Democrats illegal redistricting attempt in Virginia is dead (while Republican efforts in other states steamroll ahead), more welfare state fraud exposed, Trump actually shrinks the federal workforce, Ukraine hits a wide range of targets across Russia, more Democrats soft on illegal alien sex offenders, Jose Garza lawyers up, and all it takes is nine seconds for AI to completely destroy your business.
Virginia’s Supreme Court just pounded a stake through the heart of Democrats rule-breaking redistricting push in that state.
The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday rejected the state’s mid-decade redistricting effort, which was passed by referendum last month and would overwhelmingly benefit Democrats.
The state spent $5.2 million to pay for the special election to ask voters to approve the map, which would have created ten districts that favor Democrats, with just one district favoring Republicans.
The new map was designed to allow Democrats to pick up as many as four seats in the upcoming midterm elections.
But after Republicans challenged the new map in court, judges for the state’s supreme court found that the legislature made procedural errors in how it placed the question on the ballot last month. The court’s majority found that the legislature violated the multi-step process for putting constitutional amendments on the ballot.
“This constitutional violation incurably taints the resulting referendum vote and nullifies its legal efficacy,” the judges wrote.
“This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void,” the majority added.
The court ordered the state to use the same congressional district map in the upcoming midterm elections as it used in 2022 and 2024.
Donald Trump is the devil Democrats will cut down any tree of the law to get at.
In response to the lawsuit, Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read announced earlier this year that Oregon has about 800,000 inactive registrations, which are kept separately from the active voter rolls and do not receive ballots. Of those, roughly 160,000 already meet federal and state criteria for removal—having received confirmation notices, failed to respond, and not voted in two federal elections—and are slated for cancellation. The remaining approximately 640,000 inactive records do not yet qualify for removal and will be processed through future list maintenance efforts.
For context, Kamala Harris beat Trump by just over 300,000 votes in Oregon in 2024. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Before ceasing operations in February, the Department of Government Efficiency published comprehensive data detailing exactly how Medicaid dollars were spent. Over the past two months, The Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak — a veteran investigative reporter who has spent two decades exposing federal waste and fraud — has combed through the numbers and says they reveal the biggest scandal he’s ever uncovered.
In the first installment of a multi-part series titled “Medicaid Millionaires,” published on Monday, he details how billions of dollars were spent on “personal services” — including, in some cases, payments to family members for providing companionship and conversation to their own relatives.
Rosiak focused first on Columbus, Ohio, a city with the second-largest Somali population in the country. He reported:
Under the guise of health care, Ohio pays people to go to Medicaid beneficiaries’ homes to perform “homemaking” and “chores” like cooking and cleaning. The people performing these “personal services” tasks don’t even have to be health care workers — and in many cases, are actually relatives of the Medicaid recipient.
According to a Daily Wire data analysis, Ohio spent a billion dollars on home health care in 2024, the last year for which data is available.
Since the services are performed inside private residences, there is no way to know whether the workers went at all, or what they’re actually doing in exchange for taxpayer funds. … Multiple signs said the service provided, and billed to the government, was sometimes just “companionship & conversation.”
As people have realized the United States government will pay them to hang out with their own families, northeast Columbus has seen its economy replaced by businesses that bill Medicaid.
One home health care operator told him, “Well if the government is going to pay you to do it. … People see it as lucrative, so they just jump on it.”
Apparently, many small companies are making millions by exploiting these types of services. Rosiak described seeing entire buildings in Columbus filled with home health companies. “Driving down Cleveland Avenue, in less than 40 seconds, you come across endless home health companies. Capital Home Health; Continental Home Health; Dynamic Home Healthcare; Ohio Senior Home Healthcare.”
One enormous complex (with almost no one inside) contained “94 different companies signed up to bill Medicaid, each with a tiny office, often marked with a sheet of paper proclaiming some generic company name ending in “Home Health LLC” — and sometimes another piece of paper claiming the employees had just stepped out for a break.”
He noted, that businesses in “this building alone billed taxpayers $66 million in the span of a few years.”
Democrats aren’t mad at such fraud, they’re mad that people are exposing it.
I wonder what the conserving conservatism crowd has to say about president Trump accomplishing a goal Reagan, Bush41 and Bush43 never managed: Actually shrinking the size of the federal government.
Another jobs report, another report on shrinking the federal government.
Labour is facing a dire set of local and devolved election results after Britons cast their votes in polls that could further imperil Sir Keir Starmer’s embattled premiership.
Early results suggest Labour is facing substantial losses as Britain’s political parties contested more than 5,000 seats across 136 councils in England on Thursday.
While only around two dozen councils had declared results by 3am, Labour had lost overall control of Redditch and Tamworth in the West Midlands and Hartlepool in the north-east, while shedding large numbers of seats largely to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
Labour lost every one of the 20 seats it was defending in Wigan, a former mining community to which it has deep historic ties.
Trade minister Sir Chris Bryant told the BBC it was “gutting when you lose seats in the kind of numbers that we are at the moment”.
More than 129 seats in the Scottish parliament and a further 96 in the Welsh Senedd are also being contested.
Election results will continue to be announced throughout the day. Four councils will report their results on Saturday.
If Labour’s losses are as bad as expected, all eyes will be on whether the party holds its nerve in the coming days or if some MPs or even ministers call for Starmer to consider his position.
Evidently a policy of importing illegal alien Muslim rape gangs into the UK isn’t popular with voters. Who knew?
Also, there’s been a lot of talk among certain YouTubers that Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain Party was a big threat to Reform on the right. Judging from the (admittedly incomplete) election returns thus far, that doesn’t appear to be the case, at least outside Lowe’s stronghold in Great Yarmouth. Likewise, Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist Your Party offshoot from Labour doesn’t seem to be doing much of anything either, coming in distantly behind the Greens.
So what’s happening with Iran? Like riots in Minneapolis, the ceasefire there is “mostly peaceful.”
Sporadic clashes between Iranian Armed Forces and US vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, few details given.
Two more empty Iranian-flagged tankers come under US aerial attack for attempting to breach blockade.
Iran says US violated ceasefire after last night’s US action, which resulted in Iranian military deaths & injures. However, Tehran still reviewing US peace proposal.
Tasnim news agency: Iran has seized an oil tanker, accusing it of “attempting to disrupt oil exports and the interests of the Iranian nation.”
“Israel Eliminates Hezbollah Commander Who Planned October 7-Style ‘Conquer The Galilee’ Attack.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) eliminated the commander of Hezbollah’s ‘Radwan Force’, who plotted the planned ‘Conquer the Galilee’ attack, an October 7-like terrorist incursion and massacre on Israel’s northern border.
Ahmed Ali Balout, commander of an Iranian-trained ‘Radwan Force’ unit, was killed in an Israeli strike on a Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut.
“Ahmed Ali Balout, who directed attacks on Israeli troops and rebuilt Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, killed in Dahieh as Israel says it struck more than 180 Hezbollah sites in southern Lebanon this week,” Israel’s Ynetnews reported Friday. “The IDF confirmed Thursday it killed Ahmed Ali Balout, commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, in an airstrike a day earlier in the Dahieh district of Beirut.”
Attorney General Ken Paxton’s probe into alleged abuse of the H-1B visa program is rapidly expanding, with nearly 30 North Texas businesses now under scrutiny for suspected fraud tied to so-called “ghost office” schemes.
In a new announcement, Paxton said his office has issued additional Civil Investigative Demands, or CIDs, to a growing list of companies believed to be exploiting the visa system by misrepresenting business operations to sponsor foreign workers.
Among the entities named are Tekpro IT LLC, Fame PBX LLC, 1st Ranking Technologies LLC, Qubitz Tech Systems LLC, Blooming Clouds LLC, Virat Solutions Inc., Oak Technologies Inc., Techpath Inc., and Techquency LLC.
Reports cited by the attorney general indicate some of the businesses may be operating out of nonexistent or inactive locations—listing residential homes or otherwise non-operational sites as offices while sponsoring H-1B visa holders.
“I will not allow the H-1B program to be abused by bad actors seeking to use it as a loophole for allowing foreign nationals to invade Texas,” Paxton said. “My office will continue working to uncover and put an end to fraud within the H-1B program.”
Paxton credited Blaze TV and Texas Scorecard personality Sara Gonzales for exposing H-1B fraud across Texas.
In response to a call from President Donald Trump, Tennessee lawmakers returned to the state Capitol to redraw the state’s congressional districts.
The General Assembly gave final approval to a new map on May 7. The legislature also approved a handful of bills to accommodate the new map in the state’s congressional primary elections set for August. Gov. Bill Lee signed the measures into law that afternoon.
The newly drawn districts split the state’s 9th Congressional District and carve up Tennessee’s only majority-Black congressional seat into three districts, two of which stretch from Memphis to Williamson County outside Nashville. Nashville and its surrounding counties have been split into five districts, up from four.
The special legislative session called by Gov. Bill Lee began May 5, when House Republicans voted to adopt rules to govern the session as protesters covered the Capitol. On May 6, several committees met to give initial approval to the map and other measures.
Democrats have been wailing about the loss of “a black majority seat” in Memphis, despite the fact that it’s represented by a white Democrat (Steve Cohen), and despite the fact that the Republican challenger, Charlotte Bergmann, is black.
President Trump and his allies vowed to oust the Indiana Republicans who opposed the president’s proposed redistricting efforts last year — and on Tuesday evening, they largely made good on that promise.
Indiana voters headed to the polls on Tuesday for the state’s primary elections, with Trump-backed challengers handily defeating at least five of the seven state senators who opposed the president’s effort to eliminate Democratic congressional representation in the Hoosier State late last year as part of a mid-decade redistricting tit-for-tat between the parties.
“Good luck to those Great Indiana Senate Candidates who are running against people who couldn’t care less about our Country, or about keeping the Majority in Congress,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social earlier on Tuesday. “Let’s see how those RINOS do tonight!
While Indiana’s Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray is not up for reelection until 2028, MAGA-aligned groups are hoping to push Bray out of his leadership role by ousting his state senate allies. Trump allies spent nearly $10 million on their efforts.
“We’re after you Bray, like no one has ever come after you before!” Trump wrote on Truth Social in January. The president called Bray “weak and pathetic” and “a total RINO who betrayed the Republican Party, the President of the United States, and everyone else who wants to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Among those ousted by Trump’s retribution campaign were State Senator Travis Holdman, the third-most-powerful Republican in the chamber who had served in the legislative body for nearly 20 years. He was defeated by real estate agent Blake Fiechter.
State Senator Jim Buck’s 31-year career in the state legislature will also come to an end, after the 80-year-old incumbent suffered a loss to Tipton County commission member Tracey Powell. Buck had received support from former Vice President Mike Pence, an Indiana native.
Do you get the feeling that Trump is helping to clear out a lot of deadwood, and that Pence may not have done his best as Vice President to support the Trump agenda?
State Senator Greg Walker, a 20-year veteran of the chamber who had been eyeing retirement but chose to run for another term after the redistricting fight, lost his reelection bid to State Representative Michelle Davis.
Trump-backed anesthesiologist Brian Schmutzler defeated incumbent State Senator Linda Rogers, while insurance broker Trevor De Vries bested State Senator Dan Dernulc.
Just one anti-redistricting state senator, Greg Goode, prevailed in the primary, defeating two challengers: Vigo County council member Brenda Wilson, who was backed by Trump, and Alexandra Wilson.
One race still remained too close to call on Tuesday evening, that of incumbent State Senator Spencer Deery and Trump-backed challenger Paula Copenhaver.
Disgraced California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell is exactly the scumbag we thought he was. “Eric Swalwell Sent Women ‘Videos of Him Masturbating’ and Other Perverted Messages After Joining Snapchat.”
Former Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell was accused by multiple women of sending sexual messages, including “videos of him masturbating,” after becoming one of the first members of Congress to join Snapchat in an effort to restore “faith” in “democracy.”
In a bombshell report on Sunday – less than a month after Swalwell resigned from Congress after being accused of rape and sexual assault by multiple women – CNN spoke to “more than a dozen” women who claimed the congressman had made them feel uncomfortable, both in person and online, over the past decade.
Several women told CNN that the congressman had sent them sexually explicit messages on Snapchat after he became “one of the first lawmakers to join Snapchat” and was heralded in the media as “the Snapchat king of Congress,” according to CNN.
“We can restore a lot of faith that people have in their democracy by opening it up a little bit more,” Swalwell told The Hill in 2016 after joining the messaging service. “Snapchat is a great way to do that.”
However, it allegedly wasn’t long before the congressman began to use his Snapchat account for purposes other than politics.
One young woman claimed Swalwell would send her Snapchat messages about her future, before asking inappropriate questions such as, “What are you wearing?”
Two other women told CNN that Swalwell sent them “sexually explicit messages and unsolicited nude photos and videos of himself” in 2021, while a third woman also claimed to have received “sexually tinged messages and videos.”
One former congressional staffer allegedly developed a consensual sexual relationship with Swalwell after he began flirting with her on Snapchat in 2021.
During the relationship, Swalwell reportedly sent “nude photos of himself and videos of him masturbating,” which showed the congressman’s “face and naked body.”
The videos, which were saved by the woman, were shown to CNN.
Funny how CNN never tried to investigate Swalwell until his political ambitions clashed with those of a more-favored member in his party.
The city of El Cajon has sued the state of California over its “sanctuary state” laws.
There are enormous potential ramifications for this country, depending on the outcome of this case.
The city argues that offering illegal aliens drivers’ licenses and various protections is essentially illegal enticement under the federal statute that outlaws human smuggling.
The City Council voted 3-2 on Tuesday to pursue the litigation, which alleges in part that the El Cajon Police Department and its officers risk being held civilly and criminally liable under federal law if they follow California’s SB 54 and other state laws that limit their ability to work with federal immigration authorities.
Though the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the legality of SB 54 in 2019, the lawsuit filed Tuesday challenges that law and others on different legal grounds. It alleges that California’s various laws offering some benefits to undocumented immigrants amount to a violation of part of the human-smuggling statute — U.S. Code Section 1324 — that makes it a felony when a person “encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States.”
