Uncle Sam assembles another big stick for Iran, the radical leftwing networks in Minnesota continue to get exposed, silver shatters, two state Democrats get clipped in separate forgery cases, the rise of the Amelia memes, Microsoft update breaks everything (again), and are malls actually reviving?
And Neville Roy Singham’s fingerprints are visible everywhere.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
As of right this moment, America hasn’t gone kinetic on the Mullahs yet, but we’re assembling an awful big stick.
USS Abraham Lincoln has gone dark, with no transponder or communication, signaling possible preparation for action against Iran.
A third US carrier strike group, USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77), is moving into the Middle East theater.
Snip.
Some very interesting developments in the last 48 hours indicate something big is about to happen.
The EU all of a sudden has decided the next thing on their agenda is to declare the IRGC a terrorist group. Curious timing, that.
Minnesota agitators, including elected officials, have been organizing efforts to stalk, harass, and even hunt ICE agents in a Signal group chat that was infiltrated by Cam Higby and others.
It has been insane looking at the messages and the actual people involved.
And now DataRepublican has the donor list … you know, the people actually paying to make sure this all happens.
DataRepublican has also helpfully linked to their social media profiles.
You can download he data yourself. And DataRepublican has already turned in all the captured information to the Feds…
This is the story of how Minnesota became a political laboratory—first for the 2020 George Floyd protests, then for a sustained campaign against federal immigration enforcement. The players are the same. The money flows through familiar channels. And the strategy, according to those who designed it, was always meant to be replicated.
Snip.
Understanding how The People’s Forum operates requires following the money. And the money leads to Shanghai.
Neville Roy Singham is an American tech entrepreneur who sold his software company, ThoughtWorks, for approximately $785 million in 2017. He now lives in Shanghai, where, according to a 2023 New York Times investigation, he “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and finances propaganda worldwide.”
The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a Rutgers University-affiliated research organization, published a comprehensive report in May 2024 documenting what it calls the “Singham Network”—a web of nonprofits, fiscal sponsors, and alternative media outlets that share funding, personnel, and messaging.
According to NCRI, The People’s Forum received over $20 million from Singham and his wife, Jodie Evans (co-founder of the anti-war group CODEPINK), between 2017 and 2022. The money moved through a complex network of donor-advised funds and shell companies, including the Justice and Education Fund, the United Community Fund, and the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund.
The People’s Forum has acknowledged receiving Singham funding. In a December 21, 2021 post on X (then Twitter), the organization defended its financial relationship with Singham against critics.
Congressional investigators have taken notice. On September 4, 2025, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith sent a formal letter to [People’s Forum Executive Director Manolo] De Los Santos demanding records and alleging that The People’s Forum had “acted as a foreign agent of the Chinese Communist Party” while enjoying tax-exempt status.
“Public reporting suggests that The People’s Forum has received over $20 million from Mr. Singham and his wife,” Smith wrote. “Multiple reports have found that The People’s Forum is part of Mr. Singham’s network of non-profit organizations that serve as his conduits to spread pro-CCP narratives.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee separately requested that the Department of Justice investigate whether The People’s Forum should register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
De Los Santos himself has deep ties to Cuba. According to his biography at the Black Alliance for Peace, he “was based out of Cuba for many years” and “worked toward building international networks of people’s movements and organizations.” The New York Post reported that De Los Santos first traveled to Cuba in 2006 and was there as recently as March 2024. He has been photographed meeting with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel.
Footnotes excised. Snip.
What makes Minnesota different from other immigration flashpoints is the degree to which organizers have been explicit about their strategy.
The NCRI report notes that activists in the Singham network view the 2020 protests as proof that “the ability for mass struggle now exists inside the United States.” This framing treats George Floyd’s death not as a singular tragedy but as a tactical validation—evidence that the right combination of outrage, infrastructure, and outside support can produce transformational results.
De Los Santos’s April 2024 call to recreate “the violent protests of the summer of 2020” was not a slip of the tongue. It was a statement of doctrine.
The IDN’s establishment before Operation Metro Surge began—funded by nearly $1 million from the Bush Foundation—demonstrates pre-positioning rather than organic response. The explicit training of thousands in “rapid response” and “legal observation” tactics, the encrypted communication networks, the coordinated media strategies: none of this materialized spontaneously after Good’s death.
It was waiting.
The evidence assembled here—from congressional investigations, foundation records, tax filings, academic research, and organizers’ own statements—establishes that what is happening in Minnesota is neither spontaneous nor accidental.
The same network that helped turn George Floyd’s death into a national uprising has spent five years building the capacity to do it again. They have studied what worked in 2020, professionalized their operations, secured substantial funding, and pre-positioned infrastructure across Minnesota.
When Renée Good was killed on a Minneapolis street, that infrastructure activated precisely as designed.
Minnesota was chosen—first as the place where 2020 proved the model, then as the laboratory where that model would be refined and redeployed. The current crisis is not an accident of geography or politics.
A collection of far-left groups — led by a Communist activist network tied to CCP-linked millionaire Marxist Neville Roy Singham — is attempting to organize a nationwide anti-ICE school and business shutdown, with anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour declaring that “we will bring this country to a halt.”
The general strike effort, scheduled for this Friday, is an attempt to replicate a Minnesota-wide anti-ICE shutdown which occurred last Friday and which was organized by many of the same far-left groups — but now with designs to do so on a national scale. The planned “National Shutdown” announced early this week includes plans for large-scale marches and a day of “no work, no school, no shopping” around the country.
The Manhattan-based Marxist revolutionary People’s Forum, the left-wing BreakThrough News media outlet, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), the far-left Code Pink anti-war group, and the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition are all involved in either promoting or organizing the nationwide shutdown effort.
Just the News recently reported on how the forum, its propaganda machine, and the PSL were key players in pushing last week’s Minnesota-focused shutdown effort. Just the News also previously reported on how these and other radical activist groups have leadership links or financial ties to the funding network backed by Singham, whom others in his network call “Comrade.”
Social media used as organizing platform
The plans for Friday allegedly started with calls by a number of student groups at the University of Minnesota — the Somali Student Association, the Liberian Student Association, the Ethiopian Student Association, and the Black Student Union — who called for “Justice for Alex Pretti & Renee Nicole Good — NATIONWIDE SHUTDOWN” on Instagram on Sunday.
An investigation by Just the News shows that the forum was likely involved in creating the “National Shutdown” website which is now serving as an organizational hub for the coming Friday strike.
Did anyone notice a “nationwide shutdown” today? Mother Nature did a 100,000% better job shutting things down with Winter Storm Fern…
You gotta hand it to those Soros-sponsored district attorneys across the nation because when it comes to playing with fire, they play like they’ve never been burned.
The latest example is Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner. Not exactly a household name across the country,
But one that should be well-known to BattleSwarm readers.
Soros-linked groups have been his single largest financial backing source — helping him bypass traditional party fundraising and local contribution limits.
About a decade ago, Soros contributed about $1.7 million to the Philadelphia Justice and Public Safety PAC while Krasner was still a relative unknown in a seven-candidate race for district attorney. The Philly PAC is part of Soros’s nationwide Justice and Public Safety groups that fund “progressive” DAs in blue city contests.
According to public sources, in 2017, Soros’s donation to just one candidate accounted for nearly 30% of all campaign spending in the seven-person race. For his 2021 reelection, Soros groups gave Krasner another $1.2 million, including $259,000 for Philadelphia Justice and Public Safety PAC to run ads on Krasner’s behalf. Soros supported Krasner again last year, although I wasn’t able to find the dollar amounts before going to press.
Prior to getting all that Soros money to run for D.A., Krasner defended Black Lives Matter and Occupy Philadelphia members in court — and let’s just say Soros got his money’s worth. Or maybe it’s our money, given how intermingled Soros’s private funds are with taxpayer-funded NGOs purpose-tuned to push his causes.
Snip.
Here’s the quick and dirty transcript of Krasner talking about ICE officers: “This is a small bunch of wannabe Nazis — that’s what they are — in a country of 350 million. We outnumber them… If we have to hunt you down the way they hunted down Nazis for decades, we will find your identities, we will find you, we will achieve justice.”
What have I been repeating since the first attempt on President Donald Trump’s life last summer?
The left paints its enemies — we are no longer mere political rivals — as enemies, over and over, until some crazy decides to take justice into his own hands.
The FBI raided a Fulton County election office, evidently looking for evidence of the elction fraud carried out against president Trump in 2020. And it might be connected to…Nicolas Maduro?
Silver prices just plunged plunged over $30 an ounce today after a huge run-up. This means I’m either a genius when I sold a small amount of it last week (when prices were above where they are now), or an idiot for not selling all of it…
For three years, the world has waited for the Russian economy to implode. Instead, we watched a “Kalashnikov economy” defy gravity, fueled by high oil prices and a “friendship without limits” with Beijing. But as of January 2026, the gravity of basic math has finally caught up with Vladimir Putin.
The catalyst isn’t just the stalemate on the front lines; it’s a legislative “kill shot” from Washington and a quiet betrayal from the East. Between the new Graham-Trump Sanctioning Russia Act and a mounting domestic liquidity crisis, the Kremlin isn’t just running out of options—it’s running out of time.
