Iran is beyond broke, more Trump assassination repercussions, FBI finally raids some fraudsters, racial carve-out congressional districts are unconstitutional, Russia loses more ships and planes, Cornyn amnesty pander unearthed, an oil theft ring busted, DEI earns some college pink slips, and a brand spanking new Microsoft Zero Day exploit.
The Wall Street Journal offers a deep dive into the state of Iran’s wartime economy. And it turns out that the mullahs are, effectively, broke:
Government revenue has dried up just as the needs of its population are rising.
The war has thrown around one million people out of work directly and another million indirectly, according to early estimates cited by Gholamhossein Mohammadi, an official at Iran’s Labor and Social-Affairs ministry. That is a significant portion of the roughly 25 million people who are normally employed in Iran.
The cost of living has soared, with the annual inflation rate reaching 67 percent in the month through mid-April from the same period a year earlier, according to Iran’s central bank. The subsidized price of red meat, which was mostly imported through sea routes, has gone up to the equivalent of around $3.60 a pound, beyond the reach of most in a country where the minimum wage is around $130 a month.
“Living is not affordable anymore,” said Mahdi Ghodsi of the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies. “Iran is at its weakest point.”
Businesses across the country — from manufacturers to retailers — are closing, residents said. The lack of steel and other raw materials is hampering production in various industries. Electronic goods, which are mostly imported, are in short supply and expensive.
A 67 percent inflation rate? The worst we’ve experienced in recent memory was 9.1 percent in June 2022.
Snip.
“Iran’s rial weakened on Wednesday, with the dollar trading at around 1.8 million rials, according to market trackers. The rate reflects continued pressure on the local currency amid economic strains.” Back at the start of January, this newsletter informed you, “When Ruhollah Khomeini swept to power in 1979, one US dollar traded for 70 rials. Today, that same dollar commands a staggering 1,130,000 rials, more than 16,000-fold its price in 1979. In the last year alone, the rial has lost 50 percent of its value.” The Iran rial was the weakest currency in the world . . . back when one dollar could buy you 1.3 million rials.
Plus the specter of hunger riots.
Our ridiculous media referred to the attempted Trump assassination as a “security incident” or “loud noise.”
The security establishment has promised and made better security arrangements after the two prior attempts on Trump’s life in 2024 in Butler, Pa., and West Palm Beach, Fla., the assassination of Charlie Kirk at an open-air Utah college campus in 2025, or the wounding of congressman practicing baseball at a suburban Washington field all the way back 2017.
Those events – along with the BLM riots in summer 2020, the Antifa attacks on immigration agents, the execution of the United Health Care CEO and the attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh near his personal home – have something more in common than just the exploitation of current security postures.
They all, according to publicly released evidence, involved perpetrators influenced by a vast left-wing machinery that bombards social media, community protests and even establishment television with an unrelenting message of hatred and intolerance that can dehumanize the targets of violence and motivate armed actors to action, experts said.
That machinery ranges from nonprofits like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which actually paid racist actors in the name of fighting extremism, to the organizers of the No Kings protests who unleashed hundreds of thousands of old and young protesters onto the streets on the false notion that America has somehow become a monarchy under Trump.
In between, elitists and teachers have infused the nation with claims that America’s history is racist and unrighteous and that young Americans are predestined to fates determined as oppressors or the oppressed based on their skin color. And well-funded nonprofits consorting with America’s enemies in China and Cuba are openly fomenting a color revolution in hopes of securing a Marxist future on U.S. soil.
Allen appears to have been influenced by some of that ideology, as well as Democrats’ incessant but unfounded claims that Trump was involved in the late Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking.
The manifesto police said Allen wrote suggested he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” and that he subscribed to the Marxist paradigm of critical race theory that divides people into oppressors and the oppressed.
Who funded American Nazis and the KKK? You did, through USAID.
The NGO funding machine is getting harder to ignore.
USAID funneled $27 million through the Tides Center, with some of it going directly into the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Finally: “FBI and DHS Raid Dozens of Minnesota Fraudsters, Including ‘Quality Learing Center.'”
Federal officers are conducting raids of suspected fraudsters in Minneapolis on Tuesday, including the most infamous Somali-linked false front, the “Quality Learing Center.”
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) are targeting more than 20 locations in their latest operation against the massive Minnesota fraud network, according to Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin, who said that he spoke with the Department of Justice (DOJ), the FBI’s parent agency. The size and scope of the Minnesota fraud scandal, which is heavily linked to the Somali community there, but also implicates multiple Democrat politicians, including Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Rep. Ilhan Omar, continues to astound patriotic Americans.
Melugin posted on X April 28, “Sources tell FOX the locations are largely Somali linked businesses, including the infamous ‘Quality Learning Center’. I’m told these are court approved search warrants being served and they are tied to fraud, not immigration enforcement. Fox is told 22 search warrants were executed in Minnesota this morning.”
He also shared a statement from a DOJ spokesperson: “Today the FBI with federal, state and local law enforcement is involved in court-authorized law enforcement activity as part of an ongoing fraud investigation.”
While investigating apparent false fronts for taxpayer-funded daycares in Minnesota, journalist Nick Shirley found one that had even misspelled “learning” in its own name on its sign, calling the place a “Quality Learing Center.” Tikki Brown, the commissioner of Minnesota’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families, then asserted that the childcare facility in question closed down the previous week, explaining why Shirley didn’t see any children there. But on Dec. 29, the same location was “packed with kids.” Apparently, some fraudster panicked and summoned children to provide a veneer of legitimacy. It’s The Truman Show in real life.
A new pair of reports is shedding fresh light on how teachers unions across the country have quietly poured more than $1 billion into political causes over the past decade, with a top education watchdog warning the spending reflects a growing focus on activism rather than classroom priorities.
According to research from Defending Education, national teachers unions alone have directed roughly $669 million toward left-wing political groups, advocacy organizations and campaigns since 2015. When state and local affiliates are included, that figure balloons to more than $1 billion in total political spending.
The reports track spending from the two largest unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), as well as their state-level affiliates, using federal filings and campaign finance records.
The Supreme Court just handed down one of the most consequential redistricting decisions in a generation — and Democrats are not going to like it one bit.
In a 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, the majority held that Louisiana’s congressional map — redrawn to include a second majority-black district — constitutes an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the Fifteenth Amendment. The Court stopped short of striking down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act entirely, but it dramatically narrowed the ways in which states may use race when drawing congressional maps.
For Republicans eyeing the House in 2026, this is the kind of ruling that changes the math.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you which justices dissented.
The ruling’s immediate implications are huge. As we’ve previously reported, Republicans could potentially pick up anywhere from 12 to 19 new House seats across the South, as states seize the opportunity to redraw maps that were previously constrained by Section 2 requirements.
Democrats in South face wipeout if Supreme Court guts Voting Rights Act — NYT pic.twitter.com/goHof93AS3
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has been funded by big name businesses and philanthropists including George Soros, JPMorgan, ex-Apple CEO Tim Cook and George Clooney.
The group — indicted Tuesday for allegedly funneling millions to the hate groups it says it is ideologically against — also holds over $786 million in assets, yet still solicits donations.
In fact, it took in $106 million in donated cash 2024, according to its latest available financial disclosures, yet still ran “urgent” appeals for “emergency” cash.
Over the years, donations have been made by big name donors, many of whom pledged to the organization after clashes at a 2017 by “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Virginia, which resulted in the death of one protester.
“Ukraine Hits Shadow Fleet Tanker Marquise with Marine Drones.” “The vessel was hit about 210 kilometers southeast of Tuapse, Russia” in the Black Sea.”
“After Al-Qaeda in Mali (JNIM) [Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin] & FLA [Azawad Liberation Front] took the city yesterday, the Russian Africa Corps & Malian soldiers fled to a military base outside town where they got surrounded…The Russians negotiated an exit from the [base] and fled. But the agreement didn’t include the Marian soldiers who were left behind. So, Russia once again abandoning its supposed allies as soon as the going gets tough.” Mali rebels also shot down a Russian helicopter.
Speaking of Mali: “Defense minister killed in united al-Qaeda and ISIS jihad attack, country on verge of collapse.”
Mali was on the brink of collapse last year as al-Qaeda affiliate Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) unleashed attacks on the country. Then came a report that Jihad Watch covered yesterday about renewed attacks that injured 16 people, as efforts to create an Islamic state in Mali escalated. The new siege rapidly spiraled into much worse, with JNIM, ISIS and Northern rebels coordinating attacks. Mali’s defense minister was killed.
I’m guessing the ISIS here is the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara.
Mali’s military government, which Gen. Assimi Goïta leads, broke ties with France in 2021-2022 and hired the Russian Wagner Group (known as the Africa Corps) to fight the rebels.
Technically, Wagner Group and Africa Corps are different Russian mercenary groups, though I’m sure a lot of soldiers for the former ended up in the latter.
The siege also served as “a major blow to Russia as the mercenaries had no intelligence about the attacks and were unable to protect major cities.”
Mali now faces an existential threat, which Kurdistan24 News characterized as “a profound failure for Mali’s Russian-backed military junta, signalling severe regional instability.”
Governments in the Sahel have never been the most stable, but the Russian-backed coups there have made things measurably worse.
A resurfaced 2020 campaign ad shows U.S. Sen. John Cornyn promoting his support for the “legalization of Dreamers”—a message that has since been removed from his YouTube channel.
In the Spanish-language ad, a narrator proclaims that, while Cornyn supports secure borders, he “firmly supports legalization of Dreamers.”
The video, which was previously available on his official YouTube channel, was quickly removed after circulation on social media.
Created by executive action under President Barack Obama in 2012, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program allows certain individuals brought to the United States illegally as children, known as “Dreamers,” to remain in the country and shields them from deportation.
The program was challenged by President Donald Trump and Attorney General Ken Paxton, who argued it was unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to end the program in a 5–4 ruling.
The messaging aligns with comments Cornyn made on the Senate floor in 2020 regarding recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program following that Supreme Court ruling.
“DACA recipients must have a permanent legislative solution. They deserve nothing less,” Cornyn said at the time. “We need to take action and pass legislation that will unequivocally allow these young men and women to stay in the only home, in the only country, they’ve known.”
Cornyn also described the uncertainty surrounding their status as “terrifying” and said many recipients have built careers and families in the United States.
“These young people deserve better,” he added.
The senator further noted he had been working with advocacy groups and stakeholders—including the Texas Hispanic Chambers of Commerce, LULAC, and Catholic bishops—to find a long-term solution.
Cornyn has long been known as a squish on amnesty, but no Republican should be seeking the approval of the hard-left LULAC.
