LinkSwarm For November 6, 2026

Posted on November 6, 2026 by Lawrence Person

Been a weird week. The midterms were a disaster, but I’ve been too busy mailing out books from my most recent Lame Excuse Books catalog to worry too much about it, which is probably just as well. And given the wall-to-wall coverage of the midterms, I don’t think they require too much rehashing here.

More scammers stealing taxpayer money,

Also, a quick update on the new template. Everything works, but there are difference between how the old and new handled certain things, especially unordered lists. I didn’t use to use the

    tag before because bulleted lists looked better without it. That’s not the case for the new template, so bulleted lists in the old template are going to look weird for, well, a long, long time. I’m way too busy to even think about fixing 17 years of posts, so only expect changes on an ad-hock basis.

    • Markets drop $2.8 trillion in reaction to Democrats winning the midterms.

      https://notthebee.com/article/dhs-revokes-status-of-22-million-migrants-that-biden-let-into-the-country-?utm_source=Not+The+Bee+Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=10312026 hat tip https://instapundit.com/833593/

      https://x.com/MattMickiewicz/status/2117304177873310164?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2117304177873310164%7Ctwgr%5Ef96ba394eef9a760084bddffd2ce9f90b1af452c%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Finstapundit.com%2F833580%2F

      https://www.zerohedge.com/political/doj-uncovers-29m-more-minnesota-benefits-fraud-calls-state-epicenter-fraud-america

      https://www.zerohedge.com/political/ex-school-board-president-indicted-alleged-13-million-kickback-over-27-million-covid

    • “Excellent JDAM Strike On Drone Operators, Filmed From Very Close Range By Attack Drone.” This is north of Bakhmut, some 15 miles behind the front lines, suggesting that Ukrainian successes against Russian anti-aircraft units have been effective enough to give their aircraft more range for attack.

    • A look at a Ukrainian all-UGV offensive operation north of Lyman that failed. Interesting for a glimpse of the different UGVs Ukraine is using.

      https://www.zerohedge.com/political/california-high-speed-rail-ceo-resigns-after-reporter-confronts-board-over-consultants

    • So how’s that rigging the election to toss Spencer Pratt off the ballot working out for you, Karen Bass? “Incompetent, Uneducated Boob and Socialist Nithiya Raman Has been Elected the Final Mayor of the City Formerly Known as Los Angeles.”
    • Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “Charity Founder Gets Eight Years For Embezzling Millions.”

      The founder of a charity that helped low-income workers cover emergency bills has been sentenced to eight years in federal prison for spending millions of dollars in donations on himself. Keith Taylor, 59, of New York, founded Modest Needs around 2002, and U.S. District Judge Jennifer L. Rochon sentenced him, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced Wednesday. He pleaded guilty in August 2025 to defrauding the charity and its donors and to evading more than $1 million in federal income taxes.

    • “A federal indictment announced Wednesday accuses six people tied to one Mobile, Alabama, tax shop of filing more than 9,000 false returns that sought more than $177 million in refunds, about $81 million of which the IRS actually issued, prosecutors say.”

      Prosecutors say Jennifer Beverly, 47, owned and ran JB Accounting Tax Service LLC in Mobile from roughly 2022 through 2024. Five of her employees are charged alongside her: Jadasha Bowman, 28; Kennedy Lawrence Stovall Winston, 42; Solida Lucille Green, 36; Paris Lovett, also known as Paris Johnson, 30; and Shermeka Benjamin, 38.

      The indictment alleges the scheme ran from about 2021 through 2024. The returns allegedly carried false Schedule C statements, COVID-19 credits, fuel tax credits, credit repayments, estimated tax payments, Schedule A and Schedule 3 statements, and education credits. Spread across 9,000 returns, the refunds claimed come to more than $19,000 apiece, and the roughly $81 million issued is about 46 percent of the $177 million sought.

      All six are charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Beverly also faces 63 wire fraud counts, Bowman 11, Winston five, Green 11, Lovett 11 and Benjamin four, 105 counts between them. If convicted, they face penalties that include prison, supervised release, fines and restitution.

    • Long-running garbage far left, pro-pedophile website Salon finally shuts down.

      It’s been a rough couple of years for liberal rags, and this week, the digital pile of liberal media carcasses grew just a little taller.

      On Thursday, Salon announced that it was “ceasing publication” after 31 years. The company cited the changing “business realities of independent digital journalism” and an unsustainable publishing model as its reasons for calling it quits.

      Snip.

      In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Salon branded the GOP a “terrorist group” and suggested that “MAGA and Christian nationalism” presented a greater threat than “Hamas could ever be.” It also pushed characterizations of President Donald Trump and his allies as Nazis.

      Salon blogger Chauncey DeVega claimed in a Sept. 26, 2024, piece that “Donald Trump and his surrogates are continuing to channel and amplify Nazism and Adolf Hitler. This is not random or happenstance. It is part of a strategy.”

