9UKEAY5
Prince reports that Cloudflare has been hit with a $17 million fine by a — as he calls it — clandestine cabal in Italy. The accusation: Cloudflare refused to participate in an Italian censorship mechanism at the behest of this group.
Specifically, this concerns a system controlled by the Italian media authority AGCOM (Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni) called the “Piracy Shield.” This blocking system is officially aimed at combating illegal sports and media streaming services. The main targets are the economic interests of major players such as Italy’s Serie A football league, Sky Italia, DAZN, Mediaset, and other large European media and rights corporations.
Private actors, comparable to the so-called “Trusted Flaggers” now familiar in Germany, operate on behalf of the Italian media sector within this system. They report websites, IP addresses, or suspicious domains to the Piracy Shield. The authority then compels internet service providers and infrastructure operators like Cloudflare to implement the corresponding blocks within just 30 minutes. Every advertising minute counts; piracy is indeed a dangerously significant economic factor. The question is: How do states and affected companies enforce copyright? Do they operate under the rule of law and avoid collateral damage, such as backdoor state censorship?
According to Prince, all of this happens without a judicial order or prior review, bypassing due legal process entirely. The measures affect not only allegedly illegal content but also deeply intrude into the technical infrastructure of the internet.
“A middle school band director in the Abilene Independent School District has been busted for possessing child sexual abuse material. Lance Carl Mosley was arrested and charged with possession of child pornography.”
“U-Haul Growth Index: Texas Back on Top as No. 1 Growth State of 2025. Florida ranks 2nd for net gain of one-way customers; California last for sixth year in a row.” (Hat tip: Ted Cruz on Facebook.)
Life in deep blue Seattle: “McDonald’s rolls out store ‘no door’ policy – and bans ALL diners from eating in…The McDonald’s restaurant is located in downtown Seattle and it has been nicknamed ‘McStabby’s.’ And, it is situated in an area that has been plagued with crime in recent years.” This is your city on Democrats…
Yes, Democrats are totally rational: “Nebraska Democrat, best known for filibustering trans surgery ban, rips down America 250 exhibits at Capitol.”
Cartoonist, author and political commentator Scott Adams died Tuesday after a battle with prostate cancer. He was 68.
His ex-wife and caregiver, Shelly, made the announcement on Adams’ livestream Tuesday morning.
“Unfortunately, this isn’t good news,” Shelly said. “Of course, he waited ’til just before the show started, but he’s not with us anymore.”
Shelly read aloud a “final message” that Adams “wanted to say” on the livestream.
“If you’re reading this, things did not go well for me,” the message began. “I have a few things to say before I go. My body fell before my brain. I am of sound mind as I write this January 1, 2026.”
After speaking about Christianity, Adams’ message said, “For the first part of my life, I was focused on making myself a worthy husband and parent as a way to find meaning. That worked — but marriages don’t always last forever, and mine ended in a highly amicable way. I’m grateful for those years and the people I came to call my family.”
Snip.
In his last decade and a half, however, Adams achieved wide influence through his business advice and political analysis.
His 2013 best seller, “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big,” is one of the most influential and entertaining business books of recent years.
In it, Adams introduced the concept of using systems, rather than goals, to achieve success in life. He also advised readers to accumulate skills — a “talent stack” — rather than traditional credentials.
In 2015, Adams began commenting on politics after observing the first Republican presidential primary debate. When then-candidate Donald Trump responded to a moderator’s question that accused him of mistreating women by interjecting, “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” Adams took notice.
A trained hypnotist, Adams predicted that Trump, then a huge underdog, would win the nomination — and the presidency.
Adams drew ridicule for his bold claim. But he looked increasingly prescient as Trump dispensed with his opponents, the Republican establishment and — eventually — Hillary Clinton.
Adams used what he called the “persuasion filter”: Rather than judging whether political rhetoric was true or false, he simply evaluated it based on whether it was persuasive.
Snip.
While he excelled at explaining Trump’s tactics to a growing audience of Trump-supporting fans, Adams was also interested in explaining how Democrats, and the left-leaning media, interpreted events.
He explained that the country was often watching “two movies on one screen,” and argued — with great empathy for his opponents — that voters who felt genuinely frightened by Trump’s ascent had been led into an emotional cul-de-sac by cynical leaders.
Snip.
While he excelled at explaining Trump’s tactics to a growing audience of Trump-supporting fans, Adams was also interested in explaining how Democrats, and the left-leaning media, interpreted events.
He explained that the country was often watching “two movies on one screen,” and argued — with great empathy for his opponents — that voters who felt genuinely frightened by Trump’s ascent had been led into an emotional cul-de-sac by cynical leaders.
Leftists suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome forget just how funny and influential Dilbert was, and would have done much better listening to Adams’ explanation of how Trump works than their continuing full bore freakout. But that wouldn’t let them assuage their wounded ego with the certainty that they’re simply smarter and better people than Trump and his his deplorable followers in JesusLand…
Radial Entertainment, the entertainment company formed from the merger of Shout! Studios and FilmRise, has obtained full ownership over the “Mystery Science Theater 3000” brand from creator Joel Hodgson’s Alternaversal.
“MST3K” had been jointly owned by Alternaversal and Shout! Studios since late 2015. Radial’s purchase includes all brand assets and intellectual property and follows nearly two decades of Shout!’s multichannel distribution of “MST3K” content. The amount of the final buyout was undisclosed.
Also: “Hodgson will remain involved with the property as brand ambassador and consultant.”
I hope they can keep it going and not screw it up…
New woke Star trek is such garbage people won’t even watch it for free. “Paramount only hit 1,300 live viewers during free YouTube premiere.”
Happy Halloween! Biden’s FBI turned January 6 investigations into a vast monitoring program aimed at Republicans, the Schumer Shutdown continues, a whole of disturbing illegal alien sex offenders, Milei wins again in Argentina, Russian floating crane does what Russian ships do best, the autopen scandal deepens, and one really weird gun.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Arctic Frost was an operation by the Biden FBI to use the half-assed January 6 riot to turn the federal government into a Stasi aimed at Republicans, including “Nearly 200 Subpoenas Targeting 400 GOP-Linked Individuals, Entities.”
The Biden-era FBI’s “Arctic Frost” investigation into President Trump and the broader GOP’s role in the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot was more wide-ranging than previously known, according to newly released documents showing the bureau issued nearly 200 subpoenas targeting more than 400 Republican entities and individuals as part of the probe.
Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) released records on Wednesday showing 197 subpoenas were issued to individuals and businesses during the FBI’s “Arctic Frost” investigation targeting 430 GOP individuals and entities. He obtained the records through protected whistleblower disclosures.
Financial institutions, Trump-aligned political organizations and operatives, conservative think tanks, and payroll companies were among the subpoena recipients, according to a list compiled by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Federal investigators sought communications between the targeted individuals and media companies, prominent Trump-world officials, and legislative staff. The investigative efforts also encompassed MAGA fundraising efforts and donors.
Several GOP members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the panel Grassley leads as chairman, spoke at a press conference Wednesday afternoon unveiling the new information.
“What is revealed in those 1700 pages of documents, those 197 subpoenas, is nothing short of a Biden administration enemies list,” Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) said.
ohnson said he knew most of the 38 individuals from his state on the Biden administration’s “enemies list” and urged his fellow lawmakers to assist the Trump administration with getting to the bottom of the FBI’s conduct.
“This extended far beyond President Trump and extended to President Trump’s supporters not only here in the United States Senate but more broadly,” Senator John Cornyn (R., Texas) lamented.
“Merrick Garland was a member of Joe Biden’s cabinet. He was willing to do whatever Joe Biden and his political operation wanted him to do, including destroying President Trump,” Cornyn added.
The “Arctic Frost” investigation looked into the role President Trump played in the Capitol riot. The probe eventually morphed into special counsel Jack Smith’s Washington, D.C., criminal case against Trump. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland and then-FBI Director Christopher Wray personally signed off on the investigation when it was launched in 2022, according to a decision memo Grassley divulged last week.
Snip.
A ninth GOP Senator, Ted Cruz of Texas, was also targeted during the “Arctic Frost” investigation, Axios first reported. Several of the GOP lawmakers in the FBI’s crosshairs promoted Trump’s false claims about the 2020 presidential election being stolen from him. The attempts by Trump’s allies to contest the 2020 election formed the basis of Smith’s D.C. criminal case and criminal prosecutions in the swing-states Trump lost to former President Biden. Numerous individuals targeted in “Arctic Frost” later faced criminal charges for their failed attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.
“Jack Smith was a fundamentally corrupt prosecutor. This was a political enemies list from the beginning,” Cruz said. “This is an executive who believes it is justified spying on their opponents in the legislature because they convinced themselves the ends justified the means.”
Smith attempted to subpoena AT&T to obtain Cruz’s cellphone communications and the company’s legal counsel declined to comply, Cruz said. He praised the company for standing its ground against Smith’s attempt to gain his phone records. Cruz said that Washington, D.C., federal Judge James Boasberg signed an order prohibiting AT&T from informing Cruz of the subpoena for a year because of the potential for Cruz to destroy evidence or intimidate witnesses.
And Cruz has sent me three fundraising emails based on it this week alone.
Victory in Portland. “Antifa Retreats From Portland ICE Facility After Police Dismantle Encampment.”
The decentralized anti-fascist warriors in the Portland-area cell, aligned with the radical Democratic Party, were in full retreat overnight after officers from the Portland Police Department cleared out their encampment in front of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the Portland metro area.
Nick Shirley, who is an independent journalist and who met with President Trump at the White House earlier this month for a round table on Antifa, wrote on X, “ANTIFA HAS BEEN DISMANTLED IN PORTLAND After 140 days of controlling and camping on this street in Portland, Antifa has officially been cleared out as the police FINALLY stepped in and cleared the encampment.”
“Inside the encampment, they had loads full of medicine, medical gear, party supplies, a fridge, BBQ, etc ANTIFA’s 140 days of control have officially come to an end,” Shirley said, with an accompanying video showing inside the encampment that housed gender-confused purple-haired people who hate the Western world and capitalism.
Federal Reserve drops interest rates by a quarter point. Feel the excitement…
Democrats have badly weakened their party with left-leaning ideas and rhetoric, growing only with self-described “white liberals” while losing ground with other voters, according to a new center-left group’s report shared first with Semafor.
The group, called Welcome, consulted hundreds of thousands of voters over six months for its broad findings, including that 70% of voters think the Democratic Party is “out of touch.” Most voters, the group found, believe the party over-prioritizes issues like “protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans,” and “fighting climate change” while not caring about “securing the border” or “lowering the rate of crime.” (Welcome began as a PAC in 2022, then founded a nonprofit with the same name for political research.)
Elected Democrats will receive copies of the report after its Monday publication, followed by events to promote it in DC and New York. The report urges party members to abandon some of the progressive language about race, abortion, and LGBTQ issues that Democrats began using after the 2012 election — and recommends the nomination of more candidates willing to vote with Republicans on conservative immigration and crime bills.
“The Democratic Party had better listen — for the good of our nation,” former Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos, who ran the party’s House campaign committee when it lost seats in 2020, wrote in her endorsement of the report.
Inspired by The Politics of Evasion, an influential 1989 paper that inspired the party’s more centrist shift under Bill Clinton, the 70-page Deciding to Win document argues that Democrats must be “willing to break with unpopular party orthodoxies.” Its prescription for getting the party out of its current wilderness isn’t simple: avoidance of “both a pivot to corporate centrism and the pursuit of progressive ideology purity.”
