Your tax dollars help fund Hamas (and Brazil’s leftist censorship regime), Kathy Hochul and Gavin Newsom will do anything to keep Trump from deporting illegal aliens, Ukraine hits more natural gas facilities and data centers, and actually knocks some Russian trolls offline, a reckoning is finally coming for Ilhan Omar’s misdeeds, Musk unveils a flying car, and Hasan Piker endorses lynching black people. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Your tax dollars at work: “Louisiana Muslims Were on Medicaid While Sending Money to Terrorists.”
Between late 2023 and early this year, Abdel Adhami allegedly transferred more than $83,000, mostly through PayPal to financial associates of a Gaza-based contact who converted the funds into Tether cryptocurrency. Court records say about $2,000 was sent directly to Gaza through Western Union to a recipient who picked up the cash in October 2023.
His brother, Omar, is accused of sending about $6,000 through similar channels. Authorities say the money was ultimately routed to people associated with Saleem Alzaq, whom investigators describe as the brothers’ alleged handler in Gaza.
For example, on or about October 18, 2023, Adhami, via Snapchat account aadhami56, sent a voice message to Snapchat account “saleem_alzaq” stating the following: “I wish we could come, I wish we could help you, I wish we could do Jihad with you, you are the people of Jihad, you are the people of perseverance, you are who the Prophet, peace and prayer be upon him, has mentioned. Congratulations, congratulations, you are the free ones, not us eh . . . and let me know when you receive the wire transfer. If there is anything we can do, our lives and money and everything are at your service.”
While all this was going on, the Adhamis were on Medicaid despite having their own stores and plenty of money to send to terrorists.
A Slidell man who declined to be identified said he remembers the day federal agents raided their Slidell beauty store last month. The brothers also own a beauty store in Hammond.
Two stores. Terror cash. And hundreds of thousands in Medicaid benefits.
The wives of two Northshore brothers accused of helping funnel money to Hamas have been arrested along with another family member in a separate Medicaid fraud investigation.
The Louisiana Attorney General’s Office accuse the five of defrauding the Louisiana Medicaid program of more than $224,000 in benefits between 2021 and 2025.
Abdel Adhami, 35, and his wife, H.D. Srour, 29, received $113,344 in Medicaid benefits, according to the AG’s Office. They each face five counts of government benefits fraud and one count of theft of more than $25,000.
Omar Adhami, 33, and his wife, Abu Zenah, 28, received $81,099 in Medicaid benefits. They each face three counts of government benefits fraud and one count of theft of more than $25,000.
Their brother, Mohammad I. Adhami, 32, received $30,197 in Medicaid benefits. He faces three counts of government benefits fraud and one count of theft of more than $25,000.
New York has declined 16,070 ICE detainers for illegal aliens accused or convicted of over 50,000 serious crimes since President Donald Trump took office.
“While sanctuary politicians continue to release dangerous criminals onto their streets, our brave law enforcement officers will continue to risk their lives to arrest these heinous criminals and make America safe again. Illegal aliens have no sanctuary in America,” said DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. “We enforce these laws with no help from Mayor Mamdani and Governor Hochul. The Trump Administration is committed to protecting the American people in every city and every state, and we won’t let sanctuary politicians stand in our way. If you’re a state or local politician, your best bet is to cooperate with us so we can all make America safe again.”
Those crimes include murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault:
Homicides: 131
Kidnappings: 132
Sexual offenses: 1,017
DUIs: 1,561
Burglaries: 1,631
Robberies: 1,776
Weapons offenses: 2,198
Dangerous drugs: 4,324
Assaults: 9,502
The ICE detainers ask local and state law enforcement to hold illegal aliens for 48 hours so agents can take custody of them.
But sanctuary states like New York and sanctuary cities like New York City brush off any cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
Two illegal aliens, Dangelo Rafael Jean Caraballo and Sneider Mejia Bautista, allegedly stabbed an NYPD detective on October 2.
Both men have a lengthy rap sheet.
Local law enforcement released Caraballo after his December 2024 arrest for possession of burglar’s tools before ICE could lodge a detainer.
ICE lodged a detainer for Bautista after his October 2025 arrest for criminal possession of a weapon. The NYPD declined the detainer and released him.
Caraballo and Bautista ran to Massachusetts, another sanctuary state, for cover. Both were caught and arrested, but it’s unclear whether New York will hand them over to ICE.
Hochul signed her sanctuary state bill in May 2026. The law bars ICE agents from public places, and local law enforcement cannot cooperate with ICE.
Most public employees also cannot interact with federal immigration authorities unless they present a judicial warrant.
Hochul expanded her anti-ICE agenda in August with the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act, which bans local law enforcement from entering or maintaining any agreements with ICE.
In February, Mamdani signed an executive order to strengthen sanctuary laws in New York City.
Trump should flood New York with ICE agents and dare Hochul to arrest them.
Finally: “Feds Raid Ilhan Omar’s DC Home As Immigration Fraud Investigation Heats Up.”
Federal agents raided the Washington, D.C., home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) early Monday morning as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into the Somali-born congresswoman’s immigration paperwork, according to Fox News.
The pre-dawn operation began around 6 a.m., with multiple agents wearing Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) jackets observed outside the residence. Two sources close to the investigation told Fox News that authorities are examining immigration documents completed by Omar’s late father when she was a child.
Snip.
As Jonathan Turley previously noted, Homan confirmed that federal authorities were examining allegations involving the Minnesota Democrat.
The controversy centers in part on longstanding claims that Omar married her brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, to facilitate an immigration benefit – allegations Omar has repeatedly denied and which have not been established as fact.
Turley examined whether the allegations could support a fraud case or instead amounted to potentially defamatory accusations, and noted that the statute of limitations could complicate any prosecution involving events dating back many years.
A new federal report finds “irrefutable evidence that the nation’s largest banks have denied, debanked and discriminated against” conservatives, religious organizations and lawful businesses because of their political beliefs or activities.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released the results of its investigation into the nine largest banks it supervises in a 47-page report on Wednesday. Those banks include JPMorgan Chase Bank, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo Bank, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC Bank, TD Bank and BMO Bank.
The revelations in the report include allegations that JPMorgan Chase’s former payment processor WePay closed accounts belonging to merchants selling Trump and Make America Great Again merchandise after the bank’s screening system apparently flagged phrases including “MAGA,” “Make America Great,” and “America First.”
The report also accuses WePay of closing accounts associated with conservative religious organizations, including one that was labeled an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
PNC, meanwhile, allegedly denied a line of credit to a media company after employees argued the company’s conservative owners had expressed opinions “very contrary to PNC’s beliefs/values.”
Wells Fargo pushed a payment processor to debank a religious nonprofit over its opposition to same-sex marriage, and also declined loans to firearms businesses amid concerns about potential Biden administration pressure, the report found.
The Trump administration has filed a lawsuit against California and two election officials, seeking to prevent approximately 20,000 potentially ineligible voters from having their ballots counted in November’s midterm elections until their citizenship status can be verified.
The Justice Department alleges that California is knowingly allowing noncitizens to participate in federal elections, raising concerns about election integrity just weeks before voters head to the polls.
“State-facilitated voter fraud is unacceptable in the United States of America,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement.
“If found responsible in a court of law, the State of California will have seriously undermined confidence in our electoral system and violated laws that protect our nation’s representative system of government,” Blanche added.
According to the lawsuit, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators identified potentially ineligible voters using federal immigration records and information from the Social Security Administration and State Department.
The Justice Department previously sent Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan a password-protected drive containing more than 20,000 voter records, demanding citizenship verification within 48 hours.
Logan responded that his office would follow applicable federal and state election laws while maintaining accurate voter registration records.
The administration is now asking a federal court to prevent ballots associated with those voters from being counted until their eligibility is established.
Democrats will use every opportunity to get illegal alien votes into the ballot box.
Result? “Russian bot traffic decimated overnight after Ukraine drone strikes knock multiple Yandex data centers offline.” You know, Comrade Cartridge has been pretty quiet since August…
Abdul El-Seyed’s surrogate Hasan Piker: “I don’t give a fuck what Black people care about. Let’s go back to a better time, when lynchings were happening.”
1.4 million black people live in Michigan. https://t.co/EiEsKuuyrd
Does anyone doubt that if a white conservative “joked” about lynching black people the media would turn it into a full-in, front page onslaught to cancel him?
Former State Department official Mike Benz laid out USAID’s sweeping involvement in Brazil’s political and institutional landscape, detailing a network of American funding that reached media organizations, universities, activist groups and organizations involved with the country’s election system.
Benz, who serves as executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, broke down the extent of USAID’s footprint during an appearance on “The Benny Show” with host Benny Johnson.
“What’s happening in Brazil was a full-on Truman show. You had the media funded by USAID. You had the universities funded by USAID. You had the staffers of the Supreme Court and the TSE (Superior Electoral Court), the election court, USAID. You had all the constitutional law advocates funded by USAID. You had the LGBT activists funded by USAID,” Benz explained.
“It’s full spectrum. If you were to walk down a city block in Sao Paulo or, I don’t know, Brasilia, you would have a 360 vision of institutions funded and puppeteered by USAID without ever knowing it,” the former State Department official added. “In fact, USAID, knowing what they were doing, and I need to be careful about what I can and can’t say here, let’s just say, would anyone be surprised, for example, if USAID was going around and telling its grantees in Brazil to remove the USAID logo so that it doesn’t get out that grantee’s connection to USAID?”
Benz said USAID’s influence could continue even after its funding disappeared because institutional and legal changes remained in place.
“They knew what they were doing. They knew how sensitive it was. Would you be surprised, for example, if USAID, which basically set up the censorship state in Brazil, and this is actually something, let me quickly pivot to say, it is true that this is the first Brazilian election since the 2020 municipal elections in Brazil that does not have USAID money slushing around Lula and his allies, but is still an election that is in many ways under the thumb of the ghost of USAID,” he said. “There is something I call kind of the clockmaker’s dilemma, which is USAID, even when you remove it, the institutional and legal changes that a country goes through can live on even if you cut USAID funding down to zero.”
Benz then zeroed in on two of Brazil’s most powerful institutions, the Supreme Federal Court (STF) and Superior Electoral Court (TSE): “For example, in Brazil, you have this apparatus through the STF and TSE, the Supreme Court and the basically election court that determines all things around elections, and basically after Bolsonaro won in 2018, the TSE court with Alexandre de Moraes, the famous Voldemort judge, they declared disinformation a threat to free and fair elections, not just disinformation during an election season, but disinformation any time, misinformation, disinformation any time about anything because it could pollute people’s, I don’t know, sense of what’s true or false in the information ecosystem, and so it could have an impact on an election three years away if this false information is allowed to circulate online.”
Benz also went into detail about USAID’s connections to Brazil’s election and judicial establishment.
“That was set up by USAID, USAID flooded the zone, USAID had contact at every level with the TSE court, with the Alexandre de Moraes court,” he said. “I testified to the Brazilian Senate Relations Committee and put pictures from USAID’s website of Alexandre de Moraes being trained by CEPS (Competitive Economy Program), the USAID grantee, by NED (National Endowment for Democracy), the USAID grantee has gotten $3 billion from USAID and was created by the Central Intelligence Agency.”
So American taxpayers were footing the bill for the suborning of democracy in favor of leftwing control and censorship.
“Days after federal agents stopped an 18-year-old of Somali descent from buying an AK-47 to kill dozens at the Mall of America in an ISIS-inspired plot, another 18-year-old Somali is free after police say he opened fire outside a high school homecoming game.”
Investigators linked the Eden Prairie shooting to rival Somali gangs. The accused spent just two nights in jail before posting a $100,000 bond with $10,000 cash down. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty had said he would be held accountable.
On October 2, during Eden Prairie High School’s homecoming football game against Minnetonka, a fight involving about 10 people broke out in a parking lot after two vehicles arrived. Surveillance video showed a Hyundai Sonata, registered to the brother of Adam Abdihakeem Adam, 18, of St. Louis Park, enter the area.
harging documents state Adam was the only occupant. He got out, fired a single shot, struck two teenagers, and fled. The victims were an 18-year-old and a 17-year-old, both Somali males from St. Paul known to law enforcement and not students at either school. One was shot through the leg; the other in the foot. Both injuries were non-life-threatening. The stadium was evacuated and the game postponed.
Investigators used phone location data that tracked Adam and the vehicle before, during, and after the shooting. He abandoned the phone and changed its number. A search of his home recovered clothing consistent with what the shooter wore on video.
Eden Prairie police arrested him without incident on October 8 in Minneapolis with help from partner agencies. Police Chief Matt Sackett said, “The arrest today is an important step in this investigation. I’m incredibly proud of our officers and investigators who have worked nonstop alongside our law enforcement partners to identify those responsible and hold them accountable.”
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty charged Adam with two counts of second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon and one count of second-degree riot while armed with a dangerous weapon. She stated: “This was an alarming and dangerous act that injured two people and frightened many more. Mr. Adam will be held accountable.” She added, “Violence in our communities is completely unacceptable and it requires a professional, coordinated response, which happened here.”
Bail was set at $100,000 and Adam posted bond and was released on October 10.
For years, Welcoming America has been building a campaign to sell rural communities on immigration—training local leaders, supporting public events and teaching advocates how to change their neighbors’ minds.
Its own rural refugee toolkit describes the role of local media plainly:
“a positive force for changing public opinion”
The same guide praises storytelling used to:
“celebrate the demographic change of the community.”
“reshape the narrative about immigrants in new destination states”
“Trump Admin has Arrested 1,296 Tren de Aragua Gang Members. The admin has charged almost 350 members and associates with federal crimes.”
“President Trump created the Homeland Security Task Force to eradicate gangs, cartels, and transnational criminal organizations who entered the United States, and operated with impunity, as a result of the Biden administration’s disastrous open border policies,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told The Washington Examiner. “Our message to Tren de Aragua and all the transnational criminal organizations is simple: we will dismantle your networks, seize your profits, and put the safety of the American people first. The days of vicious gangs, like TdA, profiting off of the death of American citizens is over.”
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order forming the Homeland Security Task Forces with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ).
“The objective of each HSTF is to end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs, and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States, dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking networks, end the scourge of human smuggling and trafficking, with a particular focus on such offenses involving children, and ensure the use of all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States,” according to the executive order.
The data runs from January 20, 2025, to October 8, 2026. The task force has nabbed 1,296 Trn de Aragua members and charged almost 350 members and associates with federal crimes.
“President Trump’s Homeland Security Task Forces have encountered TdA gang members [in] almost every state,” an ICE spokesperson wrote in a statement to The Washington Examiner. “This is one of the most vicious gangs on planet earth. They rape, maim, and murder for sport.”
“Months after opening, workers at Obama’s presidential center are unionizing due to horrid job conditions.”
Nearly four months after the Obama Presidential Center opened, workers are organizing a union, citing “increasing workloads” and benefit rollbacks that have stirred concerns about their future with the organization.
Fifteen weeks working for Barack H. Obama and these folks have gone full Newsies. 😂
If the Barack Obama library is an unpleasant place to work, you won’t find me surprised. In any event, here’s what the library’s workers have alleged:
They are facing “increasing workloads.” That’s, um, sort of to be expected in the weeks after a major new facility opens and everyone’s still figuring out what work needs to be done. But okay.