      DeVega, writing in the wake of multiple attempts on the president’s life, further claimed that Trump was planning “to turn America into a type of Fourth Reich” and planning an “ethnic cleansing.”

      While keen to smear Republicans as terrorists and Nazis, Salon did its apparent best to humanize pedophiles.

      In September 2015, Salon published an article titled, “I’m a pedophile, but not a monster,” with the sub-headline, “I’m attracted to children but unwilling to act on it. Before judging me harshly, would you be willing to listen?”

      The article by self-identified American pedophile Todd Nickerson characterized pedophilia as a sexual orientation and pedophiles as victims who “suffer in silence”; insinuated there might be good things about having that particular “sexuality”; and called on readers to “be understanding and supportive.”

      Like its article mocking Warmbier and its article titled “‘Genetic sexual attraction is normal, and very real’: A woman describes the reality of parent-child incest,” Salon’s pedophile article was later scrubbed from its website. Salon’s article defending humans having sex with dolphins is, however, still up on its website.

      The demise of Salon — which was valued at $107 million when it went public in 1999 — was generally well-received.

      Hopefully anyone involved in that rag will never be allowed to work in media ever again.

    • The Bulwerk’s TDS turns into MDS with a side-effect of acute communism.

      (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

    • UK comedian/actor/podcaster Russell Brand found “guilty on one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault. He was found not guilty on two other rape charges and not guilty of attempted indecent assault.” “In the rape case, the assault took place in 2009 when a woman who met with Brand to have sex was, according to her accusations, forced to go further than she planned. The assaults Brand was convicted of took place in the 2000s as well.”
    • Oil rig off Gabon collapses and sinks.
    • Are Samsung TV’s listening to you?
    • Tesla to wind down cybertruck production in favor of Cybercabs.

      Gigafactory Texas, located outside of Austin, is the only known Tesla facility used to manufacture the Cybertruck’s components. Musk did not specify whether Cybertruck production will be moved to another facility or phased out entirely, but he said the “Cybertruck fleet will be around for a long time” in response to a user on his social media platform.

      Tesla’s decision comes after years of poor sales for the Cybertruck model, which faced intense political backlash when Musk associated himself with President Donald Trump. Over 20,000 Cybertrucks were sold in the United States last year, down 48% from nearly 39,000 units in 2024. For the first three quarters this year, over 11,500 units were sold, per preliminary figures.

      For an “unsuccessful” truck, I sure see a lot of them on the road.

    • “Utah man tells friend he can dodge a bullet. Friend pleads guilty to manslaughter.”
    • Fulton County auctions off land that doesn’t exist.
    • Adam Savage geeks out at the Library of Congress. Including the Thomas Jefferson draft of the Declaration of Independence corrected by John Adams and Ben Franklin.
    • Jeremy Clarkson on cycle lanes: “They can all fuck off. All of them.”
    • Critical Drinker raves about Widow’s Bay.
    • He also liked Godilla Minus Zero, albeit not as much as Godzilla Minus One. I need to see both of them…
    • Consumer news you can use: How to tell if your Lamborghini odometer has been tampered with.
    • What does one buck get you at the laundromat?
    • The Slow-Mo Guys play with generating sparks in the dark. Some of the shots are profoundly beautiful.
    • “Idiot King Forgets To Cancel Election.”
    • “Russell Brand Convicted In UK Court On Charges Of Raping While Not Muslim.”
Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Texas: Bright Spots In The Carnage

Posted on November 5, 2026 by Lawrence Person

While the results of this week’s election were very dismal indeed, there were a few bright spots for Texas conservatives.

  • Representative August Pfluger won re-election in the the redrawn 11th Congressional District, and will be my Congressman come January 3rd.
  • In fact, Texas will have the same number of Republican u.S. Representatives as it did before the 2026 election: 24.
  • Republicans maintain a majority in the Texas senate. I don’t say “control,” because because under the Texas constitution, Lieutenant Governor elect Vikki Godwin will theoretically run that chamber. But Democrats did flip the Texas House.
  • Because Republicans maintained a majority in the Texas senate, it’s all but impossible for Democrats to be able to ram any sort of redistricting through before the 2030 census.
  • On the Texas Supreme Court, while Democrats captured all four 2026 races there, republicans still hold a 5-4 majority in that nine member body.
  • While turning Texas blue, voters also rejected tax hikes and school bonds.

    While electing a bevy of Democrats to office up and down the ballot on Tuesday, Texas voters also rejected many of the tax increases and bonds proposed by their local governments, sending a signal to newly elected leaders about the parameters of the 2026 mandate.

    “Even given what’s happened at the state level as far as the elections go, I think that these were good signs that people are upset about their property taxes, and they’re willing to reject these large bond propositions,” economist Vance Ginn told The Texan.

    The Texas Election Code requires that local governments include the sentence, “THIS IS A TAX INCREASE” for a Voter-Approval Tax Rate Election (VATRE), and the Texas Education Code requires “THIS IS A PROPERTY TAX INCREASE” at the top of the ballot proposition for school bonds.