Greg Schultz, who managed Joe Biden’s 2020 primary campaign but was replaced for the general election, worked with Welcome to shape the report.
“For the last 20 years, Democrats have just misunderstood how you actually win elections,” he told Semafor. “I thought Biden had proven in the 2020 primary that the base of the Democratic Party is a 58-year old woman without a college degree. But when you hear people in DC say ‘the base,’ they mean white intellectuals that live in a few coastal cities.”
The report directly challenges Democrats’ predilection for the interests of “highly educated and affluent voters,” arguing that their influence “may be responsible” for the party’s closer association with left-wing politics.
Sort of sounds like Weigel’s friends are finally noticing what Republicans were saying at least as far back as Obama’s first term. But wait!
“We have much to learn from the relentless focus of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani” on those fronts, the authors write.
The risk they see is in Democrats moving left on other progressive policies, which even some in the party establishment have done while criticizing Mamdani and other democratic socialists. From 2013 to 2024, between the beginning of Barack Obama’s second term and the end of Joe Biden’s sole term, the report offers clear metrics to show how the party changed its language and gave support to left-wing bills that had little chance of passage.
So they only want the Democrat Party to be a little bit pregnant with socialism and social justice. Yeah, good luck with that, heretic. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Two rogue Democrat judges think they can bypass the executive and judiciary branches and order specific programs funded during the Schumer Shutdown. “On Friday, US District Judge John McConnell of Rhode Island announced that he would order the US Department of Agriculture to distribute a pool of contingency funds ‘as soon as possible.’ While minutes before, Boston US District Judge Indira Talwani ruled that the US government must announce by Nov. 3 whether they would authorize at least partial funding for the program using around $6 billion in contingency funds – and if so, when will they do it.”
Mexican authorities in August, with the use of DNI intelligence, captured an infamous human trafficker who would lure pregnant women to steal their babies and organs.
She would then sell the stolen babies and organs on both sides of the border, which is how the United States got involved.
Aguilar was part of the Jalisco New Generation drug cartel.
California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pimp shield law, pushed by Democratic legislator Rep. Scott Weiner, has helped foster a disturbing new sex market on Figueroa Street in Los Angeles, featuring prostitutes as young as 12 and 13 years old. For far too long, the “kiddie stroll,” as it’s known, has gone unreported because major media outlets refused to cover it, allowing it to flourish under the watch of Democratic politicians.
But now it’s time to shine a light in the darkness and expose the truth about what’s happening to these poor young girls and why nothing has been done to bring the harrowing evil to an end.
An article from the New York Times Magazine is finally covering this horrific scene in Los Angeles, though they’ve conveniently neglected to cover anything concerning the prostitution law Newsom’s administration passed.
“For the 77th Street Division, which covers the northern half of the Figueroa Corridor, prostitution had always been a problem. But in recent years, the officers had seen the magnitude of child sex trafficking explode,” wrote reporter Emily Baumgaertner Nunn.
“Gangs that had long sold drugs began to take advantage of Figueroa’s lucrative opportunity. With a dozen girls, one trafficker could easily make $12,000 a night. ‘Drugs are sold once and gone forever, but girls can be resold indefinitely,’ said [police sergeant Alvaro] Navarro, who had been in the division for two decades. Motel owners who noticed the parades of customers but feared the gangs’ retribution kept quiet,” Nunn continues.
There’s little doubt that much of the silence and fear of gang retaliation for speaking out against this vile form of human trafficking stems from the lack of police presence on California streets, particularly in Los Angeles. Democrats in the state slashed funding for police and tied officers’ hands, making it harder to pull these girls — who are just children — out of sex trafficking.
In fact, Nunn points out that the sex-trafficking unit in the city was disbanded due to budget cuts, which means each division within the police department has fewer resources available to tackle the issue. There are supposed to be a total of six investigators looking into human trafficking. Now there’s only one.
Children suffer abuse in ways too sick and twisted to imagine, and thanks to anti-cop policies from radical leftists trying to appease minorities for votes, leaders ignore it instead of acting. This is truly a miscarriage of justice. It’s immoral and evil.
“Their jobs grew even more challenging when California repealed the law allowing the police to arrest women who loitered with the intent to engage in prostitution. The repeal, known as SB 357, was intended to prevent profiling of Black, brown, and trans women based on how they dressed. But when it was implemented in January 2023, the effect was that uniformed officers could no longer apprehend groups of girls in lingerie on Figueroa, hoping to recover minors among them.
Now officers needed to be willing to swear they had reason to suspect each girl was underage — but with fake eyelashes and wigs, it was nearly impossible to tell. One girl told vice officers that her trafficker had explained things succinctly: ‘We run Figueroa now,’ he said,” Nunn writes in her article.
By the end of 2023, the city attorney started referring to Figueroa as the “Kiddie Stroll” because many of the girls working the street were under 13.
The Democrat Party is now objectively pro-rape and pro-pedophilia.
“ICE continues arresting ‘worst of the worst‘ illegal migrants accused of sexual crimes.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Tuesday told Just The News exclusively that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials are continuing to arrest the “worst of the worst” illegal migrants, despite a government shutdown.
The latest arrests include illegal migrants who have been convicted of crimes such as lewd and lascivious acts on a minor, aggravated criminal sexual assault with bodily harm, aggravated kidnapping and possession with the intent to distribute.
Monday’s arrests include a Cuban illegal migrant in Florida who was convicted of lewd and lascivious act on a minor, a criminal illegal migrant from Mexico, convicted of aggravated criminal sexual assault with bodily harm, and aggravated kidnapping in Illinois, and an illegal migrant in Tennessee who was convicted of sexual assault.
“Nothing—not even the Democrats’ government shutdown—will slow us down from arresting the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens,” Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “Yesterday, the brave men and women of ICE arrested pedophiles, rapists, and kidnappers. These are the types of predators ICE is taking off of America’s streets every single day. DHS will stop at nothing to make America safe again and remove these violent illegal offenders from our streets.”
Another illegal migrant from Mexico, identified as Adan Martinez-Gonzalez, was arrested in Texas after being convicted of aggravated kidnapping. Mexican illegal migrant Nicanor Hernandez-Gutierrez was apprehended by ICE and was previously convicted of possession with intent to distribute a quantity exceeding five kilograms of cocaine.
Former DOE nuclear engineer Matt Von Swol notices something that’s been floating around for years; the insane number of minorities (mexicans and blacks) who are booked as “WHITE” when they get arrested – something which obviously manipulates ‘inconvenient’ crime stats – something that TPUSA’s Andrew Kolvet noted have been “widely corrupted to serve a racist agenda.’
“I searched through thousands of arrests in my county and every single Hispanic individual who has been arrested is labelled as “WHITE”” Van Swol posted on X.
We cannot trust crime stats in America. They have been widely corrupted to serve a racist agenda. https://t.co/UEpwDbnv2F
It’s axiomatic in Washington, D.C., that changes that are undertaken by administrative action alone are easy to reverse.
There’s no doubt that if a Democratic president wins next time, he or she will undo much of what Trump has done through executive action, but will he or she be able to take it all the way back to where it was before?
I don’t think so. It will certainly be goodbye to the Gulf of America and the Department of War, and ICE raids will stop immediately. But Trump has struck blows against long-standing progressive priorities that were pursued in a piecemeal fashion, meant to build up and become irreversible over time. On these, it will be hard for the left to recover — in other words, Trump has broken the progressive ratchet.
How does the ratchet work? It begins with small, unobjectionable, or perhaps even salutary steps, coupled with assurances that potential downsides or extreme outcomes will never come about. Then, over time, incremental moves are made in the same direction until the unreasonable policy that we’d been assured would never happen is entrenched reality.
It is the work of decades, and it depends on no one ever pushing things back in the other direction (that would be reactionary) and everyone’s accepting the endpoint as a fait accompli.
To wit: First, women flying in combat roles. Then, women in ground combat roles, with the proviso that training and standards will stay the same. Then, gender-normed physical fitness tests and lower standards for everyone.
First, race-neutral civil rights laws, then temporary affirmative action, then permanent quotas and set-asides, then a widespread corporate and educational architecture devoted to promoting racialist practices and ideology.
First, respect and rights for gay people, then respect and rights for trans people, then everyone in America having to designate their pronouns, people getting shamed and fired for “misgendering” trans people, “gender-affirming” surgeries for minors, males competing in female sports, and the active encouragement of nonconforming sexual identities in the schools.
Trump has yanked the other way so far on these ratchet issues that it’s not clear when or how the left can get them back to the status quo ante.
It took so long to get there in the first place that snapping back to politicized training standards, pervasive DEI, or the most outlandish forms of the trans agenda will be very difficult.
Also, the sense of inevitability that the ratchet created, and the sense of helplessness on the part of opponents, has now been shattered.
Finally, there’s the problem that plausible deniability has been lost. The ratchet allowed for radical social change to be sheathed in incrementalism and in the righteousness of the starting point — DEI was on a continuum with civil rights; watered-down physical standards on a continuum with the inclusion of women in combat roles who needed no special accommodation.
Now, a revanchist Democratic administration would have to proceed directly to the most controversial and unpopular parts of the left’s agenda.
Top Biden administration officials misused executive authority and took actions without then-President Joe Biden’s authorization as his mental acuity declined, a House investigation found.
President Biden’s inner circle hid the extent of his mental decline from the American people and exercised executive authority by abusing the presidential autopen and taking advantage of a lax chain-of-command, according to a report released Tuesday by the House Oversight Committee.
“The Biden Autopen Presidency ranks among the greatest scandals in U.S. history. As President Biden declined, his staff abused the autopen and a lax chain-of-command policy to effect executive actions that lack any documentation of whether they were in fact authorized,” the report reads.
“The Committee has found that there was, in fact, a cover-up of the president’s cognitive decline and that there is no record demonstrating President Biden himself made all of the executive decisions that were attributed to him,” the report adds.
The Biden White House worked to conceal the extent of his mental decline through scripted messaging, controlled public appearances, and limited access. Staffers controlled Biden’s daily activities, appearances, and workload to prevent the public from seeing his diminishing mental capacity, the report says.
For the most part, Biden’s staff dismissed the possibility that the American people were concerned about his mental faculties. In a similar manner, Biden’s staff attributed his disastrous June 2024 debate performance to a bad cold and minimized Biden’s struggles on that fateful night.
The Oversight Committee investigated the coverup of Biden’s mental capacity with a specific focus on the Biden administration’s autopen usage at the end of his term. According to the committee, Biden officials used presidential authority and initiated executive actions without direct authorization from Biden himself, including using the autopen to sign executive orders without written approval.
Top Biden administration officials misused executive authority and took actions without then-President Joe Biden’s authorization as his mental acuity declined, a House investigation found.
President Biden’s inner circle hid the extent of his mental decline from the American people and exercised executive authority by abusing the presidential autopen and taking advantage of a lax chain-of-command, according to a report released Tuesday by the House Oversight Committee.
“The Biden Autopen Presidency ranks among the greatest scandals in U.S. history. As President Biden declined, his staff abused the autopen and a lax chain-of-command policy to effect executive actions that lack any documentation of whether they were in fact authorized,” the report reads.
“The Committee has found that there was, in fact, a cover-up of the president’s cognitive decline and that there is no record demonstrating President Biden himself made all of the executive decisions that were attributed to him,” the report adds.
The Biden White House worked to conceal the extent of his mental decline through scripted messaging, controlled public appearances, and limited access. Staffers controlled Biden’s daily activities, appearances, and workload to prevent the public from seeing his diminishing mental capacity, the report says.