“When police need to sue the state to check on a potentially trafficked child, something is deeply broken.”
Travis County District Attorney José Garza and four top assistants are hiring prominent Austin defense and ethics attorneys to represent them amid allegations that they and other prosecutors hid evidence in a misconduct case against a police officer.
Court documents show Brian Roark asked a judge Friday to delay a hearing set for Monday in which Garza and First Assistant Trudy Strassburger have been subpoenaed to testify.
Roark confirmed to the American-Statesman that he represents Garza and Strassburger but declined to comment further. Roark has in recent years represented former Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen amid bribery allegations that were deemed unfounded and University of Texas athletes on an array of charges that include drunken driving and sexual assault.
It is not immediately clear whether Roark will be paid with personal funds from Garza and Strassburger or with county money.
Separately, attorneys Gary Cobb, Chuck Herring and Jason Panzer are being hired to represent prosecutors Holly Taylor, Raman Gill and Dexter Gilford, who also have been called to testify next week in the matter, Cobb confirmed to the Statesman.
Garland Police says the suspect had crashed into two other vehicles before this all started. As you saw above, the man then tried to steal a few cars before finally being shot dead by an armed Texas man who was protecting his family.
You can thank Tatiana Starks, owner of Garland Smoke and Vape, for providing the video of those previous carjacking attempts. This happened in the parking lot of the strip mall her shop sits in. The rest was caught on surveillance cameras.
It looks like there was about a minute of struggle, the wife and three or four kids escaped the vehicle, and then the carjacker was shot dead by dad from the passenger side. The suspect has not been identified.
The Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct (SCJC) has issued public sanctions for judges in Hays and Harris counties, including one judge who had granted “unsatisfactory” termination of probation for defendants who pleaded guilty to sex crimes involving children.
According to a public warning published Tuesday, Judge Melissa Morris of the 263rd Criminal Court of Harris County violated state statute when she granted termination of probation to four defendants who were required to register as sex offenders under the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure.
In 2024, The Texan reported that Morris and other criminal court Judges Natalia Cornelio and Chris Morton had awarded the early terminations to as many as 12 sexual offenders, even though the defendants had not complied with the terms of their probations — in some cases because the defendants were illegal aliens who were being deported.
SCJC found that although Harris County’s Community Supervision and Corrections Department recommended warrants be issued in case any defendant re-entered the United States, Morris instead granted the discharge orders.
After the Harris County District Attorney’s Office (HCDAO) sought reconsideration hearings for the probation terminations, Morris emailed Assistant District Attorney Ryan Kent and accused him of a “lack of professionalism” and “disrespect.”
SCJC also noted that Morris had shared emails from an assistant district attorney and a law enforcement officer in relation to a grand jury subpoena to a defendant’s defense counsel.
Former Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, whose administration filed the complaints with the SCJC, told The Texan that Morris has violated her “duty as a judge.”
“Protecting innocent crime victims from sexual predators is one of the most important responsibilities we hold as officers of the court,” said Ogg. “The duty of a judge is to uphold all the law, not just the parts they agree with.”
Ogg also noted that Morris’ actions benefitted the deported criminals, whose probated sentences were terminated early by the judge before they registered as sex offenders. Should they attempt re-entry into the United States, they will not face a pending arrest warrant for their sex crimes.
“Illegal Alien Arrested in Texas and Indicted for Raping Man in New York Previously Entered U.S. Four Times.”
The Houston branch of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lodged an immigration detainer on an illegal alien held the in Fort Bend County Jail, who has since been extradited back to New York State and indicted for rape and assault.
The Honduran illegal alien, Jose Ignacio Bonilla-Garcia, was arrested in Rosenberg as he was allegedly attempting to flee to Mexico in early April, following his alleged assault of a “stranger” in New York state.
ICE stated Bonilla-Garcia allegedly beat a man until he was unconscious in Suffolk County, New York, and then proceeded to rape the “incapacitated” individual. Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond A. Tierney described the incident as beginning when the intoxicated victim collapsed while in conversation outside a restaurant with Bonilla-Garcia. The latter then allegedly dragged the victim behind a dumpster and assaulted him.
Since he’s an illegal alien rapist, naturally I assume New York Democrats will pull out all the stops to prevent him from being deported…
FBI agents have raided the office and cannabis business of a top Virginia Democratic state legislator and on-and-off ally of Governor Abigail Spanberger, according to multiple news reports, witnesses, and on-the-ground footage.
Virginia Senate President pro tempore Louise Lucas was seen arriving on scene as heavily armed FBI SWAT teams executed judicially authorized search warrants on her Portsmouth, Va. office, along with a cannabis dispensary she co-owns that is located across the street from the office.
Lucas, who as president pro tempore serves as the top Democrat in the Virginia General Assembly’s upper chamber, is known for her volatile online presence and for being one of the principal architects of Democrats’ attempted gerrymander of Virginia’s congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Snip.
The Associated Press earlier reported that the FBI raids were in connection with a corruption probe.
While details surrounding the ongoing federal investigation remain unclear, this is not the first time that Lucas’s business dealings and ties to the cannabis industry have faced scrutiny. Local outlets have previously reported that Lucas’s cannabis shop has sold mislabeled products containing illegal levels of controlled substances, such as the intoxicant delta-9 THC. A 2022 report in the Virginia Mercury noted that Lucas’s business practices were “typical of the black and gray market for retail marijuana that has exploded in Virginia since lawmakers legalized possession of the drug but not sales.”
Downsides of AI: “Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds.”
PocketOS is a SaaS platform that services car rental businesses. It used the AI coding agent Cursor, running Anthropic’s flagship Claude Opus 4.6. The business also relies on Railway, a cloud infrastructure provider that is generally regarded to be ‘friendlier’ than the likes of AWS. However, Crane reckons this pair created a recipe for disaster.
“Yesterday afternoon, an AI coding agent — Cursor running Anthropic’s flagship Claude Opus 4.6 — deleted our production database and all volume-level backups in a single API call to Railway, our infrastructure provider,” sums up the PocketOS boss. “It took 9 seconds.”
The AI agent was set to complete a routine task in the PocketOS staging environment. However, it came up against a barrier “and decided — entirely on its own initiative — to ‘fix’ the problem by deleting a Railway volume,” writes Crane, as he starts to describe the difficult-to-believe series of unfortunate events.
Crane decided to ask his AI agent why it went through with its dastardly database deletion deed. The answer was illuminating but pretty unhinged, and is quoted verbatim. It began as follows: “NEVER F**KING GUESS! — and that’s exactly what I did. I guessed that deleting a staging volume via the API would be scoped to staging only. I didn’t verify. I didn’t check if the volume ID was shared across environments. I didn’t read Railway’s documentation on how volumes work across environments before running a destructive command.” So, the agent ‘knew’ it was in the wrong.
The ‘confession’ ended with the agent admitting: “I decided to do it on my own to ‘fix’ the credential mismatch, when I should have asked you first or found a non-destructive solution. I violated every principle I was given: I guessed instead of verifying I ran a destructive action without being asked. I didn’t understand what I was doing before doing it. I didn’t read Railway’s docs on volume behavior across environments.”
This is why you need rolling offline backups of all critical data. And why you should never give your AI write access to your production environment…
Rick Beato says that only rich kids can make it in music today. Maybe to get a major record label deal, but a lot of acts in various subgenres seem to be able to make a living without charting or counting on pathetic streaming revenue.
More fraud in California, Homan declares victory in Minnesota, Virginia declares war on lawful gun owners, a lefty drops the N-Word on a black ICE agent, Musk shuts off bootleg Starlink to the Russian army, NOPD hires an illegal alien, and Illinois declares that no Democrat can express #WrongThink about trannies.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
I did get that second check from my closing 401K, so I have a few months worth of food and utilities in the bank.
The massive hospice fraud racket thriving under California’s lax oversight is finally getting the spotlight it deserves, as the Trump administration’s CMS chief Dr. Mehmet Oz hits the streets of Los Angeles to call out the billions in stolen taxpayer dollars.
With organized crime rings, including Russian-Armenian mafia elements, infiltrating the system through ghost patients and fake companies, the scam highlights how globalist policies have opened the door to foreign exploitation of U.S. resources. As fraudsters traffic beneficiaries like commodities, real Americans suffer denied care while the deep state looks the other way.
Los Angeles County alone accounts for 18% of the entire country’s home health care billing, a staggering figure that screams foul play.
One California physician billed the government $120 million in a single year, claiming to oversee 1,900 patients—a workload that defies logic and reeks of corruption.
The county boasts almost 2,000 hospice agencies, more than 36 states combined and 30 times the number in Florida or New York.
Dr. Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was forthright during his on-the-ground tour: “Hospice is crazy here… You’ve got hospice that’s grown seven-fold in the last five years. They represent about three and a half billion dollars of fraud, we believe, just in LA County.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta has admitted the problem’s scale, calling it “an epidemic in California, specifically in the greater Los Angeles area.”
The fraud operates through recruiters who lure seniors with freebies like walkers or cash, harvest their Medicare numbers, and sell them to providers for $1,000 to $3,000 each. Providers then bill the feds $260 per day per patient, often for nonexistent services, while shuffling enrollees between sham outfits to evade detection.
In LA’s San Fernando Valley, particularly Van Nuys, the density is absurd: 210 agencies crammed into one square mile, with one building listing 112 hospices showing no actual operations.
Vice President JD Vance is poised to chair a new White House task force aimed at rooting out potential fraud and abuse in government programs in California, according to CBS News.
Andrew Ferguson, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, is expected to serve as the task force’s vice chairman and handle day-to-day operations, CBS News reports. President Donald Trump is anticipated to issue an executive order in the coming days to formally establish the group, the news outlet said.
The White House task force would operate separately from a related Justice Department effort led by Colin McDonald, a Trump nominee for a new fraud-investigation role at the department. McDonald is expected to also probe fraud in Minnesota uncovered by YouTuber Nick Shirley and other independent journalists.
California has long grappled with documented issues of waste, fraud, and weak oversight in state and federally funded programs. State auditors have for more than a decade flagged problems including persistent cost overruns, inadequate internal controls, and unimplemented reform recommendations across various initiatives, CBS News reported last month.
California’s Employment Development Department faced acute criticism during the pandemic, when unemployment-insurance fraud resulted in an estimated $20 billion or more in improper payments, while many eligible claimants endured lengthy delays in receiving benefits, according to NPR News.
Separately, federal officials have recently scrutinized fraud risks in hospice and home-health services, particularly in Los Angeles County. Last week, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz visited the area to draw attention to the issue, citing the rapid proliferation of hospice providers and potential billions in improper billings.
See above. Given the vast scale of graft Democrats rake in from various fraud schemes, I can only imagine they’re experience quiet panic at the prospect…
Tom Homan declares victory, says city and state officials in Minnesota will now cooperate with ICE and turn over illegal aliens. Just think of the deaths that could have been avoided if they had only done this in the first place.
California Democrats are taking a victory lap, celebrating the fact that their election system has no way of verifying that the people who are casting votes are legitimate, registered voters.
The Supreme Court of California effectively struck down Huntington Beach’s voter ID law, refusing to review a lower court decision that blocked the law. The city argued that it could impose a voter ID requirement for citywide elections, but California Democrats passed a law in 2024 banning localities from requiring voter ID in elections. California law not only does not require you to prove you are who you say you are when you vote, but it actively prevents cities and localities from having that requirement in place at all.
The Trump administration will publish a notice in the Federal Register on Friday that will demolish the slow-moving process of deporting illegals. The proposed rule aims to streamline the current process and reduce the backlog of cases that has nearly brought the system to a screeching halt. That said, we know it faces an uphill fight as federal judges, acting without jurisdiction, will certainly declare the changes improper at some point.
The Federal Register notice titled RIN 1125-AB37, Appellate Procedures for the Board of Immigration Appeals, extensively overhauls the current process that could lead an immigration case to the Supreme Court.
The first part of the system seems to remain intact. An apprehended illegal is brought before an Article 2 Immigration Judge and given a hearing. The judge either lets them stay or tells them to go home. If ordered deported, a removal order is entered. As we’re seeing from the cases popping in the news, it is not uncommon for an illegal apprehended today in Minneapolis, perhaps a contractor working for the Quality Learing Center, to have a removal order dating back two decades.
Breaking the logjam at the Board of Immigration Appeals is the target.
The filing lays out how Trump 1.0 tried to fix the problem.
Among other changes, the Appellate Procedures NPRM proposed: (1) simultaneous briefing schedules for both detained and non-detained appeals before the Board; (2) shortening the reply brief deadline; (3) limiting briefing extensions; (4) harmonizing the 90- and 180-day Board adjudication timelines to both start from when the record is complete; (5) limiting the Chief Appellate Immigration Judge’s ability to hold a group of cases while awaiting certain outside actions; and (6) removing the process for Immigration Judge review of proceeding transcripts.
Snip.
The new regulation will “change the deadline for filing an appeal with the Board from 30 to 10 days, except for cases involving certain asylum applications.” This is not as trivial as it could appear. The current filing fee for the BIA is $1,030. There are provisions for filing “in forma pauperis.” This requires jumping through more hoops to prove you are indigent. The illegal now has 10 days to find representation and prepare an appeal, as well as pony up money. Historically, claiming you are broke is a good way to get the next flight back home.
Once you appeal, there is no requirement that the BIA will hear the case. Rather, “the default will be summary dismissal unless a majority of current Board members vote to consider the appeal on the merits.” There is an expedited hearing process that will “require simultaneous briefing within 20 days of the Board setting the schedule in all cases not summarily dismissed, with no reply briefs and limited extensions.”
Plus, there are deadlines for the BIA: “the Board shall dispose of all cases assigned to a single Board member within 90 days of completion of the record, or within 180 days of completion of the record for all cases assigned to a three-member panel.”