David Morens, 78, worked under Fauci while he served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The DOJ charged Morens with conspiracy against the United States; destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations; concealment, removal, or mutilation of records; and aiding and abetting. The case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland.
Morens, along with two unnamed co-conspirators, “concealed, removed, destroyed and caused the concealment, and removal of federal records to evade FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] and FRA [Federal Records Act],” according to the indictment.
During his time at NIH, which ran from 2006 to 2022, Morens used his personal email account to conduct government business, specifically discussing the origins of Covid-19 with Manhattan-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak. Morens deleted said emails after sending them.
He also spoke with NIH’s FOIA liaison, asking for tips on how to evade FOIA requests.
Sure acts like he’s guilty, doesn’t he?
“Despite state law, we’re secretly keeping DEI.” College: “All right, then, enjoy this pink slip.”
Fourteen defendants from Texas and New Mexico were federally indicted for large-scale oil theft in the Permian Basin.
The United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas announced on April 22 that the 14 conspirators were indicted for the alleged transport and theft of crude oil across the Texas-New Mexico border.
The criminal activity allegedly took place in the Permian Basin, which is responsible for nearly 40 percent of all oil production in the U.S.
Snip.
The Texas defendants are Randell Wayne Reid, age 41, of Electra; his father, James Darrell Reid, 65, also of Electra; and Christopher Frederick Harris, 22, of Seminole. Randell Reid and James Reid are both owners of Reidco Enterprises, a Texas-based company.
The defendants allegedly conspired to steal crude oil from the Permian Basin, “some of which was then stored on land that one of the conspirators leased from the United States government,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Stolen crude oil was then sold to the other conspirators well below the market value set by West Texas Intermediate (WTI) pricing. WTI is used as a benchmark to set crude oil prices in the region.
The indictment of Randell and James Reid restates these claims, adding that the men conspired to trade oil across the state borders.
Spirit Airlines to cease operations tomorrow, thanks in part to Elizabeth Warren blocking a merger with JetBlue.
The zero-day flaw combines a time-of-check to time-of-use (TOCTOU) race condition and path confusion in Windows Defender’s signature update system, according to an advisory from the Retail & Hospitality-Information Sharing and Analysis Center (RH-ISAC). If exploited successfully, a local user can access the Security Account Manager (SAM) database, obtain password hashes, and eventually gain administrator rights using the pass-the-hash technique, which would give the attacker full system control.
Local user rather than remote, so that mitigates the potential attacker pool. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
Louis Rossmann, call your office. “Conroe residents say city is stonewalling their requests for information on Flock Safety cameras.”
People in Conroe are asking city officials for answers about how Flock cameras are being used and where the collected information ends up.
Residents say they feel like they are not getting straight answers.
Residents are working to learn how these cameras operate and, on Thursday, spoke to ABC13 about their demands for city officials to be more transparent, as they feel their questions are being ignored.
“Everybody in the community wants to feel safe. Everyone agrees this could help with kidnappings and hit-and-runs. To me, I just haven’t seen the data that proves that,” said concerned citizen, James Fletes.
Officials have said in the past that Flock cameras read license plates and alert police if the plates are linked to any crimes.
This technology has been used in the greater Houston area for years. In Conroe, some people say they are worried about the number of cameras and the lack of information about them.
Fletes says this concern led him to file a public records request with the city of Conroe. He asked questions such as how many cameras there are, how they work, where the data goes, and who can access it.
He says the city told him it would cost $1,200 to release the information, so he and others in the community joined forces to cover the cost.
“This is no longer just my request. It’s the people of Conroe’s request. They funded it, and we’re tired of being stonewalled,” said Fletes.
The original request was sent in March. Now, it’s almost May, and he says no information has been released yet.
“They were quick to take the money and very slow to provide the documents,” said Fletes.
There seems to be a whole lot suspicious about the ways cities have surreptitiously rolled out AI-enabled cameras and hoped people wouldn’t notice. (Hat tip: TPPF.)
Iran teeters, Walz falls, more Russia’s shadow fleet has an epically bad week, more Minnesota Somali fraud fallout, more computer security vulnerabilities, and a policeman transformed into a frog using the power of AI! Plus the Austro-Hungarian and Achaemenid empires. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Personally, this week has been deeply frustrating, as I’ve been trying to withdraw money from my 401K account to pay my property taxes, a process I began mid-December, and it’s still not done. “Oh, these things take time,’ says 401K company. Then it’s “Oh, we haven’t heard back from your former employers.” Former employer: “Oh, we haven’t received the request from your 401K company.” Then: “Oh, the third party company we hired to handle 401K requests hasn’t received the request.” Now it’s “Oh, they’ve just started working on it, but they’re always slow at the end of the year.” It’s frustrating to have to jump through so many hoops to access my own money.
On to the LinkSwarm!
From the outside, it’s hard to tell how serious the chances of protesters are to free their own country, but they’re so fed up with the mullah’s rule that they’re burning mosques.
Iranian protestors demonstrating against the theocratic regime will face harsh punishment with absolutely zero leniency, Iran’s top judge has warned — as footage emerged Friday of mosques burning on the streets of Tehran amid the ongoing riots.
Chief Justice Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, the head of Iran’s judiciary, issued the stark warning after President Trump vowed to back those peacefully demonstrating across the country.
Signaling a potentially violent crackdown, Ejei vowed the punishment for rioters would “be decisive, maximum and without any legal leniency.”
Protesters gather as vehicles burn in Tehran, Iran.
Things in Iran seem to be moving very fast indeed…
“Authorities report that Mahmoud Haqiqat, a police station commander in Iranshahr, Iran’s southeastern Sistan and Baluchestan Province, was shot and killed by unknown assailants this week in a drive-by attack. Video circulating online appears to show gunmen firing on Haqiqat’s vehicle before it crashed. Social posts and video descriptions identify him as the former head of the city’s intelligence and allege that he was involved in operations targeting anti-regime Baluch groups in the area.” Add Balochs to Kurds and Lurs as ethnic minorities pissed at the mullah’s government. There’s also a substantial Baloch population in Pakistan, and they don’t like the Pakistani government either. Hell, history records the Balochs rebelling against the Achaemenid Empire three millennia ago…
With constant pressure from liberal activists, some states now dispatch mail-in ballots 45 to 60 days before Election Day and allow the counting of such absentee votes as many as three weeks afterward, creating an election trimester that causes vote tallies to wildly fluctuate days after polls close and increasingly erodes Americans’ trust.
But conservatives are now fighting back, first with an executive order by President Donald Trump requiring all ballots to be counted on election night, followed by a challenge to Mississippi’s counting process that has not reached the U.S. Supreme Court and then the Ohio legislature’s vote to require all its ballots to arrive on election night to be tallied.
“It’s common sense that ballots should arrive by Election Day,” Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose told Just the News this week after his state became the 35th to require mail-in ballots to arrive by Election Night in order to be counted. Previously, the state had a four-day grace period for ballots to arrive after Election Day.
“I think that trying to reduce complexity should be our goal in government, and certainly when it comes to the rules for how elections run,” LaRose said in a wide-ranging interview with the John Solomon Reports podcast. “If you were to stop the average person on the street last year and say, what’s the deadline for your ballot to get back to the board of elections, they would not know that it’s four days after. It’s kind of an arbitrary date.”
The National Conference of State Legislatures reported that many states now mail out ballots as early as 45 days to two months before Election Day and about a dozen states allow them to be counted days later — as long as three weeks afterward in Washington state, 14 days in Illinois, 10 days in Maryland and seven days in California and New York.
Tim Walz is dropping his bid for a third term as governor of Minnesota amid a national political firestorm sparked by the identification of massive welfare fraud in the state’s Somali community.
Walz released a statement Monday morning ahead of a late morning press conference announcing his withdrawal from the race.
“But as I reflected on this moment with my family and my team over the holidays, I came to the conclusion that I can’t give a political campaign my all. Every minute I spend defending my own political interests would be a minute I can’t spend defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who prey on our generosity and the cynics who prey on our differences,” Walz said. “So I’ve decided to step out of the race and let others worry about the election while I focus on the work.”
Translation: “I got caught, and I need to see if I can get away from this giant pile of graft as quickly as possible.”
Walz and fellow Minnesota Democrats have been subjected to withering attacks at the hands of Trump and his allies over the staggering scale of welfare fraud that’s taken place under their noses in recent years. Federal prosecutors announced last month that the cost of the welfare fraud perpetrated against state-run Medicaid services alone could exceed $9 billion, half or more of the $18 billion paid out since 2018.
A federal probe into the matter has been initiated, and Minnesota officials have until January 9 to provide the administration with more information regarding who is receiving the welfare benefits in the state.
It’s amazing that anyone can give Gavin Newsom a run for the title of America’s Most Incompetent Governor, but Walz is just that special.
It’s been going on a while. “Minnesota Inspector General [Carolyn Ham] covered up hundreds of millions in Somali childcare fraud in 2018.”
You know how the Somali childcare fraud has been a big thing, kind of an open secret in Minnesota for years now?
Well, not only has this been happening for at least a decade, but, according to this report, the state has known about it for at least that long.
Check out these receipts from Maze on X detailing a nine-year-old investigation into the fraud at Minnesota’s Child Care Assistance Program — an investigation that went nowhere.
The Minnesota child care fraud saga is so strange because years ago it was fully investigated, documented, and reported on by a team of state investigators set up to catch and stop child care fraud.
They spent years gathering evidence including many hours of surveillance footage. In 2018 they compiled a detailed report and delivered it to their boss, the DHS Inspector General.
Directly from the report: ‘Investigators, as well as the Supervisor and Manager of this unit believe that the overall fraud rate in this program is at least 50% of the $217M paid to child care centers in CY2017.’
What did the Inspector General do with this information? She refused to meet with her own team, refused to discuss the findings of the report, and then spent $90,000 of taxpayer money to have an outside company write a report saying the fraud isn’t quite as bad as her own team of investigators was claiming.
Woke is a heckuva drug, isn’t it?
So is corruption, scamming, and Democratic politics in general.
Former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani, now at Fox News, is investigating the left-wing, billionaire-funded dark money networks in the nonprofit world and offering much-needed coverage for mainstream Americans on how these NGOs influence protest movements, unleash riots, and conduct sophisticated political pressure campaigns.
Snip.
Key details from the report:
MacKenzie Scott disclosed sending at least $5 million in a new round of donations to the Solidaire Network, on top of a $10 million gift in 2021 via her philanthropy vehicle, Yield Giving.