They have “seen our benefits rolled back.” After just four months? That was quick! But I guess even the Obamacare Machine realized that offering full insurance to part-time administrative workers wasn’t financially feasible.
“Support from leadership,” meanwhile, has been “minimal.” Concerns about working conditions have been met with “vague responses.”
This unbearable, horrific working environment has contributed to a high turnover rate.
The workers have announced that they are forming a labor coalition, Obama Workers United, with AFSCME Council 31.
San Francisco’s Democratic mayor, Daniel Lurie, says he’s a proud progressive, but in a recent interview, Lurie acknowledged to CNN’s Dana Bash that on issues like crime, homelessness, drug use, housing, and affordability, the city getting “so entrapped in our progressive values” caused it to lose its way and go down the wrong path.
Lurie, a Levi Strauss heir with no political experience, was elected in November 2024, defeating the much better-known incumbent Democratic mayor, London Breed, in part because he promised to clean up the drug-infested streets and be tougher on crime.
In one situation from October 2025 that got a lot of national attention, Lurie was able to convince President Trump to back off sending a “surge” of National Guard troops into the city to help combat crime, successfully arguing to allow local law enforcement to work to turn things around in “continued partnerships” with the FBI, ATF, etc.:
“We have work to do, and we would welcome continued partnerships with the FBI, DEA, ATF, and U.S. Attorney to get drugs and drug dealers off our streets, but having the military and militarized immigration enforcement in our city will hinder our recovery,” he added. “We appreciate that the president understands that we are the global hub for technology, and when San Francisco is strong, our country is strong.”
In the CNN interview, Lurie noted that there was nothing progressive about overdose deaths, car break-ins, women feeling unsafe walking to their cars, and local businesses having to close because of repeat offenders.
Lurie’s social justice comrades have decided those are precisely the outcomes they desire…
Brandon Herrera’s 23rd Congressional District Democrat opponent Katy Stout isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. “Texas Democrat accidentally blasts opponent for ‘making fun of Nazis’ during live debate.” And if there’s ever been an apt last name…
Lennar and Millrose have a human centipede home selling ecosystem. Lennar makes the homes and owns Millrose, who buys the homes to rent out. And mysteriously helped Lennar hit their quarterly home-sale numbers.
At least he was ambitious. “ICE to deport illegal alien who pretended to be part of DHS and sold deportation “immunity” cards to other illegal aliens.”
[Mario Cesar Dos Santos Jr.] Brazilian illegal immigrant who admitted to creating a fake branch of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and selling counterfeit DHS and FBI identification cards — which he claimed would provide immunity from federal immigration officers — has been ordered deported …
As part of the scheme, Dos Santos claimed to be the president of the ‘Chaplain Emergency Management Agency’ (CEMA), a fictitious federal agency he created to trick attendees at training seminars into paying for immunity from immigration enforcement.
While the training courses were offered for free, participants were charged $400 to $450 for bogus certificates they believed would protect them from deportation, authorities said. Each seminar drew approximately 30 to 45 participants.
In the UK, of course. “Fifteen-Year-Old Boy Is Arrested After Joking About How A Politician Dresses.”
The leader of the Conservative Party on the Wolverhampton City Council, Simon Bennett, apparently can take anything but fashion criticism. The politician reportedly called the police on a 15-year-old boy for mocking his clothing style at meetings. It is the latest example of the collapse of free speech in the United Kingdom.
A boy only identified as “Fraser” is a 15-year-old supporter of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party. He found himself searched and arrested by four officers from the West Midlands Police at his home, locked in a cell, fingerprinted, subjected to a DNA search, and taken for a mugshot. The police then searched his bedroom and telephone.
All of this was over his joking about how Bennett dressed in public.
“Georgia Bought a $954,578 Chevy, but Officials Won’t Say What’s Inside.” “Records obtained through Georgia’s open-records law show that Georgia purchased a 2026 Traverse in April from Hardy Chevrolet GMC. Its listed “TSE cellular communications package” cost $890,478.80, with another $25,394 for installation. The rest went to equipment officials won’t identify publicly, even as state lawmakers question whether a child-welfare agency should have technology normally associated with criminal investigations.”
The Center Square reported last month how the department spent $639,000 on four other police-grade technologies that surveil web activity, extract the contents of cell phones and track cell phone locations. The prospect of the department spending nearly $1 million more on yet another surveillance tool—one that’s mobile and far more invasive—has lawmakers raising Fourth Amendment concerns, the constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
“They are not a law enforcement agency, and my understanding is that that type of equipment is only supposed to go to law enforcement agencies,” state Rep. Beth Camp, R-Concord, told The Center Square after the news wire informed her of the spending. “That is surveillance. That is spy surveillance.”
In the year 1000 A.D. an unbiased world observer would never have picked Europe as the region that would dominate the globe. Probably they would pick China with its massive population or fabulously wealthy India. The Islamic Caliphate would have looked past its sell-by date but would have beaten Europe by a mile.
Snip.
In this day and age – and particularly on Columbus Day – it is frowned upon to ask these questions. The Powers That Be tell us that Europe got rich by stealing indigenous people’s wealth, conveniently ignoring the many other non-European powers that were much more brutal at doing that than the Europeans were. The Mongol Empire in 1300 would have had poll position for World Domination, as would the earlier Abbasid caliphate. If all it takes for World Domination is to steal other people’s stuff, what was it about Europe that was different?
After all, China invented gunpowder. Why did Europe perfect it? Why did little England perfect the sailing Ship-of-the-Line? Why did the Divergence start and why there?
Today I offer two books for interested readers that explain this. One of these could never be published today, and the author would never get tenure today. Fortunately (if that’s the right word) David Landes is safely dead and doesn’t have to worry about The Usual Suspects getting him denied tenure.
Landes was a big deal in Economic History, authoring the section on the Industrial Revolution in the Cambridge Economic History. Late in his career, perhaps 30 years ago, he wrote The Wealth And Poverty of Nations, an economic history whose title was unashamedly stolen from Adam Smith. Landes insisted that social systems were key, and that some societies allowed progress towards a Great Divergence while other societies stifled attempts towards that progress.
In other words, if your society doesn’t support the right efforts it doesn’t matter how much of other people’s wealth you steal; you’re going nowhere. We see this in the history of Spain which became fabulously wealthy by stealing New World wealth but squandered it, ending up at the bottom of European power rankings. You could say exactly the same thing about the Mongol empire, or the Caliphate.
Landes’ arguments in the book are considered double-plus ungood by the woke crowd, so you might want to pick up a used copy from Amazon. The chapter on Argentina is particularly interesting in this age of President Milei. Interestingly, Milei was an Economist, and may have read Landes’ book.
A second recommendation is less controversal with the woke crowd but is joined at the hip with the Great Divergence. The political cycle world wide has been the emergence of an empire, the collapse of the empire, and the rise of a successor empire. We see this in China, in India, in Mesoamerica.
But not in Europe. Europe only had one great empire, Rome. When it fell, it was not replaced. Walter Scheidel wrote a book exploring why this unusual circumstance happened, Escape From Rome. Using Landes’ analytical framework, the Roman Empire did not encourage the types of behaviors that could have led to an Industrial Revolution, because those behaviors were seen by the Authorities as subversive to the state. But when Rome fell, there were unusual circumstances in Europe that prevented a new empire from rising in its place. Then competition between the poor emerging states set Europe on a very different path from the rest of the world. Basically, Europe escaped from Empire while the rest of the world didn’t.
Read the whole thing.
If you want to list American cities least likely to flood, Las Vegas would seem a good bet (heh), but evidently an inch of rain is enough to turn it into Venice.
“Hitler Mussolini wins Peruvian election.” “Hitler Mussolini Simeon Flores has secured a narrow victory in Peru’s local elections, exit polls show. The candidate for the centre-left Ahora Nación party was elected mayor of Queropalca, a remote district in the Peruvian Andes.”
Washington State FAed, and now they’re finding out. “Columbia Bank moving top executives to Arizona, citing Washington taxes.”
A major Pacific Northwest bank is shifting some of its top leadership to Arizona.
First reported by The Puget Sound Business Journal, the Columbia Banking System is opening an executive office in the Scottsdale area.
The office will open later this month.
The exodus of Columbia Bank executives began with CEO Clint Stein, who sold his Auburn home (for $2.45 million in September) to relocate to Arizona permanently. According to The Puget Sound Business Journal, the company said new Washington taxes are costing it approximately $8 million a year, prompting the decision to move most executive roles to Arizona.
Democrats love raising taxes more than life itself.
A reminder not to get black-pilled, another Supreme Court win for deporting illegal alien felons, San Francisco’s government offers pedos a veritable buffet, Rockefeller money is going to the ChiComs, and another deeply technical video on semiconductor processes you won’t click on.
Yes, I want to believe, but there’s evidence supporting hope. There’s evidence supporting the idea that the polls are so substantially flawed that they do not accurately reflect what’s going to happen. Again, the caveat – this could be delusion. We could be seeing what we want to see. But then, what we’re seeing is there. There is evidence supporting what we want to happen, evidence worth considering.
We’re seeing how polls have been missing big lately. Look at Abdul El-Sayed. He was supposed to win that Michigan primary in a walk. We’re talking five, 10, 15 points, according to the primary polls. And yet he barely squeaked past that squeaky woman he was competing with. We’ve seen lots of other polls that assured us of a Democrat victory. Just ask President Harris about that.
If you’ve been around a while, you know that the polls always favor the Democrats. You almost never see a Democrat surprise us by exceeding his polling against a Republican. You just don’t. So, there’s that. And of course, there’s an interest in driving down Republican enthusiasm by telling people they can’t win.
Then there’s the gut vibe. Don’t completely disregard that. In Texas, you must believe the Texans are going to support a blasphemous, anti-meat, anti-gun, anti-white, woke weirdo with a thing for trans kids. Does that sound like Texas to you? It sure doesn’t sound like Texas to me, and I’m in Texas. I’ve talked to a lot of Texan conservatives. Not one thinks this guy is going to win. Now, they agree it could theoretically happen, but they don’t think it’s going to. Ken Paxton has won three times in statewide races, and he’s done a lot of great conservative things. Are Texans really going to choose a bizarre homunculus to spend six years in Washington, D.C., voting like Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) in their name? It just doesn’t fit. It’s weird. That’s not saying it couldn’t happen – there are lots of communists here along with other weirdos, losers, and mutations who would be thrilled to have this geebo as a Lone Star senator. But it just doesn’t feel like something that’s going to happen.
Moreover, we’ve been told a lot of conservatives are going to sit this out. The bots on X are certainly pushing that coordinated message, as the semi-coherent comments on my Monday column about quitters demonstrate. Yes, there are probably some Republicans who are going to sit out this midterm, but I haven’t met any of them personally. Maybe you have. I just don’t think there are a lot of them, especially in light of how appalling the Democrats are. It doesn’t make sense, at least to people who aren’t idiots who blame everything on Epstein conspiracies and the Jews and blah blah blah, to be mad at Trump and the Republicans for not being conservative enough and showing them what-for by allowing the election of communists. As risky as it is, I’m not going all-in on the assumption that people are that stupid.
Read the whole thing, and encourage all your sane friends to show up at the polls in November.
Dr. Anthony Fauci privately sounded the alarm when he learned the U.S. Army had conducted an experiment a decade ago that aerosolized the lethal Ebola virus, which is not normally transmitted by air, and then shared the results publicly amid an ongoing outbreak in Africa, according to diary entries obtained by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul.
The then-top scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease was particularly concerned in 2016 that the Army medical research arm’s experiment seemed to show that exposure to aerosolized Ebola caused more damaging effects in subjects that had been vaccinated. This was almost four years before he championed shutting down the U.S. economy and social life over the COVID-19 virus outbreak.
Fauci wrote he believed such research should be kept secret, preferably classified, so that it didn’t undermine public confidence in vaccination in the African countries suffering an outbreak of the virus.
“What idiots those guys at USAMRIID [U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases] are,” Fauci wrote in a March 2016 diary entry. “This should have been a classified experiment that never should have been done in the first place.”
Why yes, “undermining public confidence in vaccination” is a far bigger concern than the fact that the U.S. Army under Obama was committing an actual war crime.
It’s Tuesday morning at Little Learners Daycare in downtown San Francisco. Teacher Wendy herds bright-eyed toddlers, amped up after playtime in the courtyard, back inside. They’re laughing and swatting at each other playfully, oblivious to the pack of pedophiles lurking nearby.
Four hundred feet away, dozens of registered sex offenders live at 111 Taylor Street. Wendy knew that the Tenderloin, where she operates her Mandarin-immersion daycare, was dangerous. It’s a hotbed for illegal drug activity and homelessness. But she didn’t realize that sex offenders live so close to her daycare—or that taxpayers fund their housing.
Pedophiles, illegal aliens; the only people Democrats don’t like paying for housing for is law-abiding American citizens.
According to this City Journal investigation, more than 25 percent of sex offenders in San Francisco with addresses in the Megan’s Law database live in taxpayer-subsidized buildings. Many live near a park, school, or daycare, or reside in a neighborhood with a high concentration of children. They do all of this despite statewide efforts to ban concentrating pedophiles so close to children. Instead of listening to California voters, San Francisco has become a taxpayer-funded dumping ground for sex criminals.
The Taylor Street Center is one of San Francisco’s most heavily populated sex-offender residences. Located in the Tenderloin, Taylor Street houses at least 31 registered sex offenders. The taxpayer-funded California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the federal Bureau of Prisons contract the private GEO Group to run the facility.
The reentry complex can house 240 people. It hosts specialized programs for residents like “cultural diversity education,” “gender-responsive groups,” and a “weekly meditation group.” The facility sits just 400 feet from a daycare center, 1,000 feet from a fourth-to-eighth-grade school, and five blocks away from a preschool.
Any sex offender housed in the Tenderloin is bound to encounter children. Along with having a high concentration of immigrant and low-income households, the neighborhood also has the highest concentration of kids in the entire city.
I’m sure the sex offenders call that “the buffet.”
President Trump invoked a rare and legally contested power Friday to cancel $810 million in congressionally approved spending, targeting programs for illegal immigrants and a slate of federal initiatives explicitly organized around race and DEI.
The request hits 11 funding pools at seven departments and agencies. It also landed with just five days left in the fiscal year. That’s the point of the disputed “pocket rescission” maneuver: the money runs out before Congress gets its normal 45 days to consider the cuts.
The biggest piece is $567 million at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for services to refugees, asylees, unaccompanied minors, and other non-citizens.
The White House called them “pro-illegal immigration programs” and said the money is no longer needed because illegal border crossings have fallen sharply.
But immigration spending was only part of the package.
Several of the rescissions hit programs explicitly organized around race or ethnicity.
The administration wants to rescind $10 million from the Commerce Department’s Minority Business Development Agency, which helps minority-owned businesses. The White House pointed to a 2024 federal court ruling that found the agency’s presumption of social disadvantage based on race or ethnicity unconstitutional.
Another $5 million would come from HHS’s Office of Minority Health.
The White House highlighted grants from that office addressing racial trauma among black youth, health disparities among black and Latino youth, a George Washington University fellowship promoting health equity and DEI, and a $1.5 million project addressing the effects of redlining and structural racism.
HUD housing counseling takes a much larger hit, with $56 million targeted.
The administration said the program had funded groups including UnidosUS, the National Urban League, and Housing Action Illinois, criticizing their work on structural racism, racial justice, and other DEI priorities.