For the most part, Biden’s staff dismissed the possibility that the American people were concerned about his mental faculties. In a similar manner, Biden’s staff attributed his disastrous June 2024 debate performance to a bad cold and minimized Biden’s struggles on that fateful night.
The Oversight Committee investigated the coverup of Biden’s mental capacity with a specific focus on the Biden administration’s autopen usage at the end of his term. According to the committee, Biden officials used presidential authority and initiated executive actions without direct authorization from Biden himself, including using the autopen to sign executive orders without written approval.
National Review previously reported on internal emails showing the White House’s process for deciding on commutations for violent criminals was chaotic and insular. The Biden administration did not consult with the families of the victims of the violent criminals as part of its clemency process.
Another instance the report mentions is the pardons Biden issued in the final hours of his presidency to members of his family. No records exist for the in-person meeting that led to the decision to grant those pardons.
Rather, Zients verbally authorized the use of the autopen after an aide of his transmitted the decision to issue the pardons. Zients did not know who actually applied the autopen and did not confirm with President Biden that he approved the pardons. The aide sent an email on Zients’s behalf expressing approval of the Biden family pardons.
If Biden didn’t issue the pardon, the pardon is invalid.
Free marketeers have good reason to cheer, or at least sigh with relief, with Milei’s party doing well in the Argentinian midterm elections…
In the middle of the month, this newsletter explained why the Trump administration traded $20 billion in U.S. dollars for the equivalent amount in Argentinian pesos. The Argentinian currency, which had already lost a lot of its value, was dropping perilously over fears President Javier Milei’s party might lose the midterm elections and the country would revert to its previous reckless big-spending habits. The currency trade, spearheaded by U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, represented an economic lifeline to Argentina and a metaphorical bet that Milei’s party would do well in the midterms, and keep the country on a smaller-government, more free-market-oriented path.
Secretary Bessent, collect your winnings. From the Wall Street Journal:
With nearly 99 percent of votes counted, Milei’s Freedom Advances party won almost 41 percent of the national vote, more than doubling its representation in Congress. That means his party and allies secured at least one-third of the seats in both chambers — the critical threshold that allows Milei to preserve his veto power and defend his sweeping decrees.
The result, stronger than most polls had predicted, gives Milei fresh political momentum after months of unrest over deep spending cuts and a grinding recession last year. It also shores up his standing with Washington and the International Monetary Fund, which have tied future financial support to the survival of his austerity experiment. Market analysts expect Argentine bonds and the peso to rally when trading opens Monday, reflecting relief that Milei still has political traction after taking office two years ago.
“Ukrainian drones hit the Mariysky oil refinery in Mari El, the Stavrolen chemical plant and the Novospasskoye oil depot.”
Greece sends Ukraine the big guns. “Greece is transferring 60 U.S.-made M110A2 203mm self-propelled howitzers to Ukraine, along with 150,000 shells and thousands of Zuni rockets.”
Finally: “Texas Higher Ed Board Officially Bans In-State Tuition for Illegal Aliens.” Rick Perry was a very conservative governor in many ways, but backing subsidized tuition for illegal aliens was one of his stupidest ideas.
Ken Paxton takes a scalp. “Dallas Doctor Surrenders License After Texas AG Sues For Prescribing Gender Transition Drugs To Minors.” “Paxton announced on Oct. 24 that Dr. May C. Lau has given up her state medical license but that the legal case over her alleged violation of Texas’s ban on gender transition treatment for minors is still ongoing.”
“California’s Retirement Fund Lost 71% Of $468M Investment In Clean Energy And Won’t Say How.” “According to state records analyzed by the Center Square, the CalPERS Clean Energy & Technology Fund (CETF), launched in 2007, has seen its value fall from a total commitment of $468.4 million to $138 million as of March 31, 2025. That represents a loss of more than $330 million, even after paying $22 million in fees and costs to private equity managers.” I’m sure the right pockets got lined. For Democrats, losing taxpayer money is ephemeral, but virtue signaling is forever.
Oklahoma: “State Rep. Ajay Pittman suspected of embezzling campaign funds, forgery, court records show.” Guess the party.
The Peace President keeps on winning. “President Trump participates in a peace treaty, trade and critical mineral agreement signing with the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Cambodia and the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Thailand.”
“A staffer for Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey was hit with drug trafficking charges after authorities intercepted eight kilograms of cocaine being delivered to a state office building. LaMar Cook, who has served as deputy director of Healey’s western Massachusetts office since 2023, was charged with trafficking over 200 grams of cocaine, unlawful possession of a firearm, and unlawful possession of ammunition related to the bust, Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni announced Wednesday. Multiple parcels containing about 21 kilograms of cocaine have been seized by Massachusetts State Police throughout the investigation into Cook.” Why yes, eight kilos of Peruvian Marching Powder is indeed more than 200 grams. Indeed, that’s the sort of quantity that might keep Hunter Biden supplied into the spring…
Biden’s autopen pardons are the gift that keeps giving. “Thirty-one-year-old Khyre Holbert—a convicted felon whose 20-year crack cocaine and firearm-possession sentence was commuted by former President Joe Biden at the end of his term—was slapped with a felon in possession of a firearm and ammunition charge following his alleged participation in a shooting in Omaha, Nebraska.”
Slam Frank is “Holocaust victim Anne Frank reimagined as a pansexual Latina with non-binary lover and neurodiverse family in controversial NYC musical.” Maybe NYC deserves Mamdani…
There’s been a lot of media articles that the runaway Texas House Democrats are going to cave, but it hasn’t happened yet. The Trump Administration continues to rack up success after success at the border, Ukraine hits more Russian oil facilities, once again Adam is full of Schiff, more illegal alien sex traffickers nabbed, and China finally picks on someone its own size.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said that the U.S.-Mexico border is experiencing “all-time lows” of illegal immigrant crossings after President Donald Trump’s administration ramped up efforts to secure the southern border.
On August 1, DHS released preliminary numbers for the month of July that report to show nationwide encounters are 90 percent lower than during the Biden administration, in addition to the “lowest single-day apprehensions in history” — on July 20, DHS reported just 88 apprehensions at the southern border and 116 across the country.
“History made, again. The numbers don’t lie — this is the most secure the border has ever been,” said DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. “President Trump didn’t just manage the crisis — he obliterated it. No more excuses. No more releases. We’ve put the cartels on defense and taken our border back.”
The numbers released from DHS reflect previous assessments made by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which said in July that nationwide apprehensions have hit a “new historic low” following a “dramatic shift” in policy focus since President Donald Trump entered office.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border have dropped to levels not observed since the 1960s.
Progress. “Trump Purges 275,000 Illegal Aliens From Social Security.”
Months after President Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum targeting illegal aliens and other ineligible individuals from collecting Social Security Act benefits, the president told reporters at the White House on Thursday afternoon that nearly 300,000 illegals have been removed from the government program that provides financial benefits to eligible citizen taxpayers and/or lawful permanent residents (green card holders).
“Last month, I signed the One Big Beautiful Bill, and allowed No Tax on Social Security for our great seniors … and to protect our benefits, we’ve already kicked nearly 275,000 illegal aliens off of the Social Security system,” Trump told reporters.
Recall that on April 15, the president signed a memorandum directing federal agencies to take immediate action to purge the Social Security system of illegals and fraudsters.
As Maureen Steele via American Greatness elegantly noted earlier this year, “We don’t need an executive order to bar illegals from Social Security – we need a government that obeys the law.”
Let’s not forget that the Biden-Harris regime facilitated the invasion of illegal aliens, allowing millions of these third-worlders to siphon dollars and essential services from citizens and lawful permanent residents – in what some have described as a classic Cloward–Piven strategy.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimated that taxpayers spend more than $182 billion annually to cover costs associated with 20 million illegal aliens and their children, which includes $66.4 billion in Federal expenses plus an additional $115.6 billion in state and local expenses.
The free lunch for the Democratic Party’s illegals is coming to an end.
A Democratic whistleblower told the FBI that Senator Adam Schiff authorized the leak of classified information related to the Russia collusion investigation in 2017 in an effort to discredit President Trump, newly-released documents show.
The whistleblower, who worked for Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee for more than ten years, first reported Schiff’s alleged behavior to the FBI in 2017, when Schiff was leading the committee’s Russian collusion investigation.
FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed on Monday that he had handed over the documents, first obtained by Just the News, to Congress. “We found it. We declassified it. Now Congress can see how classified info was leaked to shape political narratives – and decide if our institutions were weaponized against the American people.”
The FBI interviewed the whistleblower most recently in June 2023, at which point the unidentified intelligence officer said he had been part of an all-staff meeting called by Schiff in which the then-California representative “stated the group would leak classified information which was derogatory to President of the United States Donald J. TRUMP. SCHIFF stated the information would be used to Indict President TRUMP.”
“[The whistleblower] stated this would be illegal and, upon hearing his concerns, unnamed members of the meeting reassured that they would not be caught leaking classified information,” the report added.
The whistleblower expressed concerns that Schiff’s actions were “treasonous” and “illegal.”
District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer (Obama) wrote in his order that the government’s premise that unsealing the records would shed light on meaningful new information was “demonstrably false,” and that “unsealing the grand jury materials would not reveal new information of any consequence.”
“Contrary to the Government’s depiction, the Maxwell grand jury testimony is not a matter of significant historical or public interest. Far from it,” he wrote. “It consists of garden-variety summary testimony by two law enforcement agents. And the information it contains is already almost entirely a matter of longstanding public record.
Translation: Either it implicates powerful Democrats, or else we need to keep the issue alive to try to dirty up President Trump.
Truth: “White House Deputy Chief of Staff on Redistricting Battle: ‘We all know Democrats cheat.”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is blasting Democrats for complaining about the current redistricting uproar and accuses them of stealing dozens of House seats by counting illegal aliens in the last census.
Miller told Newsmax that Democrats brought in tens of millions of “invaders” into the nation through their open borders policies to “rig the results of the census” and the apportionment of congressional seats.
Miller pointed out that even though Republicans won a landslide in the House popular vote, they only picked up a 4-seat majority due to Democratic gerrymandering, manipulation and rigging of congressional districts.
He contrasted the gains of this last election with the 2010 election, in which the Republicans won a much smaller majority in the popular vote, yet gained 63 seats in the House.
President Trump on Monday announced plans to place the Metropolitan Police Department under federal control and to deploy several hundred National Guard troops and more than 100 FBI agents to the streets of Washington, D.C., to assist local law enforcement in fighting crime.
“I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, squalor and worse,” Trump said during a press conference on Monday. “This is liberation day in D.C., and we’re going to take our capital back.”
“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people,” he said.
Trump said the murder rate in D.C. is higher than some of the “worst places” in the world, including Bogota, Colombia.
Trump has the authority to take over the Metropolitan Police Department under the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, which includes a provision that grants him the ability to take over the department when there are “special conditions of an emergency nature.” As part of the federal takeover, Attorney General Pam Bondi will lead the department, while Terry Cole, the new DEA Administrator, will be the interim federal commissioner of the department.
On Friday, the Trump administration dispatched federal law enforcement officers to tourist hotspots around D.C. Trump has also threatened to federalize the district if crime rates do not fall and on Monday, he said he would send in the military, if needed.
Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded several DC police executive orders Thursday that restricted officers from arresting illegal migrants – vowing that the nation’s capital will not be a sanctuary jurisdiction under President Trump.
“DC will not remain a sanctuary city. Actively shielding criminal aliens will not happen,” Bondi declared in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity.
The attorney general’s comments came as she issued a new directive voiding commands issued – as recently as earlier Thursday – by DC Metropolitan Police Department Chief Pamela Smith.