    Some of the largest rejections were in the urban areas of the state, where Democratic officials swept elections.

    In the Dallas-Fort Worth area, voters rejected a number of bond and tax increase propositions.

    Dallas County’s proposed 2.4 cent tax rate increase was rejected by voters by a 3.7 percent margin. The City of Dallas’ bond Proposition A for $443 million for public safety facilities also failed by 13 points.

    In the City of Wylie, which lies in both Dallas and Collin counties, voters rejected four out of five bond propositions totaling $90.5 million. They approved the largest bond at $25.5 million for historic downtown improvements.

    Irving Independent School District (ISD) voters rejected all four propositions in a $952.4 million bond package by double-digit margins.

    Voters rejected a Mesquite ISD proposition for a Voter-Approval Tax Rate Election (VATRE) by 15 points that it claimed would generate $16 million per year and fund teacher compensation.

    Residents of the affluent University Park community, enveloped by the City of Dallas, approved a tax rate increase on their ballot. It was touted as funding needed for police officers, firefighters, public safety pensions, and residential parking enforcement.

    In the Houston area, voters rejected every school bond proposition and VATRE on the November 3, 2026 ballot, according to unofficial Harris County results.

    The largest rejection came in Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, Texas’s third-largest public school district. Voters turned down a VATRE and a $1.6 billion bond package split across four propositions. The VATRE, which would have raised the maintenance-and-operations rate by roughly 9 cents per $100 of a property’s appraised value and generated an estimated $100 million in new revenue, received only 32.5 percent support.

    Propositions B through E for infrastructure and security, technology, athletic stadiums, and swimming pools were all defeated by between 63 percent and 73 percent.

    Channelview ISD saw similar results. Its 7-cent VATRE for roughly $7.5 million in annual revenue failed by 71 percent. Four bond propositions totaling around $165 million for facilities, safety, technology, and a multipurpose indoor facility also lost.

    Crosby ISD’s $208 million bond package for a new elementary school, a replacement middle school, and campus improvements failed as well. Proposition A received about 30 percent support and Proposition B about 31 percent.

    VATREs in Spring, Huffman, and La Porte ISDs also failed. Spring sought a 2-cent increase for about $15.5 million in combined local and state funding—its second recent attempt. Huffman’s 3-cent measure, projected to raise $2 million without raising the overall tax rate due to compression, was rejected. La Porte’s 12-cent VATRE, aimed at raising $8.4 million to address a roughly $12 million deficit, also failed to pass.

    Snipping over Tarrant and Collin county.

    In Central Texas, VATREs failed in Bastrop, Del Valle, Georgetown, Leander, and Round Rock ISDs, and Bexar County area voters rejected school district tax increases in East Central, Northside, San Antonio, and South San Antonio ISDs.

    Two public school districts that narrowly passed tax increases are Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City ISD near San Antonio and Seguin ISD.

    Ginn suggested that newly elected Democratic officials, along with Republicans, should heed the warning sign given by the majority of voters who soundly rejected these tax increases and bond proposals.

    “This is a huge blue wave, but not a mandate for Democrats,” Ginn said. “The election results also included a rejection of big government policies and progressive populism.”

    “I hope that this is a wake-up call to say maybe we need to do something about government spending.”

And there it is, my attempt to be a little ray of sunshine after the blue tsunami…

Posted in Elections, Republicans, Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Just Got TWO Phising Emails With A BMP Attachment

Posted on November 5, 2026 by Lawrence Person

Just got a phishing email as a fake “order confirmation” that Gmail didn’t put in my spam folder until I tagged it as a phishing attack:

Powlowski – Daugherty – Order confirmation – 5-November-2026 at 6:27
One attachment • Scanned by Gmail

The attachment seems to indicate an order from Springfield Armory. I didn’t click on it because I’m not a moron and nobody sends an invoice in .BMP, which is a Windows bitmap format. There’s been a known exploit to embed malicious code within a BMP file since 2021.

Then, just minutes later, I got another one:

Pacocha – Krajcik – Order confirmation – 5-November-2026 at 6:47
One attachment • Scanned by Gmail

I reported both for Phishing.

Never click attachments on a email you weren’t expecting, and never click on a file attachment that looks suspicious or is a weird format type.

Always be alert for scams in any unexpected email.

Stay alert, people…

Posted in Crime, Technology | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Well, That Absolutely Fucking Sucked

Posted on November 4, 2026 by Lawrence Person

The Democratic Media Complex tries to will a “Blue Wave” into existence every two years, and they finally got one.

Call it Trump fatigue, inflation fatigue, anti-ICE animus or disapproval of the Iran War, but when every statewide race in Texas flips to the Democrats (as appears likely now), that’s a blue wave.

The first inkling I had of how bad things were going to go was seeing Republican Ashley Moody barely break 50% in Florida.

Talafreako defeated Paxton. Evidently disgust over transing kids and the rest of the social justice warrior agenda wasn’t enough to to drown out the siren song of cheaper gas and free (i.e. taxpayer funded) stuff. Judging from the across-the-board statewide losses in Texas, running Cornyn instead of Paxton wouldn’t have made a lick of difference.