Then there is the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service, slated to lose $15 million.
The office’s mission included “preventing and resolving racial and ethnic tensions” and restoring racial stability. The Trump administration shut it down earlier this year and now accuses the office of promoting critical race theory and gender ideology rather than carrying out that mission.
The package goes beyond those programs.
The administration identified $28 million in HHS research funding it wants canceled, pointing to grants involving transgender health care, racial disparities, and a $50,000 project to develop a research agenda addressing racism in emergency medicine. Another $70 million would be pulled from international education programs, including programs the White House said had funded research involving queer and transgender issues abroad.
Other cuts include $25 million for migrant student programs, $25 million across two DHS programs providing services or legal assistance to non-citizens, and $9 million for a Treasury program providing debt relief to foreign countries in exchange for conservation commitments.
Now we need to hand out pink slips to the people who were administering these programs.
Long overdue: “Education Dept. Officially Removes Biden’s Title IX Gender Identity Rules. In other words, the department is sticking to the literal interpretation of Title IX: sex-based discrimination.”
The Education Department has officially rescinded the Biden Administration’s Title IX interpretation that extended protections to students based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
In other words, the department is sticking to Title IX’s literal meaning: sex-based discrimination.
“Today’s rulemaking clears the Biden Administration’s illegal rewrite of Title IX from the Code of Federal Regulations and restores the commonsense language promulgated in the first Trump Administration, which we have been enforcing since the first days of the Administration,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “Thanks to today’s action, the published Title IX regulations faithfully reflects court orders and Congressional intent—reducing confusion for parents, students, and educational institutions. We will continue to relentlessly champion equal opportunity for all Americans and hold accountable any school or college that violates the rights, privacy, or athletic opportunities of our women and girls.”
Honestly, nothing changes because the department has been enforcing reality since January 2025: Title IX is based on sex. It’s not based on your sexual orientation or gender identity.
Somehow, the people who tell us that they were “born this way” and that “sexuality is a spectrum” are now returning to normal. It’s almost like the whole “acceptance” movement was just a social contagion that spread because teens like being rebellious!
The Supreme Court majority (6-3) has granted the DOJ request to put on hold a Boston-based US District Judge ruling that DHS policy to remove illegal aliens to so-called third countries is unlawful. The process of rapid deportation will continue while the matter is called before the Supreme Court for oral arguments in December (ruling in ’27).
The Usual Suspects opposed deporting the Democrat Party’s precious illegal alien felons.
Former Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed at least 4,782 political donations to President Donald Trump from Americans across the country between September 2019 and August 2023, Senator Chuck Grassley revealed during a Tuesday hearing featuring the former special counsel.
The checks — which Smith’s team acquired as part of their election case against Trump, dubbed “Arctic Frost” — contained donors’ personal information, including their home addresses, bank account and routing numbers, and signatures. Some of the subpoenaed donations were for as little as $1. Grassley revealed the evidence while questioning Smith during Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary hearing and followed up with a press release containing further details.
During former President Joe Biden’s administration, Smith brought two cases against Trump: The first accused him of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, and the second involved him keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Smith resigned from his position nine days before Trump was sworn in as president again; both cases against Trump have been dismissed.
As part of the FBI’s investigation into the 2020 election, agents accessed toll records, which show who a given individual spoke with on the phone but not the contents of their calls, for 16 members of Congress. He also subpoenaed records from 87 Trump White House phones, which captured records from calls between government sources and dozen of news outlets.
The political donations Grassley described were obtained as part of Smith’s investigation, which focused on whether Trump defrauded donors by raising money under the false pretext that the resulting donations would help Trump’s team overturn the results of the 2020 election.
All the easier to compile an enemies list should Democrats retake power…
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a $1.4 billion U.S.-based charity with funding from the Rockefeller family and other donors, has forged a “dangerous partnership with Communist China” and is pouring millions of dollars into China-based nonprofits that are advancing the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign policy goals.
That’s one of the findings in a new report, “The Rockefeller Network: How the Rockefeller Family Turned Their Oil Fortune into Extreme Climate Activism,” out today from Americans for Public Trust, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative watchdog organization. The report, an advance copy of which was obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon, outlines how the billion-dollar fortune of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller Sr., who died in 1937, is being used “to quietly bankroll numerous radical and leftist projects.”
Snip.
“An alarming amount—well into the millions—has found its way directly into the coffers of entities that are either official vestiges of the Chinese government, or directly and irrefutably administered by the CCP and its representatives,” the report says. “And many of these entities, while operating under the guise of ‘green’ and environmental research, are, instead, using these funds to help buttress China’s foreign influence programs around the globe, especially the CCP’s infamous ‘Belt and Road Initiative.'”
Among the grants singled out in the report as most problematic:
— $400,000 between 2020 and 2024 to the Foreign Environment Cooperation Center, “a division of the Chinese government’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment.”
— Nearly $1.5 million to the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, whose “direct ties to the Chinese government are undeniable.”
— Nearly $200,000 to Tsinghua University, which announced in 2024 that the school’s office of the president had merged with the Chinese Communist Party to “form a new Party Committee Office that would run the school.”
Groups that fund the ChiComs should have their non-profit status revoked and their assets seized.
Democrats are always saying the quiet part out loud nowadays.
They aren’t even trying to hide their radical plans to totally replace America’s voters, workers, and people with a cheap labor underclass that disproportionately votes Democrat.
[ U.S. Representative] Democrat Tom Suozzi says his biggest goal in politics is mass amnesty for criminal illegals:
“My biggest goal of what I want to accomplish in politics right now is I want to legalize 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 million people in our country.”
Amnesty was always the end goal for the illegal alien importation.
Obvious: “UK Whistleblower: 99 percent of Asylum Claims Are Fake.”
Only one in 100 asylum claims are genuine, according to a whistleblower who has revealed widespread fraud and dysfunction in the system.
The Home Office official, who has worked for years as a decision-maker on asylum and has assessed thousands of claims, said asylum seekers from certain countries use the “same script” in what he and colleagues describe as “package claims”.
He said he had encountered a large number of Iraqi Kurds claiming asylum who said they had been in a relationship with the daughter of the prime minister of the Kurdistan region. The official said it had become a “running joke” among colleagues that the number of Iraqi Kurds who said they were involved with the daughter was in the “hundreds”.
He also said that “hundreds” of claims from Pakistanis were based on the assertion that they were in fear of their lives in their home country because of their gay relationship with the same man who had provided letters supporting their claims.
The source also disclosed suspicions about large numbers of Bangladeshi claimants purporting to be dissidents of the former governing party, which is now banned, even though they were unable to provide basic information about the group.
An 18-year-old woman has been gang raped and beaten by up to ten different men, many of them with a Syrian background, in the Dutch city of Dordrecht. Although the rape occurred in May 2025, the suspects are only now being arrested. In response to the rape, political leader Geert Wilders wrote that the Netherlands also has Islamic grooming gangs and called for all the perpetrators to be removed from the country along with their families.
Six suspects have now been arrested, aged 20 to 23. During the incident, the girl, who lived in a residential group home, was driven to two different parking lots and raped by several men, some of whom filmed the assault and shared it on Snapchat. Police say the woman was humiliated and beaten.
And somehow the leaders of UK’s Labour Party say “Yes, we need more of that.”
A plane leaving Dubai and heading towards Tel Aviv almost saw a tragic end as the co-pilot of the plane turned hijacker mid-flight and attempted to take control and crash the plane….
The co-pilot, an Omani national, stabbed the pilot multiple times in an attempt to kill him and hijack the flight. The co-pilot had worked for FlyDubai for around a year.
The injured pilot was able to transmit a radio warning, Israel scrambled fighter jets, and the passengers and crew were able to subdue the attacker in midair.
The plane made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia to sort the entire mess out.
Be prepared to fight for your life on a moment’s notice, because you might have to.
More long overdue. “Trump expands H-1B visa crackdown, will scrutinize layoffs.”
The Trump administration on Thursday announced an executive order expanding the ongoing crackdown against H-1B visa abuse.
The H-1B is a visa program designed to allow companies to bring in high-skilled workers when no qualified Americans are available. But the program has faced considerable scrutiny in recent years, due to widespread fraud. Critics have argued that major employers also use it as a way to undercut American wages.
Trump’s Thursday order reaffirms the $100,000 application fee he imposed last year, but now mandates inter-agency coordination to consider an employers’s recent or planned layoffs when applying for H-1B visas.
“Our message to corporate America is simple: We’re not going to let you lay off American workers so you can replace them with cheap foreign labor,” Vice President JD Vance said.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 121 individuals during a summer enforcement initiative around Lake Lewisville in Dallas.
The operation, led by ICE’s Dallas field office, began June 27 and concluded over Labor Day weekend. It involved coordination with state and federal agencies, including the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and focused on identifying individuals unlawfully present in the country, assisting with lake-related investigations, and allowing local officers to devote more resources to boating safety enforcement.
According to ICE’s Friday release, individuals arrested during the initiative had criminal histories involving offenses such as assault, family violence, theft, burglary, sexual assault of a child, driving while intoxicated, and boating while intoxicated.
Among those arrested were two men ICE identified as members of Tren de Aragua, a transnational criminal organization designated by the U.S. State Department as both a foreign terrorist organization and a specially designated global terrorist group.
Willian Josue Ordonez Vasquez, 24, a Venezuelan national, and Edwin Josue Cabrera-Zelaya, 22, a Honduran national, were under investigation by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for allegedly operating an illegal livery business on Lake Lewisville.
I must say that I’ve never run into “illegal livery business” before, but it seems to involve not complying with Texas regulations on powered boat rental.
Man bites dog: “Too extreme for Newsom? California sanctuary bill for abortion, transgender procedures vetoed.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom used his veto pen to make out-of-state prosecutions theoretically possible for both “reproductive health care services” and “gender affirming health care services.”
The term-limited Democrat with presidential ambitions, who recently said he won’t run if fellow Californian and former Democratic nominee Kamala Harris enters the 2028 presidential race, vetoed legislation (AB 2164) to codify an extradition ban for “legally protected health care activity” in California, claiming it infringed executive authority.
Ignore the blather about Harris, Governor Hairgel is obviously running.
Researchers proved AI has deleted every reason universities exist.
Harvard University ran a controlled experiment pitting a custom AI against their own top-tier classrooms.
And the results are going to collapse the higher education bubble.
They took 194 undergraduates and split them up.
One group learned physics in one of Harvard’s best hands-on, active-learning physical classrooms. Group work. Instructor support. The premium university experience.
The other group went home and learned the exact same material with an AI tutor.
The AI didn’t just win. It embarrassed the institution.
Students using the AI learned more than twice as much as the students in the elite Harvard classroom.
They scored 30% higher on the final assessment.
And they did it in less time.
Let that sink in.
A piece of software sitting on a laptop outperformed a world-class faculty in one of the most elite learning environments on Earth.
Universities have always justified their exorbitant tuition with two things: access to elite knowledge and the physical classroom experience.
This study just proved both of those moats are gone.
When software can teach you complex physics twice as well as a $60,000-a-year institution, the math of higher education breaks permanently.
Yeah, but can AI forge friendships with the spawn of rich people, the primary purpose of so many attending the Ivy League? (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
A Detroit pastor who last year admonished a parishioner for her inadequate church donation of $1,235 was paid a salary of $538,955 that year by a taxpayer-funded nonprofit he leads that is separate from the church, according to federal records.
That salary for Marvin Winans Sr. — the pastor of Perfecting Church and a Grammy-winning gospel singer — accounted for about 61% of what the nonprofit spent toward its stated mission of “community development,” its recent report to the Internal Revenue Service shows.
His role as president for the nonprofit — Perfecting Community Development Corporation — is a half-time job, the report says, which means he was paid about $518 per hour.
Nice work if you can get it.
Winans’ salary has increased substantially in recent years and coincided with a $500,000 government grant the state awarded the nonprofit. Grant application guidance indicates the award was funded with federal pandemic relief money.
Of course it was.
Seems like Pastor Winans was far more concerned with fat stacks than flocks…
Another terror plot thwarted. “Suspect Arrested for Alleged Thwarted Capitol Attack Now in Federal Custody. Benny Caldera, Jr. was released from the Bexar County Jail into federal custody.”
A man was arrested on suspicion of planning an attack on the Texas State Capitol in Austin early in the morning of Wednesday, September 30.
The attack was allegedly set to occur on October 1.
Forty-year-old Benny Caldera, Jr., of Converse, was arrested by a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) SWAT team, according to reporting by NBC DFW.
He was booked into the Bexar County Jail and charged with making a terroristic threat against a public servant, a third degree felony, and was held on a $75,000 bond. It was not immediately clear if Caldera has a lawyer or how he plans to plead in response to the charge.
According to an arrest warrant affidavit, DPS was told by a friend of Caldera’s that he “had made verbal threats to assault the Texas State Capitol Building.” He is alleged to have said “I am going to the Capitol and I am going to shoot it up.”
Arrest documents also allege that Caldera’s motive was anger at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel political lobbying group, of which he reportedly said “these people have to be exterminated.”
Of course. Always The Joooooos!
Possibly just a dumbass shooting off his mouth. But lots of similar dumbasses have racked up kill counts in recent decades.
Make New Mexico Texas again? “Texas House Weighs Annexation of New Mexican Counties. The unlikely proposal could benefit the Permian Basin, one state representative claimed.” The chances of New Mexico agreeing without receiving something ridiculous in return (like El Paso) are virtually zero.
Gov. Greg Abbott announced the company’s decision, saying it is a $684 million capital investment that could create 3,800 jobs. The governor also announced that a Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) grant totaling $43,849,500, paired with a Veteran Created Job Bonus of $40,000, was offered to the company.
ASML wants larger EUV masks to support their High Numerical Aperture EUV stepper. “TSMC and ASML recently announced that the Taiwanese fab will adopt High-NA EUV for high volume manufacturer in 2030. In order to make this economical, the two giants will push the industry to adopt larger 6 in x 12in rectangular photo masks.” This is going to be a challenge for the entire industry ecosystem.
Retro-future noir. With aliens. Directed by Brad Bird. Mood: Cautious optimism.
BeardMeatsFood demolishes a 7 Deadly Sins challenge…and then promptly orders two more burgers and dessert. (OK, technically four more burgers, but it looks like he gave two to the cameraman.)
I just sent out my latest Lame Excuse Books catalog of SF/F/H books. Drop me a line if you’d like to receive a copy.
“Feminist Mad That The Men She Hates Won’t Date Her.” “I don’t get it. I’m aggressive, shrill, angry, and I talk online all the time about how much I hate men. Why won’t any of them ask me out?”
I would buy this so hard: “Mattel Confirms Hanukkah Barbie Comes Complete With Space Laser.”
A happy reunion:
A dog was lost for two days.
They found her and when they took her back to her owner, she started crying. https://t.co/J17xaSYMRe
Another would-be Trump assassin dirtnapped, Mexico burns, more leftwing fraud uncovered, disturbing news of taxpayer-funded child mutilation here and horrific rape overlooked in the UK, and some financial heavyweights are shedding their irrational social justice policies. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
I went out and early voted today, and voting was very heavy. (I was planning on going Thursday, but that the day the guy dropped off my new (used) dryer.) Because of redistricting, no voter registration cards were sent out, so just vote using one of several forms of official ID. (Gee, what an easy system! Just think how easy things could be if congressional Republicans made that their top priority!)