Solidaire funds a network of radical anti-Israel activist groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine, both of which are under House and Senate investigation for alleged coordination with Hamas-linked activities.
Other Solidaire-backed groups include the Palestinian Youth Movement and the US Palestinian Community Network, which publicly justified Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Scott’s grants are unrestricted, allowing recipients to spend funds freely. Solidaire used this flexibility to finance campaigns promoting “Palestinian liberation,” campus protests, and direct-action activism, including efforts to block U.S. military logistics supporting Israel.
Funding was often routed through fiscal sponsors such as WESPAC Foundation and Tides Foundation, structures that have drawn scrutiny from Republican lawmakers investigating possible links to extremist groups.
Scott’s cumulative charitable giving has reached roughly $26 billion since 2019, surpassing the lifetime donations of George Soros, and placing her at the center of growing political controversy over billionaire-funded activist networks.
The Somali ambassador to the United Nations, Abukar Dahir Osman, who is tied to a daycare company in Ohio under investigation in Washington, might have acquired an American citizenship fraudulently, according to a source in Somaliland.
Ambassador Osman, who currently serves as the rotating president of the UN Security Council, first entered America in the mid-1980s and again in 1989. He claimed to be a refugee of a minority in Somaliland persecuted by the Somali regime at the time, a Somaliland ambassador at large who tweets under the name of Haggoogane, tells the Sun via text.
Haggoogane, whose real name is Mustafa Osman but is unrelated to the ambassador, says that the current Somali UN ambassador was far from a refugee fearing extermination by the Somali regime. Instead, he tells the Sun, the UN ambassador was part of that regime in the late 1980s. “His job was to identify anyone the regime saw as a threat,” Haggoogane says.
Between 1960 and 1991 the government of Somalia killed hundreds of thousands of ethnic Isaaq and others in Somaliland, which declared independence of Mogadishu in 1991.
Following Israel’s recognition of Somaliland last month, the Israeli foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, visited its capital, Hargeisa, on Tuesday, and met with President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi. After Israel became the first UN member to recognize Somaliland’s independence, Mr. Osman, the Somali UN ambassador, convened an “emergency session” of the security council.
At Washington on Tuesday, the deputy secretary at the Department of Health and Human Service, Jim O’Neill, confirmed a rumor regarding the Somali ambassador, which has long been whispered in UN corridors.
“I can confirm public speculation that Ambassador Abukar Dahir Osman, Permanent Representative of Somalia to the UN and President of the Security Council, is in fact associated with Progressive Health Care Services, a home health agency in Cincinnati,” Mr. O’Neill wrote on X. “HHS has previously taken action against Progressive in response to a conviction for Medicaid fraud. More to come.”
The United States seized a Russian-flagged oil tanker in the North Atlantic this week while also intercepting a separate stateless “dark fleet” vessel tied to Venezuelan oil exports, US officials said, marking a significant escalation in Washington’s enforcement campaign against sanctioned energy shipments.
According to US officials, the Russian-flagged tanker Marinera, previously known as Bella-1, was seized on Wednesday near Iceland after being tracked for more than two weeks across the Atlantic, reports Reuters. The operation occurred as Russian military assets, including a submarine, were operating in the general area, though officials said there were no signs of confrontation.
In a post on X, US European Command said the tanker was seized for violating US sanctions. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded, writing, “The blockade of sanctioned and illicit Venezuelan oil remains in FULL EFFECT — anywhere in the world.”
Two US officials said the operation was carried out by the US Coast Guard with support from the US military. The Coast Guard declined to comment. Russian officials have not issued a response, though Russian state media outlet RT published an image showing a helicopter hovering near the ship.
The Marinera had previously evaded US enforcement efforts in the Caribbean and refused boarding attempts. After those encounters, it re-registered under a Russian flag and changed its name, officials said. Sources indicated the vessel may now be heading toward British territorial waters, though its final destination has not been confirmed. The UK Ministry of Defence declined to comment.
Separately, US Southern Command confirmed that the Coast Guard intercepted another tanker, the Panama-flagged M/T Sophia, in Latin American waters early Wednesday. The vessel was described as a “stateless, sanctioned dark fleet motor tanker” linked to Venezuelan oil shipments.
U.S. First Assistant Attorney Bill Essayli Thursday called California Gov. Gavin Newsom “the king of fraud,” accusing him of a lack of oversight on spending to address homelessness.
Essayli made the comments on the “Fox and Friends” telecast, during which he discussed the federal fraud charges that were filed in October against real estate executives Steven Taylor and Cody Holmes for allegedly misusing grant money meant for homeless housing.
Holmes, 31, of Beverly Hills was charged with mail fraud charge that was allegedly linked to millions of dollars in grant money that the state paid Shangri-La Industries to purchase, build and operate homeless housing in Thousand Oaks, just north of Los Angeles. Holmes was Shangri-La’s chief financial officer.
Taylor, 44, of Brentwood, was charged with seven counts of bank fraud, one count of aggravated identity theft and one count of money laundering.
Essayli Thursday said the charges are the “tip of the iceberg” in an investigation he launched with a task force in April. He said more charges would be coming, probably later this month.
The state spent $24 billion in the last five years to address homelessness and can’t account for where the money went, Essayli said on “Fox and Friends.”
California Democrats: “Hey, let’s institute a wealth tax on billionaires!” California billionaires: “See ya!”
A ballot measure that could tax the wealthiest people in California may reportedly push billionaires Larry Page and Peter Thiel to leave the state, while other wealthy residents have condemned the idea, whose supporters claim could generate up to $100 billion—though the measure has yet to be considered by state officials or voters.
Thiel, who cofounded PayPal and Palantir, and Google cofounder Page have held discussions to reduce their ties to California by the end of the year because of the billionaire tax proposal, The New York Times reported, citing people familiar with their thinking.
Thiel operates the investment firm Thiel Capital and may open an office for the company in another state, with plans to spend more time outside of California, while Page has filed documents to incorporate three limited liability companies in Florida, according to the Times.
Bill Ackman weighed in, calling California “on a path to self-destruction,” adding, “Hollywood is already toast and now the most productive entrepreneurs will leave, taking their tax revenues and job creation elsewhere.”
Billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya wrote on X the proposed ballot measure would result in an “exodus of the state’s most talented entrepreneurs” who would opt to “build their companies in less regressive states,” and argued the middle class would be the worst hit by the tax.
Dear Fleeing Billionaires: Welcome to Texas! Please be sure to discard any liberal ideas you brought with you in the nearest trash receptacle…
“Major train crash on key route used to feed Putin’s war machine with North Korean military equipment…A freight train hauling 35 wagons spectacularly derailed in Russia’s remote Amur region on the Transbaikal Railway – a strategic line linked to the famed Trans-Siberian route.”
Ukraine also hit Russian shadow fleet tanker Elbus in the Black Sea off the coast of Turkey. It’s been a bad week all around for Russia’s shadow fleet…
France and UK bomb Islamic State targets in Syria. This isn’t the first time France has bombed Islamic State terrorists, as they also participated in Operation Chammal in 2014, back when the would-be caliphate was much closer to the extremely short zenith of its limited powers.
Minnesota woman tries to run over ICE agent, immediately enters find out phase.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers fatally shot a woman during an operation in Minneapolis Wednesday.
As videos of the incident went viral, the Department of Homeland Security justified the shooting on self-defense grounds, calling the slain woman a “violent rioter” who “weaponized her vehicle” by driving towards federal agents.
Today, ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism. An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots,” said DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin.
“The alleged perpetrator was hit and is deceased. The ICE officers who were hurt are expected to make full recoveries. This is the direct consequence of constant attacks and demonization of our officers by sanctuary politicians who fuel and encourage rampant assaults on our law enforcement.”
She wasn’t the only idiot dirtnapped trying to run over ICE agents. A Tren de Aragua scumbag tried the same trick, and met the same fate, in Portland. Naturally, the usual leftist idiots there rioted.
Yesterday, Border Patrol officers had to shoot a dangerous criminal gang member in self-defense after he committed a vehicular assault on them to evade arrest. Leftists in the sanctuary city of Portland, Ore., promptly turned out to protest his shooting — and apparently to try to accomplish his deadly intention against federal officers.
In case you still have any illusions that the Democratic Party is not essentially a criminal organization, just look at the fury and violence the last few days in blue cities over the shootings of individuals who deliberately tried to seriously injure or kill Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Border Patrol officers. Renee Good in Minnesota and the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua member in Oregon were both violently and dangerously ramming their vehicles into officers at the time they were shot. That makes them leftist heroes and martyrs, it seems.
The American left is trying to do a repeat of the summer of love and mostly peaceful protests in 2020. They want to burn down what is still standing after their previous riots. With Democrat politicians and media lying to fuel violence and their followers cheering for murder, how can we avoid the conclusion that the Democratic Party is acting like a terror organization?
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has suspended the funding for Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley (CCRGV) pending an investigation into whether or not the charity is complying with federal grant requirements.
According to CCRGV, the charity learned of the suspension in late November 2025. It claims that it is “committed to compliance with federal grant requirements and will work expeditiously with DHS to resolve the matter.”
The charity stated that all of its funding was used to care for people brought to CCRGV by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) — individuals who were “released by CBP with a document that gave them permission to travel to their points of destination with instructions on where to follow up with their immigration proceedings.”
CCRGV runs the Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen, a place that offers food and shelter to immigrants who are awaiting court hearings.
According to reporting by Fox News, CCRGV was suspended after a DHS investigation revealed what the outlet called “major grant violations.”
The suspension follows “months of warnings and data reviews that auditors say uncovered sweeping inaccuracies, large gaps in migrant records, and significant billing outside federally allowed timeframes,” Fox News reported.
The investigators also reportedly found 248 instances in which CCRGV billed the federal government for services to immigrants outside of the 45-day window allowed by federal rules.
Surging liquefied natural gas exports from new North American export plants likely pushed global LNG shipments in 2025 by the most since 2022, Kpler data showed on Tuesday.
The annual rise in 2025 would be the steepest increase in global LNG exports since 2022, when shipments grew by 4.5% compared to 2021, the data showed.
North America was the key supplier of new LNG volumes, as Canada’s first-ever export facility, LNG Canada, started shipments in the middle of 2025, and Plaquemines LNG in Louisiana launched operations and ramped up shipments throughout the year.
Thanks to rising capacity and volumes, the U.S. is set to become the first LNG exporter in the world to have passed in 2025 the threshold of 100 million tons of LNG exports in one year.
Additional LNG supply is poised to hit the market between 2026 and 2030 as more U.S. export plants come online and Qatar begins shipments from its huge capacity expansion of the North Field export facilities.