The most significant development of 2026 isn’t a new missile system; it’s a tariff. The Graham-Trump Bill, greenlit by the White House on January 7, has fundamentally rewritten the rules of economic warfare. By threatening a mandatory 500% tariff on any country—including China and India—that continues to purchase Russian petroleum or uranium, the U.S. has finally weaponized the one thing Russia’s allies value more than cheap crude: access to the American consumer.
The shockwaves were instantaneous. On January 15, reports emerged that China’s largest state banks, including ICBC and Bank of China, began halting Ruble-denominated settlements. They aren’t waiting for the bill to be signed into law; they are pre-emptively cutting Russia loose to save their own export margins. When Beijing chooses its $500 billion trade surplus with the U.S. over its “strategic partner” in Moscow, the Russian war machine loses its primary life support system.
While the external walls are closing in, the internal floor is rotting. On New Year’s Day, Russia’s VAT officially jumped to 22%. This isn’t a sign of strength; it’s an act of desperation. The Kremlin is cannibalizing its own middle class to plug a federal budget revenue gap that fell 20% short of targets in 2025.
We are now seeing the first signs of a systemic banking fracture. In cities like Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk, reports of ATM shortages are no longer fringe rumors—they are the physical manifestation of a “liquidity trap.” When the state raises taxes while inflation remains double-digit and interest rates hover near 20%, the result is a “medically induced coma” for the civilian economy.
Federal officials have charged two contractors with conspiring to disrupt Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Knoxville earlier this month.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Tennessee unsealed a multi-count indictment on Friday against Tyler Shane Wells, 33, of Morristown, and 18-year-old Alexander Bonilla Servin of Smyrna.
They are charged with conspiracy to conceal and harbor illegal aliens, conspiracy to forcibly impede federal agents while engaged in performance of official duties, and conspiracy to prevent, by force, intimidation, or threat, federal agents from discharging their official duties from January 5 through January 13.
Bonilla-Servin is also charged with forcibly impeding federal agents engaged in the performance of their official duties.
Wells appeared in court on Friday and pleaded not guilty to the charges and a detention hearing is set for Monday. A trial date has been set for March 31, 2026.
Federal authorities accuse the two of plotting to block the entrance to a Hardin Valley construction site with Bonilla-Servin’s pickup truck in an effort to impede ICE agents. According to a Department of Justice release, the vehicle was put in position after federal agents were seen surveilling the site. Servin is also accused of hitting agents’ vehicle with the truck as it attempted to enter the site on January 13.
After more than a year of digging, Statehouse candidate Bailey Templeton’s most public records collection shows 1,085 Illinois children under 18 without SSNs had Medicaid bills of $66 million in 2025. That’s up 725% from $8 million for 450 children in 2021.
“It’s roughly $40 million spent on inpatient treatment, that’s a lot of time for children to be in hospitals,” Templeton told The Center Square Friday.
The data only generates more questions for Templeton.
“It raises questions about what would be called medical trafficking, where things are conducted on to children when they’re too young to be able to consent to these things,” she said.
Why, it’s almost like Democrats imported millions of illegal aliens and put them on welfare rolls…
Man tries to kill mayor in the Philippines with an RPG. (Never mind that The Sun calls it a bazooka.)
Idiot Hawaiian Democrat Senator Brian Schatz asks Marco Rubio a really stupid question, and Rubio hands him his ass:
“That’s statutory. The Helms Burton Act, the US embargo on Cuba, is codified. It was codified in law and it requires regime change in order for us to lift the embargo.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy just dropped what I’ve been calling the nuclear option.
In an appearance on Katie Pavlich Tonight Thursday, Duffy made clear that withholding $200 million in federal funding isn’t the end of this fight. If California doesn’t come into compliance on the non-domiciled CDL issue, Duffy said, “we will eventually pull their ability to issue commercial driver’s licenses to anybody in California.”
Not just the 17,000 non-domiciled CDLs at the center of this fight. Every single CDL in the state.
I’ve written extensively about this standoff since the FMCSA released its audit findings last September, which showed that roughly 25% of California’s non-domiciled CDLs were improperly issued. I’ve covered the $160 million funding hit. I’ve warned about the decertification authority in 49 U.S.C. 31312 and 49 CFR 384.405, which most people in this industry didn’t even know existed.
This didn’t start with the Trump administration’s September 2025 emergency rule restricting non-domiciled CDLs to certain visa categories. That rule, which limited eligibility to H-2A, H-2B, and E-2 visa holders, has been stayed by the D.C. Circuit since November. The court found that petitioners were “likely to succeed” on their claims that the FMCSA violated federal law in its rulemaking.
The California problem predates all of that.
FMCSA’s August 2025 Annual Program Review found California had been violating federal regulations that existed long before Duffy took office. The state was issuing CDLs with expiration dates extending years beyond drivers’ lawful presence documentation. In one case that still makes my blood boil, California issued a driver from Brazil a CDL with passenger and school bus endorsements that remained valid months after his legal presence expired.
That’s not a new rule problem. That’s a California screwed-up problem.
California agreed in November to revoke all 17,000 improperly issued licenses by January 5, 2026. Then, on December 30, the California DMV unilaterally announced a 60-day extension to March 6, citing the need to ensure it doesn’t wrongfully terminate licenses for drivers who actually qualify.
Duffy’s response on X was blunt: “Gavin Newsom is lying.”
FMCSA never agreed to the extension. California proceeded anyway. On January 7, DOT made good on its threat and withheld approximately $160 million in National Highway Performance Program and Surface Transportation Block Grant funds. That’s on top of the $40 million already withheld over California’s refusal to enforce English language proficiency requirements.
California has more than 700,000 CDL holders. The state is home to the nation’s largest trucking workforce, with over 138,000 truck drivers moving freight through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the agricultural heartland of the Central Valley, and every retail distribution center feeding the country’s largest consumer market.
Under full decertification, California would be prohibited from issuing, renewing, transferring, or upgrading any commercial learner’s permits or commercial driver’s licenses until FMCSA determines the state has corrected its deficiencies. Previously issued CDLs would technically remain valid until their stated expiration dates, but here’s where it gets ugly.
Other states could refuse to recognize California credentials during the noncompliance period. FMCSA could issue guidance declaring CDLs issued by a noncompliant state invalid for interstate commerce. The Commercial Driver’s License Information System, which enables interstate verification, could flag every California license.
For the 700,000 CDL holders in the Golden State, decertification wouldn’t just be an administrative headache.
It would effectively ground them from operating in interstate commerce.
Blue state governors should stop trying to protect their precious illegal aliens and start following federal law.
TikTok has finalized a deal to create a new American entity, avoiding the looming threat of a ban in the United States that has been in discussion for years on the platform now used by more than 200 million Americans.
The social video platform company signed agreements with major investors including Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX to form the new TikTok U.S. joint venture. The new version will operate under “defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurances for U.S. users,” the company said in a statement Thursday. American TikTok users can continue using the same app.
Tesla North America announced the completion of a major lithium refinery in Robstown, Texas, with Elon Musk calling it “the most advanced lithium refinery in the world.”
Robstown is just west of Corpus Christi.
In the promotion video, Jason Bevon, the site manager at the Gulf Coast lithium refinery, explains that the refining process used in Robstown is “inherently much more environmentally friendly.” The company claims that the process used by the refinery eliminates hazardous byproducts of the refining process and is more sustainable than traditional methods.
Bevon explained that the refinery “enables us to have access to the critical minerals for energy storage, for battery manufacturing, and ultimately for [electric vehicle (EV)] growth.”
“It enables us to accelerate Tesla’s mission by regionalizing supply chains for battery minerals and materials, by providing jobs, by cutting emissions from the transportation network that is required for these supply chains.”
“It really allows us to usher in energy independence for North America.”
Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy explains that raw lithium needs to be processed into a “chemical in the form of lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide, before being used in batteries,” which is done through refining. Currently, China dominates the global trade and production of key minerals, and leads the world in lithium refinement capabilities.
The need for lithium batteries has grown exponentially in recent years, with lithium batteries being required for EVs, smartphones, laptops, and renewable energy receptacles such as solar panels.
Also, you’re partially paying for it:
This political shift and the operation of the refinery are complemented by recent grants through the Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund (TSIF), which was established when the Texas CHIPS Act, House Bill 5174, was signed into law in 2023. The TSIF totals “approximately $948 million in total appropriations” and is used for “semiconductor manufacturing and design,” according to the Texas Economic Development and Tourism Office.
Webb County’s sheriff and his assistant chief are facing federal charges for allegedly using office resources to create and profit from a disinfecting business during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sheriff Martin Cuellar Jr., 67, and Assistant Chief Alejandro Gutierrez, 47, have both appeared before a federal grand jury after turning themselves in. Their indictments have now been unsealed, revealing that they both are accused of misappropriating Webb County Sheriff’s Office funds between 2020 and 2022.
Cuellar is the brother of U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Laredo).
According to the indictment, around April 2020 Cuellar opened a for-profit business called Disinfectant Pro Master (DPM), which used resources belonging to the WCSO. He reportedly enlisted Gutierrez and Ricardo Rodriguez, an assistant chief, to assist in the start of the venture that provided disinfecting services to local businesses, residents, and the local school district.