An armed man was shot and killed by the Secret Service in the early hours of the morning after unlawfully entering the secure perimeter at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
Austin Tucker Martin, 21, was holding a shotgun and a fuel can as he tried to enter Trump’s Palm Beach residence near the north side around 1.30am on Sunday, the Secret Service said.
President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump were in Washington, DC, last night attending the Governors’ Dinner.
Two Secret Service agents and one deputy from the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office ordered him to drop his weapons.
Things got pretty spicy in Mexico. “Mexico Kills a Drug Kingpin, and the Cartels Set the Country Ablaze.”
The good news is the cartel kingpin, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, a.k.a. “El Mencho,” is no longer with us. From the New York Times:
Mexican security forces on Sunday captured Mr. Oseguera in Tapalpa, a town of about 20,000, in the western coastal state of Jalisco, where his cartel was founded and based, the government said in a statement. Mr. Oseguera was injured in the operation and died while in transport to Mexico City for medical attention, according to the government. At least nine other cartel members were killed.
Reuters reports the raid was a result of combining U.S. intelligence-gathering with Mexican law enforcement:
The U.S. official, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, did not offer further details on any information that the U.S.-military-led task force may have offered Mexican authorities. The official stressed the raid itself was a Mexican military operation.
A former U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity without referring specifically to the task force, said the U.S. compiled a detailed target package for El Mencho and provided it to the Mexican government for its operation.
This detailed dossier included information provided by U.S. law enforcement and U.S. intelligence, the former official said.
The former official added El Mencho was very high, if not at the top, of a list of U.S. targets in Mexico.
Virginia Democrats are advancing two bills to extend deadlines for receiving and counting mail-in absentee ballots several days after Election Day.
Delegate Adele McClure and State Senator Barbara Favola, who represent Arlington, have introduced companion bills, HB 82 and SB 58, which will extend the deadline for counting absentee ballots in Virginia from noon to 5 p.m. on the third day after Election Day, reported ARL Now.
These bills are being presented as the White House seeks to curb voter fraud in Democrat-run states, particularly in regard to mail-in voting, which President Donald Trump claims is prone to widespread fraud.
Trump has vowed to sign an executive order to eliminate mail-in ballots and electronic voting machines ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, allowing absentee ballots only for the seriously ill and military personnel overseas to restore election integrity.
“Mail-in ballots are corrupt. You can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots,” Trump said on social media.
McClure and Favola said that their legislation to allow mail-in ballots to be counted well after the election will address delays caused by the U.S. Postal Service.
In June, a Pennsylvania woman appeared in federal court in connection with a $1 million-plus home care fraud scheme. Hemal Patel was charged with wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy to violate the federal anti-kickback statute. The 59-year-old Bucks County resident, according to the U.S Attorney’s Office for Pennsylvania’s Eastern District, pocketed payments for referring patients to home care agencies. Patel and others schemed to fraudulently bill Medicaid for ghost home care services.
The scam targeted Pennsylvania’s Community HealthChoices, which uses Medicaid funds to pay for home- and community-based personal assistance services for individuals with disabilities to help keep them out of nursing homes, according to court filings. Patel was one of hundreds of people charged in the Department of Justice’s National Health Care Fraud Takedown, the largest sweep of its kind covering some $14.6 billion in intended Medicaid losses.
Payouts to personal assistance services have ballooned nationally. Between 2018 and 2024, Medicaid cash in the category grew by 144 percent, from $9.6 billion to almost $23.5 billion. But payments have absolutely exploded in Pennsylvania — by more than 10,000 percent over the period, according to an analysis of new data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The massive data dump, reviewed by public spending tracker Open the Books, shows Medicaid-funded payments to Pennsylvania’s personal assistance services shot up from $5.6 million in 2018 to $583 million in 2024.
More homeless industrial complex fraud: “S.F. Homeless Nonprofit CEO Charged with Nine Felonies for Allegedly Misappropriating over $1M in Public Funds.”
The former CEO of a San Francisco-based homelessness nonprofit was charged Monday with nine felony counts after allegedly misappropriating more than $1.2 million in public funds.
Gwendolyn Westbrook, 71, is the former CEO of the United Council of Human Services. Charges against Westbrook include misappropriation of public funds, grand theft, and filing four years of false tax returns.
According to prosecutors, Westbrook misappropriated the $1.2 million through unauthorized payments to herself, improper cash withdrawals, and fraudulent reimbursements from 2019 to 2023. Prosecutors also claim Westbrook directly stole $91,000 from the United Council of Human Services.
Things that make you go “Hmmmm“: “FBI Raids Los Angeles School District Headquarters, Home of Superintendent.”
Federal agents executed search warrants Wednesday at the headquarters of the Los Angeles Unified School District and the home of Superintendent Albert Carvalho, significantly escalating the Trump administration’s fight against the nation’s second-largest school district.
The FBI conducted the raids on the 24th floor of LAUSD’s headquarters and Carvalho’s home in LA’s San Pedro neighborhood, a vibrant waterfront area, according to Fox 11. The nature of the investigation is currently unclear. LAUSD and Carvalho have yet to address the situation.
FBI agents could be seen going in and out of Carvalho’s home carrying items in boxes. Carvalho has been LAUSD superintendent since 2022 and was re-appointed to the role this past September. The affidavit for the search warrants are currently under seal, so it is unknown if Carvalho is personally a target of the investigation.
Last week, the Trump administration moved to intervene in a civil rights lawsuit against LAUSD for alleged racial discrimination tied to a program that prioritized funding for schools with lower amounts of white students. The lawsuit was brought by the 1776 Foundation, a conservative group active in K-12 education policy and school board races.
The district has also clashed with the Trump administration over immigration enforcement efforts in the area.
The defining issue of our country, powerfully visualized in 20 seconds:
“If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support: The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens not illegal aliens."
Our inquiry panel has heard extensive and deeply distressing testimony from a survivor detailing prolonged and extreme abuse, exploitation, and trafficking beginning in childhood and continuing over a number of years across multiple locations in the United Kingdom.
The panel wishes to place on record that we regard this testimony with the utmost seriousness. The survivor has provided detailed, consistent, and specific evidence over an extended period of engagement with our inquiry. She will remain anonymous and she is safe. She has made it abundantly clear that she wants the country to know her story. This is her decision, and her decision alone. Elements of her account have been independently corroborated through presented documentation and vast evidence.
The panel is also aware of additional material and supporting information that strengthens the credibility of the survivor’s account and warrants urgent and comprehensive investigation by the relevant statutory authorities.
Given the gravity of the allegations, we have thought long and hard about whether to release the following information. We believe, as does she, that the public deserves to know the truth about the rape gangs.
The survivor’s violent gang rape and abuse began at the age of 12, she was raped multiple times per day over many years. The rapes were filmed and were used as blackmail. The survivor has stated that multiple police officers were active perpetrators – money was exchanged openly and this destroyed her ability and willingness to seek help. Police vehicles were used to traffic her and some of the abuse events were called “cop nights.”
The extreme pain she suffered included filmed torture in places called ‘red rooms’.
The torture included waterboarding and strangulation by rope. Distressingly, she was raped by a dog, filmed, and forced to rewatch the footage as the men placed bets.
The co-ordination of this specific type of abuse was predominantly perpetrated by Pakistani-heritage men.
Also this:
Our rape gang inquiry is only just starting to scratch the surface – there is so very much evil among us.
Do not kid yourselves. This is happening, now. Today. All over Britain. It is an organised criminal network of rape and slavery.
China’s fishing fleets are clearing the sea out. “The People’s Republic of China (PRC), having drained as much as she can from nearby seas, has decided to strip-mine life from the most remote corners of our shared oceans.”
So scared of your own population and your inability to keep them fed and employed ashore—today—that you will knowingly strip mine life from the world’s oceans, regardless of its impact on everyone—tomorrow.
Once an ecosystem is ripped out from its foundation, there is no guarantee it can recover. They don’t care. That will be someone else’s problem. No one will do anything, as they either lack the will, or they have been bought off.
How remote and how far down the food chain is the PRC willing to go? The wholesale harvest of krill in the Antartic is as difficult to imagine as it is to see, and as such is hard to get people’s attention. It is a foundation species. If you harvest it below a certain level, the entire ecosystem will collapse.
What they are doing in South American, though?
Here’s your video.
The red are Chinese fishing boats crossing to the other side of the Pacific, rushing right up to Peru’s EEZ, before switching off their AIS and entering Peru’s territorial waters. They are doing the same off the Galapagos and Argentina.
Sounds like China is the actual existential threat to global life greens liked to claim global warming was. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
How many fingers, Winston? “Canadian tribunal fines man $750,000 for believing there are only two genders.”
“Deep penetration: Ukrainians spearhead Russian defenses in Huliaipole.”
The Ukrainian offensive near Huliaipole has developed a second axis, retaking still more territory from the Russian invaders.
This is a glorious story: Ukrainian covert cyber units set up a sting to secretly restore Starlink access to Russian units…as long as they “submit detailed information, including personal data, terminal identifiers, and geolocation coordinates.” Results: 2420 Russian control points droned and bombed.
I suppose I need to cover the weirdness of the 31st Texas congressional district race. “Congressman John Carter Faces Valentina Gomez, ‘ShamWow Guy’ in Crowded GOP Primary.” Carter was formerly my congressman until the 2020 redistricting.
Congressman John Carter (R-TX-31) is facing nine Republican challengers in the 2026 primary election for his seat, which he has held for 23 years.
Some of the contenders in the Republican primary have entered the race with unique backgrounds — including Offer Vince Shlomi, also known as the “Shamwow Guy” infomercial pitchman from the early 2000s, and social media sensation Valentina Gomez Noriega, formerly a candidate for Missouri secretary of state and best known for her unfiltered, brash tone in short videos posted online.
Other candidates in the crowded running include U.S. Army veterans William Abel, Steve Dowell, and Elvis Lossa; physician David Berry; Ed Ewald; entrepreneur and millionaire Abhiram Garapati; and businessman Raymond Hamden.
Shlomi has garnered nationwide attention after announcing his bid for CD 31, due to his familiar infomercial branding and signature voice. His campaign motto is “make America grow some balls again,” matching similar branding as seen from Gomez.
Carter is Texas’ third longest-serving member of the U.S. House of Representatives, having been the first member elected to the seat following the district’s creation through redistricting after the 2000 census. Carter cites the September 11 terrorist attacks as an event that encouraged him to run for Congress in 2002, thus leaving his prior role as district judge for the 277th District Court in Williamson County.
Carter currently serves as a member of the U.S. House Committee on Appropriations while also serving on both the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Subcommittee and the Defense Subcommittee.
He’s been endorsed for re-election by both President Donald Trump and Gov. Greg Abbott.
The top three fundraisers per the end-of-year campaign fiscal reports in the Republican primary were Carter, Gomez, and Garapati. Carter came in with $114,252 raised and reported $462,022 in cash on hand (COH). Gomez followed the incumbent with $56,175 in receipts and $22,196 in COH, while Garapti touted raising $30,000 with $39,000 in COH.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has admitted he had two affairs with Russian women while married to his now-ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, and issued a groveling apology for his links with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Gates, 70, told staffers at his foundation on Tuesday that he flew on a private plane with the disgraced financier and spent time with him in the US and abroad, but didn’t participate in any crime, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“I did nothing illicit. I saw nothing illicit,” Gates said in the town hall meeting. “To be clear, I never spent any time with the victims, the women around him.”
He lied about one thing. How do we know he’s not lying about all of it?
Speaking of Epstein: “World Economic Forum boss quits after review of Epstein links.”
The president and CEO of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Borge Brende, has resigned after a review into his links to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The forum ordered an independent review into Brende over his ties to the disgraced financier following the release of Epstein files by the US Department of Justice.
Brende has acknowledged he dined with Epstein three times between 2018 and 2019 and communicated with him by email and text, but said he was “completely unaware” of his past criminal activity.
“Illinois official got more than $300K from trucking industry while his agency gave illegal licenses…Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, a Democrat who is reportedly considering a run for Chicago mayor, is facing scrutiny over his role in improperly issuing CDL licenses after a series of high profile big rig crashes across the country.”
There were also fireworks after Middleton accused Roy of undermining a bill that would have imposed a national ban on transgender surgery for minors.
“Chip Roy had an amendment that would have allowed it to continue,” said Middleton. “It would have rewarded the transgender lobby; it would have rewarded Gavin Newsom and allowed these private transgender surgeries to continue in those blue states.”
Roy pushed back, saying the legislation was dead anyway but that his proposed amendment was to facilitate passage.
Days after the firm announced that they were scrapping DEI requirements for new board members, and six years after the death of George Floyd that ushered in institutionalized virtue-signaling, the bank’s head of DEI is leaving.
Megan Hogan, who’s been at the firm 12 years, is taking her shtick to Morgan Stanley according to Business Insider, which Hogan confirmed via email, telling the outlet that Morgan Stanley had extended “an amazing opportunity” to her in talent development.
She will report to Morgan’s head of talent development, Susan Reid, the firm’s global head of talent, and will begin in April.
The move comes after Goldman’s hard pivot away from DEI following Donald Trump’s second term – retooling its diversity program, known as One Million Black Women (oh god), a multibillion-dollar commitment to invest in black businesswomen and nonprofit leaders.
The bank also ended its requirement that companies it takes public have diverse boards, and stopped highlighting specific DEI targets in annual reports.
Hogan is being replaced by Lauren Uranker, another managing director who has been with the firm for 14 years who will become the new sole head of talent, development, engagement and management, according to the report.
But it’s not all good news.
Her mandate will be to concentrate on the transition to AI-supported work, team growth, and finding ways to keep top talent from fleeing.
Meet Karl Jacobson, the now-former police chief of New Haven, Connecticut. For virtually his entire career in police administration, he’s been a dedicated crusader against the pesky Second Amendment we mere mortals dare to exercise.
For years, this guy was a face of “gun violence” prevention, cozying up to anti-gun groups like Connecticut Against Gun Violence. He preached about treating gun ownership like a public health crisis, all while pushing programs to disarm the little people under the guise of safety. Because guns are icky and he has his.
But lo and behold, safety crusader Karl has been slapped with first-degree larceny charges for (allegedly) swiping almost a hundred grand in police department funds. Some of the money was for earmarked for…wait for it…youth programs for “at risk” kids. Thanks, Karl.
As with many of these big theft cases, there’s usually sex, drugs, or gambling behind the embezzlement. In this case, our fearless police chief was funding a gambling habit, racking up literally millions in wagers. Now the gun control crusader has been arrested, has resigned in disgrace and is facing prison.
Netflix isn’t getting Warner Brothers, as the Paramount Skydance offer was deemed superior. This is probably good news from both political and artistic standpoints, and may give movie theaters chances to survive longer.
Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Thursday that his office has reached a settlement with investment giant Vanguard, resolving part of Texas’ multistate lawsuit accusing major asset managers of manipulating the coal market through environmental investment strategies.
The agreement marks the first settlement in the case Paxton filed in 2024 against BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, in which he alleged the firms conspired to suppress coal production in pursuit of environmental goals—actions he argued drove up electricity costs for consumers.