The U.S. is set to export 14.9 billion cubic feet per day of LNG in 2025, up by 25% from 2024, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in its latest Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) for December. With new projects ramping up, the EIA expects U.S. LNG exports to jump to an average of 16.3 billion cubic feet per day in 2026.
President Donald Trump on Friday blocked the Delaware firm HieFo Corporation from acquiring assets in New Jersey-based aerospace and defense specialist Emcore for $3 million, citing national security and China-related concerns.
The president claimed HieFo was “controlled by a citizen of the People’s Republic of China,” and that there was evidence to believe HieFo, through the merger, may “take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States.”
“The Transaction is hereby prohibited,” Trump said and ordered HieFo to “divest all interests and rights in the Emcore assets, wherever located,” within 180 days.
Snip. “HieFo purchased Emcore’s chips business and indium-phosphide wafer-fabrication operations for $2.92 million.” Indium-Phosphide is a pretty exotic wafer material used in optics and photonics chips.
Leprino Foods, the world’s largest mozzarella producer and a vital supplier to major pizza chains like Domino’s, Pizza Hut, and Papa John’s, moved its operations from California to Texas. “For over a century, the Lemoore plant in California’s Central Valley served as a cornerstone of the dairy industry, but the company is now shifting billions of dollars and hundreds of jobs into a new $870 million facility in Lubbock, Texas.”
Progress! “Corporation for Public Broadcasting votes itself out of existence. The private agency, which has distributed federal funding to PBS, NPR and hundreds of local television and radio stations across the country for more than a half-century, saw its appropriations from Congress eliminated this past summer.” They promised Big Bird and delivered leftwing propaganda.
I get an incredible sense of deja vu all over again looking at Mitre’s list of top 25 exploits for 2025.
The top 4 are all very, very old. I myself demonstrated #4 when I taught a computer security class (with corporate IT Security present) back in 1994. That’s three decades ago.
And what’s with numbers 11 and 14? One of the classic papers on software security is Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit – from 1996.
Numbers 3, 6, and 22 are web server vulnerabilities that are over 20 years old, and I’ve posted about them before.
17, 19, and 21 have been known since before I was in this industry. Call it the 1980s, although it’s likely older.
Happy Friday the 13th! Harris continues to slip behind Trump despite (because?) of their debate on the network of her Best Friend Forever, Haitian immigrants in Ohio accused of eating roof rabbit, Texas blasts Biden Administration overreach (again), Conor McGregor steps into a different kind of ring, a worse than usual remake idea, and American cats meet a variety of grisly ends.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
You know that Harris bounce? Nate Silver says not so much. “I’d also note that Harris’s raw polling averages have DECLINED in most swing states since the start of the DNC. This data is NOT subject to the convention bounce adjustment. She’s had a run of pretty mediocre state polling.”
It’s not surprising that the snap polling, including by groups that conservatives trust, like Trafalgar, is showing that Harris “won” the debate. And I think that’s true. She was more polished, more prepared; she had her canned barbs. But there’s something strange going on here. While she won the debate, Democrats always come across in snap polling as winning the debates. I saw people sharing on X the history of snap polling after debates with Donald Trump, first with Hillary and then with Biden. In every one of those debates—six in total—clear majorities said that Trump lost the debate. I’m not sure what to read into that.
So, it was anger at the moderators, frustration that Trump wasn’t making a lot of the points I thought he could have made, but he was being Trump. And I’ve misjudged his appeal to voters and his electoral success so many times, so it is what it is.
But there’s something else I took away from this—and it’s showing on the screen just to the side of me here. One thing I really noticed throughout was the faces that Harris was making—very condescending, very mocking, very childish, actually. I think that’s the one thing I remember more than anything about the debate.
Now, I think Trump did a very good job, even though he didn’t make the points I thought he could have, like showing how she flip-flopped. He hit hard on the border and the economy, and I think that may have a lasting impact.
What’s showing up in the focus groups—ones I’ve seen not by right-wing groups, but CNN, Reuters, NBC—there seems to be a disconnect between who they think won the debate and how they’re reacting substantively.
Trafalgar was consistent with the others, showing a 15-point win for Harris in terms of who won the debate, but no movement in who people were going to vote for. CNN was interesting—they had an even larger, 20-plus-point win for Harris, but found that on the key issue—voters’ most important issue—the economy, Trump actually improved over pre-debate polling. Similar findings came from Reuters and NBC.
Dana Walden, a senior Disney executive whose portfolio includes ABC News, is one of Vice President Kamala Harris’ “extraordinary friends,” according to a report in the New York Times.
Walden and Harris have known each other since 1994, while their husbands, Matt Walden and Doug Emhoff, have known each other since the 1980s.
Dana Walden has donated to dozens of Democrats and contributed to Harris’ political campaigns since at least 2003, when she ran for district attorney in San Francisco.
While the legacy media has yet to find any evidence of pet consumption that it’s willing to accept, there are some much larger issues regarding the crisis that has been created in Springfield through the importation of nearly 20,000 Haitian illegals.
Former Ohio State Representative Kyle Koehler has sounded a warning regarding the consequences that have followed the Biden administration’s policy that gave temporary protected status to more than 100,000 Haitian migrants, including those relocated to Springfield.
🚨🚨 BREAKING:
Former Ohio State Rep. Kyle Koehler (@repkoehler) has made SHOCKING revelations about the illegal Haitian crisis in Springfield, Ohio during a recent speech.
1.) The Haitian illegals in Ohio are given $600-$1600 per month on Debit Cards through the Refugee Cash… pic.twitter.com/aWDyVcx7b3
Among the concerns raised by Koehler are the strain on the local school system with more than 1,600 non-English speaking students now enrolled and Haitian refugees who are 20 years old being placed Freshman High School classrooms with 13 year old kids.
Koehler also voiced concern over an individual who is renting his 63 homes to the relocated Haitians for as little as $250 per month, with 20-25 individuals living in each home.
Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) has also weighed in on the controversy, saying that he too has heard from Springfield residents complaining that pets and wildlife were being abducted and that health services are being severely strained by an influx of individuals with communicable diseases like TB and HIV.
The community of 60,000 residents is clearly facing serious issues related to the open border policies of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
When tales of Haitian immigrants eating cats emerged on social media this week, it suddenly focused attention on the city of Springfield, Ohio, but now we are learning there’s more to the story:
“Those 20,000 Haitians did not show up overnight or uninvited. Though flown in by the federal government, they were not forced on the city by the federal government. Elections have consequences. Springfield voted for this. They signaled their virtue, their signal was seen, and virtue arrived. This is what they wanted. This is what they got. They’ll have to deal with the consequences.”
(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Much commentary has focused on whether it’s true that pets are being killed and eaten by the Haitians, but that’s not really the point. The point is why Springfield became the destination for thousands of Haitians (who may or may not eat cats).
It’s a long story. First of all, you’ll find liberals insisting that these Haitians are not illegal immigrants. Research further, however, and you learn that most of them entered the country illegally, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border after making their way through Central America. After Haiti descended into its latest crisis, the Biden administration granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to all Haitians in the U.S., so you may say that they have been retroactively (but temporarily) “legalized.”
Now let’s talk about Springfield, which is a “blue” island of liberalism in a sea of Republican “red.” Ohio was once a battleground state, closely contested in every presidential election, and then Trump came along and the Buckeye State has now become a GOP stronghold. Springfield was a city of 58,662 residents before the Haitian influx, and the city sits in Clark County (population 136,000) which voted 61% for Trump in 2020.
You see that, if the Democrats can turn these Haitians into voters, they can make Clark County “blue,” and a similar calculus is being applied nationwide by the Biden administration’s immigration policy. Democrats insist that the “Great Replacement” is a right-wing conspiracy theory, but we can see them doing it — blatantly, deliberately, in front of our eyes — in places like Springfield. And this brings us to the late Warren Copeland.
For most of the past three decades, Copeland was the mayor of Springfield. He was a professor at Wittenberg University, a local institution affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Anyone who knows anything about the ELCA will tell you it is the pluperfect example of degenerate liberal Protestantism. “The ELCA has drifted so far into pagan goddess worship that to call it ‘Lutheranism’ is an insult to Luther; to call it ‘Christian’ is blasphemy,” as I wrote in 2016. Copeland was a radical obsessed with “social justice,” and the fact that Springfield repeatedly elected him as their mayor tells you something about the politics of the city. Indeed, Springfield eagerly welcomed the influx of Haitians. Read this article from December 2022:
A surge in the number of Springfield residents from Haiti has resulted in an outpouring of language assistance and additional forms of help from the Springfield City School District and others who are trying to meet their needs.
Social Justice destroys everything it touches.
Citizens have questions to City Council about vetting of Haitian refugees in Sylacauga, Alabama. City Council: “Meeting adjourned.”
For the first time in EU history, Germany is at the forefront of immigration suspension. Other EU countries will follow.
The Schengen Area…is an area encompassing 29 European countries that have officially abolished border controls at their mutual borders.
Reuters reports Germany Tightens Controls at All Borders in Immigration Crackdown.
Germany’s government announced plans to impose tighter controls at all of the country’s land borders in what it called an attempt to tackle irregular migration and protect the public from threats such as Islamist extremism.
The controls within what is normally a wide area of free movement – the European Schengen zone – will start on Sept. 16 and initially last for six months, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said on Monday.
The government has also designed a scheme enabling authorities to reject more migrants directly at German borders, Faeser said, without adding details on the controversial and legally fraught move.
The restrictions are part of a series of measures Germany has taken to toughen its stance on irregular migration in recent years following a surge in arrivals, in particular people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East.
Recent deadly knife attacks in which the suspects were asylum seekers have stoked concerns over immigration. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for a knife attack in the western city of Solingen that killed three people in August.
Polls show it is also voters’ top concern in the state of Brandenburg, which is set to hold elections in two weeks.
Scholz and Faeser’s centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) are fighting to retain control of the government there, in a vote billed as a test of strength of the SPD ahead of next year’s federal election.
“The intention of the government seems to be to show symbolically to Germans and potential migrants that the latter are no longer wanted here,” said Marcus Engler at the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research.
Seems like Germans are getting tired of all that vibrant raping and stabbing diversity…
On Wednesday, a federal court ruled in favor of Elon Musk’s X Corp in its case challenging California’s content moderation laws, citing free speech violations. X Corp filed a lawsuit to block the controversial law, which took effect on January 1, 2024.
The legislation requires social media companies to disclose details of their content moderation policies to the state or face civil penalties.