Federal prosecutors allege none of the three made any personal investments in the startup company but used county resources, vehicles, and equipment. DPM also reportedly used county funds on multiple occasions to purchase supplies for the company. Staff from the sheriff’s office were often utilized to conduct the company’s operations during their regularly scheduled shifts according to the indictment.
The indictment also claims records show that payroll was not ever issued from the company to compensate the staff that was utilized to carry out its business.
During its operation, DPM received multiple contracts with local businesses, including a $500,000 contract with the United Independent School District, where Rodriguez served on the school board.
The company eventually closed in August 2022 after UISD did not renew its contract following media coverage and public scrutiny at a school board meeting over the contract being awarded to a board member’s company.
During the duration of the company’s operation, Cuellar, Gutierrez, and Rodriguez each reportedly received over $175,000. It is alleged in the indictment that Cuellar used his revenue to purchase a 10-acre property in Laredo.
As you might expect, Martin Cuellar is a Democrat.
Dwight documents not one but two of state-level Democrat congresscritters (state rep Ayshia “Ajay” Pittman in Oklahoma and former state senator Sonya Jaquez Lewis in Colorado) being involved in forgery scandals.
Nose-ringed leftist “Grace Carol Brown is charged with arson and burglary, and is ‘accused of smashing an exterior window, unlawfully entering the Comal County (TX) Republican Party headquarters, and starting a deliberate fire inside the building’ overnight on January 13/14.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake! “Parents say their trans son killed himself because his church employer wouldn’t let him wear French maid outfit, cat ears.”
Simon Whistler on Every Saudi Gigaproject in Vision 2030. Neom is still a ridiculous pipe dream, and Whistler is far too easily impressed with “zero carbon” claims, but some of these projects are actually worth doing and on-track.
Keir Starmer’s Labour government created the character of Amelia, a purple-haired nationalist Goth girl, for a lame Flash-style game to “combat far right extremism” (i.e., anyone who objects to importing illegal alien Islamist rapists into the UK), but now that she’s been adopted and memed by the right, that move backfired big time.
Louis Rossmann reports that downgrading to an earlier operating system bricks the latest OnePlus Android phone. I’d never heard of OnePlus, but it turns out it’s a Chinese brand, so you shouldn’t be buying it in the first place…
Surprise! American shopping malls aren’t dying off.
Shopping malls, long an economic and cultural fixture of American life, are facing sustained pressure but are not disappearing altogether.
Instead, the sector is undergoing creative destruction, as traditional mall formats give way to new concepts that reflect shifting consumer behavior and market conditions, according to recent industry data.
A research report by Capital One Shopping (COS) outlines the magnitude of the challenge facing the mall sector, citing rising mall closures that remain vacant for an average of nearly four years, as well as vacancy rates that are 112 percent higher than the overall retail vacancy rate.
COS also estimates that as many as 87 percent of large shopping malls could close over the next decade.
At the same time, COS data indicate a reversal of earlier trends. From 2021 through 2025, mall openings exceeded mall closures, suggesting adaptation rather than terminal decline. In 2025 alone, 9,410 new mall stores opened, nearly double the number that closed.
Additional evidence of revival appears in a recent article published by Growth Factor. Author Clyde Christian Anderson reported that indoor mall foot traffic in March 2024 rose 9.7 percent year over year, open-air shopping center traffic increased 10.1 percent, and outlet mall traffic climbed 10.7 percent—each exceeding pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels.
Every book I bought in 2025, most from early in the year when I still had a contract job and money in the bank…
While his fellow Democrats are assaulting ICE agents over deportations of illegal alien felons, Texas U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico is kicking it old school by breaking out a bottle of Grandad’s Olde Class Warfare. Talarico just debated primary rival Jasmine Crockett, where he directed his ire against billionaires.
The debate was hosted by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). After hosting the two candidates, the AFL-CIO declined to endorse in the race.
Snip.
In their opening and closing remarks, the two candidates stuck to their respective themes thus far in the race: Talarico with his pitch for unity, loving one’s neighbor, and billionaires’ negative impact on society, and Crockett with her frequent use of the word “fight,” citing her many viral moments chewing out Republicans, the need for authenticity, and her experience as a public defender.
Snip.
Talarico kicked off with similar lines as can be seen on his campaign website and that he’s pitched at various rallies: uniting against billionaires.
He said, “Before I was a legislator, I was a public school teacher on the West Side of San Antonio, one of the poor ZIP codes in the entire state of Texas. On the west side, I learned that the real fight in this country is not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom. We will not win this race in November with the same old politics of division.”
“Billionaires want us looking left and right at each other, so we’re not looking up at them. We are building a people-powered movement to beat them,” he added.
You may remember the social justice left previously declaring that mathematical abstraction, the 1%, was the source of all evil, as part of Obama’s battle-space preparation against Mitt Romney for 2012. Evidently that was just too broad of a class enemy for Talarico. Now he’s setting his sights on the 1% of the 1% of the 1%, at the same time so many are fleeing California’s proposed wealth tax and coming to Texas to open up new factories and create jobs. I bet he’s still smarting over Elon Musk backing Trump.
The Texas Democratic primary for U.S. Senate heated up on Friday with former U.S. Rep. Colin Allred directly criticizing his rival, state Rep. James Talarico, for the first time, calling him out for accepting donations from casino magnate and megadonor Miriam Adelson while railing against billionaires’ influence in politics.
“I like James, but when I see him say that he’s running against billionaires, but then when nobody was looking, his top donor was Miriam Adelson … That contributes to the cynicism that folks might experience,” Allred said during an event at The Texas Tribune Festival.
Snip.
During his 2024 reelection campaign for the Texas House, Talarico accepted $59,000 from Texas Sands PAC, a pro-gambling group funded by Adelson. Talarico has also accepted donations from billionaire Charles Butt, the H-E-B chairman who supported candidates from both parties opposed to private school vouchers.
What are mere scruples when there’s all that sweet, sweet gambling money available to stuff into your campaign’s maw?
Though this rank hypocrisy clashes with Talarico’s performative piety, it’s par for the course for Democrats, who decry billionaires while funding their leftwing street operations through the likes of George Soros and Neville Roy Singham.
Because our billionaires are beyond reproach, and it’s always OK when we do it.
Despite the best efforts of Democrats, both Texas and the federal government have made vast strides in securing the border the Biden Administration intentionally left wide open, with border crossing by illegal aliens at record lows. But much work remains to to be done to clean up the immigration mess Democrats made, so here are some recent immigration policy tidbits from Texas.
Gov. Greg Abbott announced a temporary pause on all H-1B visa applications for public universities and state agencies on Tuesday.
The pause is set to last until the Texas Legislature addresses the matter when it reconvenes in January 2027.
Abbott stated that the freeze “will provide time for the Texas Legislature to establish statutory guardrails for future employment practices regarding federal visa holders in state government, for the U.S. Congress to modify federal law, and for the Trump Administration to implement reforms aimed at eliminating abuse of this visa program.”
The H-1B visa program allows entities to hire ”nonimmigrant aliens as workers” in specialized occupations. It authorizes temporary employment of these individuals for employers who otherwise cannot obtain the needed skillset from the U.S. workforce.
In his letter announcing the pause, Abbott explained that “the federal H-1B visa program was created to supplement the United States’ workforce — not to replace it. Evidence suggests that bad actors have exploited this program by failing to make good-faith efforts to recruit qualified U.S. workers before seeking to use foreign labor.”
“In the most egregious schemes, employers have even fired American workers and replaced them with H-1B employees, often at lower wages.”
Before spelling out the details of the freeze, Abbott added, “State government must lead by example and ensure that employment opportunities — particularly those funded with taxpayer dollars — are filled by Texans first.”
I’m with Abbott on state agencies. I can’t conceive of any position that can’t be filled by a Texas instead of a foreign national. It’s a big state!
As for universities, I can see a few situations where hiring an H-1B might be justifiable. Say, you’re creating a center for superconducting and the third greatest superconducting physicist in the world is Japanese. (Not Chinese. No matter how smart he is, he’ll steal all your data and send it straight to Beijing.) But H-1B visa programs have been abused for so long that a temporary ban is probably a good idea until those guardrails can be put into place.
His first point in the directive is that no Texas agency controlled by a governor-appointed head or a “public institution of higher education” will, without the permission of the Texas Workforce Commission, be allowed to file any new petition to sponsor “nonimmigrant worker under the federal H-1B visa program until the end of the Texas Legislature’s 90th Regular Session on May 31, 2027.”
Abbott’s second point directs state agencies with heads appointed by the governor, along with public institutions of higher education, to, “by March 27, 2026, provide the Texas Workforce Commission with a report.”
The report mentioned will include items related to visa quantity and details about visa-holders, including but not limited to “how many new and renewal petitions the entity submitted for H-1B visas in 2025,” “The countries of origin of all H-1B visa holders the entity currently sponsors,” and “Documentation demonstrating efforts to provide qualified Texas candidates with a reasonable opportunity to apply for each position fill.”
Trust, but verify.
And here’s a video from Texas Scorecard’s Sara Gonzales on H-1B abuse:
“There should be a moratorium on legal immigration.”
“How long should it be?…However long it takes.”