Under the deal, Vanguard will pay $29.5 million to the participating states and adopt new restrictions on how it uses its shareholder influence. Paxton’s office said Vanguard agreed not to pressure companies to adopt environmental, social, or governance (ESG) policies that could reduce profitability, and pledged not to direct corporate strategy or threaten to divest holdings to force policy changes.
A win for investors and energy sanity.
Here’s a case like Breaking Bad if Walter White were a Texas Tech supply chain professor dealing fentanyl. “Daniel Taylor, age 50, has been charged with federal crimes and is no longer employed by the university.”
Rural Texas residents claim that a Muslim city is being built in their backyard and accuse local officials of being very secretive about the deal.
Kaufman, Texas, residents didn’t think much of it when Kaufman Solar LLC bought a massive parcel of land in 2022. However, now that a mysterious buyer from the Middle East is looking to purchase an estimated 2,000 acres of land right next door to the planned solar farm to establish a sustainable city, they are worried about the impact.
Snip.
The Kaufman County Commissioner Court meeting Jan. 20 confirms that a buyer, through a Dallas, Texas, law firm, is seeking to purchase the land, contingent on the county approving three new municipal water districts for a potential sustainable city. The lawyer verified that the potential developer is SEE Holding, a UAE-based, privately held global holding group headquartered in Dubai, apparently focused on sustainability and spearheading a net-zero emissions future.
Republican Rep. Lance Gooden also told the Daily Caller that the buyer is based in Dubai, which he says raises serious concerns that need to be addressed before any approval for the city is potentially granted.
Right now the “Islamic City” aspect is all hearsay, but it does look, at the very least, a little funny…
Given the Epstein-based charges against Prince Andrew, Mark Felton examines his service in the Falklands campaign to determine if he actually came under fire and served honorably. The answer to both seems to be yes.
Good: Richard Hammond drives a 3,000 horsepower electric hypercar. Bad: It’s made in China. Ball’s in your court, Elon…
Happy Anti-Communism Week everyone! (In addition, of course, to May 1st being one of two Victims of Communism Day.) The #SchumerShutdown ends with a whimper, a whole lot of SNAP fraud has been uncovered, more Democrats committing fraud, Chip Roy wants a complete immigration halt, Ukraine hits a bunch more Russian oil refineries, some semiconductor shenanigans, another company leaves Delaware for Texas, some tech companies in trouble, an interesting new pistol design, and a novel theory on “AI-related layoffs.”
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
As a side note, the mosquitos have been brutal the last few days. Possibly because it’s been a very warm (though largely dry) November, and the bats have already migrated south.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday night signed a continuing resolution at the White House that ends the record-breaking 42-day federal government shutdown.
The Senate passed the resolution on Monday and the House passed it earlier Wednesday evening. The resolution will keep the entire government funded through Jan. 30, and extends funding for military construction, Veterans Affairs, the Department of Agriculture, and Congress beyond that, through Sept. 30.
Trump slammed Democrats for causing the shutdown by refusing to go along with a clean continuing resolution for over a month, and urged voters to remember the party responsible for causing the six-week-long chaos during next year’s midterms.
“Republicans never wanted a shutdown and voted 15 times for a clean continuation of funding,” Trump said. “The Democrats shutdown has inflicted massive harm … So I just want to tell the American people, you should not forget this when we come up to midterms and other things. Don’t forget what they’ve done to our country.”
The resolution gives backpay to many federal workers and reinstates employees who were fired during the shutdown, but does not include an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies despite it having been a key Democratic demand in the shutdown. The subsidies are set to expire at the end of the year.
And what did Chuck Schumer get for shutting down large portions of the federal government for more than a month? Two things: “Jack” and “Squat.”
I hear that if you call Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office, the hold music is Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.”
Last Tuesday night, Democrats were jubilant, convinced they had just inflicted the first of many consequential defeats upon their detested foes, President Trump and the Republican Party. And now here we are, six days later, and Democrats are once again disappointed, infuriated, and at each other’s throats.
For the past 41 days, Republicans have had 53 senators willing to reopen the government, joined by Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and “independent” Angus King of Maine, who caucuses with the Democrats. But it requires 60 votes to cut off debate and bring the legislation to the floor for a vote, and thus to reopen the government, Republicans needed at least four more Democrats to change their mind.
Last night, five additional Democratic senators agreed to vote to reopen the government — and in the eyes of their fellow Democrats, effectively surrendered. Tim Kaine of Virginia, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire shifted their positions.
Those eight agreed to reopen the federal government at current funding levels through January 30, and in exchange, all they needed was a pledge from Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota to hold a vote on legislation to extend the Obamacare exchange premium subsidies by the second week of December.
There are one or two other deal-sweeteners in there for Kaine, notably an attempt to reverse more than 4,000 federal layoffs the Trump administration announced in the shutdown, and language to prevent future layoffs through January 30.
Snip.
Republicans just got the government reopened in exchange for a promise of a vote — not even promise of passage! — and rehiring government workers who were on the job on September 30. That’s a very small price to pay, and Republicans didn’t have to get rid of the filibuster, the ultimate short-term gain, long-term loss for Republicans in the Senate.
Across three-fifths of the United States, the Trump administration has found half a million people receiving SNAP benefits twice over and 5,000 dead people receiving them. In deep blue states, the fraud is probably much worse.
It is important to clarify that 20+ states out of the 50 did not comply with the federal government’s request for information on SNAP beneficiaries, likely because they are trying to hide how many illegal aliens are illicitly receiving food stamps. So the horrifying numbers revealed by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, The Ingraham Angle, are actually incomplete, and will probably be much higher if the administration can make radical Democrat states provide the necessary data.
Snip.
The secretary continued to list off food stamp recipient statistics: “80% [are] able-bodied Americans, meaning they can work, they don’t have small children at home, they’re not taking care of an elderly parent. They can work, and they choose not to work, of course, because they’re getting significant benefits from the taxpayer.”
We need to restore shame to able-bodied adults living on the public dole.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
A Texas congressman is proposing a “freeze” on all immigration until the federal government fixes the country’s broken system.
U.S. Rep. Chip Roy (R–TX) said Wednesday he is introducing a bill called the “Pause Act” that will freeze all immigration until Congress achieves certain objectives, including reforming chain migration and birthright citizenship and ending H-1B visas.
He said the nation’s record-high foreign-born population is creating “a cultural problem about who we are as Americans.”
Roy, who is in a four-way race to be the Republican nominee for Texas attorney general in 2026, explained his proposal on The Benny Show.
In addition to the immigration freeze and related reforms, Roy called for revisiting Plyler v. Doe, a case originating in Texas that resulted in a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring states to fund the education of illegal alien children.
Roy also said his bill would require vetting people for their adherence to Sharia law.
“Why are we importing any human being that is adherent to Sharia law, which is totally contrary to the Constitution, and our values, and Western civilization?” Roy asked host Benny Johnson.
“In Texas, we’ve been dealing with the brunt of the illegal immigration influence. But now we’re seeing, I think, the ramifications of the H-1B system and how it has been abused, in addition to chain migration and diversity visas, which we’ve been trying to fix for a long time, and we’ve been unable to do so,” said Roy.
Mostly agree with this, though there would probably have to be a way for individual exceptions to be made (say, a foreign Christian under a death threat from jihadists, or a Russian or Chinese defector, or a foreign NBA draft choice). But it should be so narrow as to require the personal approval of DHS Director Kristi Noem…
There are Somalis in Minnesota who wouldn’t vote for far leftist Somali Omar Fateh because he was from a different Somali clan, and they want members of the rival clan kicked out of the country…
They also hit multiple targets in Novorossiysk, including both the oil terminal and the S-300/400 system defending it. Also, there’s no way I can donate €100 right now, but I really want one of those “This Is Fine” patches…
Orchestrating Over 180 Anti-Trump Lawsuits Through CREW: As co-founder of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Eisen led hundreds of ethics complaints and lawsuits against the Trump administration, often perceived as partisan harassment that politicizes oversight and strains constitutional separation of powers.
Snip.
Involvement in USAID Funding Scandal: Accused of ties to $17M misappropriation via family-linked NGO, raising corruption concerns in foreign aid.
Plenty more at the link.
(Heavy sigh) Look, I’ve been avoid the whole stupid Tucker Carlson thing because he hasn’t been a particularly important part of the mediascape for a while, and plenty of other people were already dog-piling him. Yet, this week he seemed to turn up some pretty interesting information on would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crooks. Namely that he was a pro-Trump supporter…until he radically changed his tune in early 2020.
On July 19, 2019 Crooks writes: “Ilhan Omar and others are invaders and should honestly be killed and their dead bodies sent back.”
On July 20, 2018, Crooks writes: “If youre saying trump is a bad president you arent a patriot as trump is the literal definition of Patriotism”
Seven hours after that comment, Crooks writes: “I hope a quick painful death to all the deplorable immigrants and anti-trump congresswoman who dont deserve anything this countru [sic] has given them”
Later that evening he wrote: “Everyone of the Trump hat-ing democrats deserve to have their heads chopped of and put on steaks for the world to see what happens when you fuck with America”
These types of comments continued for months, “and became increasingly violent.”
“If any of the democratic candidates win. They wont be in there for long. Because unlike the dems we have guns and lots of them”
He also quoted Mao – writing “The only real political power comes from the barrel of a gun.”
The Change:
In early 2020 as the pandemic shifted into the headlines, crooks “radically” changed – writing of “trumps stupidity.”
He then began to mock the idea of the deep state – writing that “The deep state is simply made up of anybody who dis-agrees with the right wing. Conversation over.”
In Feb. 2020, Crooks called out Trump supporters as “brainwashed,” and a “cult.”
Later that day, Crooks called Trump a racist.
And in April 2020 when the COVID panic was in full swing, Crooks became pro-lockdown, writing “It seems that you people don’t understand that sometimes Public safety comes before your Personnel rights.”
He then wrote: “…going to a chinese new years party in america isn’t putting you at risk for corona virus because believe it or not viruses don’t spread through race like Tucker Carlson probably told you.”
In May of 2020, Crooks called Republican concerns over voter fraud “ignorant.”
He then wrote a comment that sounded like a “digital manifesto,” Carlson reports.
“they only way to fight the gov is with terror-ism style attacks, sneak a bomb into an essential building a set it off before anyone sees you, track down any important people/politicians/military leaders etc and try to asasinate them. Any sort of head fight is suicide and even ambush/surprise attacks likely aren’t going to end well.”
Sounds like another “known wolf,” doesn’t it? And the assertion that “there’s no deep state” (combined with what else we know about the assassination) makes you go “Hmmm.”
Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) is pushing back on the idea that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), known as Obamacare, has made health insurance costs more affordable, saying, “Obamacare makes everyone else poor.”
Lee shared a graphic, first posted by President Trump on Truth social, showing how major health insurance company stocks have performed since the ACA was enacted in 2010 to November 2025.
The seven major health insurance companies depicted on the graph show gains of anywhere from 414% to 1177% in their stock prices between March 2010 and November 2025.
Health insurance companies are making money hand over fist—not because they’ve discovered new & innovative ways of making Americans healthier, but because Obamacare insulates them from competition while giving them massive subsidies
Lee called out the insurance providers, noting that they’re “making money hand over fist” but not because they are providing “new & innovative ways of making Americans healthier.”
Instead, Lee says, these health insurance companies are prospering due to the bureaucratic barriers that prevent new competition and from massive subsidies from the federal government.
The Saudis are getting ready to purchase 48 F-35s.
California Governor Gavin Newsom’s former chief of staff Dana Williamson was arrested Wednesday in an FBI corruption probe and charged with multiple counts of bank and wire fraud.
Federal authorities accused Williamson, 53, of participating in a scheme to funnel campaign money from former federal Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra into a personal account. Sean McCluskie, Becerra’s former chief of staff, was named as a co-conspirator.
“This is a crucial step in an ongoing political corruption investigation that began more than three years ago,” U.S. Attorney Eric Grant said in a statement. “As it always has, the U.S. Attorney’s Office will continue to work tirelessly with our law enforcement partners to protect the people of California from political corruption.”
Williamson and McCluskie stole $225,000 between February 2022 and September 2024 from Becerra’s dormant state campaign fund, the federal indictment says. The Department of Justice investigation into the matter began three years ago, under former President Joe Biden’s administration, FBI Sacramento Special Agent in Charge Sid Patel said.
“The news today of formal accusations of impropriety by a long-serving trusted advisor are a gut punch,” Becerra told local outlet KCRA 3.
Williamson was hit with 23 charges, including conspiracy to commit fraud, conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruct justice, subscribing to false tax returns, and making false statements, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
Democratic political consultants are so money-hungry they’ll rake graft off other Democrats. Big fleas have little fleas…
Man, it sure seems like a lot of prominent Democratic politicians are committing mortgage fraud. ‘Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) was hit with a federal criminal referral for alleged mortgage and tax fraud related to his purchase of a $1.2 million home in Washington, DC, that he claimed as a primary residence.” As Dwight notes: “You may remember Eric Swalwell for such hits as ‘banging a Chinese spy‘” and “threatening to use nuclear weapons against gun owners.”
So a Chinese fraudster connected to Communist intelligence services wandered in from Canada and bought a trailer park next door to a stealth bomber base in Missouri.
This is not the opening line of a surreal joke.
Whiteman Air Force Base is home to our tiny fleet of B-2 bombers, and yet an RV park just a mile away “is one of several properties near U.S. military interests acquired by a web of shell companies, which are ultimately owned by a couple who live in Canada and belong to organizations controlled by disgraced Chinese tycoon and self-described former CCP intelligence ‘affiliate,’ Miles Guo,” according to a bombshell Daily Caller report.
Someone in the federal government needs to get this fixed. Get a warrant to toss the entire trailer park to see what spectrum warfare equipment they might be using, then seize the place under eminent domain for national security reasons.
BREAKING: The Attorney General of Kansas just charged Mayor Jose Ceballos of the City of Coldwater for illegally voting as a noncitizen in several elections.
Not only did he get elected city councilman & mayor as a noncitizen, he also voted. WOW! The six charges come immediately… pic.twitter.com/amhsJJvaZW
‘We now have tools, thanks to the current White House, that we haven’t had in over 10 years,’ said Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, ‘that we can check through the SAVE program, to find out if folks end up on our voter rolls. And they could be a legal resident, but they’re not a citizen. We want to make sure that gets clarified.’
Deport him.
Least you think I’m never critical of President Trump, I want to note that his trial balloon for 50 year mortgages is a really bad idea. It’s not a way to build wealth, and the only party getting rich off that deal is the banks. Financially, you’d be better off living in a van for a few years until you can afford a real mortgage.
This certainly has a whiff of scandal: “Houston ISD Sues Texas Attorney General to Block Release of Emails with California PR Firm. The district wants to keep communications with a PR firm from becoming public.”
Houston Independent School District (ISD) filed a lawsuit against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to block the release of emails between the district and Los Angeles public relations firm Bryson Gillette.
Bryson Gillette is former Obama aide Bill Burton’s public relations firm run by Democratic operatives. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was a senior adviser there.
Bryson Gillette was involved with the district’s rebranding in May. Houston ISD’s Chief of Public Affairs and Communications Alex Elizondo told an advisory committee that the district had a brand identity that “isn’t inviting or super compelling.”
A Houston ISD spokesperson said the rebrand came at no additional cost to the district and coincided with the rollout of new district and campus website designs scheduled for August.