Brandon Herrera won’t be a U.S. Congressman.

Judging from results in the Rio Grande Valley, all of Greg Abbott’s long-term efforts to turn Hispanic voters into Republicans seems to have come undone this year.

Nationally, Democrats take the House and Senate, though not by large enough margins to overcome a Trump veto.

Abdul El-Sayed looks head for victory in Michigan, albeit the race looks much closer there. The Red/Green Commie/Jihadi alliance now has a greenlight to run Democrat priorities.

Republicans weren’t wiped out everywhere. It looks like Republicans will maintain control of the Texas House and Senate, so disarming the law-abiding and crippling the oil and gas industry are probably off the menu. Republicans won in places like Florida, Tennessee and Oklahoma.

But make no mistake: Losing Texas is going to hurt. Expect malicious prosecution of Elon Musk to be a top priority, as well as intransigence on keeping border security agreements Texas previously made with the Trump Administration, and expect the incoming Democrat attorney general to drop all lawsuits over anything touching on Democrat financial backers like Soros and Singham, far-left NGOs, voting fraud or subsidies for illegal aliens.

If there’s a silver lining, the size of the victory will likely embolden the Democrats worse impulses. “See, we should have been running socialists and jihadists all along!” It’s the DSA’s and Hasan Piker’s party now. And Trump Derangement Syndrome is the party’s real point of unification. Expect them to immediately try to impeach Trump again, and wage a full scale social justice culture war, because they won’t be able to help themselves.

And Republicans have a chance to bounce back in two years. There are no lost causes in American politics, because there are no won causes.

Possibly more later, if I feel up to it.

Posted in Austin, Democrats, Jihad, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 20 Comments

Election Day! Go Vote! (Plus Mini Election Roundup)

Posted on November 3, 2026 by Lawrence Person

Election Day is finally here! Get out and vote if you haven’t already!

And now a super-brief election news roundup, since I’m slammed right now:

  • Early trends show Republicans areas turning out at near-2024 levels.
  • In Michigan, Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens, the woman jihadist scumbag Abdul El-Sayed defeated in the primary, just endorsed Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers over him.
  • And she’s not the only one! There’s some polling place interviews that suggest those defections are having an effect, and that black voters never warmed to El-Sayed and are tired of being taken for granted.
  • Last poll shows Susan Collins up by 1.2% in Maine, by the same polling company that showed her down by six in the last race that she ended up winning by eight.
  • I was going to scan in some election flyers, but I don’t have time. I got two from August Pfluger, my congressman come January 3rd thanks to redistricting. I should check with him to see if he needs staffing for a north Austin office. Believe it or not, I actually got two flyers from Talarico. I doubt the “Paxton is dirty and cost taxpayers money” one moves the needle, but the other declares “James Talarico has a plan to address the maternal mortality crisis,” and the back makes it clear it’s pitched at black women. Mail-dropping flyers to eeruone, including Republicans, may be a low percentage move, but if you have the money the Talarico campaign has, it’s not the worst play, especially if you’re trying to appeal to women, especially black women bitter over Jasmine Crockett’s defeat. But if black women are your audience, why mail it to me? Finally, I got a flyer from Ted Brown, calling to abolish the IRS. Ballotpedia tells me he’s the Libertarian senate candidate this year, information to be found nowhere on the flyer itself. This does not exactly speak to keen attention to detail…
  • “Bored Of Having A Good State, Texas Considers Voting Democrat.

That’s all I have time for. Go vote!

Posted in Austin, Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Talarico Staffers Confirm His Moderation Is Fake

Posted on November 2, 2026 by Lawrence Person

After yesterday’s post, I thought I was finally done posting about James Talarico. But no! The James O’Keefe Media Group just dropped a hidden video filmed in my neck of the woods, and it reveals that his staffers know his entire moderate stance is a sham:

“James [Talarico], he’s not going middle.”

“He’s [Talarico] definitely going to play the middle ground because he’s in Texas. but he is a lot more progressive on it [abortion].”

“Don’t put too much stock into border security comments…“He [Talarico] and I have spoken about these issues.”

“He [Talarico] probably said that to try to make himself appear more centrist. He’s very liberal…but we’ve got to get elected, so we can do something.”

Texas U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico’s girlfriend, Brianna Menard, was identified by her father, Matt Menard, during an undercover conversation in which he and Williamson County Democratic Chair Kim Collins Gilby separately cast doubt on Talarico’s recent moderate messaging on border security, immigration, and transgender surgeries for minors.

Menard, who claims to communicate with Talarico weekly and has personally discussed immigration policies with Talarico. Insisting James Talarico remains a progressive, opposes ICE’s immigration enforcement tactics, and supports a pathway to citizenship for everyone.

Democrat believes in illegal alien amnesty! Drink!

Menard also warns against putting too much stock in Talarico’s public border security remarks.