“it is it is of no consequence to me how people across the world feel about [a moratorium].”
“This is supposed to be, like, super skilled, you know, postgraduate engineers, like the brightest minds, supposed to be the brightest of the brightest minds, engineering, doctors, uh the best of the best. That is what the H1-B visa is supposed to be for.”
She points people to https://guestworkervisas.com to look at who is applying for H1-B visas. In Texas, I would not have guessed that “Cognizant Technology Solutions” would be hiring submitting more H1-B applications than Tesla, Oracle, Schwab, AT&T and HPE combined. Other questions: Why did Dallas ISD file for 372 H1-B visas last year? “Middle school math teacher $62,000 a year. We only need someone from India. Nobody else can fill that spot.”
Bilingual requirements are another part of the scam.
Related to Gov. Abbott’s application pause, UT Southwestern Medical Center ranks 10th on the list, and Texas A&M, The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, The University of Texas at Austin, and Baylor College of Medicine all rank in the top 20.
Etc.
More good news from the Southern District of Texas, where a naturalized pedophile sex offender had their citizenship revoked.
A U.S. citizen born in Mexico and naturalized in 2010 has had his citizenship revoked after it was discovered he committed a child sexual assault prior to his naturalization and concealed it on his citizenship application.
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas in McAllen granted an order on January 22 revoking the citizenship of Carlos Noe Gallegos.
“American citizenship is a privilege that this child-abusing monster never should have been able to attain,” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a press release about the case. “We will continue ensuring that anyone who conceals such conduct while obtaining naturalization is found out and stripped of their citizenship.”
Gallegos married a U.S. citizen in December 2001 and about four years later was granted permanent legal resident status. He applied for citizenship in 2009. In answer to a question on his citizenship application about whether he had ever committed a crime for which he had not been arrested, Gallegos answered no.
He was naturalized as a citizen in 2010.
In 2016, the State of Texas indicted Gallegos on two counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child, a crime that it alleged took place in 2007. Gallego pleaded guilty to the charges and was sentenced to six years of community supervision.
The judge revoked Gallegos’ citizenship under 8 U.S.C. § 1451(a), which allows for the revocation when the “certificate of naturalization [was] illegally procured … by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.”
In this case, the government argued that Gallegos was ineligible for citizenship at the time he obtained it because, within five years of filing his application, he had committed a crime of moral turpitude and that crime adversely reflected on his moral character.
Naturalization is a privilege, not a right. Foreign-born sex offenders should be stripped of their naturalization and deported, no matter how hard Democrats fight to keep them in the country.
It’s going to take years to clean up the problems that Democrats imported into America, but progress is being made…
The Russo-Ukrainian War continues to accelerate military innovation at a furious rate. The latest innovation isn’t a better drone or newer hardware, but introducing a fundamentally new organizing principle: the gamification of combat.
The tall, bearded officer, code-named Prickly—like all Ukrainian fighters, he uses a call sign to protect his identity and his family from wartime retaliation—is proud as a peacock of what he has done in six months at the helm of his frontline drone unit. In an interview with me, Prickly gave some of the credit to Kyiv’s new “e-point” system, called the Army of Drones Bonus.
He and several of his men explained how the system works in an conversation near a former farmhouse in eastern Ukraine. The yard is littered with military equipment and junk, including the farmer’s much-worn living-room furniture, now arranged around a makeshift fire pit. Several stray cats and a mangy dog wandered around as we talked. “We’ve improved our performance by a factor of 10,” Prickly said. “We know that thanks to the drone points system, which measures how many men we kill and how much equipment we destroy.”
Snip.
The top brass in Kyiv struggle to keep up with this innovation—both the new technology and its use on a highly decentralized battlefield. Drone production is scattered and diverse, with the Ukrainian drone company DroneUA estimating that as many as 700 companies and 500 suppliers are now churning out UAVs of every description. Active-duty units control their own budgets. With drones and other military kit in short supply, most fighters supplement what they get from the government with items they buy themselves—their own clothing and vehicles, for example—crowdsourcing, and donations from charity foundations. Some units say they count on donations for more than two-thirds of their drones, and most modify the devices they receive to suit their unique battlefield circumstances.
Kyiv is working to tame this chaos with organizational reform—a corps-based command system aligned with NATO practices. But the armed forces also strive to take advantage of decentralization, harnessing it to drive innovation and effectiveness on the battlefield. That’s where the point system comes in—allowing fighters to bypass the bureaucracy in Kyiv and buy weapons directly from manufacturers.
Frontline commander Prickly said that drone pilots save video clips of the damage they do—whether destroying machinery or killing Russian soldiers. The unit prepares a daily montage and sends it to the Ministry of Defense, where experts comb over the footage to confirm the unit’s claims and confer points for verified destruction.
The allocation changes regularly, but as of June 2025, Business Insider reported that destroying a tank was worth eight points. A multiple launch rocket system counted for 10. Killing a regular Russian soldier earned 12 points. Wounding a drone pilot was valued at 15 and eliminating him netted 25. In the final step, the payoff, units use the points they’ve earned to purchase equipment—drones, drone jamming devices, ammunition, and other goods—on Brave1 Market, an online shopping platform not unlike Amazon.
For some battalions, including Prickly’s, this represents a sea change. In mid-summer, his unit, part of the 54th Separate Mechanized Brigade, ranked fifth in the nation in total points earned. “It keeps the weapons coming,” he said. “What’s different isn’t just how much you get. It’s also the choice available on the marketplace.” In the past, Kyiv sent what it sent—often the most rudimentary equipment—and units struggled to upgrade it for use on the changing battlefield. “Now we’re in direct contact with producers,” Prickly says. “We order exactly what we need, and it comes ready to use.”
Ukraine’s government-run media platform, United24, also reported that the Ukrainian government reaps data from the point system, enabling it to make better decisions about strategy. Varying the allocation—how many points, say, for a destroyed tank or for killing a drone pilot—gives Kyiv a new tool of command and control. Signals from the field about changing demand—what kinds of drones are selling best on the marketplace—help the armed forces make procurement decisions, and the system is a boon for manufacturers, who can lock in larger, longer-term contracts, enabling them to invest for the future.
Denys Davydov explains in more detail:
“The long-awaited reforms of Ukrainian army are being introduced just right now into the system under the new defense minister of Ukraine, Mykhailo Fedorov, who is a very talented young guy and who thinks absolutely openly towards the introduction of the new technologies, drones and every sort of the new features which could help to save the lives of Ukrainian soldiers and help Ukrainian army to win in this war.”
Fedorov was previously head of Digital Transformation of Ukraine where he oversaw creation DIIA, a digital app for Ukrainians to interact with a variety of government services. “It is not just useful and saves time for people, but it also helps to eliminate, or reduce it’s better to say, corruption, because you don’t have those bureaucrats, officials. Everything is happening automatically and digitally.”
“Fedorov is now ahead of the defense minister of Ukraine. He’s the fourth defense minister who got his position from the start of the war, full-scale war of Russia against Ukraine.”
“He applied E-points, [so-called] electronic points which our soldiers obtain if they target Russian soldiers, Russian BMPs, tanks, helicopters, rocket artillery systems. So the higher the price of the destroyed vehicle equipment, the more E-points they obtain.”
“They might spend those E-points for new drones or some special equipment that particular soldiers need in a special unit, brigade, regiment, whatsoever.”
“It’s similar to the gaming industry. [You] fight against virtual enemies. You earn the points which you spend for the better gear in the game. But it is happening in real life in Ukrainian army.”
“And it is very effective because total equality among all of the Ukrainian soldiers is not possible. Some units are more effective than others, and they should obtain better equipment and more drones. For example, Magyar Birds [414th Unmanned Strike Aviation Brigade], one of the most effective units, they have the most of those E-points. So the analogy is the same as with the game. The better the player, the better gear it usually has. But instead of each player fights its own separate enemy, now all of the players, all of the soldiers in Ukraine, all of the regiments, they fight against the common enemy.”
“So all of the people are interested for the top players to have this better gear. Like for example, vampire drones, also called Baba [Yaga] drones. It doesn’t mean that the rest of the brigades will obtain absolutely nothing. No, everyone has this chance to be successful to hurt lots of the Russian soldiers in some of the particular direction and earn those E-points.”
“For example, each Russian soldier costs [i.e., earns] six points. Each Russian tank costs 40 points. A Russian rocket artillery system, as for example, book 60 points. Before Russian soldier price was two points but then the price rose up to six, well, Russia start to lose way more of the infantry.”
He explains how Brave1 works. “You may buy the special gear out there on the shop order. The government itself, the defense ministry, will send it for you. They directly purchase drones from the developers. For now, this system works just for the drones, but it seems like it will be also implemented for artillery. And of course, commanders of brigades, they’re very interested.”
“So the system has been taken from video games and it is damn effective. Actually lots of the stuff is been taken from the video games, and the most successful drone operators, they used to be gamers before, they have this muscle memory. Then they used to play lots of the video games for them to get used to the flight controller. It’s way way easier than to teach from the scratch. and you have to put all of those neurons here to the small muscles and fingers. Well, gamers here as a rule are more successful than average guys just taken from the streets.”