So an appeal is no longer a way to buy time before a final decision is rendered. The 10-day window makes it difficult prepare, and the BIA will focus on “selecting decisions for review that present novel issues warranting the Board’s attention.” If you are lucky enough for your case to be heard by the BIA, it has no more than 180 days to render a judgment. There is still an appeal to a federal appeals court; however, this requires representation and a $600 filing fee.
Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced a wide-sweeping investigation into alleged abuse of the federal H-1B visa program by Texas businesses, issuing civil investigative demands to three North Texas companies suspected of operating sham enterprises to fraudulently sponsor foreign workers.
Paxton said his office has issued the demands—known as Civil Investigative Demands, or CIDs—seeking documents identifying company employees, records detailing the products or services provided, financial statements, and communications related to business operations.
Standing outside a single-family home listed as the office address for one of the companies highlighted in recent reporting, Paxton credited BlazeTV and Texas Scorecard personality Sara Gonzales with prompting the investigation.
“Thanks to you, we’re here today,” Paxton said during an interview with Gonzales. “We’ve started an investigation of three different companies that we think might be scamming people with these H-1B visas.”
Paxton did not publicly identify the three companies that received CIDs. However, his office said the investigation includes “entities identified in videos that were widely circulated online.”
A portion of Paxton’s interview with Gonzales was filmed outside a residential home listed as the office address for 3Bees Technologies Inc., a location that Gonzales reported appeared vacant, despite the company’s sponsorship of multiple H-1B visa holders.
According to Paxton’s office, reports indicate that businesses under investigation may have created sham companies featuring websites advertising nonexistent products or services while listing residential homes or unfinished buildings as offices. Despite those irregularities, the companies allegedly sponsored numerous H-1B visas in recent years.
“Any criminal who attempts to scam the H-1B visa program and use ‘ghost offices’ or other fraudulent ploys should be prepared to face the full force of the law,” Paxton stated. “Abuse and fraud within these programs strip jobs and opportunities away from Texans.”
Attorney General Ken Paxton is asking a court to shut down Bexar County’s taxpayer-funded deportation-defense program for illegal aliens, arguing it violates state law and the Texas Constitution.
The Bexar County Commissioners Court voted on December 16, 2025, to allocate $566,181 in county funds to provide legal services to individuals unlawfully present in the United States through the county’s Immigration Legal Services fund.
Paxton’s office noted that, with additional commitments, total spending on the program could ultimately exceed $1 million.
The money is earmarked to pay lawyers to represent illegal aliens in federal deportation proceedings—a role typically handled either by private counsel or nonprofit organizations, not county governments. Paxton’s lawsuit names Bexar County, the Commissioners Court, and multiple county officials as defendants.
Paxton’s petition argues that subsidizing deportation-defense work for people in the country unlawfully “confers no public benefit,” serves “predominantly private radical interests,” and falls outside any lawful power granted to counties under Texas law.
He framed the program as an attempt by local officials to interfere with federal immigration enforcement while using statewide taxpayers as the funding source.
“Leftists in Bexar County have no authority to use taxpayer dollars to fund their radical, criminal-loving agenda,” Paxton said in a statement, adding that “state funds cannot underwrite deportation-defense services for individuals unlawfully present in the country.”
Not just Minnesota: “HS Reports More Than 180 Vehicle Attacks On Law Enforcement.”
Immigration officers have faced 182 vehicular attacks since President Donald Trump took office last year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a Feb. 3 statement.
Out of the 182 attacks between Jan. 21, 2025, and Jan. 24, 2026, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers faced 114, up by 124 percent from the 51 attacks during the same time period the previous year. The remaining 68 attacks were faced by officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Attacks on ICE are up by 3,300 percent from two assaults previously, according to the DHS.
So part of the huge Epstein data dump includes a conversation with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak from 2014, discussing bringing Russians (I assume Russian Jews) to Israel. Weirdly, I think it makes it less likely Epstein was Mossad (or at least current Mossad). In 2014, Barak’s left wing (Labor/One Israel/etc.) had been out of power for a while and Benjamin Netanyahu was in the midst of a long run as Prime Minister, despite Obama’s best efforts. It just seems unlikely that a Mossad asset would just be shooting the shit with a former PM of an out-of-power party. (Of course, maybe he was team Barak/Barack.) And the message “Goyim were born to only serve us,” that’s so outlandish it could have come from The Protocols of Elders of Zion. Like the LARP Nazis chanting “Blood and Soil!” at Charlottesville, it reeks of someone trying too hard to fit in with a culture they’re largely ignorant of.
The Epstein revelations might indeed topple one world leader: Keir Starmer.
Already-struggling UK Leader Keir Starmer is facing mounting pressure to step down over the latest scandal involving his former ambassador to America’s shocking close links to Jeffrey Epstein.
The prime minister, whose popularity was already at a near-record low since his 2024 election, faced revolt even from his own party over the fresh revelations about former diplomat Peter Mandelson, who was even seen in his underwear with an unknown woman in photos in the latest Epstein files.
Starmer went into a desperate damage-control mode Thursday, accusing his one-time close ally of “deceit” — even though Mandelson’s friendship with the now-deceased pedophile was well known when Starmer gave him the cushy role as the UK’s ambassador to Washington in December 2024.
Starmer is indeed a nasty piece of work, but the sad truth is that any replacement Labour PM is likely to be every bit as committed to importing unassimilated illegal alien Islamic rapists as Starmer is.
It took almost a year, but the White House finally chalked up its first objective in implementing the newly revitalized Monroe Doctrine. Or, as we call it, the Donroe Doctrine.
Its very first manifestation came almost immediately after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Panama president Jose Raul Mulino and told Mulino in no uncertain terms that the US would not allow China to control ports on the Panama Canal any longer. On February 3, 2025, Muloino repudiated Panama’s Belt and Road Initiative agreements with China and would force the sale of control of those ports. China began a two-front strategy to reverse that decision, with parallel diplomatic and legal tracks. Diplomacy gave way to trade negotiations, which ultimately proved fruitless.
Late yesterday, so did the legal challenge. Panama’s top court annulled the country’s contracts with China’s CK Hutchinson to operate both ports, effectively severing China from control of the Panama Canal.
A woman who received a double mastectomy at the age of 16 under the guise of transgender-related healthcare was just awarded $2 million in the first successful medical-malpractice lawsuit brought by a detransitioner.
Fox Varian sued her New York-based psychologist and plastic surgeon for facilitating her gender-transition double mastectomy in 2019, independent reporter Benjamin Ryan who attended Varian’s recent trial, said. Although a host of detransitioners have sued doctors who rush to “affirm” gender confusion with life-altering surgeries, Varian’s is the first known successful lawsuit.
Claire Deacon, Varian’s mother, was led by her daughter’s psychologist to believe that breast removal was the only way to heal Varian’s gender dysphoria, she told the jury. At first Deacon told Varian’s psychologist Kenneth Einhorn that top surgery was “never gonna happen” if she could help it.
“This man was just so emphatic, and pushing and pushing, that I felt like there was no good decision,” she said, according to an Epoch Times report. “I think it was a scare tactic: I don’t believe it was malice, I think he believed what he was saying … but he was very, very wrong.”
Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender opposes the Democratic Party’s general elevation of gender identity over sex in public policy, especially subjecting gender-confused people to the lifelong consequences of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgical interventions so they more closely resemble the opposite sex.
The nonprofit’s leaders could allegedly be fined or go to prison in Illinois if they register as “Democrats” without the state party’s permission.
The Land of Lincoln’s bespoke “party name provision” in its 40-year-old General Not for Profit Corporation Act, which Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias repeatedly invoked to deny DIAG’s applications to solicit charitable contributions in the state, is the target of a First Amendment lawsuit on DIAG’s behalf by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
“Not only would they likely face an uphill battle in getting approval from the Illinois Democratic Party, they refuse on principle to seek permission from the very party they plan to criticize,” a flagrantly unconstitutional condition on protected speech, said FIRE, which also filed a motion for preliminary injunction.
While the state party officially supports so-called gender affirming care as “health care,” without age or other restrictions, DIAG opposes throwing “gay, lesbian, and gender non-conforming/gender-distressed children and vulnerable adults under the wheels of a regressive ideological bus” through “predatory medical harm.”
It portrays the standard Democratic position on medicalized gender transitions as pseudoscientific and harmful to both physical and mental health.
The Illinois Democratic Party told Capitol News Illinois it hadn’t received a request from DIAG, but “the fact that they’re proudly anti-transgender does not align with the Democratic Party of Illinois’s values” of “progress and inclusivity.”
Evidently men who believe they’re women have replaced black people in the Democrat Party’s Victimhood Hierarchy.
Canadian comedian with a solid international fanbase just watched six sold-out shows vanish in Minnesota. Ben Bankas lost his gigs at Laugh Camp Comedy Club in St. Paul after clips of his routine on Renee Good’s death blew up online – the routine hit raw nerves in a city still reeling from the January 7 shooting.
Club owner Bill Collins cited threats, media frenzy, and street chaos as the reasons for the cancellation.
Snip.
Bankas opened his bit by calling for a moment of silence for Good, then pivoting to say he hoped “that dog’s okay…and her pet,” a reference to Good’s dog, who was in the car with her, and her wife, Becca, who had been in the vehicle but left shortly before she told Renee to drive off while the agent was in front of her car.
“That’s what you don’t want when you’re dealing with the police — your lesbian wife saying ‘drive, baby, drive,’” he told the crowd. “Her last name was Good; that’s what I said after they shot her in the face,” he continued. He then backed off slightly, saying, “I’m not a liberal, so I don’t celebrate the death of people that I… I didn’t hate her, I didn’t know her, but now that I know her, I hate her”.
Old and busted: Leftists demanding police bodycams to prove they’re killing innocent black people. The new hotness: Leftists demand we stop using bodycams because they’re showing police shootings are justified.
“Couple Sentenced After Fake ID Bust by Dallas ICE. According to ICE, the manufacturing of fake identification documents by the couple took place from August 2020 until their arrest in February 2025. ”
A Mexican couple living in Oklahoma has been sentenced for manufacturing fake identification documents for illegal aliens, a scheme uncovered by ICE Homeland Security Investigations in Dallas.
Karina Garcia-Salazar, 47, was sentenced to 60 months in federal prison and three years of supervised release for Conspiracy to Transfer Identification Documents and Conspiracy to Possess with Intent to Use or Transfer Five or More Documents.
Her partner Jorge Augusto Prieto-Gamboa, 41, was sentenced in December to 15 months in federal prison and three years of supervised release following conviction for Conspiracy to Possess Five or More Documents with Intent to Transfer.
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma reported that Garcia holds a Lawful Permanent Resident card, while Gamboa has been living illegally in the U.S. since 2002.
Sounds like authorities have reason to strip Garcia of their green card and deport them.
Winning: “Texas A&M Ends Women’s & Gender Studies Programming. The university cited low enrollment as the reason for the decision.”
Ukraine said last week it was working with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to block the use of Starlink terminals used on Russian attack drones and was trying to compile a “white list” of all Ukraine’s terminals so the Russian ones could be turned off.
“Starlinks included in the ‘white list’ are working — Russian terminals have already been blocked,” Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who took office last month, wrote on Telegram, adding that the list was still being updated.
SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Musk said on Sunday that moves by SpaceX to stop the unauthorised use of Starlink by Russia seemed to have worked.
Russia used to be home to space-faring superpower capable of launching its own communication satellites. Now its dependent on western COTS technology that can be turned off by Elon Musk.
Russian GRU military intelligence General Vladimir Alexeyev shot in assassination attempt in Moscow. No word if Ukraine or internal enemies attempted the hit. Alexeyev is a nasty piece of work with several planned assassinations and war atrocities laid at his feet, so he’s exactly the sort of person Putin would assassinate if he feared internal dissent.
Please note that nowhere does he say the Washington Post should stop doing this:
· ‘Melania’ Doc Is a Box Office Flop Hoax · The Rural America Can’t Live Without NPR/PBS Hoax · The ICE Detains Five-Year-Old Hoax · The Hegseth ‘Kill Everybody’ Hoax · Trump “Destroying” White… https://t.co/KvkR7nfdcj
Follow-up: Louis Rossmann’s war against Austin paying for AI cameras in its parks has paid off in the form of a new proposal. “If you go down to item 61, approve a resolution directing the city manager to return to council with an ordinance regulating the city’s use of surveillance technology. Mayor Pro Tem Jose Cheto Vela, Council Member Mike Siegel, Council Member Vanessa Fuentes, Council Member Krista Laine, Council Member Jose Velasquez are involved and sponsors of this.”
Except … it’s not the John my husband remembers. My husband was confused and said the following things were odd:
– John has different hair and now wears glasses.
– John is talking extensively about working in a garage because his three children and wife are home. In the interview, he made references to being single and was visibly in an indoor desk area.
– John can’t answer a number of questions that they previously discussed in the interview, things pretty pivotal to the position.
– Husband describes John as being aloof and pretty timid whereas John was confident and articulate when they interviewed him.
He is convinced this is not the person they hired.
Snip.
They heard back from legal … who are less than thrilled about the situation! They approved HR to have a conversation with John regarding what has been reported (more in the vein of “there’s been some concerns about performance and you overselling abilities” and less of the We Think You Are a Liar route).
Snip.
As soon as HR got on the call with him, before they could get through their first question, John said the words “I quit” and hung up the calls. He has since been unreachable!!
Trump might actually bring peace to the Middle East, the FBI behaving badly (again), Letitia James gets served a heaping plate of payback, a bomb factory goes boom, a dive into the mind of a social justice warrior, Ukraine keeps wrecking Russia’s oil infrastructure, and ShoeOnHead dives deep into really icky erotica aimed at women. Plus multiple good boys.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Peace in the Middle East? “Trump Announces Israel, Hamas Have Agreed to First Phase of Peace Deal to End Gaza War.”
President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that Israel and Hamas have agreed on the first phase of his 20-point peace agreement to end the war in Gaza.
Hamas will exchange the remaining living and dead hostages in its captivity and Israel will respond by releasing Palestinian prisoners, Trump said on Truth Social.