According to the suit, ABC13 News requested one month of emails between Houston ISD and Bryson Gillette on May 8, which the district received on May 9. On May 21, the district asked Paxton to withhold documents and submitted the required materials to the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) asserting attorney-client privilege.
The OAG issued a ruling on August 12, ordering Houston ISD to release the records and stating that attorney-client privilege did not apply.
Houston ISD filed a lawsuit in Travis County on September 11, looking to block the emails from release.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has repeatedly slurred a federal judge by name, echoing President Trump’s history of diatribes against judges even before the current Democrat started copying the former Democrat’s social media style and insulting nicknames.
The perceived contender for the 2028 Democratic nomination for president may cluck his tongue again when he sees the latest order from U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez in a lawsuit against The Golden State’s alleged mandate on school districts to hide from parents their children’s asserted gender identity at odds with sex.
The President George W. Bush nominee ordered state Attorney General Rob Bonta and the California Department of Education to “show cause” on why they should not be sanctioned for “misleading” Benitez so he would remove them from the suit by teachers who allege their school district muzzled them and parents of “gender incongruent children.”
The state defendants’ motions to dismiss and opposition to the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment claimed that CDE had “withdrawn and conclusively replaced” an FAQ page that contained the challenged policies, which they claimed was the “only basis” for being named defendants and thus made the case moot, Benitez wrote.
“However, evidence demonstrates that the CDE may have merely moved the challenged content of the FAQ page to a new, required ‘PRISM’ training module,” as documented by the plaintiffs’ lawyers at the Thomas More Society, the judge said, ordering state defendants to explain their behavior Nov. 17 in court.
“From day one, officials from the local school district all the way to the governor’s mansion have tried to deflect responsibility” but “have now been caught not only lying to California taxpayers but attempting to mislead the Court to escape accountability,” TMS Executive Vice President Peter Breen said in a statement.
Based on early voting and some voting day results, no candidate secured over 50 percent of the votes cast, so the two highest vote recipients will move on to the runoff election, the date of which remains to be set by Gov. Greg Abbott.
The North Texas Senate seat was vacated when former state Sen. Kelly Hancock (R-North Richland Hills) resigned and was appointed by Abbott to fill the vacancy as the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts.
Snip.
Wambsganss was endorsed early on in the race by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who has vocally opposed expansion of casino gambling in Texas. She has also received support from Texans United for a Conservative Majority (TUCM), which opposes gambling expansion as well. Texans for Lawsuit Reform, a group not frequently on the same side of an electoral battle as TUCM, has also supported Wambsganss.
The Substrate startup has been doing the rounds in the news lately, thanks to its proposition of making chips using particle accelerators and X-rays instead of conventional EUV lithography, claiming it can eventually have angstrom-sized features at only $10,000 per wafer—in U.S. fabs, no less.
Oooo, where to begin? IBM tried experimenting with x-ray lithography in the 1980s and 90s, and found the rays were too energetic to use because they damaged wafers.
And technically, semiconductor equipment manufacturing already has particle accelerators: they’re called ion implanters and they’re used for gate dopants. Axcelis (formerly Eaton Semiconductor) and Applied Materials (both companies I worked for in the 1990s) make good money selling them, and there are a whole bunch of limits-of-physics reasons why you can’t use them for lithography. (Historical trivia: Applied Materials used to have their own in-house designed ion implanters, but their current offerings trace back to a competitor named Varian they bought in 2011.)
Those are bold claims, and an article by Fox Chapel Research (FCR) is seriously questioning whether they pay off.
The write-up is the first of two parts, and takes aim at not just the seemingly outlandish technological claims, but also at the track record of the venture’s founders, as well as the overall messaging on Substrate’s website. The start-up is backed by various investment funds, namely but not only Founders Fund, of whom Peter Thiel is part of.
The report says the founders are James and Oliver Proud, who reportedly have no experience in the semiconductor industry, nor do any of the investor funds. James’ latest venture was apparently the Sense sleep tracker, a product that had its inception on Kickstarter to the tune of $2.5m, but didn’t materialize until funding rounds raised over $50m. After release, the tracker was found to be borderline useless by reviewers and drew many comparisons to a scam.
ClowfishTV floats an interesting theory: A lot of those “AI-related” layoffs are just companies using that as an excuse to purge the woke from the ranks.
For more than half a century, Delaware stood as America’s corporate capital, renowned for its business-friendly laws, respected Chancery Court, and consistent legal rulings. But in recent years, leftist activist lawmakers and politicized judges have undermined that very foundation, sparking an exodus of major companies seeking stability and fairness to more welcoming states like Texas and Nevada.
On Wednesday morning, Coinbase joined the growing exodus, announcing on its website and in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal that it is moving its state of incorporation from Delaware to Texas.
“For decades, Delaware was known for predictable court outcomes, respect for the judgment of corporate boards, and speedy resolutions,” Grewal wrote in the op-ed.
However, he pointed out that recent inconsistent Chancery Court rulings and reliance on ad hoc legislative fixes do not create a sustainable business environment.
“Our decision to leave is about ensuring more predictable opportunities for the company, our shareholders, our customers and the new on-chain ecosystem we’re building,” he noted, adding, “Texas offers efficiency and predictability, in part thanks to recent corporate-law reforms that enhance governance flexibility and legal predictability.”
Grewal concluded, “Delaware wasn’t always the go-to choice for companies. At one point it was New Jersey, and before that New York. We’ve reached another inflection point in corporate law. The more states that can credibly attract companies, the better—and we’d like to see Delaware step up to stay in the mix. But as for Coinbase, you can find us in Texas….”
The exodus list from Delaware increases:
Tesla: Moved to Texas.
SpaceX: Moved to Texas.
Trump Media & Technology: Moved to Florida.
Dropbox: Moved to Nevada.
TripAdvisor: Moved to Nevada.
Roblox: Moved to Nevada.
Pershing Square: Moved to Nevada.
The Trade Desk: Moved to Nevada.
AMC Networks: Moved to Nevada.
Madison Square Garden Sports: Moved to Nevada.
Fidelity National Financial: Voted to move to Nevada.
So was a Delaware judge letting Elon Musk know how much he hated him for supporting Trump worth it?
“750-meter-long Chinese bridge partially collapses just weeks after opening.” From a landslide, but I’m betting the usual Chinesium/tofu drugs construction quality didn’t help…
At its Midlothian Data Center, alongside a number of state officials, Google announced a $40 billion data center infrastructure investment in Texas.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet, said that the investment will go toward the construction of three data center campuses located in Armstrong and Haskell counties.
Armstrong County is southeast of Amarillo. Haskell County is north of Abilene. Both counties have a whole lot of nothing there.
“They say that everything is bigger in Texas – and that certainly applies to the golden opportunity with AI,” Pichai stated.
“This investment will create thousands of jobs, provide skills training to college students and electrical apprentices, and accelerate energy affordability initiatives throughout Texas.”
Gov. Greg Abbott said the new Google AI data center announcement is “a Texas-sized investment in the future of our great state.” U.S. Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) were also in attendance, along with Congressman Jake Ellzey (R-TX-06) and a number of other local officials.
“Google’s $40 billion investment makes Texas Google’s largest investment in any state in the country and supports energy efficiency and workforce development in our state,” Abbott added. “We must ensure that America remains at the forefront of the AI revolution, and Texas is the place where that can happen.”
Google has already officially broken ground on two other data centers in the state: one in Midlothian in 2019, and the other in Red Oak in 2023. The technology company has since announced further investments into data and cloud infrastructure to the tune of $2.7 billion.
This most recent announcement of a $40 billion investment will focus on building out infrastructure to support the three new data centers. Some of that investment includes building up new and existing energy storage facilities, advanced water use operations, and partnering with universities to offer technology training and education.
My reservations about Google’s AI notwithstanding, that will offer a bunch of real jobs for real Texans…assuming the AI bubble doesn’t burst before they get built.
Speaking of tech firms in trouble, video game maker Ubisoft (makers of Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed games) has not only postponed an earnings report, they’ve suspended stock trading. I can’t recall a single instance where that was a good sign. The last time we mentioned Ubisoft, they were pissing off Japanese gamers for including a black samurai in one of their games…
Ian McCollum looks at the new Rideout Arsenal Dragon, a low-bore-axis, lever-delayed pistol. It’s funky looking and has some interesting features, including complete non-tool disassembly. However, the price point would make it way too expensive to consider even if I had a job, he experiences several firing malfunctions testing it (though it is a prototype), and I fear the tiny little tabs it uses may not hold up under heavy use. Still a pretty interesting design.
I said I might be putting up some segments from the latest Joe Rogan interview with Elon Musk, and this segment, where he talks about the California homeless industrial complex, sounds like he’s been reading BattleSwarm.
I’ve elided some of Musk’s verbal tics (“likes,” “uhs” and repeated words) in the interest of clarity and readability.
Joe Rogan: “And then you guys [California] spent $24 billion on the homeless and it got way worse.”
Elon Musk: “Yes. Like the homeless population doubled or something.”
EM: “People don’t understand the homeless thing because it it sort of prays on people’s empathy.”
EM: “The homeless industrial complex is really, it’s dark, man. [That] network of NGOs should be called the drug zombie farmers.”
EM: “When you meet somebody who’s totally dead inside shuffling along down the street, with a needle dangling out of their leg…”
EM: “Homeless is the wrong word. ‘Homeless’ implies that somebody got a little behind in their mortgage, payments and if they just got a job offer, they’d be back on their feet.”
EM: “You see these videos of people that are just shuffling, they’re on fentanyl. They’re taking a dump in the middle of the street, and they’ve got like open sores and stuff. They’re not like one job offer away from getting back on their feet.”
EM: “This is not a homeless issue. Homeless is, it’s a propaganda word.”
EM: “These sort of charities, [they] get money proportionate to the number of homeless people, or number of drug zombies.” So their incentive structure is to maximize the number of drug zombies, not minimize it.
EM: “That’s why they don’t arrest the drug dealers, because if they arrest the drug dealers, the drug zombies leave.”
JR: “So they’re in coordination with law enforcement on this?”
EM: “Yeah.”
JR: “So how do they how do they have those meetings?”
EM: “They’re all in cahoots. When you find this, it’s such a diabolical scam.”
EM: “San Francisco has got this tax this gross receipts tax. It’s not even on revenue, it’s on all transactions, which is why Stripe and Square and and and a whole bunch of financial companies had to move out of San Francisco…you’re taxed on any money going through the system in San Francisco. So Jack Dorsey pointed this out, and they had to move Square from San Francisco to Oakland, I think. Stripe had to move from San Francisco to South San Francisco, different city.”
EM: “That money goes to the homeless industrial complex. So there’s billions of dollars that go, as you pointed out, billions of dollars every year that go to these non-governmental organizations that are funded by the state. It’s not clear how to turn this off. It’s a self-licking ice cream cone situation.”
EM: “So they get this money, the money is proportionate to the number of homeless people, or number of drug zombies.”
EM: “When you add up all the money that’s flowing, they’re getting close to a million dollars per homeless drug zombie. It’s like $900,000 or something, some crazy amount of money, is going to these organizations. So they want to keep people just barely alive. They need to keep them in the area, so they get the revenue. So that’s why they don’t arrest the drug dealers, because otherwise the drug zombies would leave. But they don’t want [them] to have too much, if they get too much drugs and then they die. So they’re kept in this sort of perpetual zone of being addicted, but just barely alive.”
So the homeless industrial complex is farming homeless drug zombies as a cash crop in San Francisco. Once you understand this, a whole lot of otherwise inexplicable policies start to make sense. The shocking revelation here, that local law enforcement is in on the deal and that’s why they don’t arrest the drug dealers, makes sense, but I’d really like to see supporting evidence for it.
This is the sort of thing Republicans in congress should hold hearings on and get sworn testimony on the records. I’d also like to see DOGE-level forensic audits of the government agencies sending the money, and the NGOs spending it, to find out where all the zombie drug farming money is going…
This guy is pushing Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson “Abundance Agenda,” which aims to offer an alternative to the Democratic Party’s current downer social justice agenda. I’m not going to cover that much, since I don’t think the “Abundance Agenda” has a snowball’s chance in hell of being adopted by the Party’s current ideological core. But I am posting this for his (admittedly incomplete) critique of how Democrats grievously harmed the very people they’re claiming to be working for by destroying the quality of life in the cities they run.
“Democrats, plain and simple, need to change not only to win elections, but also to help the people they claim to support.”
“Working and middle-class American families are leaving places like California, New York and Illinois by the hundreds of thousands, often relocating to conservative regions.” Just like I talked about earlier this week.
“In the words of progressive journalist Ezra Klein: ‘You cannot claim to be the party of working families when the places you govern are places working families cannot afford to live.'” Sure you can! You just need to deploy the time-honored Democratic Party rhetorical device known as “lying your ass off.”
“Donald Trump partly won the 2024 election due to scarcity in the most essential aspects of people’s lives: affordable health care [What, ObamaCare didn’t make health care affordable? I’m shocked… -LP], energy, food, and most importantly housing.”
“For much of America, housing is simply far too expensive. In American cities, especially the liberal progressive ones, there’s an artificial scarcity of housing, and little to none of the available housing is affordable.”
“In 1970 Los Angeles, homes were 2.5 times the median family income, according to Redfin. But in 2022, LA house prices reached over nine times that of median family incomes, requiring families to earn over $220,000 to afford a home.”
“Home ownership is increasingly out of reach for the average worker, and high housing costs have led to financial instability for far too many Americans.”
“Housing supply is partly constrained by zoning restrictions…When more and more individuals and families compete for a near fixed supply of housing stock, prices typically rise making cities unaffordable for existing residents.” You mean like, say, importing millions of illegal aliens to compete with American citizens for limited housing stock?
“Many of America’s most prosperous cities, from New York and Boston to Seattle and San Francisco, heavily restrict the construction of new housing, especially the taller, denser buildings which could house more people, but that’s not the case in all of them.”
“Houston, Texas for example, has some of the most affordable housing and lowest homelessness rates in the country, despite its metro region holding over 7 million residents. This is in part because Houston has essentially no zoning. As a result, because it is extremely easy to build apartments and homes in much of the city, market forces can provide new housing at a variety of price points.”
“In liberal cities attempts, at building housing and infrastructure are often so expensive and inefficient that very little is actually built for low-income Americans. Take San Francisco, for example. The city’s numerous requirements for using public money add millions of dollars to the cost of construction, causing the typical publicly subsidized apartment to take six years to complete with a price tag of 600K per unit.” So affordable!
“San Francisco requires separate reviews from the city’s arts commission and Office of Disability, mandates electricity come from a city-owned utility company, and demands preferential treatment to small local contractors, meaning builders are discouraged from working with contractors who operate at scale.”
“Individually each requirement may seem well-meaning and progressive, but together they cause delays increase costs and ultimately limit the construction of housing for the poor, which clearly is not a progressive outcome.”
“Obstacles aren’t restricted to liberal cities like San Francisco these days building anything in America often requires jumping through a multitude of veto points, allowing interest groups, organizations and hyper local concerns to stop critical projects in their tracks.” Oh, that’s very “progressive” and by design, because every obstacle, every bureaucratic touch-point, provides opportunities for rent- and graft-seeking opportunities to grease the palms of progressives. Look at Austin’s “Reimagining Public Safety” and how just about every recommendation amounts to “take money away from the police and give it to us. This death by a thousand cuts doesn’t deserve the assumption of “good intentions.” It’s a racket that rakes off graft for the hard left.