Meanwhile, Collins Gilby suggests Talarico’s CNN town hall comments on transgender surgeries for minors were an attempt to appear more centrist to Texas voters, arguing that Democrats must first win elections to advance their priorities.

Inside Travis County Democratic Headquarters, regional organizer Andhi Beltran Garcia mentions that James Talarico is portraying himself as a moderate on issues like abortion to appeal to Texas voters while privately holding more progressive positions.

In short, Talarico still believes in every bit of social justice lunacy he was spouting off in 2020, wants to amnesty the huge wave of illegal aliens President Autopen let flood across the border, and he’s just lying about what he believes to get elected.

Just like all of us knew.

(Hat tip: Williamson County Republican Party chair Michelle Evans.)

Posted in Austin, Border Control, Democrats, Elections, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, video | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Pre-Election Talafreako Roundup

Posted on November 1, 2026 by Lawrence Person

This seemingly eternal election season is finally stumbling to a finish, so our last chance to take our shots at the walking freakshow that is James Talarico is drawing to a close. So let’s pull out those rotten tomatoes:

  • Everyone was wondering what sort of freak James Talarico, and evidently he’s the kind of freak that signs up for Fetishes and Group Sex on Fling.com right before he starts teaching sixth graders.

    An email address that James Talarico’s attorneys confirmed belonged to and was at one time used by the Texas Democratic U.S. Senate candidate appears in a database search result associated with the adult dating website Fling.com’s 2011 data breach. A Fling.com account was created with Talarico’s email address just before Talarico began teaching sixth graders.

    The result lists the username “mohawk787” and an account creation timestamp of December 26, 2010, at 20:56:49. The profile’s interests field lists “FETISH,” “GROUPSEX,” “SEXUAL RELATIONS,” “ONLINE FLIRTING,” and “OTHER.”

    His lawyers claim he was “hacked,” but why would anyone care about an unknown Talarico in 2011, long before he ever ran for office?

  • Yet another Talarico law busted. “NY Times Exposes Talarico’s Fake Story About Overcrowded Classrooms.”

    James Talarico has a compelling story about teaching classrooms with 45 students during a two-year stint as a Teach For America educator, but even the New York Times is poking holes in it.

    “When I entered the classroom, the Texas Legislature had just gutted the public education budget by $5 billion — so I had 45 kids in one classroom,” Talarico claims on his website. “There weren’t enough desks for everyone, so some of my students sat on the air conditioning unit.”

    “In the richest country on the planet, I knew that was unacceptable,” he says.

    It is a compelling claim – Republicans cut public education funding so these students suffer. Talarico certainly thinks it will resonate with voters, which is why he keeps repeating it.

    “At one point, I had 45 students in one classroom,” he said. “There weren’t enough desks for all those kids, so I had students sitting on the air-conditioning unit in the wealthiest country in human history — in the 21st century, children sitting on the air-conditioning unit.”

    But the NY Times says the story may not be true.

    The Times reported:

    Documents from the Texas Education Agency indicate that the most students ever assigned to a class period that Mr. Talarico taught was 30, with most of his classes ranging in size from 22 to 27 students. In the interviews with Mr. Talarico’s former students and colleagues, they recalled classrooms where every desk was occupied, but not crowding to the point where students were sitting on air-conditioners.

  • Little did I know that when I put up yesterday’s post that creator Tetsuo SI had already put up a video slamming Talarico:

  • Very latest poll has Paxton up over Talarico. Don’t get cocky. But also don’t get black-pilled. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

    • It all comes down to turnout…

    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

    “America Innovates, Europe Regulates”

    Posted on October 31, 2026 by Lawrence Person

    Finally, a suitable use for AI-generated videos: Making fun of the EU choosing regulation over innovation.

    “We formed a committee.”

    “Please accept all cookies.”

    This is the way the EU ends
    This is the way the EU ends
    This is the way the EU ends
    Not with a bang, but with a committee

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    Posted in Regulation, Technology, Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

    LinkSwarm For October 30, 2026

    Posted on October 30, 2026 by Lawrence Person

    Happy Halloween Eve! Between finishing up a Lame Excuse Books catalog and getting ready for Halloween, time for the LinkSwarm has been squeezed this week, but I think we’ll muddle through. And I’m still dealing with discontents from the new template (Twenty Ten) necessitated by the PHP upgrade. My first attempt to comment out the PHP block for automatically putting the author bio below posts result in an error, so I haven’t made any progress on that front. And I’m not wild about the italics for blockquotes.

    Crypto hacked, Ukraine Storm Shadows a bunch of Russian petrochemical and semiconductor plants, more illegal alien voting fraud, another Swalwell-related raid, and an adorable canine jailbreak artist.

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • This may be a big deal. “Binance Suspends Transactions After It Is Targeted in Biggest-Ever Cyber Heist. The crypto exchange says users will be made whole. But hackers made off with an estimated $6.3 billion.”

    Binance suspended transactions Thursday as the exchange investigates the biggest cyber heist in history.