Science fiction has been predicting video gamers making effective warriors for decades, from Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game to Michael Bishop’s “The Last Child Into the Mountain.” But I don’t think anyone ever thought up video game reward systems as the basis for advanced weapon distribution.
Britain had one of the best professional military systems in the world, but by the end of World War II they found an American system focused on logistics and speed surpassing their results on actual battlefields. (Montgomery spent two months preparing to cross the Rhine in the meticulously planned Operation Plunder; Patton did it in one night using small boats without asking permission.) In the modern world, America’s “pull” logistical system runs rings around the Soviet/Russian “push” system. We’ve already covered how Ukraine now has a direct feedback loop between front-line units and MilTech equipment manufacturers.
Ukraine’s gamification approach represents another potential logistics revolution, with the best units potentially making use of the best gear. But a significant amount of the gamefication approach’s effectiveness may be unique to the static, atomized, defense war of attrition Ukraine is fighting, as the system seems less suitable to, say, big offensive pushes. And there have to be guardrails in place to prevent drone operators from “going Rambo” rather than supporting more important mission objectives.
Still, the ability of front-line units to interface directly with manufacturers for new gear is an approach I could see the U.S. military undertaking for some units.
And if Russians are outraged about their soldier’s deaths being used in a video game-like scoring system, 1.) They sure don’t seem to have cared enough about their soldiers being killed in wasteful “meat wave” assaults and endless undermanned probing attempts, and 2.) Maybe they should have avoided launching an illegal war of territorial aggression in the first place…
Remember back in July when the Sinologist tea-leaf readers suggested that Xi Jinping was on his way out after having lost a power struggle with PLA General Zhang Youxia? Well, that speculation was accurate except for the tiny, teensy weensy detail that the subject and predicate were reversed.
The Chinese military’s top general is being investigated for suspected serious violations of discipline and law the Defense Ministry said Saturday,
Zhang Youxia, the senior of the two vice chairs of the powerful Central Military Commission, is the latest figure to fall in a long-running purge of military officials.
Analysts believe the purges are designed both to reform the military and to ensure loyalty to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who also chairs the military commission. They are part of a broader anti-corruption drive that has punished more than 200,000 officials since Xi came to power in 2012.
Another member of the commission, Liu Zhenli, has also been placed under investigation by China’s ruling Communist Party, a Defense Ministry statement said. Liu is the chief of staff of the commission’s Joint Staff Department. The commission is the top military body in China.
The statement did not provide any details on the alleged wrongdoing.
Zhang, who is 75, joined the People’s Liberation Army in 1968 and is a general from its ground forces.
The Communist Party expelled the other vice chair of the commission, He Weidong, last October and replaced him with commission member Zhang Shengmin.
Commie leader always fear rebellion in the ranks of their own military more than invasion by foreign powers. That’s why Stalin purged the top ranks of the Soviet military in 1937, a major contributing factor to the Wehrmacht kicking the Red Army’s ass in the opening phases of Operation Barbarossa in 1941. That Xi is consistently purge-happy doesn’t bode well for the CCP’s near-term chances of invading Taiwan.
There are also reports that Xis targeting “naked officials,” i.e. those high ranking Chinese military leaders with the audacity to let their relatives live abroad. After all, the CCP never knows when having the ability to put Mrs. General’s head in a vise might be necessary as a persuasion tool.
Oh Getty Images, what would I do without your weirdly appropriate clip art?
Peter Zeihan has long argued that Xi has purged anyone with ambition or competence from the CCP ranks, leaving no potential successor in on stage. It looks like he was right about that one.
This is all good news for Taiwan and the free world. The harder Xi purges the military, the less real support he’ll have and the less likely they’ll have competent leadership to push across the Formosa Strait.
Also, I wonder if all those rumors of Youxia supplanting Xi weren’t a CIA psyop to get play on Xi’s paranoia and push him into purging competent PLA officers…
As expected, Winter Storm Fern brought in ice and snow, but so far the power grid in Austin has stayed up. Austin Energy is reporting 99.99% of customers have power, which is probably slightly more than usual. That’s a sharp and welcome contrast from the Picasso painting of outages they showed during Snowpocalypse 2021:
Or Arborgeddon in 2023. While I hope Austin Energy learned their lesson about trimming trees near power lines, I think a lot of the improvement comes down to the different profiles of the storms. Yesterday brought lots of rain in the morning, but it cleared for several hours before freezing temperatures hit, giving trees a chance to dry out rather than accrete limb-killing layers of ice. Then we got a couple of hours of sleet, then snow, and right now I don’t see any accumulation on the limbs outside my windows.
And speaking of salt, it’s going to take several days to clear Austin roads of snow and ice, as it doesn’t look like it’s going to get above freezing until Tuesday, with freezing temperatures at night throughout the week.
There are all sorts of Constitutional principles that seem to evade the dubious mental grasp of New York Democrats. Yesterday Letita James displayed her ignorance of freedom of religion, freedom of association and the need for the government to avoid viewpoint discrimination when she shut down a Jewish group for opposing jihad.
New York City had Republican mayors within living memory. And in 2024, President Trump had his biggest gains in New York. Especially in the borough of Staten Island where he won 2/3rds of the vote. So now Gov. Hochul’s former lawyer, currently serving as a ‘judge’, has declared the existence of Republican representation in Staten Island to be ‘unconstitutional‘.
A judge on Wednesday threw out the boundaries of the only congressional district in New York City represented by a Republican, ordering the state to redraw its borders because its current composition unconstitutionally dilutes the votes of Black and Hispanic residents.
In his ruling Wednesday, Justice Jeffrey Pearlman said the New York district represented by Republican U.S. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, which includes all of the borough of Staten Island and a small piece of Brooklyn, should be reconfigured before this year’s midterm elections.
The lawsuit, filed by an election law firm aligned with the Democratic Party, argued that the lines of the district don’t account for a rise in Staten Island’s Black and Latino population. It pushed for the district to be redrawn to include parts of lower Manhattan, which leans more liberal.
Whoa. Hold up a minute there, Pearlman.
Now I may be just be a simple country Hyper-Chicken blogger, but it seems to me that the criteria Pearlman articulated as the reason for his decision, namely the need to carve out race-conscious districts, is precisely the criteria the Fifth Circuit said you couldn’t use in Petteway v. Galveston County.
Indeed, since partisan advantage was cited as an acceptable guiding principle for redistricting in that same decision, Pearlman could have stood hunched over like Gollum and declared “We hates them the nasty Republicans! Hates them! They keeps deporting our precious illegal alien rapists!” and still been on firmer constitutional ground.
Presumably Pearlman is ignoring the decision because New York isn’t in the Fifth Circuit and the case hasn’t been heard by the Supreme Court yet. But when it is heard, Pearlman has articulated the precise criteria the decision declared unconstitutional as a consideration for redistricting, giving Republicans a ready-made criteria for getting the decision overruled if the Supreme Court (as expected) validates the Fifth Circuit ruling.
The Apple Weather app is finally catching up with the National Weather Service and, holy crap, things are not looking good:
Austin Weather forecast 1/23/26
Yeah, it’s going to get above freezing, so the city will run again, but I’ve got to keep my plants inside for a week or more. Any any potential power loss is really gonna suck. Here’s that Austin energy outage map again.
My own 401K travails and money woes continue. I did receive the money I tried to transfer to my checking account in December. But I had only split it up to get half of it into 2025 for tax purposes. I was also going to have to transfer more more into my bank account this month to cover my property taxes. They assured me would only take a day to transfer funds after my IRA got set up. Surprise! It might be a day for most people, but because my phone doesn’t receive text messages, I had to request they send me a check, which is going to take 15 days. (Funny how they seem to be able to transfer money in instantaneously, but you have to jump through hoops to get your own money in 2+ weeks.) Yesterday, I had to sell some silver rounds to cover the last bit of property taxes and living expenses for two weeks (including a vet appointment for my two dogs). Fortunately, silver is at at an all-time high. I sold mine when it was just under $100 an ounce, and now it’s over $103.
Oh, yeah, some other stuff happened this week: More Minnesota fraud, more California fraud, Don Lemon joins the KKK (as a subject of federal scrutiny), more commie ties for left wing agitators, more of Russia’s shadow fleet comes a cropper, and William Shatner eats cereal.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Just like we already knew: “California: Newsom’s ‘National Model’ for Homeless Wracked by Fraud.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom has made reducing the homelessness crisis in California a top priority, saying the scale of the state’s efforts is “unprecedented” and calling for the continued expansion of his signature effort – Project Homekey – that has already cost $3.75 billion.
But in a state with more than 181,000 homeless individuals, or about one-third of the U.S. total, Homekey has been marred by failures and scandals, including a lack of government oversight and accountability as well as a federal investigation into allegations of fraud in Los Angeles.
Lack of government oversight isn’t a bug for Governor Hairgel, it’s a feature.
Newsom, who appears to be preparing for a presidential bid in 2028, could make Homekey, which he calls a “national model,” a talking point in his campaign. The state claims the program has created almost 16,000 permanent housing units that will serve over 175,000 people. But since the state doesn’t track outcomes – whether people placed in housing saw their lives improve or if they returned to the streets – the program’s effectiveness is unclear, according to a critical 2024 state auditor’s report.