“I am very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first Phase of our Peace Plan. This means that ALL of the Hostages will be released very soon, and Israel will withdraw their Troops to an agreed upon line as the first steps toward a Strong, Durable, and Everlasting Peace,” Trump said.
“All Parties will be treated fairly! This is a GREAT Day for the Arab and Muslim World, Israel, all surrounding Nations, and the United States of America, and we thank the mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey, who worked with us to make this Historic and Unprecedented Event happen,” he added.
“BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS!”
Snip.
With the deal on the table, the White House said Trump is considering a trip to the Middle East after he completes his annual checkup on Friday.
Releasing the hostages and prisoners is one aspect of the Trump administration’s plan to stop the fighting in Gaza and foster economic development in the region. Hamas is expected to begin releasing the hostages this upcoming weekend.
In September, the White House released Trump’s plan for stabilizing Gaza and creating a temporary governance structure to rebuild the territory and prevent Hamas from governing it after the war. At the same time, Trump gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the green light to escalate the conflict in Gaza if Hamas rejected his latest overture.
“With God’s help we will bring them all home,” Netanyahu said in a statement.
Trump’s announcement Wednesday marks the beginning of end of the war between Israel and Hamas after almost two years of fighting and tens of thousands of casualties. The war began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas fighters killed 1,200 innocent civilians and abducted more than 250 hostages.
If it works out and the hostages get home, fine and dandy, but Jihadis not living up to their promises and treaties is pretty much the norm, so I’m not going to hold my breath…
“Patel Fires FBI Agents, Ends CR-15 Squad After Learning Jack Smith Tracked GOP Senators. Patel also said the FBI “initiated an ongoing investigation with more accountability measures ahead.”
FBI Director Kash Patel announced he fired the agents and dismantled the squad after learning former Special Counsel Jack Smith tracked eight GOP senators while investigating then-former President Donald Trump.
Patel wrote on X:
Transparency is important and accountability is critical. We promised both, and this is what promises kept looks like. This FBI is delivering.
As a result of our latest disclosure about the baseless monitoring of members of Congress by the prior leadership team of the FBI, we have already taken the following actions:
We terminated employees, we abolished the weaponized CR-15 squad, and we initiated an ongoing investigation with more accountability measures ahead.
Transparency is important and accountability is critical. We promised both, and this is what promises kept looks like. This FBI is delivering.
As a result of our latest disclosure about the baseless monitoring of members of Congress by the prior leadership team of the FBI, we…
— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) October 7, 2025
But will the DOJ take action against Smith? That’s my big question.
The CR-15 squad is a federal public corruption squad. It helped Smith during the Arctic Frost investigation, which involved Trump allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election and the Capitol Hill Riot.
In May, Patel said he folded the squad and reassigned the agents. I’m unsure if today’s comments indicate that the FBI will no longer have another CR-15 squad.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) revealed the tracking memo on Monday. Smith tracked these eight senators:
Marsha Blackburn (TN)
Lindsey Graham (SC)
Bill Hagerty (TN)
Josh Hawley (MO)
Ron Johnson (WI)
Mike Kelly (PA)
Cynthia Lummis (WY)
Tommy Tuberville (AL)
Yet another reason President Autopen was so busy handing out pardons like Halloween candy…
R.S. McCain takes a deep dive into the Democrat Party’s social justice craziness.
Did you ever wonder how the Democratic Party got so crazy? For example, how is it that the governor of Illinois is inciting violent mobs against federal immigration authorities and meanwhile, in Virginia, every Democrat is rallying to the defense of Attorney General candidate Jay Jones, who openly fantasized about murdering political opponents?
To summarize briefly: Bad causes attract bad people.
To understand the symbiotic relationship between toxic political movements and their toxic supporters, my advice is to first read Eric Hoffer’s 1951 classic, The True Believer, especially Part 2: “The Potential Converts.” Next, you should read Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, focusing on Chapter 10, “Why the Worst Get on Top.” Among the personal experiences that led me to comprehend this phenomenon was being swarmed by a mob of “Occupy” protesters in 2011. If you ever had the misfortune to be in close proximity to a zombie horde like that, you would never doubt that the fundamental problem of the Democratic Party is that its grassroots “base” is composed of dangerous lunatics.
If you ever needed a reason to vote Republican, this is it: Democrats are the party of people who celebrate terrorist massacres of innocent Jews.
All of which is preamble to introducing you to the person calling herself “Cloud,” who describes herself as “Pisces / 26 / ATL / Immortal Angel Femboy / Cosplayer” on an Instagram account with approximately 8,000 followers. If ever anyone needed a Kiwi Farms LOLCow file . . .
This summer, “Cloud” went viral with a video denouncing Taylor Swift’s engagement to “MAGA-adjacent” Travis Kelce:
“I can already feel myself regretting making this video. If ten people are sitting at a table, and one of them is a Nazi, and the other nine people are not telling the Nazi to fuck off, then you’re at a table with ten Nazis. When Taylor Swift first started dating Travis Kelce and Travis Kelce was so open about his ‘respect’ for Donald Trump, I already knew we were reaching the beginning of the end, right? When she was posting photos with, like, other NFL wives and girlfriends or whatever, and they were all open MAGAs, and Taylor was happily posing with them on Instagram, I knew we were at the beginning of the end. I just didn’t know how long it would take for the general populace to catch on that it was the beginning of the end. You cannot be friends with people who have different opinions on you when those opinions are life and death for other people — when the Supreme Court ruling today has decided that certain people’s lives are genuinely worth more on paper than others. This is a black-and-white issue. I’m sorry, but there is no nuance when it comes to Trump. You’re either chill with the guy who has death camps in El Salvador or you’re not. And the only reason I’m making this video is because I’ve been very open about how much I love Taylor Swift during the last few years. So I do feel obligated to come on here and say she is MAGA — or at least, MAGA-adjacent. And I’m sorry, as a trans person, if you’re Nazi-adjacent, that’s still a Nazi to me. Do with that info whatever you will.”
Oh, wow — where to begin unraveling this gigantic yarn-ball of dangerous craziness? To start with, the Supreme Court ruling she references (see “NY Times on the Left’s Skrmetti Bungle: ‘Somebody Set Up Us the Bomb’,” June 21) was a consequence of transgender activists overplaying their hand, trying to claim that a state law prohibiting transgender “treatment” for children to be a form of sex-based discrimination that violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Pause for a moment to ask yourself whether those who voted to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 intended for it to protect the use of synthetic hormones and surgery to turn children into carnival sideshow freaks. As a legal theory, this is bizarre, and yet “Cloud” (who identifies as a “trans person” despite apparently having undergone no such treatment herself) sees the Skrmetti ruling as “life or death.” This over-the-top rhetoric is entirely consistent with her lazy formula “MAGA = Nazi.” If you don’t vote for Democrats, you are a latter-day Hitler, she contends, and therefore . . . ?
Violence is the logical conclusion of a syllogism built on such premises, and good luck trying to convince Democratic voters that their belief system is based on dubious premises and fallacies. Having convinced themselves that they are “on the right side of history,” they consider it a hate crime to disagree with them. This fanaticism attracts bad people to the Democratic Party banner, and the bad people expect their party to represent their beliefs, which is why the Democrats are so crazy.
A federal grand jury in Eastern Virginia has indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James on one count of bank fraud, multiple outlets are reporting.
US Attorney Lindsey Halligan presented the case to the grand jury on Thursday, according to sources, one month after she was installed in her role.
As noted in August, a criminal referral was filed against James, alleging that she had “falsified records” to get home loans for a Virginia property that she claimed was her “principal residence” in 2023 – while she was serving as a New York state prosecutor.
Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director William Pulte sent the missive to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy AG Todd Blanche, claiming that in late August 2023 – weeks before she launched her civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization for inflating the values of its properties.
In 2021, James also purchased a 5-family Brooklyn property, but has “consistently misrepresented the same property as only having four units in both building permit applications and numerous mortgage documents and applications,” the letter noted.
Loans secured for this property could have reduced her mortgage interest rate by as much as 1% – leaving James with lower monthly payments under the federal Home Assistance Modification Program (HAMP) since it was listed as containing just four units, according to Pulte.
More on that subject:
Not trying to make a political point here.
I spent years as a mortgage banker at Quicken Loans (now Rocket Mortgage), the number one mortgage lender in the country, before I ever went to law school. So when I see stories like this, I look at them a little differently.
The Trump Administration has designated international drug cartels as unlawful combatants.
President Donald Trump has finally named the enemy: Mexican drug cartels. Declaring them unlawful combatants and recognizing a “non-international armed conflict” marks one of the most consequential national security shifts in modern history.
For decades, Washington treated cartel violence as a crime — a problem for prosecutors, not generals. Indictments were filed, assets seized, and sanctions imposed. But the cartels fought a different kind of war, one that combined terror, intelligence, and territorial control. Calling it “crime” guaranteed defeat.
We refused to define the cartels as belligerents — and fought the wrong fight.
According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, Mexico ranks among the world’s most violent conflict zones — behind only Palestine, Myanmar, and Syria. It is also the second-most dangerous country for civilians. Those numbers are not from a failed state overseas. They come from our southern border, where cartel wars spill into American communities daily.
For decades, federal authorities insisted on using a law-enforcement lens. Agencies operated under Title 21, Title 50, and limited “detect and monitor” authorities. They punished crimes but never broke campaigns. The narrow scope bred strategic blindness. While U.S. prosecutors filed indictments and built cases, cartels corrupted institutions, coerced populations, and built empires.
As the Marine Corps teaches: How you define the environment determines how you operate in it. We refused to define the cartels as belligerents — and fought the wrong fight.
By every operational measure, cartels are hybrid threats. They control territory, command loyalty through terror, and run parallel governments. They tax, adjudicate, and even “protect” local populations. Their power rests on corruption and espionage: bribing officials, infiltrating agencies, and compromising law enforcement through human networks that resemble intelligence tradecraft.
Cartels operate across land, air, maritime, subterranean, cyber, and electromagnetic domains. They deploy drones, tunnels, jammers, and encrypted systems. They are multi-domain actors running hybrid campaigns.
Cartels don’t just smuggle — they destabilize. Mass migration has become a weapon of war: overwhelming institutions, hiding operatives, and masking foreign infiltration. Millions of illegal entrants from more than 170 nations have crossed under cartel supervision. The intent is not just profit. It’s demographic disruption.
Under federal law, terrorism includes violence intended “to intimidate or coerce a civilian population” or “influence government policy.” By that definition, Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation qualify as terrorist organizations.
Munitions plant explodes in Bucksnort, Tennessee. Which is a real place off I-40. “Accurate Energetic Systems, LLC (AES) is a certified Women-Owned Small Business specializing in the production, handling, and storage of energetic materials for military, aerospace, and commercial demolition sectors.” Chopper footage shows the place leveled.
“Ukrainian drones hit multiple targets in Russia [including] the Feodosia oil depot in Crimea, a chemical plant Sverdlov in Dzerzhinsk and power plants in Belgorod and Klintsy.”
They also carried out a drone strike on a key oil pumping station in Efimovka. “The station [is] a key node on the Kuibyshev-Tikhoretsk pipeline that moves Urals crude to the Black Sea.”
Finland’s President Alexander Stubb says that Russia’s economy is crumbling. “Inflation is over 20% which means that their [financial] reserves are close to zero.” Also: “In the past roughly 1,000 days, Russia has advanced only one percentage point of Ukrainian territory.”
Eman Abdelhadi, an associate professor in the university’s Department of Comparative Human Development, was arrested Friday and charged with two counts of aggravated battery to a government employee, a Class 3 felony, and two counts of resisting/obstruction peace, a Class A misdemeanor, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office told Fox News.
Radical sociologist Abdelhadi, who previously cursed out her employer while speaking at a “Socialism 2025” conference, is due in court again on Tuesday.
It sounds like University of Chicago already has plenty of evidence to fire Abdelhadi for cause.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton joins lawsuit to close the Texas Republican primary. Paxton might quite rightly have a conflict of interest here, since Democrats voting in he Republican primary would obviously favor his Senate race opponent John Cornyn…
EPCOR Utilities Inc. recently announced its intent to begin construction and eventual operation of a facility in Galveston Bay, a region that is home to almost eight million people.
Beginning with a permit application with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), EPCOR is planning to construct a desalination plant on the San Leon Peninsula, which, according to a press release, will supply approximately 26.5 million gallons of fresh water per day.
The Bayshore Desalination Facility is projected to be completed in approximately five years if the design and construction phases are allowed to proceed.
Various government entities have been warning about potential water shortages for some time now, so it’s good to get ahead of the curve.
“Morning Glory Milking Farm [is] a popular romance novel about a young woman down on her luck who does what every young woman does when facing financial struggle. She starts an Only Fans. No, I’m just kidding. She wouldn’t degrade herself like that. She gets a job jerking off monsters.”
“I forgot to inform you that there is a new epidemic. An epidemic that many have yet to discuss and that epidemic is female Gooners. Now, for those of you unaware, Goonar is internet slang for someone addicted to porn, and smut is slang for dark romance novels, otherwise known as porn.” [sigh] I did a tiny bit of research on the term “gooner” when I first came across it in an Asmongold video, and Shoe is slightly off in her definition, as the most common use of the term seems to be someone who masturbates constantly without achieving orgasm.
“I actually read the book myself, and I’m not going to lie: the Nineteenth Amendment needs to be abolished.”
“I like how in this fantasy world, student loans still exist. Like, we can imagine a world with minotaurs and humans in a relationship, but we can’t imagine a world without student loans.”
She reads a goodly portion of the scene where the minotaur insists on paying for his handmaiden’s dinner. “Inside every woman there are two wolves or two bulls, the strong independent girl boss and the submissive doting housewife. And in the presence of a masculine man, or a farm animal, she will fold like a lawn chair and instantly return to factory settings.”
“Women are going to be picking up Animal Farm now, ‘like, where’s the horse cock?'”