The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco overturned a previous lower court’s decision that ruled against pausing enforcement of the state law. The panel of three judges decided the law facially violated the First Amendment, Reuters reported.
“X Corp. is likely to succeed in showing that the Content Category Report provisions facially violate the First Amendment,” Judge Milan D. Smith, Jr. wrote in his case opinion.
In the complaint filed in Sept. 2023, X Corporation argued that Assembly Bill 587 violates the company’s First Amendment rights because it pressures “companies such as X Corp. to remove, demonetize, or deprioritize constitutionally-protected speech that the State deems undesirable or harmful” which “interferes with the constitutionally-protected editorial judgments” of the company.
For free speech advocates, we often feel that other citizens have become passive observers as an anti-free speech movement grows around us, threatening our “indispensable right.”
One of the most infamous figures in this movement has been former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has long been the smiling face of censorship. As the head of the Labour Party, Blair pushed through some of the early crackdowns on free speech in the United Kingdom. He is now calling for global censorship to expand these efforts.
In an interview on LBC Radio, Blair declared:
“The world is going to have to come together and agree on some rules around social media platforms. It’s not just how people can provoke hostility and hatred but I think… the impact on young people particularly when they’ve got access to mobile phones very young and they are reading a whole lot of stuff and receiving a whole lot of stuff that I think is really messing with their minds in a big way.”
Remember, when the want to crackdown on “misinformation,” the sort of things they want to ban are opinions contrary to their social justice agenda. Such as “the Chinese coronavirus came from a lab” or “there are only two biological sexes.”
More of that voting fraud Democrats swear doesn’t exist. “Illegal Alien Charged With Stealing U.S. Citizen’s Identity to Vote in Elections. She voted in the 2016 and 2020 primaries and general elections.”
The Biden Administration wants Texas to cede Fronton Island to federal control. Texas Governor Greg Abbott told them to get stuffed.
I am in receipt of a letter from the U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) to the Texas General Land Office (GLO) … given that it concerns actions taken under Operation Lone Star to secure Texas’ southern border around Fronton Island against the ongoing invasion of Texas by transnational criminal cartels — a crisis created and incentivized by your Administration,” Abbott wrote.
Abbott added that the letter “alleges that GLO has altered the flow of the Rio Grande by engaging in activities on Fronton Island without USIBWC’s approval.”
“It also alleges that [the] GLO trespassed on federal land in the process of facilitating cleanup and security efforts on the Island … That agency responded in a letter … detailing that GLO has not engaged in construction activities at all, and, in any event, Fronton Island is state-owned land.”
Abbott then responded to the United States Section of the International Boundary and Water Commissioner Maria-Elena Giner’s request that Fronton Island be returned to its pre-construction conditions: “You are either unaware of, or indifferent to, what those ‘pre-construction conditions’ were.”
Before Texas secured Fronton Island, Abbott wrote, “[T]ransnational criminal cartels had assumed practical control of the densely vegetated Island and used it to terrorize Texas communities.”
He recounted occasions when authorities found the criminal cartels to be using the “thick vegetation” to “stash weapons, plant explosives, evade apprehension, and engage in open warfare against rival cartels and against state and federal officers.”
“Are you aware that your appointee is asking Texas to return grenades and rocket launchers along with IEDs to the Island?” he asked the Biden administration.
Abbott continued, “Your open-border policies have allowed an invasion at the southern border and incentivized criminal activity that threatens the lives of Texas law enforcement, soldiers, and citizens.”
“Yet … the federal government has refused to enforce federal laws — even in dangerous areas like Fronton Island.”
“I determined that Texas could not ignore an ongoing invasion of its sovereign territory,” Abbott said of his decision on October 5, 2023 to move a “heavily armed invasion force” onto Fronton Island.
He then addressed USIBWC’s complaint that Texas had built “two sediment bridges.”
“Your Administration’s letter betrays a basic misunderstanding of facts on the ground, and its claims are unsupported by either science or common sense.”
Dwight has been sending me tidbits on the ongoing meltdown among government officials in New York City following FBI raids. Like this: “Paranoid police officials meeting in parking lots as fed raids leave NYPD, City Hall in shock.” “Law enforcement sources telling The Post that they’re afraid NYPD headquarters is bugged and their words are being recorded.” Plus New York City Mayor Eric Adams evidently has several burner phones, which is both highly suspicious and probably justified. And since Adams is reportedly using the messaging app Signal, presumably they’re modern Android or iPhones, which are: A.) More expensive than classic burner phones, and B.) Probably not conducive to quick SIM card swaps, ala Stringer Bell on The Wire.
Anyway, NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban just resigned.
Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori dead at 86. Fujimori revived Peru’s economy and destroyed the Maoist Shining Path guerillas, but in the end he too fell prey to Peru’s long history of government abuse of power and corruption. In the end, he too was corrupt and committed human rights abuses…and was still arguably the most successful (and important) President in Peru’s troubled history.
“The head of the UN wants to create a fake bank that will circumvent EU and US sanctions against Russian banks.”
Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham pushed back against a Biden-Harris administration proposal to “lease nearly 150,000 offshore acres to an energy company (Hecate Energy) with no experience in wind projects.” But it’s easy to understand why the Biden Administration wants to hand the assignment to Hecate: They donate lots of money to Democrats.
Alan Dershowitz announces he’s leaving the Democratic Party over its “anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist convention.” One wonders what took him so long.
Remember Taral Patel the Ft. Bend democrat who faked hate crimes against himself? Now he’s facing even more felony charges. “Last week a grand jury indicted him on four felony counts of Online Impersonation and four misdemeanor charges including Online Impersonation and Misrepresentation of Identity with intent to ‘harm.'”
Self-cleaning litter box has the unfortunate downside of killing your cat.
Rick Beato interviews bassist Tony Levin of Peter Gabriel and King Crimson fame. It’s an interesting interview, especially the part about how he sold all his stuff to go on tour with Buddy Rich, only to find out that Rich’s old bassist had agreed to come back, so he was out of a job…
“Optronic Technologies, Inc., better known to backyard astronomers as the parent company of both Orion Telescopes & Binoculars and Meade Instruments, has shut its offices and storefront in Watsonville, California.” Actual manufacturing was done in Tijuana, so I’m not sure how much California’s new minimum wage law had an effect.
There are rumors that Barbie director Greta Gerwig wants to make an all female Fight Club remake. That’s about as good an idea as an all-male reboot of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
Comedian Kevin Hart’s chain of vegetarian restaurants in LA closed down. 1. How’s that minimum wage working out for you, California? 2. Vegetarian restaurants aren’t even profitable in LA. 3. Stick to comedy. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
More signs of the Biden Recession, the DOJ wants to put its thumb on the scale against Trump again, more Secret Service incompetence comes to light, more Kamala cringe, a bunch of lawsuit news, and a metric ton of Babylon Bee links. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
I keep thinking I’ll keep the LinkSwarms to shorter lengths, and the world continues not to cooperate.
The start of the third quarter saw a deterioration in business conditions at US manufacturers as new orders declined for the first time in three months, according to S&P Global.
This makes sense as we have seen ‘hard’ US macro data serially disappoint for three months.
S&P Global US Manufacturing PMI falls to 49.6 in July, dropping into contraction for the first time since Dec 2023.
ISM Manufacturing PMI plunged to 46.8 (48.8 exp) – weakest since Nov 2023 (near post-COVID lockdown lows)
The FBI is going to resume its coordination with social-media companies on content moderation ahead of the 2024 election, after the Supreme Court dealt a blow to free-speech advocates who argue the federal government’s close cooperation with Big Tech firms violates the First Amendment.
According to a Department of Justice memo drafted earlier this month, the FBI “will resume regular meetings in the coming weeks with social media companies to brief and discuss potential [Foreign Malign Influence] threats involving the companies’ platforms.”
By “Foreign Malign Influence,” what they mean, of course, is “the possibility of a Trump victory.”
The memo is featured in a report from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz on the effectiveness of the department’s information-sharing system for monitoring foreign threats to U.S. elections. National Review has reached out to the FBI for comment on the memo.
Horowitz recommended the DOJ increase its transparency around the policies it put in place to ensure information sharing does not trample on the First Amendment, and to ensure the coordination strategy evolves to keep up with ever-changing foreign threats. The report’s appendix says both of the recommendations have been taken up by the DOJ, and requests documentation of the FBI’s outreach to social-media companies over the coming months.
The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and local offices will be tasked with building relationships with social-media companies in areas under the purview of various FBI field offices. As part of this outreach strategy, FBI officials are being instructed to make companies aware of the new standard operating procedure for monitoring suspected foreign influence operations online.
I’m so old that I remember when the primary duty of the FBi was to solve crimes, not to aid the Democratic Party…
Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe was directly involved in denying additional security resources and personnel, including counter snipers, to former President Trump’s rallies and events – despite repeated requests by the agents assigned to Trump’s detail in the two years leading up to his July 13 attempted assassination, according to several sources familiar with the decision-making.
Rowe succeeded former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned last week after bipartisan calls following her widely panned testimony before the House Oversight Committee. But both Rowe and Cheatle were directly involved in decisions denying requests for more magnetometers, additional agents, and other resources to help screen rallygoers at large, outdoor Trump campaign gatherings.
It was Rowe’s decision alone to deny counter sniper teams to any Trump event outside of driving distance from D.C., these sources asserted.
Criminal negligence all the way down:
🚨🚨🚨 EXCLUSIVE: A Secret Service counter sniper sent an email Monday night to the entire Uniformed Division (not agents) saying he will not stop speaking out until "5 high-level supervisors (1 down) are either fired or removed from their current positions." The counter sniper… pic.twitter.com/0dg99EESQk
The Democratic Party ruling class’s bloodless coup of their own democratically elected presidential nominee, who also happens to be the nominal sitting president of the United States, is one of the most astonishing political developments of my lifetime. Joe Biden, though clearly physically and mentally impaired, has sought the presidency for quite literally longer than I have been alive. Biden had been defiant ever since the June 27 presidential debate debacle that he was not going anywhere, despite overwhelming pressure from party elites and sycophantic media lapdogs demanding he do precisely that. He has a Lady Macbeth-like wife who craves power, and he has a felonious son in desperate need of a presidential pardon.
Yet the coup succeeded. Biden became the first incumbent president to not seek reelection after his first term since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. Biden made the much-anticipated announcement—not with a solemn Oval Office address—three days later, and he didn’t even explain his decision. Rather, he issued a bedridden tweet from a personal, not even official, account. It’s the equivalent of divorcing your wife over text message. As if that weren’t crazy enough, the announcement came smack in the middle of a five-day period in which Biden was not publicly seen and during which he apparently experienced an unspecified medical emergency. Suspicious much?