Smith is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. “DC police chief [Pamela Smith] asks what ‘chain of command’ means after question from reporter.”
Hilarious news this week: “Two Chinese ships collide while chasing Philippine Coast Guard boat.” A Chinese Coast Guard ship collided with a Chinese Navy ship. And yes, there is video:
A power bill crisis is gripping parts of the U.S. Mid-Atlantic and is set to worsen, threatening to financially crush households as long-range forecasts point to a brutally cold winter. What began in Baltimore, Maryland – as first covered in our reporting one year ago- has now spread to New Jersey, where residents are furious over skyrocketing electricity costs.
The common denominator in both states? A disastrous green energy agenda, pushed by radical leftist lawmakers, is dismantling reliable and cheap fossil fuel power generation in favor of unstable solar and wind. This has unleashed a power bill armageddon on working-class and middle-class households, as well as mom-and-pop businesses, all while baseload power demand surges in the era of AI data centers.
Fox News is beginning to latch onto the power bill crisis theme, starting with coverage of New Jersey residents who are absolutely furious over exploding power bills. This new development could severely damage the state’s Democratic leaders in the upcoming elections.
This all started when New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities approved a 17 to 20% rate hike for power bills in June. Many residents were shocked when they opened their bills at the end of last month.
“$200 more, I know my electrical bill,” one Jersey woman told Fox News reporter CB Cotton, adding, “I was shocked. So to say the least, I’m very disappointed. This is killing us, and every time you turn around it’s something more. You only get little pleasures in life that you enjoy, and my air conditioner is one of them.”
Perhaps Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy’s decision to shutter the state’s nuclear and coal plants, without a one-to-one replacement for lost capacity on the grid, was a catastrophic error that is only now coming home to roost. He also prioritized offshore wind farms and other green energy projects, which have left the grid more fragile than ever.
“Just like the old gypsy woman every Republican ever said!”
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, disillusioned and even disavowed by Democratic leaders, is showing Republicans some love in the midterms. The union’s donations are evidence of a realignment that could outlast President Trump’s term unless Democrats embrace at least some union-friendly policies like tariffs.
Prior to 2024, the Teamsters backed almost no Republicans. This year, the Democrat, Republican, Independent Voter Education PAC gave the maximum, $5,000, to each of 22 House Republicans and backed several Senate candidates, Politico reports. They also gave $50,000 to the Republican Attorneys General Association.
After dumping millions into the 2024 election cycle and coming up short, Las Vegas Sands appears ready to roll the dice again.
New financial disclosures show that Texas Sands PAC, the Texas-based political arm of the casino giant, has more than $9 million in cash on hand heading into the upcoming election season. That money comes almost entirely from Miriam Adelson, the billionaire owner of Las Vegas Sands and majority owner of the Dallas Mavericks. Despite its name, Sands does not operate casinos in Las Vegas or anywhere in the United States; its operations are exclusively in China and Singapore.
While the group has largely held off on spending in recent months, records show it contributed $1.8 million to members of the Texas House during the 2024 cycle—$1.34 million to Republicans and $457,500 to Democrats. That spending mirrors the strategy the group employed last time: pour money into protecting lawmakers who supported its push to legalize casino gambling in Texas.
That effort didn’t go as planned.
Despite getting casino legislation to the floor of the Texas House in 2023, Sands watched its momentum collapse in the primaries. Voters rejected the very lawmakers who had sided with the casino giant. Former House Speaker Dade Phelan, the top recipient of Sands money, was forced into a runoff. Meanwhile, 14 Republican House members who voted for casino legislation either lost re-election or chose not to seek it.
Sands and Adelson attempted to salvage the cycle with a massive last-minute push. The Texas Defense PAC, funded entirely by Adelson, poured more than $7 million into runoff races in an effort to rescue Phelan’s allies. But again, the money didn’t translate into wins.
Now, Sands is recalibrating.
Although no major new contributions have been reported yet this cycle, those connected to the group have continued to work in some statewide campaigns.
Former State Sen. Kelly Hancock, who is now running for state comptroller, has hired John Jackson to run his campaign.
Until earlier this year, however, Jackson served as Sands’ head political consultant in Texas. He previously managed campaigns for Gov. Greg Abbott and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn.
Hancock did not respond to a request for comment on whether he supports the group’s efforts to bring government-monopoly casinos to Texas.
Neither Don Huffines or Christi Craddick—the other two candidates currently in the race—have casino operatives leading their campaigns.
Hancock is not the only one with senior staff tied to the casino operator.
Jordan Berry, a recent registered lobbyist for Sands, also serves as a campaign consultant to numerous candidates in the state legislature, including State Sen. Mayes Middleton (R–Galveston) in his campaign for attorney general. Berry’s lobby registration with all his clients ended on June 23.
City-owned Kansas City grocery store closesdespitebecause of millions of dollars in subsidies.
Not this shit again: “Judge Rules Against Little Sisters of the Poor in Obamacare Contraception Case.”
A U.S. district court decided on Wednesday to strike down a 2017 federal regulation that exempted religious employers from the Affordable Care Act’s mandate for employer-sponsored health insurance to cover the cost of contraception.
If the ruling holds, religious non-profit organizations such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, the defendants in the case, may now be required to file for an accommodation process with the government that still maintains employees’ access to contraception without the religious organization having to pay. For-profit employers would have access to no religious exemption from the mandate whatsoever.
Judge Wendy Beetlestone, chief judge for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, found that the Trump administration’s 2017 rule expanding religious exemptions from the contraception mandate was “arbitrary and capricious,” thus violating statutory authority. Consequently, she declared the rule vacated.
The left can’t stop attacking the Little Sisters of the Poor because it is intolerable to them that there is an legitimate source of moral authority apart from the state. Catholic nuns must be forced to pay for contraception (and abortions) as a token of their submission to social justice. Every. Knee. Must. Bend.
I know you’ll be shocked to learn that Beetlestone is an Obama appointee…
So on Monday, I get a text from my property management company saying that they’ve retained an outside security company to address the numerous complaints about loitering and drug sales in the neighborhood.
‘Beginning today, you will see these security personnel around the properties and in the neighborhood, goes on and on about procedures.’
Okay. Today’s Wednesday. It’s two days later, I get an email from my property management, and they said,
‘We’re disappointed to share that the security company that was hired has pulled out of the neighborhood. After a day and a half of doing recon and observing activity in the neighborhood, they decided the problems with crime exceed their resources to control. We will continue to work with organizations and neighborhood and explore other options to improve public safety and so on.’
Funny what happens when a Democrat-run locale decides to “defund the police” because a random black drug user died…
“Commissioner Ramsey Seeks Removal of Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo. Following a vote to censure Hidalgo, Ramsey said, ‘It is time to consider replacing Judge Hidalgo.'”
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo faced a historic 3-1 censure vote from the commissioners court after her proposed property tax increase was rejected. The vote followed accusations of disruptive behavior, prompting Republican Commissioner Tom Ramsey to call for her removal.
This is the first time a Harris County judge, the chief executive of the county, has been censured.
Lots of candidates (Democrats and Republicans) are lining up to run against Hidalgo next year.
United States Attorney Lesley A. Woods announced that five people were charged by complaint for a range of federal violations that center around their alleged conspiracy to engage in labor trafficking, sex trafficking, and harboring of aliens at several hotel locations across the Omaha metro area and into central Nebraska. The defendants own, operate and manage several hotels in the Omaha metro area located at the following locations where federal search warrants were executed in the early morning hours of August 12, 2025:
The AmericInn, 2920 S 13 Ct., Omaha;
The Inn (formerly Super 8), 9305 S 145th St., Omaha;
The New Victorian, 10728 L St., Omaha; and
Roadway Inn, 1110 Fort Crook Rd S, Bellevue, NE.
The five Nebraska men from Nebraska with very Nebraskan names were identified as:
Kentakumar Chaudhari, a/k/a Ken Chaudhari, age 36, of Elkhorn, NE;
Rashmi Ajit Samani, a/k/a Falguni Samani, age 42, of Elkhorn, NE:;
Amit Prahladbhai Chaudhari, a/k/a Amit, age 32, of Omaha;
Amit Babubhai Chaudhari, a/k/a Matt, age 33, of Omaha; and
Maheshkumar Chaudhari, a/k/a Mahesh, age 38, of Norfolk, NE.
Federal, state, and local law enforcement officers conducted a search of 14 premises, including homes and several “Brow and Lash” salons associated with the men.
During the operation, law enforcement officers rescued 10 minors from an alleged labor trafficking conspiracy that involved putting children under the age of twelve years old to work at the hotels for long hours with little to no pay. Seventeen adult victims were also rescued from the same conspiracy.
The US Attorney’s Office says at least one of the defendants were running a sex trafficking operation that sold both children and adults into prostitution. Sex trafficking was “not only allowed at the hotels … but also encouraged.” Prosecutors say hotel management and employees sexually abused the victims personally, as well as selling their victims out to others.
Drugs were also openly used and sold at the hotels, according to officials.
The Biden Administration went all-out to ensure that all 50 states got to enjoy that vibrant illegal alien diversity they imported…
An Arizona judge is reportedly planning to free an illegal alien who kidnapped and raped a girl from Kansas whom he brought all the way to Arizona.
The 14-year-old girl went missing on July 20, but authorities were able to track her cell phone and locate her in an Extended Stay America hotel in Chandler, Arizona. The kidnapper is a man named Cristian Leonardo Caal Mucu. When police arrived, the teenage girl was alone in the hotel room. What local media was reluctant to admit was that Caal Mucu is an illegal alien. And now this predator is set to be released on bail with only electronic monitoring.
A coalition of Republican-led states is suing the Biden administration and the State of California in an attempt to prevent new electric vehicle mandates on truck owners and operators throughout the country from going into effect.
Two legal challenges were filed over the new emissions rules, Nebraska Attorney General Hilgers said in a statement on May 13.
They include a petition for review filed by a coalition of 24 states in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit which challenges the Biden administration’s new regulation setting stronger greenhouse gas emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles.
Texas isn’t mentioned in the article, but it is in the filing:
Under 42 U.S.C. § 7607(b)(1), Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 15, and D.C. Circuit Rule 15(a), the States of Nebraska, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming petition this Court for review of the final agency action taken by Respondents United States Environmental Protection Agency and Michael S. Regan, in his official capacity as Administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, titled “Greenhouse Gas Emissions Standards for Heavy-Duty Vehicles—Phase 3,” published at 89 Fed. Reg. 29,440 (April 22, 2024). A copy of the agency action is attached to this petition.
Petitioners will show that the final rule exceeds the agency’s statutory authority and otherwise is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and not in accordance with law. Petitioners thus ask that this Court declare unlawful and vacate the agency’s final action.
That petition lists the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its administrator Michael Regan as defendants.
In the legal filing, plaintiffs argue the EPA’s rule imposing stringent tailpipe emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles effectively forces manufacturers to produce more electric trucks and fewer internal combustion trucks.
The EPA has said the new rules, which are set to take effect for model years 2027 through 2032, are needed to help combat climate change and will help avoid up to 1 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the next three decades.
However, the infrastructure needed to support such vehicles is “virtually nonexistent” and they also have shorter ranges and require longer stops, according to Mr. Hilgers.
The new regulation will also negatively impact the economy and put extra pressure on power grids, according to the lawsuit.
A separate coalition of 17 states and the Nebraska Trucking Association also filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California seeking to block a package of regulations that they say are “targeting trucking fleet owners and operators.”
That lawsuit lists the EPA and the California Air Resources Board as defendants.