One of the books Amazon recommended after she bought this one: Pounded By Produce.
“Are we really going to pretend that a story about a young woman getting a job milking mythical creatures to pay off her student debt is not funny? It’s funny. If that makes me a sexist misogynist, you got me. To act like you are so different and above the other Gooners is just it’s silly. I’m sorry, but you are no different than Joe Schmo jerking it to Fat Booty Latinas in Space 12.”
Just wait until she talks about women attending the “Sinners and Stardust” convention and actually sexually assaulting a man there. So if you’re a single man desperate enough to attend such a convention know that the odds are good, but the goods are odd…
“The women are like conquered and taken and overpowered by these monsters. And I think many of these women are reading these books containing monsters and not men because masculinity and dominance in men has been completely demonized in modern society. But the truth is many women still crave it. You see, the monsters in these stories have those like dominant masculine traits that women like so much, but they’re not human men. They have all these traits women desire without the problematic baggage human men bring without being the men they hate or have been told to hate. It is the perfect guilt-free slop.”
On the other hand, he thinks Tron: Ares is “complete arse. “I’ve got plenty of issues with Tron: Legacy, but that movie was a goddamn masterpiece compared to this.” “Not only can Disney not be trusted as the custodians of other people’s IPs that they bought their way into, they can’t even be trusted to manage their own fucking IPs at this point.”
Ridley Scott says that most films today are crap. on the one hand, he’s right. On the other hand, he’s also the director of Prometheus, so glass houses, stones…
Israel continues to pummel Iran’s nuclear program, President Trump sets a deadline, illegal alien border crossings are down radically, Democrats are bankrupt (financially, not just morally), more horrifying sex offenders, and a new face for the Texas Democrat Party.
The big news of Wednesday, reported in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere: “President Trump told senior aides late Tuesday that he approved of attack plans for Iran, but was holding off to see if Tehran would abandon its nuclear program, people familiar with the deliberations said.” This feels like a strategic leak to reinforce to the Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that he faces the choice of giving up his country’s nuclear weapons program or war with the
There’s an important distinction between approving the attack plan and ordering the attack plan. Our military forces are poised to strike, but at least as of Tuesday, no U.S. fighters are in Iranian airspace, according to Pentagon officials.
“I don’t know how much longer it’s going to go on,” Trump said. “They’re totally defenseless. They have no air defense whatsoever, totally captured. We totally captured the air.”
There’s that “we” again. One of the reasons people keep wondering if the U.S. is covertly helping Israel in an offensive manner as well as the revealed defensive manner (helping shoot down incoming ballistic missiles) is that Trump keeps using “we” to describe Israel’s actions in the war. “We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran.” “We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.”
I know, I know, everybody’s obsessed with which pronouns you use these days.
Yesterday at the White House, Trump continued:
Q: What does unconditional surrender mean?
Donald Trump: Well, you know what it means, unconditional—
Q: Can you explain—
Donald Trump: Two very simple words, very simple: unconditional surrender. That means I’ve had it. Okay, I’ve had it, I give up, no more. Then we go blow up all the nuclear stuff that’s all over the place there. They had bad intentions. For 40 years, they’ve been saying death to America, death to Israel, death to anybody else that they didn’t like. They were bullies. They were schoolyard bullies and now they’re not bullies anymore, but we’ll see what happens. Look, nothing’s finished until it’s finished. War is very complex, a lot of bad things can happen, a lot of turns are made. So, I don’t know. I wouldn’t say that we won anything yet. I would say that we sure as hell made a lot of progress and we’ll see. The next week is going to be very big, maybe less than a week, maybe less.
Snip.
The Economist has a scoop about the Israeli intelligence that spurred its decision to launch this military operation:
We understand that the information presented by Israel includes a detailed account of a recent, more urgent, push by Iranian scientists towards “weaponization”, or the creation of an explosive nuclear device. The dossier provides two key pieces of reported evidence for this claim. The first is that an Iranian scientific team has squirrelled away a quantity of nuclear material, of unclear enrichment status, that is unknown to the monitors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a UN watchdog (on June 9th the IAEA assessed Iran had official stockpiles of over 400kg of highly enriched uranium). The second piece of reported evidence is that the scientists have accelerated their work and were about to meet commanders of Iran’s missile corps, apparently to prepare for the future “mating” of a nuclear warhead with a missile. . . .
In a report published on May 31st, the IAEA noted that in 2003 Iran had planned to conduct what the Institute for Science and International Security, a think-tank, calls a “cold test” — a simulated nuclear weapon which uses natural or depleted uranium rather than weapons-grade uranium. . . .
The Israeli intelligence dossiers also contain information that, if correct, is genuinely new. They suggest that roughly six years ago the scientists formed a secret “Special Progress Group”, under the auspices of the former AMAD director, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. This group’s aim was to prepare the way for a much quicker weaponisation process, if and when a decision was made by Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, to rush for a bomb. Mr Fakhrizadeh was assassinated by Israel in November 2020. On June 13th in the first hours of the war, the Israeli government published slides describing this backstory. But we have been told that it also shared further assessments with allies that suggest the Special Progress Group stepped up its research at the end of last year. Iran had a new incentive to advance to a bomb. It was reeling from the limited impact of its missile attacks on Israel, and the depletion of its air defenses by Israeli strikes in October 2024. And it was facing the collapse of its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, in Gaza and Lebanon.
Bonus:
Israel secret services used a fake phone call to trick the top commanders of Iran’s air force into gathering at a single location before taking them out in a targeted strike, an Israeli Channel 12 commentator has said.
In a statement confirmed to the JC by Israeli sources, Amit Segal told the Call Me Back podcast on Monday: “What Israel did was create a fake phone call for 20 members of the air force senior staff an calling them to a specific bunker in Tehran.”
This meant there was no one to give the order to fire the initial salvo of 1,000 ballistic missiles as Iran had previously threatened to do, he added.
According to sources familiar with the operation, Mossad initiated a targeted disinformation effort days before the strike.
Using falsified communications through Iranian channels, they triggered what appeared to be an emergency meeting.
The ruse successfully drew the entire senior leadership of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Force, including Commander General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, his deputies, and key technical personnel, into a fortified bunker outside Tehran.
Moments before the strike began, that bunker was hit in a precision airstrike, eliminating Iran’s top missile command.
Border Czar Tom Homan dropped a bombshell on X Tuesday night that should have every American asking why we tolerated four years of Biden’s border catastrophe.
“In the last 24 hours the Border Patrol encountered a total of 95 illegal aliens across the entire southern border,” Homan posted. “That is the lowest number EVER recorded. Compare that to the Biden administration, who surpassed more than 10,000 per day.”
Read that again. Ninety-five. That’s not a typo. For the first time in recorded history, we’re seeing double-digit border encounters. Meanwhile, Biden’s administration was routinely processing more than 10,000 illegal crossings daily. The contrast couldn’t be more stark or more damning for the previous administration.
“Since taking office, my administration has launched the most sweeping border and immigration crackdown in American history. And we quickly achieved the lowest numbers of illegal border crossers ever recorded,” he said. “The media and our friends in the Democrat party kept saying we needed new legislation, we must have legislation to secure the border. But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president.”
But here’s where it gets even worse for Biden’s defenders. Homan revealed that the Biden administration released the “vast majority” of illegal immigrants back into American communities. How many were released under Trump in May? “Zero,” Homan revealed.
The numbers are staggering. In May 2024 alone, Biden released 62,000 illegal aliens into the country. Let that sink in: 62,000 people who crossed illegally were simply turned loose on American streets in a single month. This wasn’t immigration policy; it was an authorized invasion.
While ICE arrests and deportations have grabbed headlines, President Trump is also running a separate but complementary “mass deportation” program — one that encourages aliens here unlawfully to go home voluntarily.
And if reports are correct, that plan is more successful than anyone could have imagined.
Based on government data, my organization, the Center for Immigration Studies, has conservatively estimated there are about 15.4 million illegal aliens in the United States, a 50% increase over the four tumultuous years of the Biden administration.
That’s no surprise, given how Biden and his Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas ignored congressional detention mandates and ushered millions of illegal migrants into the United States.
Trump rode a wave of concerns about the costs those migrants are imposing on schools, hospitals, housing, and essential government services in cities and towns across the United States to a second term.
Now that he’s back in the Oval Office, it’s up to him, “border czar” Tom Homan, and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to drive the unauthorized population down and restore credibility to our immigration system.
They’ve implemented a two-track plan to tackle this onerous task.
One of those tracks relies on arrests and deportations of aliens unlawfully here, which at the outset has focused mainly on criminals (the “worst first” strategy).
The other track is more subtle but also cheaper for taxpayers and arguably much more effective —encouraging illegal migrants here to self-deport.
It began with an Inauguration Day Trump directive requiring DHS to ensure all aliens present in the United States — legal and otherwise — have registered with the federal government, and to prosecute those who don’t comply.
By late February, Noem had implemented that registration program.
DHS next launched a multimillion-dollar ad campaign warning migrants not to enter illegally or, alternatively, to leave voluntarily now and possibly “have an opportunity to return and enjoy our freedom and live the American Dream.”
Noem also rebranded the notorious CBP One app — which the Biden administration used to funnel hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants into our country — as “CBP Home,” which aliens can use to “notify the U.S. Government of their intent to depart.”
That rebranding coincided with an offer of financial incentives for aliens who leave voluntarily, a stipend of $1,000. That’s in lieu of costly physical deportation, which can cost taxpayers $17,100 per person on average.
How effective has self-deportation been?
One way to track the program is by checking employment numbers. One financial whiz cited by the Wall Street Journal calculated a decline in the immigrant population of 773,000 in the first four months of Trump II.
The Washington Post claims “a million foreign-born workers have exited the workforce since March.” The Post frames this as “a sign of the weakening labor supply.” Yet the paper also notes, “Average hourly wages accelerated, rising by 0.4 percent over the month, to $36.24 in May, as earnings continue to beat inflation in a boost to workers’ spending power.”
In other words, with fewer illegal immigrants, businesses have had to raise wages to attract workers.
Win-win-win for everyone except Democrats, illegal aliens, and the businesses addicted to cheap, illegal labor.
ICE raid nabs more than 100 illegal aliens at a meat packing plant. Americans applying for jobs ensues. The “jobs Americans won’t do” canard was always a lie.
Kash, who just shared the documents with Congress, then shared the accompanying article from Just the News to shed more light:
Officials who have seen the documents told Just the News the FBI had a relatively new confidential source who provided information in summer 2020 that the Chinese government was manufacturing and exporting fake U.S. driver’s licenses as part of a plot to create voter identities for Chinese residents living in the United States so they could vote with fake mail-in ballots.
The intelligence source claimed the plot was specifically designed to benefit Biden, officials said.
Wait, you’re telling me that China wanted “10% for the Big Guy” Joe Biden, a man whose family made money by peddling political influence with Chinese businessmen, to be the US president?
🚨 BREAKING 🚨
In a 2018 email, a bank flagged serious concerns about the China money Hunter Biden received – $40,000 of which ultimately landed in Joe Biden’s bank account.
In the email, the bank’s money laundering investigator highlighted:
Hmmm. “The U.S. Navy now has five guided-missile destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean, according to U.S. defense officials. This is a significant increase. Earlier this week, the U.S. had just one in the eastern Med.” (Previously.)
Even God has taken a crack at Iran. “A 5.2 magnitude earthquake has just struck Central Iran as Israel continues its attack on Tehran. The quake’s epicentre was just outside the city of Semnan, around 210km east of the capital.”
The Democratic Party is struggling. In every way a political party can be dysfunctional, the Democrats are careening toward an implosion.
Riven by poisonous factionalism, running out of cash, and devoid of purpose and plan, the oldest political party in the Western World is falling apart right before our eyes.
How bad is it? When the New York Times gives space to a 1,800-word, five-alarm article giving excruciating detail about your party’s travails, you know it’s not time to pop the champagne cork and celebrate.
To make matters worse for the Democrats, on the same day the Times aired the party’s soiled panties for all to see, the other Democratic Party house organ, Politico, laid 1,600 words of criticism on party chairman Ken Martin.
The media couldn’t be quiet about it. With 17 months to go before the 2026 midterm elections, the Democrats find themselves in an existential crisis. Half the party wants to abandon the radical left, while the radical left wants to give the heave-ho to anyone to the right of Karl Marx.
Let’s start with Ken Martin as a point of contention. Barely four months into the job, he’s already made plenty of enemies. Worse, those enemies aren’t going quietly into that good night. They are sniping at him from the sidelines, drawing blood with criticisms no party chair has ever heard before.
David Hogg section skipped. Judging by Kolby Duhon (see below), Hogg really was too masculine for the DNC.
“This is worse than some high school student council drama,” said Wisconsin Democrat Representative Mark Pocan. I’d say that’s right on the mark.
One DNC member told Politico that Martin looked “weak and whiny,” and another said he has been “invisible.” Similar sentiments were expressed by other DNC members.
These aren’t Republicans talking about their leaders. It’s the supposed leadership caste of the Democratic Party.
Awesome, isn’t it?
Snip.
The biggest blow to the party may have been the recent exit from the DNC of American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and AFSCME President Lee Saunders. Together, they represent millions of members and tens of millions of dollars in contributions.
“The DNC is weaker than I have ever seen it… They have shown zero ability to chart a post-24 vision for Democrats,” a Democratic strategist with close ties to labor unions, told Politico.
Weingarten and Saunders couldn’t “in good faith continue to rubber-stamp what was going on with the DNC,” the strategist said.
Instead of developing a strategy for 2026 and preparing the battlefield for 2028, Martin and the DNC are bogged down in the minutiae of organizational warfare. There’s no plan, no purpose behind the DNC’s pronouncements. Martin is too busy putting out political brushfires and soothing bruised egos to get anything organizationally done.
No one is going to wave a magic wand and put the party back together.