    “It does look like a hack on Binance,” Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s founder, said in a post on the social-media platform X. “User funds are safe.”

    Binance said late Thursday that the hack totaled around $6.3 billion.

    Zhao, who no longer leads the world’s biggest crypto exchange but remains its largest shareholder, added that stablecoin providers Tether and Circle had moved quickly to freeze some $1.7 billion in stolen assets. Binance later revised that number to $3 billion across several different assets.

    Cybersecurity research firms TRM Labs and Pangolin Intelligence said the heist appears to have been conducted by North Korea’s TraderTraitor hacking group, which has been behind many of the largest crypto hacks in recent memory. “This was absolutely North Korea,” said Nick Carlsen, a senior investigator on the Global Investigations team at TRM, who told the Journal he worked with Pangolin Intelligence to correlate hackers’ blockchain activity with information they gathered on other DPRK-linked attacks.

    Binance said it has suspended all deposits and withdrawals as its team conducts security checks, freezes funds and works with law enforcement.

    This is evidently not just the biggest crypto heist, but the biggest heist of all time by value, period.

    Somehow a whole lot of that “super secure” crypto seems to disappear every year, making it seem less secure than boring old fiat currency. And it may not be hardened enough to survive the AI era. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Days before midterms, ICE and DOJ announce new wave of noncitizen voting arrests With the midterms days away, federal officials are arresting and charging noncitizens accused of illegally registering and voting. DHS says it’s checking about 300,000 more cases against state voter rolls. That puts noncitizen voting at the center of the election-integrity debate going into Election Day.”

    The Trump administration continues to investigate and arrest illegal immigrants accused of unlawfully registering to vote or voting in American elections.

    Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced on Thursday that it had arrested dozens of illegal immigrants for alleged voter fraud, including many accused of actually casting a ballot illegally.

    “These arrests, carried out in coordination with our federal, state and local law enforcement partners, are the result of careful, methodical investigations,” acting ICE Director David Venturella said in a press release. “American elections must be conducted in accordance with the law, and allegations of illegal voting deserve our undivided attention. When the facts support criminal charges, we pursue them. Every eligible voter deserves an election process that follows the law.”

    ICE provided 18 examples of illegal immigrants it has arrested on voter fraud charges, including many who not only voted illegally but also have been arrested for other crimes as well.

    Aden Hassan Aden, an illegal immigrant from Somalia, allegedly voted in the 2020 federal election and has convictions for domestic violence, drug possession, and larceny. Mai Tran, an illegal immigrant from Vietnam, allegedly voted in the 2024 federal election and, according to ICE, has been convicted of fraud, drug possession offenses, burglary, larceny, and illegal use of credit cards.

    Phath Vorn, an illegal immigrant from Cambodia, is accused of voting in the 1992 federal election and again, according to ICE, has convictions for assault with intent to murder, assault with a dangerous weapon, and possession of a weapon.

  • “El-Sayed courted Muslim centers where clerics portrayed U.S as Satan, sought ‘revenge’ on Zionists.” Of course he did. He’s a jihadi scumbag, and no one should be remotely surprised at revelations he palled around with other jihadi scumbags any more.
  • “Novokuybyshevsk Oil Refinery Attacked By Drones!”
  • “New Video of Big Storm Shadow Strike on Proton Plant in Oryol.”
  • “Satellite Imagery of Proton Plant After Storm Shadow Strike in Oryol: Multiple Impacts Confirmed.” Proton manufactures semiconductors and silicon wafers. And Google’s AI results suggest those are 100mm wafers, which was state of the art…in 1979.
  • “Azot Chemical Plant in Tula Hit By Drones!” “Russia’s Azot chemical plant in Novomoskovsk, Tula region, got hit and caught fire after a drone strike. It’s one of Russia’s biggest fertilizer producers. Ukrainian intelligence says it also supplied nitric acid to a factory making explosives for Russia’s war machine. Judging by the footage, the AM-70 ammonia production unit appears to be on fire.”
  • “Another Storm Shadow Strike! On Energia Plant (Makes Chemicals for Missiles).”
  • “Ukrainian Drones Attack Omsk Ozon Warehouse & Petrochemical Plant.”
  • “Ukraine Destroys & Damages 60 Russian Trucks in One Night at Parking Lot in Donetsk!”
  • “Big HIMARS Strike on Russian Command Post During Long Operation… This was near the Kupiansk axis.”
  • “Two Su-34 Destroyed At Marinovka Air Base.”
  • And a Su-57 just caught fire and burned itself out.
  • “Pittsburgh welfare supervisor allegedly stole EBT cards, traded food stamps for crack.”

    Sheila McDonald, 46, of Pittsburgh, worked at the Lehigh County Assistance Office in Allentown, where she was responsible for safeguarding EBT cards.

    Prosecutors accuse her of taking 48 of the cards and carrying out more than 270 unauthorized transactions that drained $20,558.61 in benefits …

    An unidentified man told investigators he repeatedly received EBT cards and their PINs from McDonald as payment for crack cocaine, authorities said.