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit are challenging a string of California regulations called “Advanced Clean Fleets” which aims to “accelerate a large-scale reduction in tailpipe emissions focusing on zero-emissions medium- and heavy-duty vehicles,” according to the California Air Resources Boards’s (CARB) official website.
The rules would ban big rigs and buses that run on diesel from being sold in California starting in 2036.
Nebraska AG Mike Hilgers seems to be walking point on this one but, as usual, Texas is joining in another lawsuit against Biden Administration regulatory overreach.
Better to get this law thrown out now than to wait until food become unaffordable because there aren’t enough reliable trucks to deliver it…
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, alongside Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach and Gun Owners of America Texas director Wes Virdell, held a press conference on Wednesday morning announcing the filing of two lawsuits against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) regarding new rules about private firearm sales.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced new rules adding definitions of certain terms under the Safer Communities Act that will expand the circumstances requiring individuals to obtain Federal Firearm Licenses (FFL) and perform background checks to sell guns. This is to close the so-called “gun show loophole,” which has been a priority for the Biden administration.
If they are talking about the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022, there’s absolutely nothing in the text of the act about closing any “gun show loophole.”
Texas’ lawsuit was filed on the morning of May 1, 2024 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Amarillo Division. It was filed by Texas with the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Utah; Jeff Tormey; Gun Owners of America; Gun Owners Foundation; Tennessee Firearms Association; and the Virginia Citizens Defense League also listed as plaintiffs.
Kansas’ lawsuit was filed on the morning of May 1, 2024 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, Delta Division. It was filed by Kansas alongside the states of Arkansas, Iowa, Montana, Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming, with Phillip Journey, Allen Black, Donald Maxey, and the Chisholm Trail Antique Gun Association also listed as plaintiffs.
Both lawsuits seek declaratory and injunctive relief.
“Today, Texas is leading a multi-state coalition that is suing to stop the final rule issued by the ATF that criminalizes private firearm sales. Biden’s latest effort to unilaterally curtail our constitutional rights is completely illegal,” said Paxton in his speech.
“Yet again, Joe Biden is weaponizing the federal bureaucracy to rip up the Constitution and destroy our citizens’ Second Amendment rights. This is a dramatic escalation of his tyrannical abuse of authority. With today’s lawsuit, it is my great honor to defend our Constitutionally-protected freedoms from the out-of-control federal government.”
Kobach also spoke at the announcement of the lawsuits.
“Biden’s latest attempt to strip away the Second Amendment rights of Americans through ATF regulations will make many law-abiding gun owners felons if they sell a firearm or two to family or friends. This rule is blatantly unconstitutional. We are suing to defend the Second Amendment rights of all Americans,” said Kobach.
“Until now, those who repetitively purchased and sold firearms as a regular course of business had to become a licensee… This rule would put innocent firearm sales between law-abiding friends and family members within reach of federal regulation,” the Kansas court filing reads. “Such innocent sales between friends and family would constitute a felony if the seller did not in fact obtain a federal firearms license and perform a background check.”
While not at the announcement, the attorneys general of Utah and Mississippi both offered statements in the lawsuit’s press release.
“Nearly 40 years ago, Congress condemned ATF for targeting innocent gun owners instead of focusing on felons, calling ATF’s actions ‘reprehensible.’ Congress even changed the law to limit ATF’s authority. But ATF is at it again, this time trying to require a citizen selling even a single firearm to obtain a license. Utah is proud to join the 26 states — in three separate lawsuits— protecting their citizens from this bureaucratic overreach.” said Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes.
“By seeking to treat every legal gunowner as a commercial gun dealer and every gun sale or trade into a commercial transaction, this rule unmasks the Biden Administration’s anti-gun agenda in ways many of its other actions have not. The Second Amendment could never have contemplated this kind of regulation and it will not withstand scrutiny in the courts. On behalf of Mississippi gunowners, we are proud to stand with the citizens who have come forward in this lawsuit,” said Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch.
Twenty-five states are suing the ATF across both lawsuits. Florida has also filed its own suit against the ATF for declaratory and injunctive relief about the same rule.
For those counting along on the home game, that’s more than half the states in the union suing the Biden Administration over their latest attempt at gun legislation by fiat.
This is not the first lawsuit that Paxton has filed against the ATF this year. In February, the State of Texas sued the ATF over the Biden administration’s recent decision to redefine firearms with pistol braces as short-barrelled rifles under the National Firearms Act (NFA).
Complete civilian disarmament has been a longterm goal of the Democratic Party, and to that end they would love to ensnare ordinary Americans in FFL laws and paperwork for private firearms transactions, despite such restrictions never being contemplated by the founding fathers. In the post-Bruen judicial landscape, expect the courts to be extremely skeptical of unconstitutional firearms regulation, especially those with no basis in the underlying statute language, and expect Paxton to notch another victory over the Biden Admistration in his belt.
It’s been a week of petty frustrations, with simple things like paying for online transactions made impossible by websites that send out the wrong information despite the right information being on file. Speaking of frustration, Americans continue to be battered by high inflation, blacks continue to abandon Biden, and it turns out that the Pope might, just might, be Catholic after all.
A hotter-than-expected consumer price index report rattled Wall Street Wednesday, but markets are buzzing about an even more specific prices gauge contained within the data — the so-called supercore inflation reading.
Along with the overall inflation measure, economists also look at the core CPI, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, to find the true trend. The supercore gauge, which also excludes shelter and rent costs from its services reading, takes it even a step further. Fed officials say it is useful in the current climate as they see elevated housing inflation as a temporary problem and not as good a measure of underlying prices.
Supercore accelerated to a 4.8% pace year over year in March, the highest in 11 months.
Tom Fitzpatrick, managing director of global market insights at R.J. O’Brien & Associates, said if you take the readings of the last three months and annualize them, you’re looking at a supercore inflation rate of more than 8%, far from the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal.
According to a Wall Street Journal Swing State Poll, blacks, especially black males are abandoning Biden in huge numbers.
While most Black men said they intend to support Biden, some 30% of them in the poll said they were either definitely or probably going to vote for the former Republican president. There isn’t comparable WSJ swing-state polling from 2020, but Trump received votes from 12% of Black men nationwide that year, as recorded by AP VoteCast, a large poll of the electorate.
That’s an 18 percentage point swing, minimum, for black males, if the national results and the swing state voting is similar.
By confirmed, I mean those who said they intended to vote for Trump.
The gap is even larger if we factor in undecided voters. Biden is down by a massive 30 percentage points vs 2020.
Good: A teacher helping her son with homework. Bad: A teacher helping her son force female students into sex trafficking. “Klein Cain High School cosmetology teacher Kedria McMath Grigsby is accused of helping her son, Roger Magee, force the troubled teens into prostitution.”
Investigative science writer Paul Homewood last year discovered considerable tampering in 2022 with the recent CET record. He initially found that in version one, the summer of 1995 had been 0.1°C warmer than 2018. In version 2, the two years swapped places with 1995 cooled by 0.07°C and 2018 warmed by 0.13°C. Alerted to these changes, Homewood then analysed the full record from version 1 to 2, and the graph below shows what he found.
As can be seen, the adjustments up to 1970 are small with ups and downs offsetting each other. Homewood then found that the years from 1970 to 2003 had been cooled markedly, followed by significant rises to 2022. Homewood concludes that “unfortunately it is part of a much wider tampering with temperature globally – and the tampering is always one way, cooling the past and heating the present”. Given that we now know that the Met Office has been using class 4 statistics for two thirds of its database since 2006, the recent higher adjustments would seem to call for clarifying explanations from the state-funded Met Office.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has announced his interim charges for the Senate, a set of 57 issues he is calling on Senate Committees to investigate and research ahead of the legislative session next year.
The list of charges runs the gamut of issues conservatives have called on the legislature to address, including property tax relief, protecting Texas land from hostile foreign ownership, and strengthening laws preventing electioneering by school districts and other political subdivisions.
Some of the biggest reform proposals, however, have been reserved for higher education.
Patrick has asked the Higher Education Subcommittee to study and make recommendations regarding the role of ‘faculty senates’, antisemitism on college campuses, as well as to review the implementation of a new state law banning DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in state universities that went into effect earlier this year.
“The Senate’s work to study the list of charges will begin in the coming weeks and months. Following completion of hearings, committees will submit reports with their specific findings and policy recommendations before December 1, 2024,” said Patrick.
When you think Houston Democratic Congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee has already said the stupidest thing she possibly can, she goes out and proves you wrong.
Thanks to New York City’s idiotic rent control laws, not only would a hotel guest refuse to pay rent or leave, but a court actually ruled that he was the owner of the hotel.
First class stamps are going up to 73 cents. Thanks, Joe Biden.
If the commies running Vietnam accuse someone of a crime, I don’t automatically trust them, but Truong My Lan may actually be guilty.
Behind the stately yellow portico of the colonial-era courthouse in Ho Chi Minh City, a 67-year-old Vietnamese property developer was sentenced to death on Thursday for looting one of the country’s largest banks over a period of 11 years.
It’s a rare verdict – she is one of very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white collar crime.
The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court’s way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.
The habitually secretive communist authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case, going into minute detail for the media. They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved.
The evidence was in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes. Eighty-five others were tried with Truong My Lan, who denied the charges and can appeal.
All of the defendants were found guilty. Four received life in jail. The rest were given prison terms ranging from 20 years to three years suspended. Truong My Lan’s husband and niece received jail terms of nine and 17 years respectively.
Snip.
By 2011, Truong My Lan was a well-known business figure in Ho Chi Minh City, and she was allowed to arrange the merger of three smaller, cash-strapped banks into a larger entity: Saigon Commercial Bank.
Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.
They accused her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.
The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% of all the bank’s lending.
According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.
That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam’s largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.
I've been waiting 29 years to tell this story about OJ and his days at USC. Now that he's dead (may he burn in hell) I have a story that I signed an NDA for that is no longer valid. I was a junior at USC working in Topping Student Center on campus in 1995. I was an administrative…
Still more evidence that Tara Reade complained about Biden surfaces, plus stories of just how extensively Beijing Joe pandered to China. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Remember all those polls showing Biden up big over Trump? Fugitaboutit. “According to an extensive survey by the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government released in late April, only 34 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 say they have a favorable view of the former vice president, with just 8 percent saying they have a “very favorable” opinion of Biden. In the same survey, 47 percent of young people said they have an unfavorable view of Biden.”
The advantages for the Democrats in swapping in a different candidate should be obvious. While many, like DNC Chair Tom Perez, seem to be immune to embarrassment and can blithely ignore charges of hypocrisy, the public isn’t going to be so easily deceived. Holding Biden to the same standard that Brett Kavanaugh was (or at least giving the impression of doing that) would at least make them consistent.
But there’s more to the story than that. Without intending to do so, Tara Reade could wind up providing a plausible cover story for removing a candidate that has a lot more problems than one sexual assault allegation. The fact that Uncle Joe has been locked up in his basement by the pandemic is probably the only thing stopping his campaign from turning into even more of a trainwreck. The few live interviews he’s done recently have ranged from being mild and uninteresting to downright alarming when his mind appears to wander, he stumbles over his words and careens from one topic to another.
It just seems to be increasingly obvious that Joe Biden is well past his Best Sell By Date. And this is the guy that will have to go toe-to-toe with Donald Trump on the debate stage sooner or later. Swapping him out for someone younger, sharper, and preferably without a sexual assault scandal dogging their heels would probably pay big benefits.
More on the same subject. “By now, it can’t genuinely be disputed that Reade told others about being sexually harassed while working for Biden. And although the husband didn’t mention assault or Biden himself, others have said that Reade alleged assault by Biden.”