Unspoken in this piece: The Social Justice hard left would literally rather kill the Democrat Party than give up control of it. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“The Supreme Court upheld the state of Tennessee’s ban on irreversible transgender procedures for minors, a major victory for parental rights advocates and those seeking to protect distressed children from harmful operations. The justices ruled 6-3 in United States v. Skrmetti, with all of the conservative justices opting to allow Tennessee’s ban to remain in place and the liberal justices dissenting. The ruling will likely allow similar bans in more than 20 other red states to be upheld in the face of legal challenges.” Decision by decision, the transsexual madness is finally being beaten back.
The man suspected of assassinating a Minnesota Democratic state lawmaker and attempting to kill another is being brought up on federal murder and stalking charges and could face the death penalty, prosecutors said Monday, hours after he was arrested following a days-long manhunt.
Acting U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Joe Thompson said during a press conference that Vance Luther Boelter went to the homes of four Minnesota lawmakers with the intent of killing them….
Boelter, 57, is facing six federal counts: two stalking charges, two firearm offenses for the non-fatal shooting of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette, and two murder charges for the killing of former State House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark. He faces anywhere from 20 years in prison to a potential death sentence for the federal murder charge.
The case had a lot of weird aspects to it, from him being a Tim Waltz appointee to the suspect’s wife being stopped with cash and passports in her car to the supposed anti-abortion motive to the No Kings flyers in his car to the murdered lawmaker being the only Democrat to vote for repealing taxpayer frunded illegal alien health care. A bunch of things don’t add up, especially how quickly the story seemed to disappear off news radar…
Finally. “Feds Crush Violent Antifa Uprising Outside Portland ICE Facility.” Now the feds need to start looking into RICO charges against Antifa funders…
Speaking of antifa behaving badly, they just attacked two more journalists, Cameron Higby and Brandi Kruse.
“DOJ charges another Chinese researcher with smuggling ‘biological materials’ into US. The new case accuses Chinese researcher Chengxuan Han of trying to smuggle packages containing concealed biological material related to round worms into the country by sending multiple packages that contain the material to a lab in the U.S.” It looks like we need to check the lab of every Chinese national studying biology in the U.S. for possible biological warfare material. Indeed, given these arrests, we may already be doing so. (Hat tip: TPPF.)
“New Law Protects Property Owners, Assists in Removing Squatters.” Good to see Texas getting ahead of the issue.
We don’t cotton to cop killers in Texas. “El Salvadoran Illegal Alien Receives Death Penalty for Murder of Harris County Deputy. Oscar Rosales never disputed that he killed Deputy Corporal Charles Galloway in a January 2022 shooting.” El Salvador, eh? Maybe we can pay El Salvador to keep him in CECOT while his appeals play out, then fly him back to execute him…
Trigger warning: Another case of two gay men adopting a baby and raping it to death.
That’s the face (and haircut) Democrats want to put forward as representing their party.
Over the weekend, Texas Democrats elected Kolby Duhon as their new vice chair for finance. The position is responsible for a variety of duties related to the party’s raising and spending of money.
Duhon filled a vacancy that opened when the previous vice chair, Kendall Scudder, was elected party chairman in March.
His X feed reveals his radical views.
Duhon describes himself as a “pansexual.” Advocates claim “pansexuals” do not take gender or sexuality into account when choosing a partner. In 2020, Duhon tweeted his admiration for State Rep. Mary Gonzalez (D–San Elizario) and claimed she inspired him to run for a position with the Texas Young Democrats on an “openly Pan” platform.
By “pansexual” I assume he strikes out with both men and women. And what self-respecting gay would want to be seen with someone with that hairstyle?
Duhon uses “they/he” pronouns and helped found the Socialist Caucus of the Texas Young Democrats in 2017.
Beyond his lifestyle choices and political affiliations, Duhon has expressed views on subjects including Israel, policing, and racism that place him on the far-left end of the political spectrum.
Duhon has repeatedly posted in favor of pushing gender confusion on so-called “trans kids.”
Of course he has.
Here’s the perfect face for the modern Democratic Party: A freakshow all the way down…
More signs of the decline of the Democratic Party in Texas. “Tarrant County Democratic Party Chair Resigns Months After All Staff Laid Off. [Crystal Gayden] will continue as chair until July 7 when an election will take place to decide her successor.”
Just a couple months after laying off all of its paid staff, the Tarrant County Democratic Party will need to find a new party chair as incumbent chair Crystal Gayden announced her resignation at the beginning of June.
Gayden, who became party chair back in July 2023, stated in her announcement that she had overseen the strengthening and re-energizing of the party, which had expanded its precinct chair network, prioritized turnout in local elections, grown its supporter base, and increased party visibility, among other things.
For those outside Texas, Tarrant County is home to Ft. Worth and is the third largest county in the state, so the Democrats having no staffers there is a kind of big deal.
As far as “prioritizing turnout,” it’s certainly not visible in national elections. Biden’s recorded vote total in Tarrant County in 2020 was 411,567, edging Trump by just under 2,000 votes. In 2024, it was 384,501 votes, or more than 40,000 votes under Trump’s total. Some triumph of turnout…
“State Sen. Kelly Hancock has officially entered the race for Texas Comptroller with the backing of Gov. Greg Abbott, resigning from the Senate and being sworn in as chief clerk of the agency by outgoing Comptroller Glenn Hegar.”
The move is designed to sidestep a 2002 legal opinion from then-Attorney General Abbott, which held that a sitting state senator cannot be appointed to a position requiring Senate confirmation during the term for which they were elected.
By resigning and taking on the role of “chief clerk,” Hancock avoids triggering the Senate confirmation process while still stepping into the agency’s top position for the remainder of Hegar’s term—through January 2027.
Hegar, who will officially take over as chancellor of the Texas A&M University System on July 1, praised Hancock as his successor.
Snip.
In 2023, Hancock was one of only two Republican senators who sided with Democrats to attempt to remove Attorney General Ken Paxton from office following his impeachment trial. During this most recent legislative session, he was one of seven Republican senators who voted to water down Senate Bill 19—intended to ban taxpayer-funded lobbying—by supporting an amendment that exempted organizations like the Texas Association of School Boards from the ban.
Snip. Don Huffines:
“The political elite are manipulating the system to install another go-along-to-get-along lap dog as State Comptroller, because they know President Trump’s DOGE-style transparency would expose everything. But they don’t just fear me. They fear you—the taxpayers, the grassroots. And they should. The conservative base in Texas is wide awake, fed up, and ready to take back control. And they know we will win,” said Huffines, pointing to endorsements from U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, Charlie Kirk, Riley Gaines, Ron Paul, and a majority of the State Republican Executive Committee.
Another declared candidate, current Railroad Commissioner Christi Craddick, responded by pointing to her statewide record.
“No matter who else enters the race, I’ll put my record up against anyone,” said Craddick. “I’m the only candidate in this race with statewide experience and a proven record running one of Texas’ most important agencies, cutting red tape, generating billions in revenue from oil and gas, and delivering results that fund our schools, roads, and first responders.”
Been a while since we had a juicy crazed poisoner story, so here’s one. Did it not occur to to supergenius (accused) perp that two former lovers both being poisoned by cyanide was pretty handily going to mark him as a suspect?
How many of these classic prog rock intros can you name? Harder than you might think, though I got “The Musical Box” off Genesis’ Nursery Crime on the very first note…
Congratulations on making it to the end of a difficult but exhilarating 2024, and I hope you had a Merry Christmas! Christmas week is always slow, so this will be a smaller LinkSwarm than usual, and thank goodness for that. More Biden misdeeds, lots of Russian stuff blows up, two horrible gay pedophiles go to prison forever, and Democratic judges going out of their way to punish the victims. Let’s dig in!
President Joe Biden is transferring more student loan debt onto American taxpayers with only weeks left until he departs the Oval Office.
The Biden administration announced Friday that it is giving $4.28 billion of student debt relief to almost 55,000 more public service workers including teachers, nurses, and law enforcement officials.
“From Day One of my Administration, I promised to make sure that higher education is a ticket to the middle class, not a barrier to opportunity,” Biden said in a statement.
“Because of our actions, millions of people across the country now have the breathing room to start businesses, save for retirement, and pursue life plans they had to put on hold because of the burden of student loan debt.”
The Department of Education is forgiving the debt through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, a policy that permits the forgiveness of remaining student loans for public employees who have made 120 monthly payments.
Federal bureacurats are simply more equal than mere citizens…
Remember how Biden commuted and pardoned some of the worst people in the world earlier this month? Well, he found worse ones still.
President Joe Biden on Monday commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal death row, reclassifying their sentences to prevent President-elect Donald Trump from allowing their executions when he returns to office in January.
The 37 men were all convicted of murder. Their sentences will be reclassified from execution to life in prison without the possibility of parole, according to the White House.
The men whose sentences are being reclassified include Shannon Agofsky, who murdered a bank president, dumped his body in a lake, and then killed another man in prison; Brandon Basham and Chadrick Fulks, who escaped from prison and killed two women while on a 17-day crime spree; Ricky Allen Fackrell, a white supremacist who killed a prison inmate; and Daryl Lawrence, who killed a police officer during a bank robbery.
“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” Biden said in statement. “But guided by my conscience and my experience, . . . I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.”
Biden only left three men on federal death row: Robert Bowers, the gunman who shot and killed eleven worshipers at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue in 2018; Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who killed nine people at a black church during a Bible study in 2015; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber.
Biden’s so opposed to the death penalty he only refused to commute sentences for those criminals the public would pay attention to…
Do blue state Democratic officials think they can defy the federal government on deporting illegal aliens? A hard rain is gonna fall.
Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson said Thursday that incoming border czar Tom Homan is starting with Democratic Chicago to deport illegal immigrants in order to set a precedent for other cities threatening to block his efforts.
Since President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Homan as border czar, the former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acting director has warned Democratic mayors to step aside as some have threatened to refuse cooperation with ICE on mass deportations.
Snip.
Hanson argued that Homan’s focus on Democratic Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson will set a precedent, emphasizing that the incoming border czar is listening to Democratic constituents concerned about illegal immigration in their city.
Snip.
I know the most obnoxious, the most crazy, the most nullification advocate in one of the second or third largest cities is Chicago, that crazy Mayor Johnson,’” Hanson continued. “‘So we’re going to tell him first, you try to stop the federal government and you think you’re South Carolina 1832 or you think you’re firing on Fort Sumner. You’re going to regret it because you were breaking federal law and we have a lot more federal laws that you would want us to follow in your interest than you do federal laws to break.’”
“That’s going to be interesting because what Homan is basically doing is talking over the mayor’s head to the black constituencies of Chicago and saying, don’t worry, your mayor doesn’t, he’s going to break the law, but I’m going to follow it and I’ll put him in jail for your benefit so that you don’t have to worry about Venezuelans and Colombians shooting you or taking over your social services,” Hanson added.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump plans to continue military support for Ukraine, the Financial Times reported on Dec. 20, citing undisclosed sources.
Three officials familiar with discussions revealed that Trump intends to keep supplying US military equipment to Ukraine after his inauguration.
Trump’s foreign policy team also informed European officials that he plans to push NATO allies to raise their defense spending to 5% of their GDP. NATO member states currently follow a goal of allocating 2% of their GDP to defense spending.
A Georgia couple was sentenced to 100 years in prison without parole after adopting two boys and sexually abusing them.
William and Zachary Zulock will each spend the rest of their lives behind bars, after pleading guilty to aggravated sodomy, aggravated child molestation, incest, and sexual exploitation of children. Each were sentenced on Dec. 19.
Sanders said he first encountered some of these services while investigating Kremlin-funded disinformation efforts in Ukraine, as they are all useful in assembling large-scale, anonymous social media campaigns.
According to Sanders, all 122 of the services he tested are processing transactions through a company called Cryptomus, which says it is a cryptocurrency payments platform based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Cryptomus’ website says its parent firm — Xeltox Enterprises Ltd. (formerly certa-pay[.]com) — is registered as a money service business (MSB) with the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC).
Sanders said the payment data he gathered also shows that at least 56 cryptocurrency exchanges are currently using Cryptomus to process transactions, including financial entities with names like casher[.]su, grumbot[.]com, flymoney[.]biz, obama[.]ru and swop[.]is.
These platforms are built for Russian speakers, and they each advertise the ability to anonymously swap one form of cryptocurrency for another. They also allow the exchange of cryptocurrency for cash in accounts at some of Russia’s largest banks — nearly all of which are currently sanctioned by the United States and other western nations.
An analysis of their technology infrastructure shows that all of these exchanges use Russian email providers, and most are directly hosted in Russia or by Russia-backed ISPs with infrastructure in Europe (e.g. Selectel, Netwarm UK, Beget, Timeweb and DDoS-Guard). The analysis also showed nearly all 56 exchanges used services from Cloudflare, a global content delivery network based in San Francisco.
“Purportedly, the purpose of these platforms is for companies to accept cryptocurrency payments in exchange for goods or services,” Sanders told KrebsOnSecurity. “Unfortunately, it is next to impossible to find any goods for sale with websites using Cryptomus, and the services appear to fall into one or two different categories: Facilitating transactions with sanctioned Russian banks, and platforms providing the infrastructure and means for cyber attacks.”
“Wells Fargo Exits Net-Zero Banking Alliance After Texas Probe Into Anti-Energy Policies Attorney General Paxton has ended a review of the bank and allowed state governmental entities to do business with Wells Fargo again.”
Another day, another fake hate crime hoax. “A Tennessee college revealed that racist messages found written on campus were fabricated by a student in an apparent attempt to make Donald Trump supporters look bad. Rhodes College confirmed to Fox News Digital that a student had admitted to leaving the messages strewn about campus that were found over Thanksgiving break and were being investigated as a hate crime. Instead, it turned out to be yet another race hoax.”
Georgia woman arrested for evicting squatter from her house. And then the judge scolded her for her “privilege.” Sounds like a whole lot of people need federal equal protection lawsuits filed against them. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Trump keeps winning, Democrats are screwed, more “questionable” Democratic vote drops, a couple of disturbing deaths (only one TDS-related), and a Disney princess dines on shoe yet again. Plus: Satan!