    He suspected McDonald had gotten the cards through her work at the welfare office, authorities said.

    Every week a new instance of fraud pops up because the federal government is finally looking for welfare fraud. Under President Autopen, they weren’t, mainly because so much of the fraud was flowing into Democrat pockets.

  • It begins. “Somali-born superintendent says Maine schools should change policy on dogs because they are impure.”

    Abdullahi Ahmed, the Somali-born assistant superintendent for student, family and community partnerships at Portland Public Schools, proposed changes to the district’s policy on dogs and other animals, citing Islamic beliefs about ‘ritual purity.’

    I have a better idea: Let’s hand your ass a pink slip and change our policies on letting unassimilated Muslims immigrate to the United States.

  • “Mexican Illegal Faces Charges After Beheading Iwo Jima Statue.

    Miguel Alonso Maldonado Sorianom, illegal migrant from Mexico residing in the US, has been officially charged after battering a replica of the Iwo Jima flag-raising statue near the Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia. One of the figures on the statue was beheaded before police apprehended the man.

    Prince William County Circuit Court Chief Judge Petula Metzler granted Soriano a $2,500 secured bond. Conditions include GPS monitoring, alcohol/drug testing, remaining in Virginia, and completing a mental health evaluation (plus any recommended treatment). A preliminary hearing is set for January.

    However, ICE has lodged a retainer, and if the suspect posts bond they plan to take him into custody. Meaning, Soriano will not be escaping with a slap on the wrist. A General District Court judge initially tried to grant the migrant cashless bail until prosecutors objected (another example of the two tier legal system which has long given illegal migrants special treatment).

    Jail him and deport him. Then deport any of his illegal alien family and friends.

  • “Green cards for sale: Feds bust another sham-marriage ring as prices hit $100,000 per arrangement.”

    Federal prosecutors in Boston on Wednesday charged six people with running an alleged decade-long sham-marriage ring, with illegal immigrants purportedly paying between $38,000 to $40,000 per wedding to gain legal status.

    Jennifer Gonzalez, 43, of Fall River, Mass., allegedly ran the business, collecting money from illegal immigrants to arrange sham marriages so they could obtain immigration status, the U.S. District Attorney’s Office for Massachusetts announced this week. Court documents allege that Gonzalez paid four U.S. citizens – Erica Daniels, 29; Chreise Alejandro, 39; Jessica Tavares, 31; and Jaylin Hill, 26 – to marry one or more illegal immigrant “customers.” Amara Pugh, 31, another U.S. citizen, allegedly worked as the “secretary” for the sham-marriage business, federal officials said. Those arrested have not entered pleas, yet.

  • “Montana Democrat Claims Senator Offered Her a Job to Drop Out of the Race — in Violation of State Law.”

    Alani Bankhead, a Montana Democrat running for the U.S. Senate, says a Democratic senator offered her a job with the Democratic National Committee if she agreed to drop out of the upcoming midterm election and cede the field to an independent candidate who the party believes has a better chance of besting Republican Kurt Alme.

    If the exchange occurred as Bankhead described, the lawmaker responsible would be guilty of violating state law.

    The “independent” the DNC is “allegedly” pressuring Bankhead to back is Seth Bodnar. We previously covered Bodnar’s toes to Democrats here.

  • “FBI raids Beverly Hills mansion as part of Eric Swalwell investigation.”

    Federal authorities raided a California mansion belonging to billionaire Stephen Cloobeck on Tuesday morning, Fox News has learned.

    The FBI targeted Cloobeck’s Beverly Hills mansion in connection with an investigation into disgraced former Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif. Swalwell resigned from Congress and withdrew from the California gubernatorial race earlier this year after facing multiple accusations of sexual misconduct.

    Snip.

    The raid was linked to a sex worker reportedly connected to the investigation.

    Cloobeck is a longtime supporter of Swalwell’s political campaigns.

    Also this tidbit: “Cloobeck was arrested earlier this year in an unrelated case, in which he faced charges of attempting to influence witnesses in a criminal case against his fiancée.” Most curious.

  • Haiti overrun with Hiatians. “Haitian officials are now complaining they’re ‘OVERWHELMED’ by the amount of Haitian migrants the United States is returning to their country.” Which is some 450 of them. “Now imagine 20,000 Haitians plopped in small-town Ohio and Pennsylvania!”
  • Serbia’s long-running pro-Russian strongman Aleksandar Vucic has been ousted by a youth-backed “Students’ List” party. When last we checked on Vucic, he was attending a Clinton Global Initiative meeting.
  • Microsoft offers buyouts to 60,000 of its employees.

    Job cuts and downsizing announcements across corporate America have gained momentum, a trend we featured in a report last week titled “Tech Layoffs Surge As Corporate America’s AI Blitz Raises Fears The Worst Is Yet To Come.”

    Days later, Bloomberg reports that Microsoft will offer voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 employees while spending heavily on artificial intelligence and data center expansion.