“[Our budget] is bloated with homeless spending, a bottomless pit and taxpayer boondoggle that doubles down on failure year after year,” the Republican-turned-Democrat Los Angeles Councilwoman Traci Park said at a meeting in May. “Hundreds of millions of dollars on bridge homes and Homekeys and interim housing sites, and no one can even tell us which ones are operational.”
What is clear is that homelessness in California has skyrocketed in the five years Homekey has been in place, growing by more than 20%, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. That’s an increase of some 36,000 people between 2019 and 2024.
Homekey has been touted by officials as a more cost-effective way to house the homeless. By hiring developers to convert excess motel and hotel rooms and other existing structures into permanent housing, the costs are two to three times lower than building new units, according to the auditor’s report.
But with huge contracts available to developers and very little oversight of their activities, some of that cost savings was lost to fraud, according to federal prosecutors. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli for the Central District of California launched a fraud and corruption task force to find out where the money went, and in October filed criminal charges involving two developers who allegedly defrauded the system.
My guess is that not a single leftwing activist in California will be indicted by the state government for their own role in the fraud…
The videos coming out of Minneapolis, of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers apprehending illegal immigrants in the streets while having to fight off aggressive and sometimes violent anti-ICE activists, are the predictable result of a Democrat strategy that amounts to nullification.
I mean nullification in the historical sense, like the Nullification Crisis of 1832 when South Carolina declared federal tariffs to be null and void within the boundaries of the state, and President Andrew Jackson threatened to send in the U.S. Army to enforce federal law.
What the Democrats of South Carolina did back then is essentially what the Democrats of Minneapolis are doing today, fomenting a 21st century nullification crisis by making it nearly impossible to enforce federal immigration law in the territory under their jurisdiction. Trump, who has ordered 1,500 active duty troops stationed in Alaska to prepare for a possible deployment to Minnesota, is well within his rights (and within historical precedent) to respond in the same vein as Jackson did to what amounts to a nullification crisis.
Indeed, the whole point of so-called sanctuary laws is to make it difficult or impossible to enforce federal immigration laws — to nullify them. Sanctuary policies like the ones operative in Minneapolis (and many other Democrat-controlled cities) prohibit state and local law enforcement from working with federal immigration authorities.
Under normal circumstances, when an illegal immigrant commits a crime the local authorities notify federal immigration officials before the offender is released, so that ICE can take custody and begin the process of deportation. The handover occurs between law enforcement agencies in a controlled, orderly, safe manner.
But in places where Democrat lawmakers have created sanctuary jurisdictions, local law enforcement is barred from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement in this way. Instead of handing over illegal immigrants to ICE, the police simply release them. That means ICE agents have to go out into the community, into neighborhoods and businesses, to track down and arrest illegal immigrant criminals wherever they might be.
This is obviously a much more volatile and dangerous way to enforce federal immigration law. And in Minneapolis, it’s even more volatile and dangerous thanks to anti-ICE activists and vigilante mobs attempting to disrupt, impede, and in some cases attack ICE agents. Indeed, it’s a recipe for violent clashes between ICE and anti-ICE mobs. A cynic might say that’s the entire point, to make federal immigration enforcement as chaotic and tense as possible in hopes of exactly the kind of confrontations that led to the death of Renee Good, the woman who was fatally shot earlier this month when she tried to ram an ICE agent with her vehicle.
The goal of fomenting such mayhem is straightforward: to thwart the enforcement of federal immigration law. Keep in mind, ICE is not doing anything beyond the scope of federal law in Minneapolis. It is not exercising any new or novel powers not authorized under federal statute. As Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander in charge in Minneapolis said at a press conference this week, the operations and tactics of Border Patrol and ICE agents in the city are “born out of necessity” but are nevertheless “legal, ethical, and moral.”
“Our operations are lawful. They’re targeted. They’re focused on individuals who pose a serious threat to this community. They are not random and they are not political,” he said. The “necessity” Bovino refers to is that which has arisen as a direct result of Democrat sanctuary policies. Ordinarily, we wouldn’t see the very public, visible ICE operations now underway in Minneapolis and other sanctuary cities simply because criminal illegal aliens would be transferred to federal custody by local law enforcement.
But that’s not happening because Democrats don’t like federal immigration laws. Since they don’t have the political power to change them, they have decided, like Democrats in South Carolina in the 1830s, simply to declare them null and void in their territory.
I would suggest Minnesota Democrats should reconsider before Trump decides to do to Minneapolis what Sherman did to Savannah in 1864, but knowing Minneapolis, all he probably needs to do is hand out gasoline and matches to the #BlackLivesMatter/Somali set and let them burn it down themselves…
A collection of far-left activist groups — including the Democratic Socialists of America, major labor unions, explicitly Communist groups, and a CCP-linked protest network — have all organized a strike scheduled for Friday which aims to “shut down” schools and businesses statewide in Minnesota in an effort to push ICE out.
The planned shutdown was announced early last week — “ICE Out of MN: Day of Truth and Freedom” — include plans for a large-scale march in Minneapolis and a day of “no work, no school, no shopping.”
The radical Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), the left-wing BreakThrough News media outlet, and the Manhattan-based Marxist revolutionary People’s Forum are all involved in either promoting or organizing the Minnesota shutdown effort. Just the News previously reported on how these and other radical activist groups have leadership links or financial ties to a funding network backed by wealthy businessman and self-avowed communist Neville Singham.
The GOP-led House Oversight Committee voted this month to subpoena Singham for information about this sprawling activist network. The Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the Revolutionary Communists of America, and the Twin Cities chapter of the Communist Party USA — all avowedly Marxist groups — are also listed as co-sponsors of the Friday protest.
The DSA — which helped propel Zohran Mamdani to Gracie Mansion in NYC — including the national organization and the local Minnesota chapter — are listed as backing the anti-ICE effort scheduled for Friday.
Major labor unions such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) are listed as co-hosts of the shutdown effort, while the United Auto Workers (UAW) also endorsed the strike.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon told conservative podcaster Benny Johnson that former CNN host Don Lemon has been put “on notice” by the Justice Department and could face charges under federal civil-rights laws, including the Ku Klux Klan Act, for his role in storming a church service in Minnesota. Lemon allegedly joined a far-left mob that was on the hunt for a pro-ICE pastor at a St. Paul church.
“The Klan Act is one of the most important federal civil rights statutes. Its a law that makes it illegal to terrorize and violate the civil rights of citizens. Whenever people conspire to do this, the Klan Act can be used,” Dhillon told Johnson.
Dhillon continued, “Everyone in the protest community needs to know that the fullest force of the federal government is going to come down and prevent this from happening and put people away for a long time.”
“There is zero tolerance for this kind of illegal behavior and we will not stand for it,” she emphasized.
Johnson wrote on X, “DOJ confirms Don Lemon has zero ‘journalism’ protections against FACE Act violations. Lemon was fully aware of the violations and may face KKK Act conspiracy charges.”
But others got indicted. “FBI Arrests Left-Wing Activist Who Led Mob of Protesters into Minnesota Church.”
Federal authorities have arrested the woman who led an anti-ICE mob into a Minnesota church last week.
Nekima Levy Armstrong is facing charges related to violating the FACE Act, which prohibits interfering with the exercise of religion at a place of worship.
Minutes ago at my direction, HSI and FBI agents executed an arrest in Minnesota. So far, we have arrested Nekima Levy Armstrong, who allegedly played a key role in organizing the coordinated attack on Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a post on X.
“We will share more updates as they become available. Listen loud and clear: WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP,” she added.
Armstrong led a group into the Cities Church in St. Paul on Sunday, believing that one of the church’s pastors works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Dozens of demonstrators interrupted the service shouting, “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good.”
Armstrong is a civil rights lawyer and “scholar-activist,” according to her website. She previously played a key role in organizing boycotts against Target over its decision to walk back its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, according to Fox News.
Homeland Security Secretary Krisit Noem announced on Monday that immigration officers have arrested more than 10,000 illegal immigrants in Minnesota.
“PEACE AND PUBLIC SAFETY IN MINNEAPOLIS!” Noem exclaimed in a post to X. “We have arrested over 10,000 criminal illegal aliens who were killing Americans, hurting children and reigning terror in Minneapolis because Tim Walz and Jacob Frey refuse to protect their own people and instead protect criminals.”
The figure includes about 3,000 “criminal illegal aliens” arrested by federal authorities in just the last six weeks, the secretary said.
Snip.
“There is MASSIVE Fraud in Minneapolis, at least $19 billion and that’s just the tip of iceberg,” Noem asserted in the same post. “Our Homeland Security Investigators are on the ground in Minneapolis conducting wide scale investigations to get justice for the American people who have been robbed blind.”
Indeed.
“Abbott Offers State Assistance to HUD for Fraud Identification Program. HUD Secretary Turner identified $5 billion in potentially erroneous payments.”
Gov. Greg Abbott has volunteered Texas assistance to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in identifying fraud in federal housing programs after the agency identified at least $5 billion in potentially erroneous payments last year.
According to a letter sent to HUD Secretary Scott Turner on Monday, Abbott offered state participation in a pilot fraud identification program through the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA).