The Democrats’ decision to coup their own president is a curious one, on the political merits.
Hold aside the galling hypocrisy of the purported party of “democracy” trying to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot under an outlandish constitutional theory while simultaneously attempting to bankrupt, prosecute and incarcerate him on equally spurious grounds. Hold aside the self-proclaimed party of “democracy,” feigning ignorance over how its overheated rhetoric laid the seeds for their political opponent’s recent near-assassination and its continuing to depict that opponent as an existential threat to the American constitutional order. And hold aside that purportedly “democratic” party deposing its own presumptive elected nominee—a stark reversal from its presidential primary, when party poobahs worked hard to shut out all viable competition. Somewhere in Minnesota, Dean Phillips would like a word.
Hold all that aside. Because even on its own terms, the coup of Biden for cackler-in-chief Kamala Harris is going to spectacularly backfire on the Democrats.
Already, Democrats and the corporate media have been working hard to “define” Harris for the American people. At times, this has included some rather dubious retconning, such as magically pretending she wasn’t the Biden administration’s appointed “border czar.” (She was.) But the even bigger problem for Democrats is that Harris is not an unknown commodity. On the contrary, she is a very well-known commodity—one who just happens to be about as popular with the American public as venereal disease.
Harris’ current average approval rating is under 38%, and an NBC News poll last June found her to be the single least popular vice president in American history—only 32% of Americans had a positive view of her, putting her 17 points underwater. Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign was an absolute dud, self-imploding well before the first primary votes were cast. And as recently as a month or two ago, Democratic elites were openly discussing whether she could still be dropped as Biden’s 2024 running mate. Funny how quickly one can go from the weakest link to the great savior of “Our Democracy.”
Practically, the path to winning 270 Electoral College votes still runs through the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. It is frankly bizarre for Democrats to swap out the man who talks ceaselessly about his hardscrabble Scranton upbringing for a Californian who boasts the most left-wing voting record of any presidential nominee in modern history. Do Democrats really think Harris’ support for the Green New Deal and a national fracking ban will play well in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania or in the auto factories of Detroit? Will white working- and middle-class voters concerned about skyrocketing crime look favorably upon Harris’ enthusiastic support for the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, which racked up $2 billion worth of property damage?
Tucson-based World View, cofounded by now-U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly in 2012, received venture capital from Tencent — among the largest tech companies in China — both in 2013 and 2016. Tencent, like most Chinese tech giants, has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party….
Spy balloons partially funded by ChiComm ties? Like, how is this considered a totally normal business for a Senator to be in?
Not sure how much you can trust Seymour Hersh, but he says that Obama is the one who finally pushed Slow Joe out, threatening to invoke the 25th Amendment on him. He also says Obama is pulling Kamala’s strings. So there’s that.
Early in the morning, the FBI raided the home of Linda Sun, a former official for Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration. Sun served as Hochul’s deputy chief of staff for a year. Before that, she was the deputy superintendent for intergovernmental affairs and chief diversity officer under disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo. The federal officers searched the $3.5 million home, which resides in the exclusive neighborhood of North Shore.
That’s on top of a raid aimed at Winnie Greco, a top aide to New York Mayor Eric Adams.
While the left is trying it’s hardest to recast Kamala Harris as a moderate Democrat – quietly scrubbing her public record over the past 5 years – her actual positions have always been radical.
For starters, she’s on record wanting to abolish ICE (which she compared to the KKK), letting criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber and rapists vote, ban fracking and offshore drilling, defund the police, provide US taxpayer subsidized healthcare to illegals, and ban private health insurance.
Meanwhile, during 2020 Democratic primary debate Harris said that if elected president, she would “ban by executive order the importation of assault weapons.”
She also said she would reinstate Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status and DACA protection for illegal immigrants, and end other Trump-era immigration policies.
And in multiple speeches and interviews, Harris insisted America needed racial ‘equity’ as well as ‘equality.’ In other words, she endorses ‘equality of outcomes’ over ‘equality of opportunity.’
As The Federalist pointed out on Tuesday:
She Supported Bailing Out 2020 Rioters
Accused rapists, repeat offenders, and rioters alike benefitted in June 2020 when Harris encouraged her social media followers to donate to a bail fund dedicated to those arrested for their months-long, $2 billion siege of cities like Minneapolis. The vice president later lied about her involvement in the money-raising scheme.
She Put Other Countries’ Borders Before Her Own
Harris traveled thousands of miles away from the U.S. border invasion she was tasked with handling to deliver “peace and security” to the borders of Ukraine, which “is a country.”
She Proudly Enabled the Jussie Smollett Race Hoax
Harris called the staged hate crime an “attempted modern-day lynching.” She did not apologize even after Smollett was found guilty of felony disorderly conduct and making false police reports.
She Sponsored Legislation That Would Codify Abortion Through All Nine Months
As a senator, Harris was a proud co-sponsor of the original version of the “Women’s Health Protection Act,” which sought to codify abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.
She’s Openly Anti-Catholic
As a senator in 2018, Harris smeared Brian Buescher, a nominee for the U.S. District Court in Nebraska, for his affiliation with the famous Catholic fraternal organization Knights of Columbus and its historically pro-life views.
Flip, meet flop, as Kamala Harris tries to walk back all her radical positions.
In 2019, Kamala Harris was rated the ‘most liberal’ Senator in a now-scrubbed rating from GovTrack. She’s on record wanting to abolish ICE (which she compared to the KKK), letting criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber and rapists vote, banning fracking and offshore drilling, defunding the police, providing US taxpayer subsidized healthcare to illegals, and banning private health insurance.
According to the NY Times, “video clips of her old statements and interviews are being weaponized as Republicans aim to define her as a left-wing radical who is out of step with swing voters.”
“The archive is deep,” said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and ad maker who is working with David McCormick, the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, among other campaigns. “We will run out of time before we run out of video clips of Kamala Harris saying wacky California liberal things. I’m just not sure that the rest of this campaign includes much besides that.”
To that end, McCormick’s campaign has produced one of the first TV ads to attack Harris on her longstanding positions.
Yet, according to the Times, nevermind all that- Harris is now a reformed moderate – and has suddenly reversed course on virtually all of her most radical views.
On Friday, the Harris campaign announced that she no longer wants to ban fracking – a ‘significant shift’ from where she stood four years ago. She’s also reversed course on funding for border enforcement, no longer supports a single-payer health insurance program, and has walked back liberal fever dreams of a mandatory gun buyback.
She is no longer pushing for a single-payer health care system, and on Friday her campaign said she would maintain Mr. Biden’s pledge not to raise income taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. -NYT
Packing the Court? Nah…
On Monday, as Mr. Biden prepared a speech in Texas calling for term limits and ethics guidelines for Supreme Court justices, the Trump campaign resurfaced statements Ms. Harris made in 2019 saying she was “open to this conversation” about expanding the Supreme Court. Ms. Harris, in a statement released by her campaign, endorsed Mr. Biden’s proposal, which does not call for adding additional justices to the court.
According to Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank, Harris has ‘evolved’ into a Biden style centrist (if centrism is defined as letting 20+ million illegals into the country and cooking Americans with inflation).
“There’s a tremendous difference in changing one’s policy ideas and changing one’s principles,” said Bennett. “She has not changed her principles. She still thinks climate change is an existential threat — she just doesn’t think the Green New Deal is the way to address it.”
Sure Matt.
The Times also hints that Harris is essentially an idiot who didn’t really understand her own positions while running for president in 2020.
…during that race, Ms. Harris also often appeared as if she were not sure what she believed. In a CNN town-hall event the day after what was widely viewed as a successful campaign rollout in Oakland, Calif., she appeared tentative while discussing health care policy, eventually saying she would eliminate private health insurance and institute a single-payer health care program.
She would go on to propose an array of policies popular with progressives. She sought to increase pay for public-school teachers by an average of $13,500 through a bump in the estate tax.
She also called for an assault weapons ban and said she would sign an executive order mandating background checks for customers of any dealer who sold more than five guns in a year.
Minnesota governor Tim Walz is on the short list to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate. This is almost laughable when you look at Walz’s record running the state government, which somehow manages to combine the honesty of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, the competence of former Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco, and the sharp-eyed ethical-watchdog instincts of soon-to-be-former New Jersey senator Bob Menendez. A whole lot of shady and unethical people in Minnesota see the state government as a giant pile of money just waiting to be taken, with a sleepy guard in the form of the governor.
“J. D. Vance is weird.” Yeah, the modern Democratic Party is the last set of people who should be accusing others of weirdness…
“Did the Israelis just take out two key leaders in Iran’s proxy armies? Just hours after announcing that a strike in Beirut killed Hezbollah’s top military commander, the Iranian state media announced that Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh had been “martyred” in Tehran. Haniyeh had just arrived there to meet the newly elected president.” Reports say he stayed in the same room in the same complex every time he visited, so Israel managed to sneak a bomb under his bed several months ago…
“Canada’s standard of living is on track for its worst decline in 40 years, according to a new study by Canada’s Fraser Institute. The study compared the three worst periods of decline in Canada in the last 40 years – the 1989 recession, the 2008 global financial crisis, and this post-pandemic era. They found that, unlike the previous recessions, Canada is not recovering this time. Something broke. In fact, according to the Financial Post, since 2019 Canada’s had the worst growth out of 50 developed economies. Inflation-adjusted Canadian wages have been flat since 2016.” That’s what happens when you elect socialist asshats like Justin Trudeau.
Like the electoral blowout feared by national Democrats with Biden at the top of the ticket, Phelan’s abysmal record of the Texas House under his mismanagement resulted in a political disaster; more incumbent Republicans lost their primary re-election campaigns than any time in modern history.
Phelan himself is damaged goods, politically. He outspent his primary opponent by a 5-to-1 margin yet garnered a “win” of less than 700 votes in a race that saw a couple of thousand Democrats flip primaries, clearly to “help” him.
Everyone in the House knows that their defeated colleagues earned challengers because Phelan made them vulnerable… and then left them to go down in defeat.
But he is, for now, still the speaker… in name, anyway.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was publicly done with Phelan more than a year ago after the speaker and his cronies sent a deeply flawed, legally problematic, and factually vacuous “impeachment” of Attorney General Ken Paxton to be sorted out by the Senate.
The Democratic Party’s social justice agenda in action: “At least eleven transgender-identifying male felons are currently housed at a formerly women-only prison in Washington State. Many of them committed violent crimes against women and children before they entered the Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW), colloquially known as ‘Purdy.'”