Reade says she didn’t use “sexual harassment” (or “rape”) in the original announcement because she “chickened out.”
Remember how New York unilaterally cancelled it’s Democratic presidential primary? A federal judge says “Not so fast.”
Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang challenged New York’s decision to cancel its Democratic primary, scheduled for June 23. The state chose to do so because it’s obvious former Vice President Joe Biden will win the nomination and the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, which has ravaged the state.
Judge Analise Torres ruled that New York must have its Democratic primary, finding the cancellation unconstitutional, and it must include “all qualified candidates.”
New York removed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) because he suspended his campaign in April. He wanted to stay on the remaining ballots to gain delegates as a way to pressure the Democratic Party to bend its platform to his radical ideas.
Tara Reade claims to be a loyal Democrat, and she might be doing her party a huge favor. Her accusation that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993 gives Democrats a plausible excuse to ditch the former vice president as their 2020 presidential nominee, thus sparing themselves a likely disaster in the fall campaign. To put it as bluntly as possible, Biden’s mental decline is so obvious as to be an embarrassment, as he stumbles in every interview, even with the most friendly journalists. Democrats and their friends in the media attempting to push Biden’s candidacy forward resemble nothing so much as the cast of the 1989 comedy Weekend at Bernie’s, hauling around their dead boss’s corpse and trying to pretend he’s still alive.
Many Democrats, of course, claim that Biden’s mind is unimpaired, or at least not bad enough to prevent him from defeating President Trump in November. Such Democrats apparently believe that Trump is so unpopular that doubts about Biden’s mental acuity will make no difference. This attitude is part of what can be called the “referendum” perspective on the fall campaign. Rather than seeing the election as a choice between two candidates, instead these Democrats expect voters to go to the polls to vote against the incumbent. The success of Democrats in the 2018 midterm election encourages this view, which was the subject of an Associated Press article over the weekend, reporting that “Biden campaign aides say they are bullish on the prospects of winning states Trump carried in 2016.”
Maybe so, but maybe these Biden campaign aides are just blowing smoke. It is impossible to believe they haven’t noticed that their candidate is a few fries short of a Happy Meal. Every TV interview provides further evidence that the 77-year-old Biden is non compos mentis.
The impossible dream: Making Joe Biden go viral (for reasons other than his Senior Moments). His team’s solution? Pure pablum. It’s the strategy that combines the honesty of a bank’s email laying out its Covid-19 strategy with the homespun forthrightness of an insurance company email announcing its Covid-19 strategy…
Is it any wonder that Democrats are starting to wonder if they’ve bought a pig in a poke, and just how to pawn him off on somebody else?
Just as bad for the Dems on the electability issue, a new poll shows that young voters — a key party constituency — just aren’t that into the 77-year-old who first ran for president before any of them were born. The Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Institute of Politics poll shows that “only 34 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 say they have a favorable view of the former vice president,” with just 8 percent at “very favorable.” Nearly half — 47 percent — said they have an unfavorable view of the former Veep.
Trump voters might skew older, but they’ll crawl over broken glass to vote for POTUS in November. A recent Emerson poll found that Trump has a 19-point advantage in the enthusiasm gap, 64%-45%.
After New York canceled its primary vote last week, we learned that while it would be both risky and difficult, it is still possible for Democrats to nominate someone other than Biden:
As of April 27, the former vice president has 1,305 of the 1,991 delegates needed to clinch a first-round coronation at the party’s convention. New York offered 320 delegates up for grabs, 274 pledged to the primary winner; a prize that would have brought Biden closer to the nomination.
If New York’s decision triggers other states to cancel their own primaries, it is entirely possible that Biden could arrive at the Democratic convention without a guarantee of the nomination.
Larger states with upcoming primary votes include Georgia, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, plus a few medium-size states like Maryland, Indiana, Kentucky, and Louisiana. Pennsylvania and Indiana have already delayed their votes, but if they and a few others like them decide instead to cancel as New York did, then that would be a clear indication that the DNC has decided to shove Biden out onto an ice floe for an ignominious retirement from presidential politics.
Biden was winning the nomination largely because he was not the socialist Bernie Sanders, who terrified the Democratic establishment.
Biden was also not Michael Bloomberg. The multibillionaire former New York City mayor jumped into the race when Biden faltered and Sanders seemed unstoppable. But Bloomberg spent $1 billion only to confirm that he was haughty, a poor debater, and an even worse campaigner. He often appeared to be an apologist for China and seemed clueless about the interior of the United States.
The least offensive candidate left standing was Biden. Many Democratic primary voters initially had written him off as an inept retread, a blowhard, and an impediment to the leftward, identity-politics trajectory of the newly progressive Democratic party.
On the campaign trail, Biden insulted several voters, using insults such as “fat,” “damn liar,” and, weirdly, “lying dog-faced pony soldier.”
Long ago he spun tall tales about how in his youth he had taken on a Delaware street gang with a 6-foot chain or slammed a bully’s face into a store counter. More recently, he taunted President Trump with tough-guy boasts about taking him behind the proverbial gym and beating him up.
Biden has been unable to keep his hands off women. Even his supporters cringed when he was seen sniffing the hair, rubbing the shoulders or whispering into the ears of unsuspecting females, some of them minors. Stranger still, Biden waxed on about his commitment to the #MeToo movement. The handsy Biden has insisted that women who made accusations of sexual harassment must be believed.
The more House Democrats attacked Donald Trump for supposedly pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden’s wheeler-dealer son Hunter, the more Biden’s own suspect dealings with Ukraine surfaced. Such scrutiny followed from Biden’s boast, caught on video, that he had leveraged Ukraine by threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees unless a Ukrainian prosecutor was fired. That prosecutor had wanted to investigate the Ukrainian company for which Hunter Biden worked.
During the year-long rise, fall, and rise of his campaign, the 77-year-old Biden often appeared confused. He was occasionally unable to remember names, places, or dates. Biden would try to speak extempore but seemingly forget what he was trying to say.
The coronavirus epidemic and subsequent lockdown seemed to offer rest for Biden. But the more he recuperated from campaigning and sent out video communiques from his basement, the more he appeared to confirm that his problem was not simple exhaustion or age but real cognitive impairment.
With the Democratic nomination a lock, Biden assumed liberal reporters would allow him to campaign as a virtual candidate. They would forget his lapses and ignore prior controversies, including the sexual assault allegations by Tara Reade, a former aide.
At first, the media complied — as it always had with Biden’s troublesome habit of violating the personal space of women, his bizarre put-downs on the campaign trail, his exaggerated he-man stories, his mental lapses, and his dealings with Ukraine. Again, to the Democratic establishment, Biden was far preferable to Sanders. Had the socialist Sanders won the nomination, he likely would have wrecked the Democratic Party in 2020.
But Biden misjudged the liberal media. Reporters were at first willing to overlook his liabilities. But the more Reade persisted in her accusations and the more the media ignored them, the more embarrassing the media’s utter hypocrisy became. Journalists had torn apart Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh over allegations of sexual assault, after all.
So suddenly the press decided that Biden was no longer worth shielding. Yet the change of heart was not entirely for fear of appearing hypocritical. Rather, the media seems terrified of Biden’s increasingly obvious cognitive decline.
In other words, the media was most certainly not going to be degraded on behalf of a nominee who may no longer seem viable.
Meanwhile, Lisa Bloom says she believes Tara Reade but is voting for Biden anyway. “Shut up and vote for the rapist!”
Reade, at this point, has more people who she told around the time of the assault than Ford has had ever. She has more credibility than Ford ever had.
What is remarkable is not the leftwing pundits and Democrats who deny this. It is expected that the very Democrats who condemned Kavanaugh would try to obfuscate on this. What is remarkable is the media. Where is Ronan Farrow or the New Yorker or Jane Meyer or NBC News or the rest of them? The only prominent talking head who currently has a justification for silence is Michael Avenatti and that’s because he is in jail. The very people who tried to bring down Kavanaugh hiding behind the veneer of objective reporters are now no where to be found or are trying to throw up Potemkin Villages of obfuscation to avoid having to deal with Reade’s allegations.
If you realize that Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Joe Biden, and the laundry list of others were never about #metoo or sexual harassment or assault, but over whether or not people should be able to murder babies, you’ll understand the double standard. The Brett Kavanaugh attacks and Joe Biden defenses have never been about the patriarchy or power. They have always been about preserving the right to kill kids.
Democrats should see themselves in the mirror when they see Trump supporters. So long as their guy can beat the right, they’ll embrace whatever it is. They’ll never admit it, but they’ll know it is true even as they try to distinguish.
On January 5, 2017, a meeting was held in the Obama White House in the Oval Office. Both President Obama and Vice President Biden attended. This meeting, it turns out, was critical to the anti-Trump operation by the Obama administration, reports Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist. “It was at this meeting that Obama gave guidance to key officials who would be tasked with protecting his administration’s utilization of secretly funded Clinton campaign research, which alleged Trump was involved in a treasonous plot to collude with Russia, from being discovered or stopped by the incoming administration,” she wrote.
Also in attendance at this meeting was then-CIA Director John Brennan, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, then-national security adviser Susan Rice, then-FBI Director James Comey, then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and other members of the national security council.
It was at this meeting that Barack Obama spoke with Yates and Comey about wiretapped conversations of Trump’s incoming National Security Adviser Gen. Michael Flynn with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the Trump transition, indicating that President Obama was directly knowledgeable of the efforts to surveil the Trump campaign and undermine the incoming administration.
It was 2012 and Joe was thinking about his future. A year earlier his best friend, Senator Chris Dodd, had left the Senate to run the MPAA. The MPAA was Hollywood’s trade association and the movie industry, reading its own writing on the wall, wanted into China, and was willing to sell its soul to make a deal.
Biden wanted Hollywood cash for a future presidential campaign.
Dodd had been one of the sleaziest figures in the Senate, even by the low standards of the era, eager to do favors for any well-heeled industry from finance to entertainment. His friendship with Biden gave him a direct pipeline into the Obama administration. And Dodd gave Biden a pipeline into Hollywood.
“Joe was our champion inside the White House,” Dodd later said.
Two years later, in 2014, Biden began an address to the MPAA by joking, “there have been the rumors all those years when Chris and I served in the Senate that although I was chairman, he controlled me.”
“We’ve just given new life to those rumors,” he continued, describing how he had left a meeting with Obama and Chancellor Merkel, telling Obama that he had to address the MPAA.
“There is no question that you’ve got the right guy with the right influence,” Biden concluded.
And that’s exactly what Biden had been proving in Los Angeles as he surrounded Xi with Hollywood tycoons, especially Jeffrey Katzenberg, a major donor to his 2020 campaign, and cut a deal with the Chinese thug to increase the quota of Hollywood movies allowed in by the Chinese Communist regime.
Funny how the sleaziest Democrats have such lucrative employment after they leave office. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Remember, Scott Adams pegged Harris as the veep pick back in December, despite the fact that “Adams thinks Harris is the worst candidate to ever be in any presidential race.”
Michigan Democratic Governor Grethen “Obergruperfuhrer” Whitmer says she’s “quite comfortable” in believing that Joe Biden is innocent because “he has a (D) after his name.” (I may be paraphrasing a tad…)
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Here in Texas we’re enjoying intermittant torrential rains, which means that walking your dog after one is like breathing warm soup.
Former President Barack Obama was unhappy with Hillary Clinton and her failed “soulless campaign” in 2016, saying he saw her loss as a “personal insult.”
The new details come from a recently released update to New York Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker’s book Obama: The Call of History.