“We will gladly work with you to develop fraud-prevention measures that ensure federal taxpayer funds, like those in the rental-based assistance programs, are not taken advantage of by bad actors,” wrote Abbott.
Turner, a former Texas state representative who was appointed by President Donald Trump to head HUD last year, published a financial analysis of the agency that warned of fraud and a lack of internal controls.
Using AI, HUD reported finding more than 30,000 deceased persons either actively enrolled in a rental assistance program or who had received assistance after they died.
Turner’s financial report also warned that his staff had identified examples of non-compliance with standards of internal controls under the Biden administration.
“The reviews determined that under the prior Administration, HUD experienced a deterioration in financial controls and governance and identified a material weakness affecting internal controls and financial governance across multiple program offices.”
Multiple federal agencies launched or extended investigations in Minnesota after new revelations of widespread fraud in the state last month. Last week, Abbott directed the Texas Workforce Commission and the Health and Human Services Commission to investigate potential childcare fraud in Texas.
A member of the violent Latin Kings gang was arrested after allegedly stealing government property from an FBI vehicle vandalized during unrest in Minneapolis Wednesday night, federal authorities said.
Fox News confirmed that Raul Gutierrez, 33, was arrested Thursday in a joint operation involving the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
The FBI said multiple government vehicles were vandalized and broken into Wednesday night in Minneapolis while agents were responding to a reported assault on a federal officer, adding that federal property was stolen from inside the vehicles.
“One individual who allegedly stole federal government property out of an FBI vehicle in Minneapolis last night has been arrested,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on X, adding that the suspect was a member of the Latin Kings gang with a violent criminal history. “FBI personnel are continuing to pursue other subjects involved. There will be more arrests.”
Is their any doubt the left will treat this gang banger scumbag as a hero?
A few weeks ago, I noted that California was losing over $160 million due to improper management of its commercial driver’s license program.
And well, Governor Gavin Newsom asserted his current budget would only have a $2 billion deficit, the state’s shortfall is actually estimated to be over $17 billion according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
The budget reports a $2.9 billion deficit, described as a “modest shortfall” by Department of Finance staff. This estimate differs markedly from the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) projection of a $17.6 billion deficit—a gap of $14.7 billion. According to department staff, the governor’s proposal incorporates $31.5 billion in additional revenues not included in the LAO forecast and excludes the risk of a stock market downturn that the LAO elected to factor into its analysis. Overall, the state budget totals $348.9 billion, including $248.3 billion in General Fund expenditures and $23 billion in total reserves.
Now, the gap may even widen.
California is facing federal demands to repay more than $1 billion in Medicaid funds that Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), says were improperly used for health care for illegal aliens.
The Trump administration is planning to claw back over $1 billion in federal Medicaid dollars it says are being spent by blue states on healthcare for illegal immigrants, including some with violent criminal records for murder and rape.
A preliminary audit by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that, over the last few years, mostly during 2024 and 2025, California; Washington, D.C.; Illinois; Washington; Colorado; and Oregon improperly spent a combined $1,351,204,127 in federal Medicaid funds to help pay for healthcare for illegal immigrants.
While federal Medicaid dollars are supposed to be prohibited broadly from being used to cover healthcare for illegal immigrants, they can be used by states for emergency treatment regardless of a patient’s citizenship or immigration status.
While 5 other states were also investigated for illegal alien-oriented Medicaid abuses, California was by far the most egregious.
Virginians asked for it, and if the flurry of bills introduced in the 72 hours since Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s inauguration pass — and with a Democratic supermajority, they likely will — residents of the Old Dominion are going to get it “good and hard.” If enacted, these proposals would raise taxes substantially, shorten sentences for violent criminals, and erode election integrity statewide.
Virginia voters delivered Spanberger a landslide victory in November over her Republican opponent, then–Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears. Despite presenting herself as a moderate during the campaign, Spanberger’s congressional voting record — nearly 100% aligned with the Democrats’ progressive agenda — suggested her governance would be anything but.
Let’s start with the tax increases: HB979 would create two new tax brackets. Currently, Virginians are taxed at 5.75% for all income over $17,000. If this bill passes, residents earning between $600,000 and $1 million will be taxed at 8%, and those earning over $1 million will pay 10%.
Before anyone argues that these taxpayers can well afford it, remember that this group includes farmers, small businesses, and sole proprietors — many of whom are about to be “crushed” by the impact.
The advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform sounded the alarm on the proposed new taxes in a piece titled Democrats Pounce On Virginia Taxpayers. ATF noted, “Under unified Democrat control, Virginia is poised to become a tax-hiking outlier in a region full of states that are phasing out their income taxes.”
The article highlights some of the most shocking tax proposals now being advanced by state Democrats.
HB 378 – Imposes a 3.8% net investment income tax on individuals, trusts, and estates beginning in taxable year 2027. If enacted, HB 378 would raise VA’s top marginal income tax rate on portfolio and passive income to 9.55%.
HB 900 – Authorizes sales tax hikes in various transportation districts, imposes a new tax on each and every retail delivery in Northern Virginia (Amazon, Uber Eats, FedEx, UPS, etc.), similar to the one imposed in Minnesota by Gov. Tim Walz (D).
HB 919 – Imposes a firearm and ammunition tax equal to 11% percent of the gross receipts from the retail sale of any firearm or ammunition by a dealer in firearms, firearms manufacturer, or ammunition vendor, as such terms are defined in the bill.
HB 978 – Extends the retail sales and use tax to dry cleaning, landscaping, and other previously exempt services.
Democrats now control the legislature and Governor’s office in Virginia.
Here are just a few of the bills they’ve introduced
– New 4.3% sales tax on Uber Eats, Amazon, etc deliveries.
– New sales tax on admissions to a wide variety of businesses.
– Create two new higher tax…
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 19, 2026
NEW retail and sales taxes coming to Virginia introduced by Virginia Democrats in a single bill:
“Levies the retail sales and use tax on the following services: admissions; charges for recreation, fitness, or sports facilities; nonmedical personal services or counseling; dry… pic.twitter.com/ki96Ngpj6T
— NOVA Campaigns (@NoVA_Campaigns) January 19, 2026
This legislative blitz has something for everyone — including convicted criminals in the state.
HB863 would “eliminate mandatory minimum sentencing for rape, manslaughter, assaulting a law enforcement officer, possession and distribution of child pornography, and all repeat violent felonies.”
Funny how Democrats are now objectively and reflexively pro-rape…
Here at Davos, I’ve heard numerous versions of this sentiment: “We Europeans/Canadians stood up to Trump and forced him to retreat. This is a major victory for the rules-based international order.”
This is a very wrong take. The reality is that Trump won Davos, hands down. And not only did he win it; he owned it. I have never before seen a single individual so completely dominate this vast bazaar of the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and the self-important.
Snip.
Davos Man—I should say Davos Person—worries a lot more about such things than he—they—used to. The latest edition of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report, which is based on surveys of business executives and academics, ranks “geoeconomic confrontation” and “state-based armed conflict” as the No. 1 and No. 2 risks most “likely to present a material crisis on a global scale in 2026.” On a two-year time horizon, geoeconomic confrontation remains top of the list. Asked to characterize “the global political environment for cooperation on risks in the next decade,” 68 percent of respondents picked a “multipolar or fragmented order in which middle and great powers contest, set, and enforce regional rules and norms.”
All of this is just a series of Davosy euphemisms for the one big risk that Davos Person fears above all others: Donald Trump. This is funny when you consider last year’s mood, which—in the wake of Trump’s reelection—was very bullish about the United States under Trump 2.0. “Almost everyone at Davos is long U.S., short EU,” I wrote in these pages this time last year. “The new Davos consensus is that Europe cannot get its economic act together and never will, whereas America is rocking and rolling, and if you don’t own the big U.S. tech stocks, then the FOMO may kill you.”
My long-standing contrarian rule is that the Davos consensus is always wrong. In last year’s case, I added, Davos Person should be very careful what they wished for. Sure enough, in 2025 European stocks outperformed U.S. stocks. And, of course, Trump 2.0 has turned out to be every good European’s worst nightmare.
In the run-up to Davos 2026, Trump did his utmost to wind up Europe’s elite, not to mention Canada’s. On social media and in interviews, he insisted that he was determined to get Greenland for the United States. “Greenland has to be acquired,” he wrote on the eve of his arrival in Switzerland. “Denmark and its European allies have to DO THE RIGHT THING.” He did not rule out military action. He threatened to impose new 10 percent tariffs on all countries that resisted. And he posted memes of maps of Denmark (and Canada) cloaked in the Stars and Stripes and an AI-generated image of himself planting an American flag on “Greenland—U.S. Territory Est. 2026.”
To stoke up the crowd ahead of the president’s arrival, Trump’s cabinet members chimed in. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s anti-European trash-talking so enraged the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, that she stormed out of a Davos dinner. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent drolly wondered if European leaders might unleash their “most forceful weapon,” the “dreaded European working group.”
Snip.
This was vintage Trump, part real-estate pitch, part reality TV. “All we’re asking for is to get Greenland,” he riffed, “including right, title, and ownership, because you need the ownership to defend it. You can’t defend it on a lease. Legally, it’s not defensible that way, totally. And number two, psychologically, who the hell wants to defend a license agreement or a lease[?]”