At this point the author wanders off into more “good intentions, bad outcomes” examples, like environmentalism etc., but non-lefties no longer assume good intentions on the part of the Democratic Party.
Things he fails to mention: How high crime in blue cities with Soros-back prosecutors ruin the quality of life for poor and middle class Americans, and (again) how the huge influx of illegal aliens raises housing prices and sucks up resources that used to benefit American citizens.
Toward the end he states “Democratic doctrine often focuses so much on redistribution rather than growing the pie as a whole,” sounding rather like Jack Kemp or Newt Gingrich in 1994. And I’m pretty sure Democrats at the time either ignored them or called them Nazis.
But the baseline truth is that the ideological core of the Democratic Party wants nothing to do with your white boy “abundance agenda” because it directly conflicts with their primary goals of increasing their own abundance of wealth and power, taking full control of the Democratic Party and using it to destroy Americas existing structures to rebuild them into their imaginary socialist utopia.
You can’t make someone see the advantages of your “abundance agenda” if their entire likelihoods are predicated on not seeing it.
What a freaking epic (and tiring) week! I waited until Fox and Decision Desk had declared Trump the winner past 1 AM Wednesday morning, and then had to get up a few hours later to get ready to work. So we’ve got more election fallout, Israel bags more terrorist scumbags, Elon Musk and Ron Paul may team up to fight government waste, Texas continues to purge wokeness from public institutions, and a song mystery is solved.
Last time around, Trump squandered his momentum. He passed the tax bill that the establishment GOP wanted, after which they didn’t need anything from him and turned to obstructing him….
Like airplanes on a runway. Trump’s approach this time around should be what he should have done last time: Shock and awe. Shut down departments, fire bureaucrats, exercise emergency powers, all so fast that the establishment’s responses are saturated. Javier Millei’s whirlwind assault in Argentina should be the model, sometimes in specifics but also in general approach. Bureaucrats move slowly; Trump should move fast.
Elon Musk says he can cut $2 trillion easily; do it. Also, set bureaucrats competing with each other for what funds remain. Divide and conquer.
The FBI’s files on its policing of domestic dissent should be opened up, as should the details of the NSA’s illegal domestic spying. Trump should have outsiders investigate possible (likely) prosecutorial misconduct in the January 6 prosecutions – something judges have already raised – and fire those responsible, as well as subjecting them to what other legal consequences may apply. The lesson that the deep state can’t intervene in domestic politics needs to be driven home, and the only way to do that is to ruin a lot of lives on the part of people who deserve to have their lives ruined, from the top of the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies to the bottom. Likewise those involved in social media censorship programs, “Operation Chokepoint” style economic warfare, and the like. Abuse of government power against the citizenry should be treated as a criminal matter, because it is.
Trump should also announce that the federal government is waiving qualified immunity on the part of such officials.
There are lots more ideas – you can submit your own in the comments below, and the much-maligned Project 2025, though not actually a Trump initiative, contains some – and Bloomberg is already warning that if elected Trump will dismantle the White House’s gun control ministry. Oh no!
The specifics aren’t really the point here, though I should probably post another essay just about those. But the point here is rapid action across a wide variety of fronts. Trump should take advantage of the precedents that Biden has set for far-reaching executive action, though you can bet that when he does the press will pretend this is the first time anything like that has ever been done.
The story of how Harris pocketed record sums while failing to gain support from voters will be studied by campaigns for decades to come. Democrats who successfully pressured octogenarian President Joe Biden to pass the torch to the former California senator are now conducting an internal autopsy of the 2024 race, in which Trump raised and spent hundreds of millions of dollars less than Harris.
“A billion dollars paled in comparison to the increased prices Americans were seeing across the country,” Tom Fitton, president of the conservative group Judicial Watch and a longtime Trump ally, told the Washington Examiner. “Voters weren’t fooled.”
The Harris campaign and its affiliated committees dropped more than $654 million on advertising from July 22 to Election Day, whereas Trump spent $378 million, or 57% less, in the same category, according to data from AdImpact.
Future Forward, the $500 million “ad-testing factory” and super PAC that supported Harris, was a reliable clearinghouse for checks from wealthy Democrats such as Reid Hoffman, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Dustin Moskovitz. And anonymous donations, or so-called “dark money,” also benefited Harris at a faster and more substantial clip than Trump thanks to lax federal laws that progressives often criticize but, nonetheless, exploited in 2024.
The Harris campaign declined to comment on its finances. A fuller portrait will be public after the election, as the Federal Election Commission mandates post-general election reports for candidates within 30 days.
In mid-October, the Harris campaign disclosed that it had spent over $880 million this election, almost $526 million greater than the roughly $354 million that the Trump campaign had disclosed spending, according to a Washington Examiner analysis of federal filings. Much of the Harris campaign’s spending was allocated for digital media advertising, polling, and travel from state to state, including to a private jet company called Advanced Aviation.
Payroll and the taxes that accompanied it accounted for $56.6 million of the Harris campaign’s spending. In comparison, the Trump campaign reported spending $9 million on payroll — employing hundreds fewer staff members.
There was also the army of political, digital, and media consultants who were paid over $12.8 million by the Harris campaign, filings show.
One vendor, Village Marketing Agency, received over $3.9 million and reportedly worked to recruit thousands of social media influencers to boost Harris online. Others that scored lucrative consulting gigs from the campaign included the likes of Precision Strategies, a Democratic-aligned marketing agency; Ethos Organizing, founded by former Ohio Democratic Party director Malik Hubbard; and the Biden-allied SKDK communications firm.
Snip.
“Event production” was also a staple spending area of the Harris campaign, which notably hosted a star-studded lineup of musicians from Lady Gaga to Katy Perry for an election eve rally.
The campaign paid more than $15 million, according to federal filings, to companies for such services.
There was $1 million for Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions on Oct. 15 in West Hollywood, California.
Winfrey, a top Harris ally, appeared at a town hall with the vice president in September and was at her final rally in Philadelphia before Election Day.
Viva Creative, a marketing agency that has touted its work with Oprah, comedian Trevor Noah, the Washington Nationals baseball team, and American Express, scooped up $1.8 million from the Harris campaign for event production from September to October. A company called Production Management One in Maryland received $1.7 million, with large payments also going to Vox Productions, Temple University, Wizard Studios North, the Park Hyatt Chicago, and other entities for event production, filings show.
Then there was Majic Productions, a Wisconsin-based company, which has worked the NBA playoffs, the Super Bowl, and at the Bellagio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. The Harris campaign paid that company $2.3 million.
A source familiar with the matter told the Washington Examiner that the Harris campaign spent six figures on building a set for Harris’s appearance on the popular Call Her Daddy podcast with host Alex Cooper. The interview came out in October and was reportedly filmed in a hotel room in Washington, D.C.
In the end, San Francisco mayor London Breed’s recent efforts to crack down on homelessness and crime weren’t enough to save her from the wrath of voters frustrated by years of disorder and talk of a “doom loop” in the famously progressive city.
After 14 rounds through the city’s ranked-choice voting process, Breed lost decisively to Daniel Lurie, a more moderate Democrat and a wealthy heir to the Levi Strauss fortune.
Lurie was ahead from the first round, and after 14 rounds led with 56.2 percent of the vote to Breed’s 43.8 percent, according to the San Francisco Department of Elections.
With San Francisco actually restoring sanity, pretty soon Austin will be the only crazy leftwing city left in America…
“UK Conservative Party elects ‘anti-woke’ Kemi Badenoch as new leader. The UK’s Conservatives on Saturday elected Kemi Badenoch as their new leader, replacing Rishi Sunak after the party’s poor performance in July’s general election. Badenoch, a staunch “anti-woke” advocate, faces the challenge of uniting a divided party while redefining its future.”
Israel seems to be on another winning streak. Israeli Commando Raid Captures Hezbollah Naval Commander….The terrorist, identified by Lebanese media as Imad Amhaz, chief of Hezbollah’s naval operations, was picked by Israeli commandos from the town of Batroun, some 100 miles into the terrorist-held hostile territory.”
Today, the Board of Regents of Texas A&M University System pushed back against “shared governance” with woke faculty members. They voted to end 52 low-performing programs, including an LGBTQ minor.
Over the course of many months, State Rep. Brian Harrison (R-Midlothian) repeatedly criticized DEI courses and the LGBTQ studies minor at Texas A&M. In September 2024, a university spokesperson confirmed that they would deactivate 38 certificates and 14 minors, including the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies minor.
On November 7, the Board of Regents unanimously approved the deactivation of these programs by voice vote.
The only question is why it took so long to fight back against the woke mind virus…
Want to be infuriated? “A federal disaster relief official ordered workers to bypass the homes of Donald Trump’s supporters as they surveyed damage caused by Hurricane Milton in Florida, according to internal correspondence obtained by The Daily Wire and confirmed by multiple federal employees.”
“The Grift Is Ending: ESG Fund Managers Being Told To “Keep Their Lawyers Very Close.”
Green New Boom: “Lithium-Ion Battery Recycle Plant Explodes in Missouri.”
RIPeanut. “Outrage Ensues After Beloved Rescue Squirrel Seized By NY, Euthanized.”
Speaking of sickening, you might want to skip to the next LinkSwarm entry if you don’t want to hear about horrific child abuse: “Animator Bolhem Bouchiba was sentenced to 25 years in prison for ordering the torture of children on live streams, paying parents to abuse their own kids.” Now he works for Disney.
Remember all that money to was supposed to flow to semiconductor companies that fabbed chips in America thanks to the CHIPS Act? Well Intel has seen exactly jack and squat from it. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger: “As we said on our [earnings] call, we are disappointed by the time it is taking to get it done: it is well over two years since the CHIPS Act passed and over that period I have invested $30 billion in U.S. manufacturing and we have seen $0 from the CHIPS grants.” What are the odds that the money has actually been raked off into the usual Democratic pockets? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Followup: “For five years, Mickey Barreto lived in Room 2565 at the storied New Yorker Hotel without paying a dime. But the free ride ended when he was not only evicted, but also charged earlier this year with a criminal scheme to claim ownership of the Midtown Manhattan hotel. Now, two doctors and prosecutors have said that he is not mentally competent to stand trial, and a judge has given him seven days to find inpatient psychiatric care.” (Hat tip: Dwight.) (Previously.)
Kotaku lays off more writers, though ultra-woke leftist Alyssa Mercante evidently left on her own. Evidently they’re down to six fulltime staffers.
Everything you know is wrong. “A new peer-reviewed study led by Sydney-based researchers Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falleti has found that the time it would take for a typing monkey to replicate Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets, and poems would be longer than the lifespan of our universe.”
“Democrats Admit Trump Actually Won In 2020 And Is Now Unable To Serve Third Term.” “We probably should have been more up-front about the fact that we stole the election and Biden was never president, but oh well. Hindsight is 20-20. I guess Kamala wins by default now, right?”
More evidence of the Biden Recession, California’s welfare state goes extra crazy, Chicago has to spend mad money to produce illiterate children, an Assistant DA resigns, a cyberattack hits car dealers nationwide, a Brazilian thief gets ventilated, and God unites the entire world in hatred of the New York Yankees. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Taxpayers are funding a new high-rise building in Los Angeles where homeless people will enjoy skyline views, a cafe, a gym, and an art studio, not to mention the free rent.
The fancy new building is 19 stories high and has 278 units, each costing about $600,000. The total cost was $165 million, according to the Los Angeles Times. It is the first of three new high-rise buildings that will soon house homeless people.
Snip.
This modern tower for the homeless includes a TV in each apartment, a gym, an art room, a soundproofed music room, a computer room with a library, a TV lounge, a courtyard, and a cafe that will host movie nights. There are also six common balconies, four of which have dog runs.
Where are politicians getting all the money for this project? The buildings are funded by the city’s supportive housing loan program, Proposition HHH, which was approved by city voters in 2016, as well as state housing funds and $56 million in state tax credits.
The three apartment buildings will be located around the headquarters of the Weingart Center, a nonprofit that assists homeless people. Kevin Murray, a former California state senator, is the man behind the project. He serves as the chief executive of the nonprofit.
I’m sure all the Homeless Industrial Complex members involved got generously paid for their efforts. Once again, the message of the Democratic Party is: You’re suckers for working for a living.
Illinois Policy just issued a report showing that while CPS has doubled spending per student since 2012, grades are down by 60-80%, depending on the subject. “Just 1-in-4 CPS students can read or perform math at grade level,” the report says. “The percent of students enrolling in college after high school graduation is decreasing. And for those who do enroll, another study found many are struggling to finish college in four years – just 30% get their bachelor’s in four years compared to 47% nationally.”
By every other measure… there’s no other way to put this… CPS is falling apart.
In 2023, 26% of students in grades 3 through 8 across all of CPS could read at grade level and about 18% could do math proficiently. For 11th grade CPS students, only 22% could read at grade level and 19% do math proficiently.
CPS’ failure to engage students shows in the chronic absenteeism rate. Chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed.
According to ISBE data, 86.3% of teachers in CPS were rated as proficient or excellent in 2023, down from 91.4% in 2019. Yet many students in CPS are struggling to reach proficiency in core subjects.
There’s much more at the link, all of it tragic. An entire generation of Chicago students is failing — and being failed by their schools and, let’s be brutally honest, by their families.
If you’re thinking that CPS must be seriously underfunded to achieve such dismal results, you must have been living in a cave for the last 40 or 50 years. CPS will spend a jaw-dropping $29,028 per student this year. My family lives in a lovely exurb of Colorado Springs and our district spends roughly one-third of what CPS does — $10,214 per student — and we get much better results. It isn’t about the money. It rarely is.
The case began in November 2022, when Loper Bright Enterprises, a fishery based out of Cape May, New Jersey, appealed a district court opinion to the Supreme Court. The conflict between Loper Bright and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) started after the agency decided to require private fisheries like Loper Bright to pay their regulatory inspectors for their time observing fishery practices.
While the law doesn’t explicitly allow this practice, the Fishery Service cites the Chevron Deference, a precedent set by a 1984 Supreme Court case, which states that an ambiguous law can be interpreted by government agencies as they see fit. In short, the Fishery Service wants private companies to pay their salaries and found a legal loophole to justify it.
While this may seem like an isolated incident, it is just one example of a long history of government agencies infringing on individual liberty. The outcome of this case holds supreme importance for the future of our republic and the preservation of our financial and civil freedoms.
Since 1950, the federal government has steadily grown in size. Today, it has over 2.9 million civilian employees, more than Walmart has worldwide. This growth has paved the way for the creation of a governmental pseudo-branch denoted the “administrative state.” The administrative state contains government employees who have a significant impact on people’s everyday lives but yet aren’t held accountable to citizens in the form of elections. These unelected bureaucrats undermine the central ethos of a republic, where elected officials are supposed to seek the good of their constituents or risk not being re-elected.
The problem with this system was made evident during the pandemic. During the COVID shutdown, hundreds of millions of Americans were sentenced to lockdowns, impacting their schools, churches, and families. Many of the people behind this policy were members of the CDC, one of the government agencies that comprise the administrative state. The decisions they made were not subject to the traditional checks and balances which typically constrain the US government. Instead, America found itself under a tyranny of the unelected.