The new edition, which includes Obama’s reaction to the 2016 election, said Obama compared himself to Michael Corleone, the titular character of “The Godfather.” Obama thought he “almost got out” of office untouched, like a mob boss avoiding a hit job.
Obama found himself shocked by the election results, thinking before Nov. 8 there was “no way Americans would turn on him” and “[h]is legacy, he felt, was in safe hands.”
The president’s standing in the Midwest now is arguably stronger than when he nearly swept the region in 2016. Polling shows Trump’s job approval rating in the Midwest is in the mid-forties, and his overall favorability rating is highest in the Midwest. Trump’s approval rating in the region is roughly the same as Obama’s was during the same point in his presidency, according to Gallup tracking polls.
The working class, the nearly 70 percent of Americans without a college degree who have been ignored and even ridiculed by both political parties, is flourishing. Five of the top ten cities enjoying the greatest job opportunities for lower-wage workers are in the Midwest. “A majority of the metro areas with the highest shares of opportunity employment are located in the Midwest . . . after adjusting for cost-of-living differences, median annual earnings tend to be relatively high in that region,” according to an April 2019 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
Finding enough workers “is a problem playing out in many parts of the Midwest, a region with lower unemployment and higher job-opening rates than the rest of the country,” according to an April 2018 Wall Street Journal report, citing hiring challenges by employers in Iowa, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Southwestern Ohio, solid Trump country, is in the midst of a warehousing boom. The construction industry is thriving nationwide, but the Midwest is leading the pack.
The administration’s attempts to secure the southern border are gaining popularity in the Midwest. According to a recent Washington Postpoll, 40 percent of Midwesterners say Trump’s approach to illegal immigration will make them more likely to support him in 2020, compared to 36 percent who say they are less likely. Further, 83 percent of Midwesterners called the situation at the Mexican border a crisis or a serious problem. It will take some smooth convincing by the Democratic presidential candidate to not only disabuse Midwesterners of their views, but to assure them that open borders are best for families in Racine and Grand Rapids.
Comey will claim that everything he did in the FBI was by the book. But after the investigations by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz and U.S. Attorney John Huber, along with Barr’s promised examination, are completed, Comey’s mishandling of the FBI and legal processes likely will be fully exposed.
Ideally, Barr’s examination will aggregate information that addresses three primary streams.
The first will be whether the investigations into both presidential nominees and the Trump campaign were adequately, in Barr’s words, “predicated.” This means he will examine whether there was sufficient justification under existing guidelines for the FBI to have started an investigation in the first place.
The Mueller report’s conclusions make this a fair question for the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign. Comey’s own pronouncement, that the Clinton email case was unprosecutable, makes it a fair question for that investigation.
The second will be whether Comey’s team obeyed long-established investigative guidelines while conducting the investigations and, specifically, if there was sufficient, truthful justification to lawfully conduct electronic surveillance of an American citizen.
The third will be an examination of whether Comey was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director and attorney general. This, above all, is what’s causing the 360-degree head spins.
Oh, should we use the word “bombshell” or the phrase “the walls are closing on?”
The company Flint, Michigan, hired to replace lead water pipes had no experience with the work, according to a councilwoman and a contractor, despite that the city has received more than $600 million in state and federal aid for its water crisis.
And the city ignored a model showing where lead pipes are and paid to dig up every yard, the vast majority of which had copper pipes, according to meeting minutes.
The city also prohibited contractors from using an efficient method of digging holes known as hydrovac excavation, Flint Councilwoman Eva Worthing told The Daily Caller News Foundation. That leveled the playing field for a contractor, WT Stevens, with no experience or the appropriate equipment — and let it bill far more to taxpayers, she says. All of these factors, she adds, needlessly led to more waiting for anyone who actually has lead pipes.
Huge amounts of aid dollars — including $100 million from the Environmental Protection Agency — have flowed to the small city of 90,000 residents to address lead in its water supply, even though it doesn’t have a chief financial officer and, until recently, its finance chair was a gun felon.
The federal money “should be a good thing for the city,” Worthing told TheDCNF, “but given the mismanagement of the pipe replacement program, I am concerned that it’s not going to get used properly.”
The city “chose to dig up yards that they knew were copper, and they decided to hand dig instead of hydrovac,” Worthing told TheDCNF. “That was because WT Stevens didn’t have the ability, and you get more money [digging by hand]. It costs $250 [to hydrovac] versus thousands” to dig a large hole without the equipment.
Hey, remember when journalists reported on all the scandals among Virginia’s state leaders, until they noticed the (D)s after their names? “Northam, who largely won on anti-Trump anger, is now less popular than the president in the state.”
Alabama Democratic state representative John Rogers last week: “Some kids are unwanted, so you kill them now or you kill them later. You bring them in the world unwanted, unloved, you send them to the electric chair. So, you kill them now or you kill them later.” Rodgers this week: “I am now a candidate for United States Senate.” He’s primarying incumbent Democratic Senator Doug Jones, who only got in because of the Roy Moore fiasco.
Recent data show that the U.K.’s gun control experiments are actually causing more harm than good. Like its Australian counterpart, which also implemented draconian gun control in the 1990s, negative criminal trends have started to surface since new gun control laws were enacted.
Sexual assaults have seen an alarming rise from 1995 to 2006, specifically increasing by 76.5 percent according to Howard Nemerov’s book 400 Years of Gun Control. All the gun control in the world has not been able to save the U.K. from steadily increasing rates of violent crime.
“The century-long relationship between American Jews and the nation’s elite universities has rotted away. Now is the time for all of the good people involved—students, parents, donors—to get out, and fast.”
Believe women…unless they’re raped by a homeless person. “Seattle’s activist class seems, then, to have more compassion for transient criminals than for the victims of their crimes.”
I'm in Nebraska for a trip. The national media has done a horrific job covering the catastrophic flooding that has for months made homes inaccessible. It is all you see from the air, and a big deal. pic.twitter.com/XU9DmTb5Ju
Leaked Trump Peace Plan? I’d sort of like President Trump to stay away from all peace plans, as they all seem to be asking for trouble. This one is interesting. It calls for a two state solution, some Egyptian facilities for Gaza, incorporating settlements into Israel, a lot of non-U.S. countries picking up the bill, and penalties for rejecting the deal. It make so much sense that Palestinians will surely reject it out of hand…
More on China’s play for technological dominance: “Huawei Technologies, the spearhead of China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), isn’t a Chinese company, but an imperial juggernaut that crushes its competition and employs their intellectual resources. By 2013 it employed 40,000 foreigners–mostly in R&D– out of a workforce of 150,000.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The New York Times had a story in which they breathlessly told us that Trump lost a billion dollars in the late 1980s and early 1990s. You know, just like Trump himself told us in his book The Art of the Comeback. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
“Facebook co-founder says Zuckerberg ‘not accountable,’ calls for government break up.” Better idea: Make all social media companies publish clear, defined reasons for suspending or banning users, and make the processes by which those decisions are made transparent. Nah, they’d never go for that, as that would keep them from arbitrarily banning conservatives… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Jim Goad says Facebook should leave Louis Farrakhan alone…because he’s hilarious. “This cat is one of the most accomplished mind-fuckers in American history, and I’m glad to call him a fellow citizen.”
Moving The Extending Arms of Christ: This probably won’t mean anything to you unless you grew up in Houston, but there was a large, striking mosaic above the emergency room entrance on Houston Methodist Hospital that had to be moved to an interior atrium under construction due to the hospital’s expansion.
Hope you’re enjoying the spring weather! This week: Jexodus, Clinton emails (yet again), and a fair amount about aircraft. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:
President Donald Trump calls for recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Since Israeli has controlled the Golan Heights for more than half a century, this would not be a radical and surprising move were it not for much of the world’s (and the Democratic Party’s) antipathy to the Jewish state. Expect liberal Jewish Democrats (see below) to fiercely condemn the move…
For those of us who consider Chelsea Clinton a cringe-inducing banality, that she could be accused of anything so momentous, never mind a racist slaughter in the Antipodes, was puzzling indeed. And so it was with great curiosity that I read the Buzzfeed piece in which the pair explain their actions. In it, they accuse Clinton of having “stoked hatred against” all Muslims, everywhere, with a single tweet criticizing just a single one, Ilhan Omar. When the Democratic congresswoman complained about lawmakers being forced to pledge “allegiance to a foreign country,” she wasn’t repeating a hoary anti-Semitic trope which has instigated all manner of desecrations and violent attacks and pogroms. No, according to these NYU coeds, exemplars of American higher education as impressive as those Yale students who screamed at a distinguished professor for hours over Halloween costumes, Omar was “speaking the truth about the massive influence of the Israel lobby in this country.”
It is Rep. Omar who is the victim here. “Chelsea hurt our fight against white supremacy when she stood by the petty weaponizers of antisemitism, showing no regard for Rep. Omar and the hatred being directed at her,” Asaf and Dweik declared. English translation: People who are left wing, Muslim or “of color” cannot be anti-Semites, and those who say otherwise will be condemned as handmaidens of Jim Crow. This is especially true if the person in question is, like IIhan Omar, all three.
Reading the many progressive identity-based defenses of Omar, which repeatedly and pointlessly invoke the fact that she is a hijabi-wearing black refugee being criticized by a white native-born American woman, one gets the impression that this particular legislator can pretty much say whatever she wants and expect to be absolved for it: Her canonization as a left-wing hero is necessary, and irrevocable.
Omar can’t be an anti-Semite because members of “marginalized” groups are inherently virtuous. This is the ultimate logic of identity politics. Jussie Smollett just had to be telling the truth; he is black and gay and progressive and his purported assailants were white and straight and wearing MAGA hats. But when Asaf and Dweik insist that she “did nothing wrong except challenge the status quo,” they are taking the side of anti-Semites over Jews. They are normalizing anti-Semitism.
They are not the only ones. For a growing number of progressives, anti-Semitism has become an ideological obligation as central to their political identity as the Universal Basic Income, Green New Deal, a 70-percent marginal tax rate, and free higher education. These progressives, of course, cannot openly say this. Anti-Semitism is bad. Some of their best friends are Jews. The Holocaust happened. So they need to redefine anti-Semitism out of existence, while redistributing the valuable cultural capital of Jewish historical suffering to more deserving groups. Thus, the phenomena of “white Jews.”
However, I think the author misses one obvious reason Democrats pander to Muslims: They’ve decided they need their votes more than they need Jewish votes, therefore Jews are expendable in order to keep the victimhood identity politics coalition together.
The negative Jexodus will be the aftermath of a radicalization that splits the Democrats, as it did Labour in the UK along dividing lines of militant socialism, Islamism, and anti-Semitism. These three ‘isms’ will split Jewish Democrats alone those same lines leaving the radicals on the inside and moderates outside. Those Jews who remain will be required to prove their loyalty by denouncing Jews and Israel. These demands will be put forward in the stridently anti-Semitic tones commonplace on the fringes of the Left.
The 2020 season is just getting started and the Sanders campaign’s deputy press secretary, an illegal alien, already accused Jews of being disloyal, and Elizabeth Warren issued a statement in defense of Rep. Omar accusing Jews of inventing anti-Semitism accusations to silence criticism of Israel. It’s no coincidence that these overt shows of anti-Semitism are coming from the leftiest figures in the race.
And it will only get worse.
Jewish lefties have a high degree of tolerance for anti-Semitism. But ultimately the only Jews who will be able to remain in the Dem ranks will have very thick skins and career ambitions, like Chuck Schumer, harbor a complicated mix of shame and hatred for Jewishness, like Bernie Sanders, or have no connection to anything Jewish beyond their last names, like your average millennial Obama official.