As for the haters, “Canada lives because of the United States,” Trump declared. “Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.” And: “Here’s the story, Emmanuel. The answer is you’re going to do it. You’re going to do it fast. And if you don’t, I’m putting a 25 percent tariff on everything that you sell into the United States. And a 100 percent tariff on your wines and champagnes.”
Except that, almost as an aside, Trump then called the whole Greenland thing off. “We never ask for anything [from NATO],” he rambled, “and we never got anything. We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force where we would be, frankly, unstoppable. But I won’t do that. Okay? Now everyone’s saying, ‘Oh good.’ That’s probably the biggest statement I made because people thought I would use force. I don’t have to use force. I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force.”
Later that evening, following a “very productive meeting” with NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, Trump announced on Truth Social that he would not impose the additional tariffs on European countries he had threatened. He and Rutte had “formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic Region.”
Snip.
The problem with all of this is the premise that Trump ever seriously meant to annex Greenland or to impose new tariffs on the Europeans. Why would he when a) the United States already enjoys (under a 1951 treaty with Denmark and a 2004 agreement with Greenland) all the military access to the frigid island it could every possibly need, while the Danes pay for the heavily subsidized inhabitants of the island; and b) Trump means what he says on Truth Social only about half the time, according to The Wall Street Journal’s recent analysis of 2,700 substantive Truth posts. I’ll say it again: Half the time he’s bluffing. And it was the same when he was on Twitter in series one.
Snip.
Ten years ago, Europeans made the mistake of taking Trump neither seriously nor literally. Now they make the opposite mistake of treating him both seriously and literally. But, as Saleno Zito explained nearly 10 years ago, the correct approach is to take him seriously but not literally. The fact that Trump carries out only around half the threats he makes on social media is a feature, not a bug—and it’s certainly not a sign of weakness. It is a deliberate tactic designed to leave counterparties uncertain. On this occasion, Trump was bluffing, and the administration never had the remotest intention of imposing new tariffs on Europe, much less taking military action to annex Greenland.
So Trump asked for the moon, threatened to disastrous sanctions on his negotiating counterparts, and then settled for what he actually wanted all along.
Cue the tiny violins: “Eric Swalwell Could Be Ineligible for Governor or Face Jail Time.”
Eric Swalwell’s political ambitions just hit a major snag. Swalwell, most famous for public flatulence and bedding a Chinese spy, wants to be the next governor of California, but he is now the target of a court challenge that could blow his entire gubernatorial campaign out of the water before it even gets started.
The accusation? He doesn’t actually live in the state he wants to govern.
Conservative activist and filmmaker Joel Gilbert dropped a legal bomb on January 8, filing a petition in Sacramento Superior Court arguing that Swalwell is constitutionally barred from seeking the governor’s office.
Gilbert has a strong case.
California’s constitution requires gubernatorial candidates to live in the state for five years before the election. Gilbert says Swalwell has been living in Washington, D.C., not California, which makes him legally ineligible to run for office.
“Swalwell is ineligible to run for governor of California because the California constitution requires that a candidate live in the state for five years before an election,” Gilbert told PJ Media. “Swalwall has no home address in California; that’s why he committed perjury on his candidate statement form 501 by providing his attorney’s office for his home address. Swalwell has a sworn Deed of Trust on his Washington, D.C. home where he declared that location as his primary residence.”
The complaint gets more interesting from there.
Public records searches allegedly show that Swalwell has no ownership or lease of any California property — his congressional financial disclosures from 2011 through 2024 back this up, listing zero California real estate holdings. When Swalwell filed his campaign paperwork on December 4, he listed an address on Capitol Mall in Sacramento. The problem is that the address isn’t a residence; it’s the office of his Sacramento lawyer, Greenberg Traurig, located in a high-rise.
Swalwell owns a $1.2 million, six-bedroom home in northeast Washington, D.C., where he lives with his wife, Brittany Watts, and their three kids. Mortgage documents from April 2022 list that D.C. property as his “principal residence.”
There are really only two possibilities here, according to Gilbert: Swalwell either committed mortgage fraud — a serious crime that could result in prison time — or he’s ineligible to run for governor.
New Labor Department filings reveal the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teachers’ union, has been channeling millions in taxpayer dollars to far-left political outfits, including Soros-backed networks and shadowy activist groups.
Instead of bolstering education, these funds are propping up anti-American causes, from anti-Israel protests to rigging electoral maps.
The bombshell underscores the deep rot in union leadership, where public money meant for schools is weaponized against conservative values and national security.
The filings, obtained by Fox News Digital, paint a damning picture of misdirected priorities. “The NEA’s last fiscal year report showed it sent $300,000 to the 1630 Fund, the liberal dark money group Fox News has been reporting on extensively, and in most cases exclusively — Tens of thousands of dollars to the (George Soros’) Tides Foundation Network,” according to the report.
These aren’t voluntary donations from union members’ pockets—these are taxpayer dollars funneled through the system. The Tides Foundation has ties to anti-Israel activism, while the Sixteen Thirty Fund operates as a hub for progressive dark money, influencing elections without transparency.
The NEA didn’t stop there, the report notes, adding it “was also involved in several state issues. It backed a campaign to end standardized testing in Massachusetts and fight gerrymandering in Ohio, to the tune of half a million dollars for each of those and it sent hundreds of thousands of additional money to groups committed to racial and education justice movements.”
One of the biggest payouts was a whopping $3.5 million to Education International, a global teachers’ federation where NEA President Becky Pringle serves as vice president. Critics call it a cozy self-dealing arrangement, with American tax dollars flowing offshore to international agendas.
The subpoenas went to the offices of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, according the outlets, including Reuters, the New York Times and Fox News, which cited anonymous sources.
The subpoenas come days after the Department of Justice announced it was launching an investigation into Walz and Frey in connection with a suspected conspiracy to impede federal immigration enforcement in the state.
I am hoping there are also subpoenas in the works for several years of their bank records, to see how much they participated in the Somali fraud…
Over the past several days, it appears that Minneapolis police officers have quietly kind of quit in another way.
From Alpha News:
Around 100 Minneapolis police officers could soon be off duty for weeks to months from an already critically understaffed police department, and just as the city faces a serious public safety crisis with protesters inciting confrontations with the surge of federal agents working in the city.
Multiple sources confided to both Alpha News senior reporter Liz Collin and to Crime Watch Minneapolis that 60 to 100 officers from the Minneapolis Police Department have applied or plan to apply for the state’s new paid leave program. The Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) program was signed into law by Gov. Tim Walz during the 2023 DFL trifecta and went into effect on the first of this year.
This won’t end well: “Japanese Yields Soar To All Time High After PM Takaichi Calls Snap Election Seeking More Spending, Less Taxes.” Doubling down, yet again, on Abenomics, won’t solve Japan’s continuing problems.
New York has finally ended its nearly decade-long campaign to force Catholic nuns and other religious ministries to fund abortions.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty announced on Tuesday that New York agreed to enter into a settlement with their clients after a lengthy court battle over a state abortion mandate that went to the Supreme Court twice. Plaintiffs in the case, Roman Catholic Diocese v. Harris, included a group of Catholic and Anglican nuns, Catholic dioceses, Christian churches, and faith-based social ministries.
“For nearly a decade, New York bureaucrats tried to strong-arm nuns into paying for abortions because they serve all those in need,” said Lori Windham, senior counsel at Becket and an attorney for the religious groups. “At long last, the state has given up its disgraceful campaign. This victory confirms that the government cannot punish religious ministries for living out their faith by serving everyone.”
In a press release, AG James, who had previously worked to shut down the NRA because she disagreed with its politics, announced that she had closed down Betar, a pro-Israel group , for appearing at synagogues to defend them from Muslim mobs, for claiming that “that all devout Muslims ‘hate America’, and for making derogatory remarks about Islam and Gaza.
Did Howard University not cover the unconstitutionality of viewpoint discrimination back when James was obtaining her law degree there? (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Nick Shirley sat down with YouTuber Andrew Callaghan, and caught Callaghan deceptively editing the interview just like the MSM does.
Microslop 365. “Microsoft has invested tens to hundreds of billions of dollars into AI, okay? And so AI is not allowed to be the problem. And so it has to be you.”
I usually visit HEB Mondays and Fridays, but given the probability of an incoming ice storm (which now has the name Winter Storm Fern) I went this afternoon, when it was already very busy and the shelves were just starting to look picked for some items.
Except bananas. They were gone.
Yes, we have no bananas
There was still milk, though one shelf looked empty. I didn’t check the bread aisle.
The frozen pizza aisle was picked but still had decent options. The snack aisle was also picked. And HEB brand canned dogfood was out of individual cans.
If you were contemplating running to the store to pick stuff up, sooner is better than later.
As for the storm itself, the National Weather Service forecast looks considerably nastier than the Apple weather bugs predict. Here’s a snapshot:
Director Blue also has an infographic up, but it’s mostly things you should already know.
Come Saturday, I won’t be traveling any farther than walking my dogs around the block, but if you absolutely have to drive on icy roads, take all due precautions. Be sure you’ve got road flares in case you get stuck. For longer trips, consider carrying some food and water, as well as a couple of blankets, in case your trapped in your car on an Interstate during the storm.