Speaking of which, the NFL’s $4.7 billion antitrust judgement was just overturned. “The jury’s damages verdict was otherwise unsupported by the evidence.”
“A Bakersfield College professor who was investigated and disciplined after he questioned the use of grant money to fund social justice initiatives at his school has agreed to a $2.4 million settlement to resolve his lawsuit.” Keep hitting them in the pocketbook…
Bungie games, of Destiny and Halo fame, just laid off a bunch of staff. Official line says 17% of the company, but elsewhere I’m hearing the true total is closer to 40%. Microsoft bought then spun out Bungie, and Sony bought them in 2022.
Half a year gone already. This week: The debate confirmed that pretty much everything Republican said about Biden being old and out of it was true, people can’t afford housing anymore, the Supreme Court reigns in the administrative state, a whole bunch of layoffs come down the pike, two sorta, kinda coups, fake meat doesn’t pay, and we say farewell to a Texas original. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
President Joe Biden looked old and disoriented during Thursday’s CNN debate with Donald Trump. He spoke in a quiet and hoarse voice, made some incoherent answers, and often stumbled over his own words.
It was a lackluster performance that played directly into Republican depictions of the 81-year-old president – the oldest president in American history — as too old and frail to serve another four years in office. Trump said as much during the debate.
“He’s not equipped to be president,” Trump said. “You know it and I know it.”
The debate was a highly personal affair between two men who made little effort during their nearly two hours on stage to contain their disdain for one another.
Biden called Donald Trump a “loser,” and a “whiner” with the “morals of an alley cat.” Trump accused Biden of turning the United States into a “third-world nation” and of being the “worst president in history by far, and everybody knows it.”
Trump turned in a spirited performance, hammering Biden on inflation and the immigration crisis under his watch. But Biden’s struggles seemed to be the major takeaway for CNN’s post-debate panel, which reported that senior Democrats are in an “aggressive panic” over their party leader’s apparent frailty.
Speaking about improvements he’s claiming at the border, Biden at one point seemed lost, saying: “I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on, the total initiative relative what we’re going to do with more border patrol and more asylum officers.”
“I don’t really know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump replied. “I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
At another point, Biden got visibly lost when talking about his plan to raise taxes on the wealthy to wipe out the debt, saying he wanted to make sure “that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with, with, with the Covid, excuse me, with dealing with everything we had to do with, look, we finally beat Medicare.”
“Well, he’s right,” Trump said, “he did beat Medicare. He beat it to death.”
He stammered. He stumbled. And, with fewer than five months to November, he played straight into Democrats’ worst fears — that he’s fumbling away this election to Donald Trump.
The alarm bells for Democrats started ringing the second Biden started speaking in a haltingly hoarse voice. Minutes into the debate, he struggled to mount an effective defense of the economy on his watch and flubbed the description of key health initiatives he’s made central to his reelection bid, saying “we finally beat Medicare” and incorrectly stating how much his administration lowered the price of insulin. He talked himself into a corner on Afghanistan, bringing up his administration’s botched withdrawal unprompted. He repeatedly mixed up “billion” and “million,” and found himself stuck for long stretches of the 90-minute debate playing defense.
And when he wasn’t speaking, he stood frozen behind his podium, mouth agape, his eyes wide and unblinking for long stretches of time.
“Biden is toast — calling it now,” said Jay Surdukowski, an attorney and Democratic activist from New Hampshire who co-chaired former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley’s 2016 presidential campaign in the state.
In text messages with POLITICO, Democrats expressed confusion and concern as they watched the first minutes of the event. One former Biden White House and campaign aide, granted anonymity to discuss the matter, called it “terrible,” adding that they have had to ask themselves over and over: “What did he just say? This is crazy.”
Sales of previously owned homes are sitting at a 30-year low and didn’t move much in May as prices hit a new record and mortgage rates remain high.
So-called existing home sales in May were essentially flat, down 0.7% from April to a seasonally adjusted, annualized rate of 4.11 million units, according to the National Association of Realtors, or NAR. Sales fell 2.8% from May of last year …
The median price of an existing home sold in May was $419,300, a record-high price in the Realtors’ recording and up 5.8% year over year. The gain was the strongest since October 2022. Prices gained in all regions.
The Realtors noted in a release that the mortgage payment for a typical home today is more than double what it was five years ago.
It’s almost as though the Biden Recession, constrained supply (a great deal from blue locale regulation that prevent housing from being built), and high interest rates mean that no one wants to buy or sell.
According to a new report, the average renter can’t afford a typical U.S. apartment.
According to Redfin, the typical U.S. renter household earns about $54,712 per year, which is 17.3% less than the $66,120 needed to afford the median-priced apartment at $1,653 per month. This means that 61% of renters can’t afford their housing without significant financial stress.
Snip.
Inflation, which has surged during Biden’s presidency, certainly exacerbates this issue. Rising costs for essentials like food, gas, and utilities leave renters with even less disposable income to cover their housing costs. Despite promises to address affordability and economic inequality, the Biden administration has doubled down with claims that inflation is going down and that wage growth has outpaced it — which isn’t true. Biden has made it more difficult for Americans to achieve financial stability.
Pixar (part of Disney) (175 people, 14% of the company, who must have been thrilled to get a pink slip and then see unwoke Inside Out 2 go on to be Disney’s biggest movie of the year)
The Supreme Court on Friday issued a ruling overturning the 1984 Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council case, striking down a previous decision that granted federal agencies immensely broad power to draw up regulations without congressional approval.
The Court ruled in both Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce — two nearly identical cases — that regulatory agencies will no longer be able to fill in the blanks of vague legislation in 6-2 and 6-3 decisions, respectively. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused herself from the first case because she sat on the federal appeals court that had previously heard the case.
In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that it is not the place of agencies to clarify ambiguous legislation.
“Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities,” he wrote. “Courts do. The Framers, as noted, anticipated that courts would often confront statutory ambiguities and expected that courts would resolve them by exercising independent legal judgment.”
Writing a concurrence, Justice Neil Gorsuch argued that the concept of Chevron deference “undermines” many of the principles on which the United States was founded.
“It precludes courts from exercising the judicial power vested in them by Article III to say what the law is,” he wrote. “It forces judges to abandon the best reading of the law in favor of views of those presently holding the reins of the Executive Branch. It requires judges to change, and change again, their interpretations of the law as and when the government demands.”
This is a huge blow to the unchecked administrative state and a key decision in helping reign in untrammeled executive regulatory power.
This looks like it will put a crimp in Biden’s amnesty plans: “SCOTUS rules 6-3 that there’s no constitutional guarantee for non-citizen spouses to be admitted to the US.”
Russia’s newest S-500 air defense system has been deployed to Crimea to defend against ATACMS strike. Result? It was destroyed by an ATACMS strike. “This is a big embarrassment for Russia, that its newest and best missile system has had its clock clean by 30-year-old missiles.”
“War crimes arrest warrants issued for top Russian officials. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant for Russia’s former defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, and the chief of general staff, Valery Gerasimov.” It would make one hell of a Dog The Bounty Hunter episode…
Andrew Cuomo (D-isgrace) admits that the bogus Trump hush money kangaroo trial should never have been held. “If his name was not Donald Trump and if he wasn’t running for president. I’m the former AG in New York. I’m telling you, that case would have never been brought. And that’s what is offensive to people. And it should be!” Broken clock, twice a day.
Federal judges in Missouri and Kansas issued separate rulings on June 24 blocking key sections of the Biden administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) program, which is designed to lower student loan payments and forgive debts.
A new version of the program that would reduce payments and shorten maximum repayment periods was set to take effect in July.
U.S. District Judge Michael Crabtree for the District of Kansas ruled that the Republican states were likely to succeed in their claim that the department lacked explicit congressional authority to enact this portion of the program.
“Defendants have offered colorable, plausible interpretations of the Higher Education Act that could authorize the SAVE Plan, but those interpretations fall short of clear congressional authorization,” Judge Crabtree, who was appointed under President Barack Obama, wrote on Monday.
However, he declined to block the program entirely, expressing concerns about the practicality of reversing parts of the plan that had already been implemented. He also said that Republicans’ delay in filing their lawsuits undermined their arguments that there was an immediate need to halt the entire program.
In a separate decision on the same day, U.S. District Judge Judge John Ross for the Eastern District of Missouri, also a President Obama appointee, blocked the department from forgiving “any further loan[s]” under SAVE until he decides the full case. His order said that such actions would likely strip state loan operators of revenue.
Judge Ross also suggested that the SAVE program might have exceeded the authority of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and that Missouri would likely be harmed by the program.
Just imagine if a Republican judge got a chance to rule on it…
“Kenya Protesters Storm Parliament, Police Fire Live Rounds, After Lawmakers Unleash Eco-Austerity.” Seems like $2.7 billion in taxes to serve nebulous “green” goals is unpopular in a country where the per capita GDP is $2,099. Thanks, IMF…
And an attempted coup in Bolivia evidently failed. President Luis Arce is a bit of a socialist scumbag, so it remains to be seen if he intends to follow in Venezuela’s footsteps to economic ruin.
Not only are the massive crowds a problem, but this year the Saudi city is under an excessive heat warning, with highs at times having reached between 110 and 115°F during the day, and 100°F even at night. This has resulted in what could be a record amount of heat injuries and deaths by the pilgrimage season’s end. On Monday the Saudi weather service recorded a temperature of 125 degrees Fahrenheit at Mecca’s Grand Mosque.
Many of the dead were “unauthorized pilgrims” who hadn’t paid their Hajj fee. “This group was more vulnerable to the heat because, without official permits, they could not access air-conditioned spaces provided by Saudi authorities for the 1.8 million authorized pilgrims to cool down after hours of walking and praying outside.”
More accused perverts in classrooms. “Former Denton ISD Coach Arrested for Online Solicitation of a Minor. A mother from another school district says she tried to warn Denton ISD of an inappropriate encounter her daughter had with district employee Justin Wallace Carter.”
“A Uvalde County grand jury has indicted former school district police Chief Pete Arredondo and another former district officer on charges of child endangerment, the first criminal charges brought against law enforcement for the botched response to the deadliest school shooting in Texas history, the San Antonio Express-News reported. Arredondo and Adrian Gonzales face felony charges of abandoning or endangering a child.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
A fun edition of What’s My Line featuring America’s most decorated war hero.
Kinky Friedman, RIP. He was a Texas original, an entertaining musician, a successful author, and the last interesting Democrat in Texas. Dwight already posted “The Ballad of Charlie Whitman,” so I direct you over there. I have an inscribed (not to me) first of A Case of Lone Star, and I should probably read that next.