This overreach extends beyond individual liberty into private business. When businesses can be encroached upon at a whim by unelected authorities, long-term investment becomes a much riskier endeavor. When the COVID shutdown occurred, many small businesses, with their small profit margins and high overhead, were unable to weather the storm. For the companies that survived, the blatant government intervention and the severe consequences that followed left a sour taste in their mouth for future capital investments. You’re not going to build a new business if a bureaucrat can shut it down the next day. All of these factors contribute to government agencies having a negative impact on financial markets and investor portfolios.
The Chevron Deference precedent, which is at the center of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, gives even more power to these governmental agencies. When ambiguity exists, this precedent allows courts to simply defer to agencies’ interpretations, even if those interpretations favor the agencies’ own interests. It also allows courts to seek out ambiguity in order to give near-unbridled power to these agencies.
If the Supreme Court upholds Chevron, it will further entrench the power of unelected bureaucrats and make it increasingly difficult for individuals and businesses to challenge agency overreach. However, if the Court rules against Chevron, it would represent a shift toward increased restraint of the administrative state, leading to a reevaluation of the scope and authority of federal agencies.
Israeli arms exports hit record sales. Funny how having products that actually work stimulates sales. I’m betting Russia is enjoying the opposite right now…
Baseball game announcer: We will not be singing the national anthem. Crowd: The hell we won’t! Patriotism ensues.
Speaking of DA’s behaving badly, a followup: Assistant Travis County DA Joseph Frederick, who was charged with aggravated assault, has resigned before he could be fired, his lawyer saying this was to maintain his health benefits, because he has Parkinson’s. Which is strange, because COBRA covers involuntary termination as well.
Argentine President Javier Milei has a glorious rant about how you can’t negotiate with leftists.
This week’s California restaurant chain closing due to the minimum wage hike: Arby’s. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“CDK Global, a major software provider to auto dealerships in the U.S., has been hacked, forcing the company to shut down most of its systems temporarily. This cyberattack effectively halted sales operations at approximately 15,000 car dealerships, including those under General Motors, Group 1 Automotive, and Holman.” Without this software, there’s essential dead in the water. (More details.)
Speaking of money-losing MSM outlets, the incoming editor of the Washington Post says thanks but no thanks after the staff there preemptively published a hit piece on him. How’s that letting the inmates run the asylum working out for you, Jeff Bezos?
George R. Nethercutt Jr., the Republican who ousted Democratic Speaker Thomas S. Foley in the Newt Gingrich Contract with America wave of 1994, dead at 79 (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Is olive oil good for your brain? I hope so, since it’s an Atkins-compliant dressing for my salad, so I generally get more than the recommended teaspoon a day.
Lies trying to hide how bad the Biden Recession sucks continue to unravel, a mini Texas-vs.-California update, Ukraine makes another oil refinery go boom, true depths of human depravity, some Bill Burr and Critical Drinker links, and two tons of Murica. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Against expectations of a small improvement from -11.3 to -10.0, the headline sentiment gauge dropped to -14.4 (the lowest end of analysts’ forecasts).
Furthermore, the production index, a key measure of state manufacturing conditions, fell five points to -4.1, a reading that suggests a slight decline in output month over month.
Other measures of manufacturing activity also indicated declines this month.
The new orders index – a key measure of demand – dropped 17 points to -11.8 after briefly turning positive last month.
The capacity utilization index edged down five points to -5.7, and the shipments index plunged from 0.1 to -15.4.
The decline in new orders came alongside a surge in prices as raw materials costs rose to 13-month highs…
That has the stench of stagflation lathered all over it.
Also worse than reported: employment numbers. “Philadelphia Fed Admits US Payrolls Overstated By At Least 800,000.”
We first have to go back to December 2022, when we reported something shocking: as part of its data analysis of the “more comprehensive, accurate job estimates released by the BLS as part of its Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) program”, the Philadelphia Fed found that the BLS had overstated jobs to the tune of 1.1 million! This is what the Philadelphia Fed wrote in its quarterly Early Benchmark Revision of State Payroll Employment report at the time:
Our estimates incorporate more comprehensive, accurate job estimates released by the BLS as part of its Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) program to augment the sample data from the BLS’s CES that are issued monthly on a timely basis. All percentage change calculations are expressed as annualized rates. Read more about our methodology. Learn more about interpreting our early benchmark estimates.
So what did this “more accurate”, “more comprehensive” report find? It found that…
In the aggregate, 10,500 net new jobs were added during the period rather than the 1,121,500 jobs estimated by the sum of the states; the U.S. CES estimated net growth of 1,047,000 jobs for the period.
Lots of detailed analysis snipped.
Putting it all together, we now know – as the Philly Fed reported first – that the labor market is far weaker than conventionally believed. In fact, no less than 800,000 payrolls are “missing” when one uses the far more accurate Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data rather than the BLS’ woefully inaccurate and politically mandated payrolls “data”, and if one looks back the the monthly gains across most of 2023, one gets not 230K jobs added on average every month but rather 130K.
Of course, none of that paints Bidenomics in a flattering picture, because while one can at least pretend that issuing $1 trillion in debt every 100 days to add 3 million jos per year is somewhat acceptable, learning that that ridiculous amount buys 800,000 jobs less is hardly the endorsement that the White House needs.
I think I link a story like this every year: “California Leads Among U.S. States Sending People to Texas in 2022. Florida and New York combined sent fewer people to Texas than California.” Leave any leftwing politics behind when you move…
California has a $55 billion deficit. But don’t worry, for the 24-25 fiscal year, it’s a $73 billion deficit.
A Russian-backed “propaganda” network has been broken up for spreading anti-Ukraine stories and paying unnamed European politicians, according to authorities in several countries.
Investigators claimed it used the popular Voice of Europe website as a vehicle to pay politicians.
The Czech Republic and Poland said the network aimed to influence European politics.
Voice of Europe did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.
Czech media, citing intelligence sources, reported that politicians from Germany, France, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Hungary were paid by Voice of Europe in order to influence upcoming elections for the European Parliament.
The German newspaper Der Spiegel said the money was either handed over in cash in covert meetings in Prague or through cryptocurrency exchanges.
Pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk is alleged by the Czech Republic to be behind the network.
Mr Medvedchuk was arrested in Ukraine soon after the Russian invasion, but later transferred to Russia with about 50 prisoners of war in exchange for 215 Ukrainians.
Czech authorities also named Artyom Marchevsky, alleging he managed the day-to-day business of the website. Both men were sanctioned by Czech authorities.
“$100M missing from Bay area trust fund management company. A Bay area father who counted on a local non-profit to handle a trust fund designed for his daughter’s long-term care feels duped.” And this is a trust for special needs kids.
The radical leftists in control of Baltimore City Hall have plunged the metro area just north of Washington, DC, into apocalyptic levels. We advise readers to entirely avoid the metro area as violent crime spirals out of control.
Failed social justice reforms, defunding the police, and widespread mistrust of the police have resulted in a skeleton police force that will no longer be able to protect residents in some regions of the city.
Fox Baltimore reported last Tuesday that only three police officers were on duty for the Southern Police District, which includes more than 61,000 residents.
Joe Lieberman, RIP. One of the least reprehensible Democratic senators of the last 30 years or so. But I still remember this:
Don’t click on this link unless you want to plumb the depths of human depravity. Noteworthy: “He and his husband.”
Stellantis, AKA The European Monster That Ate Chrysler, just just laid off a whole bunch of white collar workers. Note their mention of focusing on “implementing our EV product offensive.” Oh yeah, they’re boned.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declares victory over Disney, as the latter has dropped their lawsuit over the the elimination of their special district status.
Sean Combs, AKA “Puff Daddy,” AKA “Diddy,” raided by the FBI. “A source close to the investigation told NBC News that the raid was connected to allegations of sex-trafficking and sexual assault and the solicitation and distribution of illegal narcotics and firearms.” “Source close” caveats apply.
The federal government is going to allow a shuttered nuclear power plant to be restarted. “The federal government announced that it would provide a $1.5 billion loan to restart a nuclear power plant in southwestern Michigan. NJ-based Holtec International acquired the 800-megawatt Palisades plant in 2022 with plans to dismantle it, but with support from the state of Michigan and the Biden administration, the emphasis has shifted to restarting the nuclear power plant by late 2025 instead.” Not wild about the loan part, but restarting America’s nuclear energy growth is long overdue.
Used Japanese homes are worthless Not just because of the shrinking population, but because they’re designed to be.
The Critical Drinker is not impressed with the Road House remake. “The Patrick Swayze original wasn’t exactly peak cinema. It was dumb and over-the-top and silly, and I don’t imagine people were exactly crying out for a remake. But damn, man, it’s like Citizen Kane compared to this version.”
School tries to ban American flag from truck. Result: Two tons of Murica.
Twitch is cracking down on streams that “focus on intimate body parts.” After watching this, I have one question: Where exactly did the lady featured obtain her “automatic butt jiggler?”
Feel-good crime aftermath story:
Dog shot during the robbery given a warm send off by hospital staff after undergoing multiple surgeries..🐕🐾🥺🙏❤️ pic.twitter.com/OnSjqmRt2u
Because the ground invasion wasn’t enough, the Biden Administration has been flying illegal aliens into American cities, wages for Americans are down, San Francisco continues inching toward sanity, some crime news, and Fisker looks farked. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
A Freedom of Information Act lawsuit has revealed that the Biden administration has flown at least 320,000 migrants into the United States in an effort to reduce the number of crossings at the southern border, according to Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies.
“The program at the center of the FOIA litigation is perhaps the most enigmatic and least-known of the Biden administration’s uses of the CBP One cellphone scheduling app, even though it is responsible for almost invisibly importing by air 320,000 aliens with no legal right to enter the United States since it got underway in late 2022,” wrote Bensman.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had initially refused to disclose information about the flights, which use a cell phone app, CBP One, to arrange.
“Under these legally dubious parole programs, aliens who cannot legally enter the country use the CBP One app to apply for travel authorization and temporary humanitarian release from those airports. The parole program allows for two-year periods of legal status during which adults are eligible for work authorization,” Bensman continues.
The flights resulted in illegal immigrants being placed in at least 43 American cities from January through December 2023.
Under the terms of their release, migrants are able to remain in the US for two years without obtaining legal status, and are meanwhile eligible for work authorization.
How many Americans realized they were voting for this invasion when they voted for Biden?
A new witness could testify Fani Willis warned lover Nathan Wade’s former business partner to stay quiet about their affair, an explosive new court filing claims.
“They are coming after us. You don’t need to talk to them about anything about us,” Willis is alleged to have warned Terrence Bradley in a September 2023 phone call.
The call was overheard by Cobb County, Georgia, prosecutor Cindi Lee Yeager, according to court papers filed Monday by Trump co-defendant David Schafer.
The tide continues to turn in San Francisco. “‘Progressivism Is Out’: San Franciscans Pass Ballot Measures Requiring Drug Testing for Welfare, Expanding Police Surveillance.”
San Francisco voters who’ve grown tired of the crime, homelessness, and drug use plaguing their left-wing city overwhelmingly approved a pair of ballot measures on Tuesday that will expand police powers and require welfare recipients to be screened for drugs.
Proposition E, which authorizes police to use surveillance equipment — cameras, drones, and even facial-recognition technology — without prior permission from an oversight body, passed with 59,818 votes, or 59.9 percent. The proposition will also loosen restrictions on police chases and require that officers spend less time on paperwork and administrative duties.
Proposition F, which mandates that anyone receiving public-assistance benefits be screened for a substance-abuse disorder, passed with 63,295 votes, or 63 percent.
As part of the proposition, public-assistance recipients found to be drug-dependent could be offered treatment. If it is made “available at no cost, the recipient will be required to participate to continue receiving” public benefits, according to the proposition.
“Progressivism is out—for now,” the San Francisco Chronicles’ website read in bold letters on Wednesday morning, “Voters make it clear: S.F. can no longer be called a progressive city.”
The approval of both propositions was a big win for San Francisco’s embattled mayor, London Breed, who placed both measures on the primary ballot in an effort to tamp down on crime and to take aim at drug addiction and overdose deaths in the city. She told reporters on Tuesday that passage of the two measure will allow her administration to “continue the work we’re doing” to improve public safety, according to the Chronicle.
With San Francisco turning slightly sane, Austin may vie with Seattle, New York and Chicago for the title of America’s Most Insane Radical Leftwing City.
In June 2023, The Daily Signal’s Fred Lucas reported that the Indian Health Service (IHS), which falls under the Department of Health and Human Services, is collaborating with the ACLU, Demos, and several other left-wing organizations to register new voters. In order to expand the reach of these efforts, the Biden administration designated an Arizona-based Indian Health Service (IHS) facility as an official voter registration hub in October.
According to Arizona Democrat Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, Native Health of Phoenix, which caters to “urban Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and all other individuals,” will “assist individuals in the voter registration process.” The administration confirmed that the IHS facility would be one of five designated as voter registration sites by the end of 2023.
Much like young voters, Native Americans heavily favor Democrats.
4. Department of Agriculture
The USDA is another federal agency directing its efforts at potential Democrat voters. Earlier this month, emails obtained by The Daily Signal show the agency was colluding with Demos as early as August 2021 to work on turning out voters.
As The Federalist’s M.D. Kittle reported, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service “encourages all state agencies administering the child nutrition programs to provide local program operators with promotional materials, including voter registration and non-partisan, non-campaign election information, to disseminate among voting-age program participants and their families.”
One of the “ideas” recommended by the agency is for “[s]chool food authorities administering the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) in high schools, and adult day care centers and emergency shelters participating in the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) to promote voter registration and election information among voting-age participants and use congregate feeding areas, such as cafeterias, or food distribution sites, as sites for the dissemination of information.”
Sweden officially became part of the NATO alliance Thursday, two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused the nation to overhaul its non-alignment policy.
Snip.
“It’s official – #Sweden is now the 32nd member of #NATO, taking its rightful place at our table. Sweden’s accession makes NATO stronger, Sweden safer, and the whole Alliance more secure. I look forward to raising their flag at NATO HQ on Monday,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on X Thursday. Hungary ratified Sweden’s ascension into the alliance last week, becoming the final NATO country to do so.
The nordic country applied for NATO membership in May 2022, about three months after Russia began its war in Ukraine. The admission of Finland and Sweden expands NATO to 32 members.
As Peter Zeihan noted, “in the Swedish military, every day you wake up, you prepare for one thing: the war with the Russians.” Good job, Putin!
Blaze Media journalist Steve Baker was arrested by the FBI and brought to a Texas federal courtroom in handcuffs, a belly chain and foot shackles to face four nonviolent misdemeanor charges for being at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021…
“There’s nothing in there about my behavior,” Mr. Baker told The Epoch Times. “It’s all about my words. Everything. It’s all about stuff I said before, stuff I said after, and that’s it. No more complicated than that.”
Mr. Geyer said his client’s arrest shows an “unprecedented shift in Department of Justice policy [after it] had spent decades adhering to special protections for journalists.”
Speaking of people who shouldn’t be getting taxpayers subsidies, Harvard “We Hate Jews” University wants $2 billion in taxpayer-backed bonds.
Recall effort against Dallas’ Democrat-turned-Republican mayor Eric Johnson fails. Number of signatures to have a recall election: 103,595. Number of signatures submitted: Zero.