The Democrats have shown no ability to moderate their extremist drift. The movements pushing them leftward are, like the Democratic Socialists of America, openly supportive of anti-Semitism.
That’s the easiest case to make for Jexodus because the Democrats will be the ones to make it.
Jews will exit the Dems voluntarily or they will be forced out.
Snip.
Jewish Democrats have responded to the outbreak of anti-Semitism with the usual nebbish excuses, blaming Israel, Netanyahu, and the ‘politicization of anti-Semitism”. But socialist movements were anti-Semitic before Zionism and Jesse Jackson was slurring Jews as ‘hymies’ long before Netanyahu.
Israel is a convenient excuse for anti-Semitism, not only by anti-Semites, but by their Jewish apologists who are eager to exercise a sense of control over a hatred that cannot be controlled, by taking the blame. And then placing it as far away as possible, on another country thousands of miles away.
The anti-Semites blame the Jews. The Jews blame Israel. And nothing is learned from the experience.
Speaking of Clinton, in “newly revealed emails, [she] discussed classified foreign policy matters, secretive ‘private’ comms channel with Israel.” That is to say, emails from her secret, illegal, unsecured server, which means that back-channel might not have been so “private” after all. I might have to restart the Clinton Corruption Watch updates. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The liberal consensus, then, has emerged as a profoundly illiberal, repressive force—precisely because it grants the autonomous individual such wide berth to define what is good and true. If maximizing individual autonomy is the highest good and, indeed, the very purpose of political community, then for Chelsea Manning to exercise “her” autonomy requires the state to compel the rest of us to say that “she” wasn’t born male. And even absent state compulsion, as already exists in Canada and elsewhere, the institutions charged with upholding the consensus—corporations, big tech, universities, and elite media—can exact a high price for dissent.
Snip.
In Europe and, to a lesser extent, in the U.S., raising a peep about unrestricted mass migration was treated as phobic. Likewise, the guardians of the consensus drummed out of the public square those who questioned the wisdom of replicating the West’s political forms in societies shaped by history, and countless other factors, to favor order, community, and authority over individual autonomy. On the home front, economic growth, interconnectedness, and openness were treated as the only ideals worthy of the name.
We’re hanging our whole maritime strategy in the Pacific Ocean around a few of these big, super-expensive iron airfields. If a carrier battle group (a carrier rolls with a posse like an old school rapper) gets within aircraft flight range of an enemy, then the enemy will have a bad day. So, what’s the super-obvious counter to our carrier strategy? Well, how about a bunch of relatively cheap missiles with a longer range than the carrier’s aircraft? And – surprise – what are the Chinese doing? Building a bunch of hypersonic and ballistic anti-ship missiles to pummel our flattops long before the F-35s and F-18s can reach the Chinese mainland. We know this because the Chinese are telling us they intend to do it, with the intent of neutering our combat power and breaking our will to fight by causing thousands of casualties in one fell swoop.
The vulnerability of our carriers is no surprise; the Navy has been warned about it for years. There are a number of ideas out there to address the issue, but the Navy resists. One good one is to replace the limited numbers of (again) super-expensive, short-range manned aircraft with a bunch more long range drones. Except that means the Naval aviation community would have to admit the Top Gun era is in the past, and that’s too hard. So they buy a bunch of pricy, shiny manned fighters that can’t get the job done.
Speaking of fighting the last war, the Air Force plans to buy more F-15Xs and less F-35s, supposedly because the non-stealthy F-15X can carry more weapons and work with F35s to deliver more ordinance. The F-35 has its issues, but this is probably the wrong decision. The Air Force still hasn’t figured out an optimal 21st century platform for carrying out close air support, a mission that institutionally has been among the least favored of its priorities.
Offutt Air Force Base sits near Omaha, the home of the Strategic Air Command and several vital aircraft, was affected by the recent flooding.
The Russian Navy is in trouble. After years of coasting on the largesse of the Cold War, Russia’s navy is set to tumble in size and relevance over the next two decades. Older ships and equipment produced for the once-mighty Soviet Navy are wearing out and the country can’t afford to replace them.
Snip.
Russia’s economy, flat on its back for more than a decade, started to claw back in the mid-2000s, thanks in large part to spiking oil prices. Today Russia is the fourth largest spender on defense worldwide. In 2017, the earliest year in which comparisons are possible, Russia’s gross domestic product amounted to $1.5 trillion dollars, of which it spent 4.3 percent on defense. That works out to $66.3 billion for Moscow’s war machine, trailing only the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia (yes, Saudi Arabia spends more on defense than Russia).
Snip.
Today, 28 years after the end of the Soviet Union, Russia still relies mostly on Soviet-era ships. The country’s sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, has suffered from repeated mechanical problems and should be, but probably won’t be, retired immediately. Russia has built no cruisers since 1991, relying on the five impressive-but-aging Kirov and Slava-class cruisers to act as the country’s major surface combatants. Russia has built only one destroyer since the Cold War, the Admiral Chabanenko. Chabanenko was laid down in 1989 and commissioned into service in 1999.
Likewise, most of Russia’s submarine fleet still consists of Soviet-era submarines, including Delta-class ballistic missile submarines, Oscar-class cruise missile submarines, and Akula, Sierra, Victor, and Kilo-class attack submarines, which have been in service for so long they are still referred to by the code names they were given in Soviet service.
Key Democratic operatives and private investigators who tried to derail Donald Trump’s campaign by claiming he was a tool of the Kremlin have rebooted their operation since his election with a multimillion-dollar stealth campaign to persuade major media outlets and lawmakers that the president should be impeached.
The effort has successfully placed a series of questionable stories alleging secret back channels and meetings between Trump associates and Russian spies, while influencing related investigations and reports from Congress.
The operation’s nerve center is a Washington-based nonprofit called The Democracy Integrity Project, or TDIP. Among other activities, it pumps out daily “research” briefings to prominent Washington journalists, as well as congressional staffers, to keep the Russia “collusion” narrative alive.
TDIP is led by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI investigator, Clinton administration volunteer and top staffer to California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein. It employs the key opposition-research figures behind the salacious and unverified dossier: Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Its financial backers include the actor/director Rob Reiner and billionaire activist George Soros.
Speaking of Soros, here’s a list of all the left-wing oprganizations Soros funds, over 200 of them. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Brexit slightly delayed. Probably until April 12. At which time Theresa May and the EU will probably find some other excuse to delay it again…
The MSM continues to lie about president Trump’s Charlottesville remarks. Scott Adams has been noting this for a long time:
As one can see from the transcript, Trump excluded the Charlottesville racists from the “fine people” category and condemned them totally and specifically. This is typically reported without the bottom part. pic.twitter.com/YQlvYd9R5j
Democrats have floated radical proposals designed only to appeal to the far-left progressive wing of the party. Those ideas include stacking the Supreme Court or, at the very least, implementing term limits for justices; pushing for a constitutional amendment to end the electoral college; reducing the voting age to 16; and ending the legislative filibuster.
These do not represent the return to norms and values moderate Americans want.
It’s not fringe Democratic candidates floating such ideas but prominent presidential candidates like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand.
Mind you, that’s in addition to the Democratic support for the Green New Deal, a massive government undertaking that one former Congressional Budget Office director estimated could cost as much as $93 trillion.
Let’s be honest: Democrats wouldn’t have offered up such ideas if Hillary Clinton had won the election in 2016. This is all about Donald Trump and supposedly creating an environment to react to the Trump presidency which can prevent someone like Trump from winning again (via the electoral college).
Speaking of Facebook, Joe Bob Briggs notes that the best way to suppress hate speech is not to suppress hate speech.
I’ve seen Klan rallies that are so lame they don’t get noticed. Why don’t they get noticed? Because they chose some town that was wise enough not to care whether they gathered there or not. The Klan has no power until it goes into an area that hates it. Clarence Brandenburg knew this. He could have spoken down in the Appalachian part of Ohio, but he chose sophisticated urban Cincinnati instead. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to prison. It was a great Klan recruiting year.
Tomorrow, a Houston taxpayer named Darryl Chapman will ask a judge to stop the new contract with Cigna, calling it an illegal procurement, rigged from the start to make sure they won. The court hearing is scheduled for 1:00 pm in Judge Steven Kirkland’s court.
One of the allegations is that Cigna was given information about medical claims that another company United Healthcare wasn’t given.
But why would city hall ever play favorites? Isn’t it supposed to be what’s in the best interest of taxpayers and of city employees and their families?
It’s hard not to notice that the Mayor’s close friend Cindy Clifford was in the room during the vote. Clifford was the head of Mayor Turner’s Inaugural Committee. She’s been on the winning side of a curious number of big city contracts since then.
City records show she’s the lobbyist for Cigna. The Mayor pushed through the Cigna deal today, even after learning the legal action had been filed.
Qatar faces an ongoing and immediate threat of destruction by revolution [by] its population of foreign workers. Qatari citizens make up only 12% of the actual population of Qatar. 88% of the populace are imported labor, and Qatar treats them horribly. It is a case that the UK Independent rightly describes as “modern slavery,” and there are far more slaves being abused than there are citizens abusing them.
For every Qatari citizen — male, female, adult, child, elderly — there are seven working age foreigners walking around who have legitimate reasons to hate them…. [this] explains Qatar’s sudden decision to purchase many new tanks and mobile artillery, allegedly to prepare itself against soccer riots in the 2022 World Cup. You don’t need tanks to stop a soccer riot. However, the Leopard tank variation they are purchasing is optimized for urban warfare; and the mobile artillery can be used to fire canister, while providing the gunners with cover from improvised weapons like Molotov Cocktails, or rifles seized from the police.
Here’s a long (too long) essay about how the need for social media positivity is killing honest book reviewing. But it also displays that insular “only high literature talked about by inner circles of New York cognoscente is worth talking about” attitude that’s a contributing factor to most readers tuning out.
Like a Netflix show? Good luck, because Netflix is never going to renew it, because long show runs are not part of their business models.
“When the Dominatrix Moved In Next Door.” Neighbors go all NIMBY on a “kink collective.” That’s what you get for moving into such a backward, sex-hating location as [checks notes] Brooklyn. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Is this a great state or what?
A Texas man decided to test the “all leashed pets welcomed” policy at Petco by taking his Watusi Steer to get a check up. Video shows the African Watusi walking through the doors of Petco with his owner by his side only to get welcomed with open arms. https://t.co/ad7ek6iJhOpic.twitter.com/bCndgDh6Bp
The flooding even got so bad that “the National Weather Service office in Omaha, Nebraska, was forced to evacuate due to river flooding.”
Given it’s still winter in much of the Midwest, a lot of those floodwaters carried along bolder-sized icebergs, making the damage that much more extensive.
Here are some videos:
Multiple bridges and dams have been washed away:
Some Tweets:
Here's a map, courtesy of the @StarTribune, showing flood-stricken areas: covering half or more of Nebraska, Iowa, and Wisconsin, as well as significant parts of Michigan. Interstates and highways are closed. Cities like Omaha, Des Moines, and Milwaukee are experiencing flooding. pic.twitter.com/rbsfXKPqEJ
Just spoke w/ @GovRicketts. The people of Nebraska & across the Midwest, especially the Farmers & Ranchers, are feeling the impacts from severe weather. The first responders & emergency response teams have done a great job dealing w/ record flooding, high winds, & road closures.
Ended up with about 50 acres worth of these in the hay meadow. Probably have them till June. Some are 3+ foot thick and big enough you could hold a square dance on. #nebraskafloodingpic.twitter.com/LkSufNbmAU