Attorney General Ken Paxton announced today the launch of a new major initiative to protect citizens’ sensitive data from unauthorized exploitation by tech companies and artificial intelligence.
The initiative was launched under the umbrella of the Attorney General Office Consumer Protection Division and established a team for “aggressive enforcement” of state privacy laws. It will also “ensure companies respect Texans’ privacy rights and safeguard their personal data.”
According to a press release from Paxton’s office, the data protection team is set to be one of the largest privacy law enforcement teams in the entire United States.
“Any entity abusing or exploiting Texans’ sensitive data will be met with the full force of the law,” said Paxton. “Companies that collect and sell data in an unauthorized manner, harm consumers financially, or use artificial intelligence irresponsibly present risks to our citizens that we take very seriously.
“As many companies seek more and more ways to exploit data they collect about consumers, I am doubling down to protect privacy rights,” he continued. “With companies able to collect, aggregate, and use sensitive data on an unprecedented scale, we are strengthening our enforcement of privacy laws to protect our citizens.”
Specifically, the new team will focus on enforcing the Data Privacy and Security Act, the Identify Theft Enforcement and Protection Act, the Data Broker Law, the Biometric Identifier Act, the Deceptive Trade Practices Act, and federal laws such as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
“Texas has been a national leader in advancing conservative technology policy, and this initiative is the perfect complement to legislative wins in recent sessions as it will ensure Texas has the expertise and firepower to enforce laws that protect consumers and hold Big Tech accountable,” said David Dunmoyer—the Texas Public Policy Foundation Better Tech for Tomorrow campaign director.
“Big Tech companies have gleefully flouted laws like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act for years, and in the absence of meaningful federal action, this initiative demonstrates Texas’ willingness to once again step into the breach and fight on behalf of Texans,” he continued. “This initiative will only further cement Texas’ national leadership in this space.”
This is the latest development in Texas’ efforts to crack down on data privacy infringement. In mid-summer of last year, Gov. Greg Abbott signed the Texas Data Privacy & Security Act into law.
The law applies to primarily businesses and entities who conduct business in the state of Texas or produce a product consumed by Texans, process or engage with the sale of personal data, and who are not considered “small businesses” unless the business has its hand in transactions of personal data.
That enforcement effort sounds both needed and deserved, but the question is how you enforce those laws when they cows have not only left the barn, but have been sucked down and sliced up into thousands of vast international data farms far beyond the regulatory reach of the state of Texas.
Big data lives and breathes on personal data that you’ve agreed to give up in variegated clauses scattered throughout the sprawling text swamps of terms and conditions for online sites you use for free.
Have a Facebook account? Congratulations! Every bit of information you’ve shared with Facebook (your friends network, your interests, the sports teams you follow, the foods you favor, etc.) is now available to every partner of Facebook. And everyone partners with Facebook. If they have your email address or your phone number, they have your data.
Ditto Google, with the additional proviso that Google has sucked up and cataloged pretty much every public database in the world, plus every single search query you’ve launched, ever, and every web page you’ve ever viewed through Chrome.
Ditto Microsoft, for LinkedIn (yes, Microsoft bought LinkedIn), Windows, Explorer, Edge, Bing, etc.
Ditto Twitter for everything you’ve ever tweeted or liked there.
Ditto Sony, whose PlayStation Network data got hacked.
Ditto Apple, though they seem to have better privacy protection provisions than most, mainly because they make their money off hardware. This doesn’t make them the good guys, just the least bad buys.
And don’t forget state, location and federal government entities, whose data security is probably several orders of magnitude worse than the tech giants.
Given that there’s so much personal data out there, so much legally acquired, how do you go about putting the genie back in the bottle? It’s a near impossible task, given that the tech giants not only hire armies of lawyers to defend themselves from lawsuits, but also lobbyists to write laws protecting them from said lawsuits.
One place to start: Joining in a lawsuit where Facebook’s parent company Meta actually used stolen data to train AI, namely using a giant database of pirated books without paying authors. Paxton’s office could join one of the lawsuits against Meta, or file a new one on behalf of Texas authors whose work was used without compensation.
Catching a tech giant with their pants down while actually breaking the law may give Paxton leverage to address other privacy concerns, and possibly the chance to do some eye-opening discovery…
It’s always fun when a giant multinational corporation tries to pull an extra-slimy move and the consumer backlash is so fierce that they have to back down.
Helldivers 2 is a super-popular game created by Arrowhead Game Studios but published by Sony that sold a zillion copies on release. Then Sony got the bright idea to retroactively force PC gamers to link their Steam accounts to their PlayStation Network (PSN) accounts, even though this was not a requirement at launch, and the fact that PSN isn’t even available in some 177 regions would mean the game would be rendered useless for multitudes of buyers. The outcry was so vast and fierce that Sony had to back down.
Following extensive player backlash, Sony has walked back its plans to require PC players of Helldivers 2 to link their Steam accounts with a PlayStation Network (PSN) account. The requirement had previously been scheduled to take effect May 6. Now, it will be optional for PC players of the third-person sci-fi shooter.
“Helldivers fans—we’ve heard your feedback on the Helldivers 2 account linking update,” Sony wrote early Monday morning. “The May 6 update, which would have required Steam and PlayStation Network account linking for new players and for current players beginning May 30, will not be moving forward. We’re still learning what is best for PC players and your feedback has been invaluable. Thanks again for your continued support of Helldivers 2 and we’ll keep you updated on future plans.”
Arrowhead Game Studios CEO and Helldivers Creative Director Johan Pilestedt thanked Sony for changing its stance. “I am impressed by the willpower of the Helldivers 2 community and your ability to collaborate,” Pilestedt wrote Monday morning. “I want to thank our partners and friends at PlayStation for quickly and effectively making the decision to leave PSN linking optional. We together want to set a new standard for what a live game is, and how developers and community can support each other to create the best game experiences.”
Sony’s decision to switch course comes after Helldivers 2 faced criticism from fans over the PSN account-linking requirement. The game, which was released back in February, did not require PC players to create or link a PSN account upon launch and didn’t clearly warn players that they would have to create one at a later date or later lose their ability to play the game. According to Sony, PSN account-linking wasn’t required at launch due to “technical issues.”
Steam gamers felt blind-sided by the announcement that they would have to sign up for what is primarily an account for PS4 and PS5 console owners despite being PC gamers. Others expressed frustration because PSN accounts aren’t available in every country. This would have meant that gamers in 177 countries—mainly nations in the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Africa—would have no longer been able to play Helldivers 2 without a VPN. Some players cited security concerns with Sony, such as the data breaches it faced in 2011 and 2023, as the reason they don’t want to create or connect a PSN account.
Here’s Penguinz0 covering the decision and its walk-back in much more pungent terms:
“Sony, leave it alone.”
Indeed.
Chalk up a rare win for the good guys over corporate stupidity.
Also, everyone knew that Japan was going to take over the world.
Giant Japanese electronic companies like Sony, Toshiba and Fujitsu were leaders in their markets, Japan had a big export surplus, and Japanese companies were buying up iconic American assets like Rockafeller Center. Experts assured us that Japan was ascendant and that we needed to follow the “Japan Inc.” model of public/private partnerships, as well as the heavy vertical integration of the Japanese zaibatsu conglomerates, if we wanted to compete in the world market.
It turns out that almost all that just about every aspect of that prescription was horribly wrong:
Fast-forward 30 years. When one of Japan, Inc.’s leading corporations makes the news, as often as not it’s the result of an accounting scandal in which corporate profits were grossly overstated for years as a matter of policy–a policy intended to mask the stagnation in the company’s sales, product lines, competitive position and profits.
What happened to the often-copied, much-vaunted Japan, Inc.? Many observers see Japan’s core problem as demographics: as its birth rate has fallen below replacement levels, the population of Japan is aging rapidly. Since young people start households and spend money, economic growth depends largely on the spending of young people rather than the declining spending of older people.
While a decline in the youthful demographic certainly impacts growth, this view overlooks the larger problem: Japan, Inc.–its educational system, government, banking and corporate sector–was optimized for the mode of production that existed in the postwar world from the late 1940s to the late 1980s.
Now that the Digital-Industrial Revolution is remaking the way goods and services are produced and distributed, the system that worked wondrously well in 1960 no longer aligns with the needs of this emerging mode of production.
In the 1980s, Japan’s optimized-for-industrial-exports system reached its zenith, and many US pundits built careers predicting that Japan would soon eclipse the US in every economic and financial metric.
But the excesses of Japan’s banking sector and the rise of new technologies that didn’t lend themselves to gradual improvement and vertically integrated corporations disrupted the predictions of Japan’s global dominance.
Just as Sony ate the lunches of slower, less efficient American companies like RCA, soon the Japanese electronic giants found themselves being beaten by more nimble and disruptive international competitors like Apple and Samsung.
Toshiba is now so broke they may need to spin-off their semiconductor business, despite it being the most central and profitable business in their company, probably because building a new state-of-the-art 300mm wafer fabrication plant for 10nm process technology can now cost up to $14 billion.
In the five years since a $1.7bn accounting scandal was uncovered at Olympus, the number of improper accounting cases exposed each year in Japan has nearly doubled. It hit an all-time high of 58 cases in the 2015-16 fiscal year, according to Tokyo Shoko Research, which provides data on corporate failures.
In many cases, the revelations have shone a light on malpractice and subterfuge dating back years — the legacy of management terrified of failure but left fighting decades of economic stagnation, squeezed costs and a shrinking domestic market.
Children accounted for 12.8% of the population, the ministry said. By contrast, the ratio of people aged 65 or older was at a record high, making up 25.6% of the population. Jiji Press said that, of countries with a population of at least 40 million, Japan had the lowest ratio of children to the total population – compared with 19.5% for the United States and 16.4% for China…
The proportion of people aged 65 or over is forecast to reach nearly 40% in 2060, the government has warned.
Japan’s government has been running huge budget deficits since 2009, and debt now stands at about twice the size of the economy.
For a while, the South Korean chaebol looked like they were going to supplant the Japanese zaibatsu as world beaters, but Samsung and LG have started running into some of the same problems.
The lesson here is not “Merica, fark ye!”, it’s that capitalism works. The creative destruction of capitalism is necessary to keep economic progress moving forward. My biggest fear is that in his efforts to save American jobs, President Trump will prop up the GMs and Boeings of the world at the expense of smaller, nimbler competitors looking to supplant them.
For the country’s long-term economic well-being, government should get out of the business of picking winners and losers entirely.