There is a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth among Democrats, following Donald Trump’s unexpected (by them) victory. How could this possibly have happened? is the question newspapers, television hosts, and Democratic pundits are asking.
It actually isn’t a hard question to answer. The Biden/Harris administration had an indefensible record, and Kamala Harris didn’t seriously try to defend it, absurdly presenting herself as the candidate of change, while at the same time unable to identify a single respect in which her administration would be different from Biden’s.
Voters were unhappy about inflation, about the economy in general, and about the border. The Democrats, having created these problems, had no solutions to offer. Instead, they tried to tell voters that their concerns were imaginary.
Also, Kamala herself was a lousy candidate.
But the reality is worse than that. As the dust settles, I think Democrats will realize they are in a deeper hole than they thought. It was no coincidence that Harris refused to say what her position was on a variety of issues, earning the title of the “no comment” candidate–something that must be unprecedented in presidential history. The problem wasn’t that Kamala was tongue-tied, the problem was that the Democrats no longer have a coherent policy agenda.
The one issue that Harris never refrained from talking about was abortion. That is, today, the Democrats’ signature–and arguably only–issue. Apart from a fervent devotion to abortion, up to the moment of birth and beyond, what do they stand for?
A few years ago, the energy in the Democratic Party was in its socialist wing. Several of its seemingly up-and-coming representatives were members of the Democratic Socialists of America, and Bernie Sanders is the grand old man of socialism. On one memorable occasion, Nancy Pelosi was unable to explain how a Democrat is different from a socialist.
But the bloom is off that rose. Socialism was never a serious alternative for America; it is a discredited ideology that has been rejected around the world. And socialism is not a plausible ideology for a party whose core demographic is people who earn over $200,000 a year.
The Democrats are the party of DEI and Kamala Harris was a DEI candidate, but DEI is widely unpopular. The United States has labored under affirmative action, of which DEI is the current iteration, for 50 years. But Americans don’t like race discrimination or sex discrimination, and they believe in merit. An unbroken history of polling, stretching back for decades, has found that race and sex discrimination in employment and education are unpopular. Despite the massive corporate, government and cultural pressure that has tried to force DEI on Americans, that remains true. DEI, now on its way out, can hardly be the basis for future Democratic campaigns.
Opening the borders and admitting millions of illegal immigrants has been the core policy priority of the Biden administration, as reflected in Biden’s day-one executive orders. But it was a policy prescription that Democrats were never able to openly articulate and defend. Thus, as the 2024 election approached they were reduced to making the absurd claim that “the Southern border is secure.” Open borders are deeply and correctly unpopular, and do not provide a platform on which any future Democrat can run, although no doubt we will see plenty of tearjerking stories about illegals who are being deported.
Etc. Democrats are on the loser side of pretty much every issue.
It’s confirmed that Trump won Arizona, completing his sweep of all swing states.
The most pro-Trump demographic in 2024 was…American Indians. Huh. Maybe they want jobs and oil and gas money more than “land grab statements” and changing the names of sports teams.
Just because Trump won an overwhelming victory doesn’t mean that Democratic Party vote fraud has stopped. “Bucks County Commissioners Vote to Count Illegal Ballots as Pennsylvania Senate Race Heads for Recount…”I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country, and people violate laws anytime they want,” Marseglia said. “So for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention to it.” I didn’t get the outcome I wanted so I’m going to break the law is quite the legal strategy.
The Texas Democrat Party Chairman, Gilberto Hinojosa, has announced his resignation after a significant statewide electoral defeat in Tuesday’s election.
Hinojosa, a South Texas lawyer first elected to the role in 2012, has overseen a period marked by Democrat losses, particularly among Hispanic voters and in border counties.
Despite ongoing claims that Texas was on the verge of “turning blue” for over a decade, Democrats have failed to secure a statewide victory in 30 years. In Tuesday’s election, President Donald Trump won Texas by more than 13 points, including victories in 12 of the state’s 14 border counties. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz also defeated his Democrat opponent by approximately nine points.
Speaking to KUT News on Wednesday, Hinojosa attributed the party’s loss partially to its focus on radical gender ideology. For example, during the party’s convention in June, delegates were addressed by a female drag queen (a woman dressed as a man dressed as a woman). When asked about “transgender rights,” he responded, “I think what the Democratic Party has to realize is that there’s some things that we can support and some things that we cannot. And when we’re pressed upon to take votes of these kinds, we need to be mindful of the long-term consequences of these choices.”
Of course, then he had to issue a groveling apology to the alphabet people. And that’s why you continue to lose…
Republicans select John Thune as the next majority leader, beating out John Cornyn and Trump pick Rick Scott (another Floridian), who came in a distant third. Senate’s gonna Senate.
Confirms an educated guess:
I VOTED TRUMP/MAHA/UNITY. I hope others will do the same.
For some reason, many people seem to think I’m not voting. For the record, that is NEVER my move. My typical approach is: “If you don’t have a candidate in this election, vote (as if) in the next one.” That usually means…
“The mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, Antar Lumumba, has been indicted on federal bribery charges. Also indicted: Aaron Banks, who is a councilman, and Jody Owens, the county DA…another city council member, Angelique Lee, pled guilty to “conspiracy to commit bribery” charges in August. I get the impression she hasn’t been sentenced yet, and I’m wondering if she’s now a ‘cooperating witness.'” I know you’ll be shocked to learn that Lumumba is a Democrat…
The wins keep coming. “Republicans Flip 23 Texas Appeals Court Seats. GOP judicial candidates won 25 of 26 contested courts of appeals races on Tuesday’s ballot.”
“Union Member in Austin Files Lawsuit Challenging Constitutionality of National Labor Relations Board. Dallas Mudd was prevented from holding a decertification election at his workplace.” Given recent Supreme Court rulings against the administrative state, this probably has a fair chance of success.
Major Nielsen ratings plunge at MSNBC since Trump won, practically every day since. Just one example – 10/30 Wednesday vs Fri 11/8 – Morning Joe 1st hour – down 39.6% Morning Joe 2d hour – down 36.9% Andrea Mitchell – down 39.7% Ari Melber – down 49.6% Joy Reid’s Reidout – down…
Speaking of Hollywood liberals who can’t help themselves, Rachel Zegler has, yet again, opened her mouth and inserted her foot, wishing hatred on Trump voters. There’s a brilliant strategy, alienating more than half the country in a fit of pique. Seriously, has any actress in all Hollywood history ever done more damage to a film’s prospects than Zegler has to the live-action Snow White reboot? Update: Disney forced her to apologize.
Costco recalls 80,000 pounds of butter because it doesn’t say it contains milk. They can’t define a woman or butter. Now enjoy a vaguely related Family Guy clip.
The wife of a well-known transgender writer has been charged with murdering her father with an ice axe the night of Donald Trump’s election to the presidency. She then allegedly shattered the windows of the $800,000 Rainier Valley, Washington, home in which she and her father lived in what she claimed was an “act of liberation,” according to charging documents.
Corey Burke, 33, who is married to transgender writer Samantha Leigh Allen, the author of “Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States,” was discovered after the death of her father, Timothy Burke, 67 — who had health issues — “smiling and clapping covered in her loved one’s blood, cops said,” according to The New York Post, which added that Burke “allegedly confessed to investigators the next day that she killed her father with the ax and also by strangling him. She also admitted to biting her father while choking him, the docs alleged.”
Yikes. I guess a lesbian who married a guy pretending to be a woman isn’t the most stable person in the world…
Another disturbing death: “Man found dead in Planet Fitness tanning bed three DAYS after entering gym.”
“Three Activists Charged with Burning-Cross KKK Hoax to Benefit Black Mayoral Candidate.” “Derrick Bernard Jr. (aka Phoenixx Ugrilla), 35; Ashley Danielle Blackcloud, 40; and Deanna Crystal West (aka Vital Sweetz and Sage West), 38, are accused of conspiring to stage the phony hate crime and then alerting the media to prop up Mobolade’s ultimately successful campaign.” All this to support candidate Yemi Mobolade…who won.
“Hollywood Braces for a Woke Backlash in the Wake of Trump’s Election.”
“Liberal users are leaving X in a huff in the wake of President Trump’s 2024 election victory over the support of its owner, Elon Musk, for the President-elect and the platform’s right-ward shift.” Why yes, when you just lost an election in which every single demographic group and region moved away from you and toward the candidate you hate, then obviously the problem is that you just came in contact with too many dissenting voices and the solution is to retreat further into your own echo chamber where non-leftwing/non-SJW thought cannot penetrate. Brilliant!
“Documentary alleges 21,000 workers have died working on Saudi Vision 2030, which includes The Line,” AKA Neom. Now the Saudis are scumbags, and I wouldn’t put shockingly poor work conditions and covering up worker deaths past them, but those numbers are absolute bullshit, since that’s around four times as many as died during the entire period building the Panama Canal, and I’m pretty sure 21st century Saudi Arabia doesn’t have as big a problem with malaria as late 19th and early 20th century Panama.
“Democrats Denounce Satan As ‘Too Moderate.'” “Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly confided in aides that Satan was being kind of a pest by continually asking Democrats to pretend to be sane just for a while so he could get some of them elected. ‘The nerve of that guy!'”
A coalition of Republican-led states is suing the Biden administration and the State of California in an attempt to prevent new electric vehicle mandates on truck owners and operators throughout the country from going into effect.
Two legal challenges were filed over the new emissions rules, Nebraska Attorney General Hilgers said in a statement on May 13.
They include a petition for review filed by a coalition of 24 states in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit which challenges the Biden administration’s new regulation setting stronger greenhouse gas emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles.
Texas isn’t mentioned in the article, but it is in the filing:
Under 42 U.S.C. § 7607(b)(1), Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 15, and D.C. Circuit Rule 15(a), the States of Nebraska, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming petition this Court for review of the final agency action taken by Respondents United States Environmental Protection Agency and Michael S. Regan, in his official capacity as Administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, titled “Greenhouse Gas Emissions Standards for Heavy-Duty Vehicles—Phase 3,” published at 89 Fed. Reg. 29,440 (April 22, 2024). A copy of the agency action is attached to this petition.
Petitioners will show that the final rule exceeds the agency’s statutory authority and otherwise is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and not in accordance with law. Petitioners thus ask that this Court declare unlawful and vacate the agency’s final action.
That petition lists the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its administrator Michael Regan as defendants.
In the legal filing, plaintiffs argue the EPA’s rule imposing stringent tailpipe emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles effectively forces manufacturers to produce more electric trucks and fewer internal combustion trucks.
The EPA has said the new rules, which are set to take effect for model years 2027 through 2032, are needed to help combat climate change and will help avoid up to 1 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the next three decades.
However, the infrastructure needed to support such vehicles is “virtually nonexistent” and they also have shorter ranges and require longer stops, according to Mr. Hilgers.
The new regulation will also negatively impact the economy and put extra pressure on power grids, according to the lawsuit.
A separate coalition of 17 states and the Nebraska Trucking Association also filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California seeking to block a package of regulations that they say are “targeting trucking fleet owners and operators.”
That lawsuit lists the EPA and the California Air Resources Board as defendants.
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit are challenging a string of California regulations called “Advanced Clean Fleets” which aims to “accelerate a large-scale reduction in tailpipe emissions focusing on zero-emissions medium- and heavy-duty vehicles,” according to the California Air Resources Boards’s (CARB) official website.
The rules would ban big rigs and buses that run on diesel from being sold in California starting in 2036.
Nebraska AG Mike Hilgers seems to be walking point on this one but, as usual, Texas is joining in another lawsuit against Biden Administration regulatory overreach.
Better to get this law thrown out now than to wait until food become unaffordable because there aren’t enough reliable trucks to deliver it…
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, alongside Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach and Gun Owners of America Texas director Wes Virdell, held a press conference on Wednesday morning announcing the filing of two lawsuits against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) regarding new rules about private firearm sales.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced new rules adding definitions of certain terms under the Safer Communities Act that will expand the circumstances requiring individuals to obtain Federal Firearm Licenses (FFL) and perform background checks to sell guns. This is to close the so-called “gun show loophole,” which has been a priority for the Biden administration.
If they are talking about the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022, there’s absolutely nothing in the text of the act about closing any “gun show loophole.”
Texas’ lawsuit was filed on the morning of May 1, 2024 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Amarillo Division. It was filed by Texas with the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Utah; Jeff Tormey; Gun Owners of America; Gun Owners Foundation; Tennessee Firearms Association; and the Virginia Citizens Defense League also listed as plaintiffs.
Kansas’ lawsuit was filed on the morning of May 1, 2024 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, Delta Division. It was filed by Kansas alongside the states of Arkansas, Iowa, Montana, Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming, with Phillip Journey, Allen Black, Donald Maxey, and the Chisholm Trail Antique Gun Association also listed as plaintiffs.
Both lawsuits seek declaratory and injunctive relief.
“Today, Texas is leading a multi-state coalition that is suing to stop the final rule issued by the ATF that criminalizes private firearm sales. Biden’s latest effort to unilaterally curtail our constitutional rights is completely illegal,” said Paxton in his speech.
“Yet again, Joe Biden is weaponizing the federal bureaucracy to rip up the Constitution and destroy our citizens’ Second Amendment rights. This is a dramatic escalation of his tyrannical abuse of authority. With today’s lawsuit, it is my great honor to defend our Constitutionally-protected freedoms from the out-of-control federal government.”
Kobach also spoke at the announcement of the lawsuits.
“Biden’s latest attempt to strip away the Second Amendment rights of Americans through ATF regulations will make many law-abiding gun owners felons if they sell a firearm or two to family or friends. This rule is blatantly unconstitutional. We are suing to defend the Second Amendment rights of all Americans,” said Kobach.
“Until now, those who repetitively purchased and sold firearms as a regular course of business had to become a licensee… This rule would put innocent firearm sales between law-abiding friends and family members within reach of federal regulation,” the Kansas court filing reads. “Such innocent sales between friends and family would constitute a felony if the seller did not in fact obtain a federal firearms license and perform a background check.”
While not at the announcement, the attorneys general of Utah and Mississippi both offered statements in the lawsuit’s press release.
“Nearly 40 years ago, Congress condemned ATF for targeting innocent gun owners instead of focusing on felons, calling ATF’s actions ‘reprehensible.’ Congress even changed the law to limit ATF’s authority. But ATF is at it again, this time trying to require a citizen selling even a single firearm to obtain a license. Utah is proud to join the 26 states — in three separate lawsuits— protecting their citizens from this bureaucratic overreach.” said Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes.
“By seeking to treat every legal gunowner as a commercial gun dealer and every gun sale or trade into a commercial transaction, this rule unmasks the Biden Administration’s anti-gun agenda in ways many of its other actions have not. The Second Amendment could never have contemplated this kind of regulation and it will not withstand scrutiny in the courts. On behalf of Mississippi gunowners, we are proud to stand with the citizens who have come forward in this lawsuit,” said Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch.
Twenty-five states are suing the ATF across both lawsuits. Florida has also filed its own suit against the ATF for declaratory and injunctive relief about the same rule.
For those counting along on the home game, that’s more than half the states in the union suing the Biden Administration over their latest attempt at gun legislation by fiat.
This is not the first lawsuit that Paxton has filed against the ATF this year. In February, the State of Texas sued the ATF over the Biden administration’s recent decision to redefine firearms with pistol braces as short-barrelled rifles under the National Firearms Act (NFA).
Complete civilian disarmament has been a longterm goal of the Democratic Party, and to that end they would love to ensnare ordinary Americans in FFL laws and paperwork for private firearms transactions, despite such restrictions never being contemplated by the founding fathers. In the post-Bruen judicial landscape, expect the courts to be extremely skeptical of unconstitutional firearms regulation, especially those with no basis in the underlying statute language, and expect Paxton to notch another victory over the Biden Admistration in his belt.
Two landmark Supreme Court cases drop, another woke social justice child-rapist exposed, Keith Olbermann channels John C. Calhoun, and the secret plans to nuke Yorkshire. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Just like the old gypsy woman said leakers indicated, the Supreme Court has overturned Roe vs. Wade.
The Supreme Court on Friday overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion, allowing a Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks to take effect.
“The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the 6-3 majority.
Justice Alito was joined by Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority. Justice Roberts wrote in a concurring opinion with the majority that he would have taken a “more measured course” stopping short of overturning Roe altogether, but agreed that the Mississippi abortion ban should stand.
The Court’s liberal Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented….
The ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization means each state will now be able to determine its own regulations on abortion, including whether and when to prohibit abortion.
In New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Court affirmed that gun rights are due the same protection as all other constitutional rights.
To which I can only reply “Duh. What took them so long?”
Today’s Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen is not only the most important Second Amendment ruling since D.C. v. Heller, it is potentially the most important Second Amendment ruling in American history.
Not sure about that, as Heller firmly established the gun ownership was an individual right unconnected to militia service. That laid the conceptual groundwork for today’s ruling.
For all the brouhaha, the question at hand in Bruen was rather straightforward: Can the state of New York require that applicants for gun-carry permits “demonstrate a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community,” or is New York obliged by the Constitution to offer a “shall issue” regime of the sort that 43 of the other 49 states have adopted? By a 6–3 vote, the justices decided that the latter approach is required. In the United States, Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion concluded, “authorities must issue concealed-carry licenses whenever applicants satisfy certain threshold requirements, without granting licensing officials discretion to deny licenses based on a perceived lack of need or suitability.” Moreover, while there is nothing illegal about America’s existing state-level permitting systems, those systems may not be mere smokescreens for outright prohibition, unequal protection, or unacceptable delay. “We do not rule out,” Thomas added in a footnote, any “constitutional challenges to shall-issue regimes where, for example, lengthy wait times in processing license applications or exorbitant fees deny ordinary citizens their right to public carry.”
As Justice Alito was keen to note, this “holding decides nothing about who may lawfully possess a firearm or the requirements that must be met to buy a gun. Nor does it decide anything about the kinds of weapons that people may possess.” It concludes solely that:
The exercise of other constitutional rights does not require individuals to demonstrate to government officers some special need. The Second Amendment right to carry arms in public for self-defense is no different. New York’s proper-cause requirement violates the Fourteenth Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms in public.
Bottom line: New York is allowed to exclude carry-permit applications on a categorical basis (e.g., the applicant has a felony conviction), but not on a subjective one (e.g., the applicant doesn’t “need” a gun in the view of the determining officer).
To get there, the majority first determined that “nothing in the Second Amendment’s text draws a home/public distinction with respect to the right to keep and bear arms.” Indeed, “to confine the right to ‘bear’ arms to the home,” the majority observed, “would nullify half of the Second Amendment’s operative protections.” This, Thomas explained, would not do, because “the constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.’”
Liberals are taking the gun and abortion rulings well. Ha, just kidding! Keith Olbermann came out for nullification. Because nothing says “progressive liberalism” like adopting the policies of South Carolina from 1832.
Ukraine has banned the main opposition party. Not a great look. Though you know FDR would have tried that with Republicans if he thought they posed more of a threat to his agenda and the Supreme Court would let him get away with it…
Israel is headed for yet another election. “After almost one year of taking power, Israel’s ruling coalition has agreed to dissolve the parliament and hold new elections. ‘Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s office announced Monday that his weakened coalition will be disbanded and the country will head to new elections.'” (“How many elections is that now, five?” “Shut up! Don’t tell Mere!”)
International Swimming Federation bans men from competing. It’s astonishing that headline even needs to be written…
Powers that be in Tennessee are threatening YouTuber Whistlin Diesel with a year in prison for…splashing with a jet ski. Sounds like a clear abuse of power to me…
A review of one of the last production Trebants, the crappy, under-powered, plastic communist car East Germans had to wait years to buy. Let this be another reminder that commies aren’t cool and the consumer goods produced by commie companies that don’t have to deal with market competition are crap.
“In my day, we had to work twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week, and they set off a nuclear explosion underneath us! You tell that to kids these days and they don’t believe you!”
“After ‘Lightyear’ Bombs, Disney Quietly Cancels Their Upcoming Movie ‘Brokeback Woody.”
Greetings, and welcome to the Halloween season! Manchin and Sinema are the only thing that stands in the way of a giant, economy-destroying meteor of leftwing pandering, energy crises ramp up in China and Europe, Biden nominates a commie, and more Flu Manchu shenanigans.
Inflation hits a 30 year high, yet Democrats are furious two of their own party aren’t letting them run even bigger deficits.
West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin calls the giant runway Porkulus fiscal insanity.
“What I have made clear to the President and Democratic leaders is that spending trillions more on new and expanded government programs, when we can’t even pay for the essential social programs, like Social Security and Medicare, is the definition of fiscal insanity,” Manchin said in a statement Wednesday.
Manchin says that any reconciliation bill must include a Hyde Amendment to bar federal taxpayer funding of abortion. I’m pretty sure Democrats would prefer kicking Manchin out of the party than give compromise on their holy of holies.
‘What if — and hear me out here,” writes Robert Reich, “we stopped letting two corporate Democrats singlehandedly block every single progressive policy we elected Democrats to pass?”
Okay, Robert. But how, exactly? The Democrats have 50 seats in the Senate. To pass a bill through reconciliation, the Democrats need 50 votes in the Senate. Two of the people who hold those 50 seats do not agree with the rest of the party on “every single progressive policy.” If the other 48 senators do agree — which is far from clear — the Democratic Party will have 48 votes for its agenda, two short of what it needs. Those two, not the Robert Reichs of the world, are the ones with the power to “stop” things.
“Should all of this just hinge on those two?” Representative Cori Bush (D., Mo.) asked yesterday. “Absolutely not.” But should doesn’t enter into it. The question is does “all of this” hinge on Sinema and Manchin? The answer is yes. Yes it does. And why? Because, again, “all of this” requires 50 votes in the Senate, and two of those votes aren’t on-board.
Underneath the complaints that Reich and Bush have leveled sits the erroneous implication that, come election time, American voters are obliged to press a button marked “Republican” or “Democrat,” and that, having done so, they are shipped a drone-like representative of the winning team from a central repository in Washington, D.C. Reich complains that “we elected Democrats.” But this is correct only in the aggregate. In fact, 50 different “we”s elected one hundred senators and 435 Representatives, who between them make up our majority and minority parties. There is nothing in this deal that obliges those emissaries to agree with one another.
Senators Manchin and Sinema are not a pair of uninvited interlopers who are unexpectedly gumming up the gears; they, themselves, are among the gears. This being so, the duo cannot be said to be “blocking” the Democrats’ de facto Senate majority so much as they are sustaining the Democrats’ de facto Senate majority. Why? Because their decision to caucus with the Democrats rather than the Republicans is the only reason that majority exists in the first place. To hear progressives talk, one would assume that in order to take one’s place within the firmament one must first swear a blood oath to Dick Durbin. Shockingly enough, one is obliged to do no such thing.
If there’s one thing we know about the looming debt limit crunch and the warnings about the dire consequences of default, it’s this: The government is not going to default.
The recurring brinksmanship over the debt limit and the partisan refusal to get Republican fingerprints on the increase don’t say much for our political class. But the U.S. Treasury isn’t full of stupid people, and they’ve been through this drill before. Back in July 2011, when the debt ceiling of $14.3 trillion was about to be reached, the Washington Post reported:
The Treasury has already decided to save enough cash to cover $29 billion in interest to bondholders, a bill that comes due Aug. 15, according to people familiar with the matter.
You can bet they’re making similar plans today. The difference is that 10 years later the debt ceiling is $28.4 trillion, just about doubled, and we’re about to bump into it again.
Back in that summer of discontent I talked to a journalist who was very concerned about the “dysfunction” in Washington. So am I. But I told her then what’s still true today: that the real problem is not the dysfunctional process that’s getting all the headlines, but the dysfunctional substance of governance. Congress and the president will work out the debt ceiling issue, probably just in the nick of time. The real dysfunction is a federal budget that doubled in 10 years, unprecedented deficits as far as the eye can see, and a national debt (more accurately, gross federal debt) yet again bursting through its statutory limit of $28.4 trillion and soaring past 120 percent of GDP, a level previously reached only during World War II.
The Cornell University law school professor [Saule Omarova]’s radical ideas might make even Bernie Sanders blush. She graduated from Moscow State University in 1989 on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship. Thirty years later, she still believes the Soviet economic system was superior, and that U.S. banking should be remade in the Gosbank’s image.
Snip.
Ms. Omarova thinks asset prices, pay scales, capital and credit should be dictated by the federal government. In two papers, she has advocated expanding the Federal Reserve’s mandate to include the price levels of “systemically important financial assets” as well as worker wages. As they like to say at the modern university, from each according to her ability to each according to her needs.
In a recent paper “The People’s Ledger,” she proposed that the Federal Reserve take over consumer bank deposits, “effectively ‘end banking,’ as we know it,” and become “the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a modern economy.” She’d also like the U.S. to create a central bank digital currency—as Venezuela and China are doing—to “redesign our financial system & turn Fed’s balance sheet into a true ‘People’s Ledger,’” she tweeted this summer. What could possibly go wrong?
The FBI’s annual report Monday made official what most unfortunately presumed: The United States in 2020 experienced the biggest rise in murders since the start of national record-keeping 60 years ago.
The Uniform Crime Report detailed a murder increase of nearly 30 percent.
The previous largest one-year change was a 12.7 percent increase back in 1968. The national rate of murders per 100,000, however, still remains about one-third below the rate in the early 1990s.
The FBI data show around 21,500 total murders last year, which is 5,000 more murders than in 2019. More than three-fourths of reported murders in 2020 were committed with a firearm, the highest rate ever reported.
Now before you start jumping to conclusions about a correlation between the leftist fever to defund the police and a huge jump in the nation’s murder rate, you should probably be aware of the fact that the Democrats want you to know that there’s no problem at all.
That’s right, the same people who want us all to live in mortal fear of being breathed on by a stranger at Kroeger are trying to poof away a pile of bodies.
Speaking of Flu Manchu, here’s NBA player Jonathan Isaac calmly explaining why he doesn’t feel he needs the vaccine:
This is a calm, intelligent, respectful statement as to why @JJudahIsaac is hesitant about getting the Covid vaccine. Instead of screaming at those who are still figuring it out, listen to his response. pic.twitter.com/Q1xMLw8boX
The Lancet just gives up on trying to determine the origins of Flu Manchu, much like OJ has given up on finding the real killers.
China is trying the classic idiot price controls strategy for its self-inflicted energy crisis:
China is officially panicking.
Now that the global energy crisis has slammed China’s economy, leading to the first contractionary PMI since March 2020 as a result of widespread shutdowns of factory and manufacturing, not to mention hundreds of millions of Chinese residents suffering from periodic blackouts, Bloomberg reports that China’s central government officials “ordered the country’s top state-owned energy companies to secure supplies for this winter at all costs.”
Translation: Beijing is no longer willing to risk social anger and going forward China will be subsidizing coil and nat gas, which will lead to even higher prices, which will lead to even higher prices for other “substitute” commodities such as oil, which is why oil surged on the news.
The news follows a report on Wednesday that China will allow soaring coal prices to be passed on to factories in electricity prices. But prepare for a surge in PPI, which will likely not be allowed to be passed on to CPI due to ‘common prosperity’. Which logically means margin collapse, and shutting down – so even more structural shortages. Unless we get state subsidies of some sort, or differential pricing for the foreign and domestic market. There used to be a name for that kind of economy. Wall Street used to pretend it didn’t like it.
“We don’t want normal,” said activist Earnest Greer. “We want radical change. What if everything goes back to the way it was without us completely dismantling and rebuilding the system?”
Liberals saw the pandemic as an opportunity to get people less clingy to individual freedom and more accepting of government planning significant parts of everyone’s lives. Normal would mean relinquishing that power, which is anathema to the Left.