    “This offer gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now with support,” Chief People Officer Amy Coleman wrote in a memo earlier today.

    The memo cited by the outlet says workers on selected units in the US, Canada, India, and the UK at the vice president level and below will be eligible for the voluntary buyouts.

    Some employees in data centers, sales, and marketing are excluded. Benefits will match a standard severance package, according to the report.

    Bloomberg data shows Microsoft employed 223,000 people at the end of June and has cut thousands of jobs in recent years. The Big Tech firm’s total workforce began to plateau in 2022.

    The cynical part of me wants to guess that 60,000 is the number of non-Indian employees they have left. Given how much Microsoft’s own devs complained about Copilot being inferior to other AI coding offerings, it looks like they’re going all-in on a “using AI is better than employing people” strategy, and I suspect that will be their undoing. Letting that much institutional memory walk out the door, especially for a company whose products are infamously kludgy, seems like a recipe for disaster.

  • High profile companies drop SPLC screening. Better late than never, I guess.

    Major companies have finally stopped using the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate groups” list to decide who qualifies for corporate giving programs.

    1792 Exchange has asked companies to drop SPLC since the DOJ finally exposed the “anti-hate” group as a fraud. Officials alleged SPLC funneled $3 million to white hate groups.

    One boss faces accusations of funneling $1.2 million to her informant lover in a neo-Nazi group.

    I mean, SPLC wouldn’t exist without hate!

    1792 Exchange announced these nine companies removed the SPLC filter:

    • BlackRock
    • Salesforce
    • Mastercard
    • Texas Instruments
    • AT&T
    • NVIDIA
    • Microsoft
    • American Express
    • DoorDash

    This is good news for freedom, and bad news for those running fake racism scams. And given BlackRock’s agreement to back away from their previous ESG stance, they seem like a company repenting of their woke madness.

  • Tesla just got approved for big tax breaks on a solar factory in Fort Bend.

    Tesla’s proposed $10 billion “Project Crystal Sun” solar factory in Texas could get up to 35 years of local tax breaks on its equipment, according to the four agreements Fort Bend County commissioners approved on Thursday.

    “Project Crystal Sun”sounds like the third installment in a science fiction video game franchise.

    The vote was 4-0. And Tesla still hasn’t committed to building the plant in Texas.

    Tesla applied for a 10-year school property tax limitation under the state’s JETI program, through Lamar CISD and the Texas Comptroller. The plan is a vertically integrated solar plant near Richmond, southwest of Houston, that would make everything from silicon ingots to finished modules, with commercial production targeted for Q1 2029.

    Lamar CISD approved the school tax piece in September. The county was next.

    On October 22, the commissioners court approved items 25A to 25D on its agenda: a Chapter 312 tax abatement, a Chapter 381 incentive agreement, a foreign trade zone agreement with a payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT), and a “true up” PILOT agreement. Interim County Judge Daniel Wong abstained because his engineering firm has worked with Tesla.

    Each agreement covers a different slice of Tesla’s tax bill, and together they run for decades.

    The Chapter 312 agreement abates 100% of county property taxes on Tesla’s equipment and other tangible personal property at the plant for 10 tax years. The clock starts in tax year 2029 by default, but Tesla can move it to the first year after production starts, as late as 2031 without needing the county’s approval.

    Tesla’s JETI application splits the $10.1 billion into $1.52 billion of real property and $8.6 billion of personal property, mostly production equipment.

    Land and buildings aren’t part of the deal.

    It’s not a done deal, but just think if California hadn’t locked down so hard, and Democrats didn’t suffer from Musk Derangement Syndrome, you’d have to think California would have been a possibility to locate a solar plant…

  • Another conviction for that thing that never happens. “Five Noncitizens Charged With Illegally Voting in South Texas. The nationals from Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, and Nigeria face years in prison and steep fines for charges of unlawful voting, as well as fraud.”

    Five noncitizens, including one illegal alien, have been charged in the Southern District of Texas for “unlawfully voting in federal elections, lying on immigration documents, or falsely claiming American citizenship.”

    According to the announcement, 33-year-old Trinidad and Tobago native Ali Khan was charged with “voting by an alien in a federal election” for illegally voting in 2024. Khan had been illegally residing in La Porte near Houston prior to his arrest. It is unclear when Khan first entered the United States, though the announcement reports that he had been a DACA recipient.

    The four legally present noncitizens charged were 61-year-old Mohammed Omar Hassan of Nigeria, 29-year-old Diego Benavides Rodriguez, 51-year-old Jose Vasquez-Mendoza, and 37-year-old Karen Hinojosa-Martinez. Rodriguez, Vasquez-Mendoza, and Hinojosa-Martinez are all citizens of Mexico residing in South Texas.

    Better get this one out of the way now because, knowing Democrats, we’re going to be dealing with hundreds of much larger voting fraud cases next week…

  • “At Least 64 Dead After Two High-Speed Trains Collide In Spain.” “The death toll from this morning’s collision between two high-speed trains south of Madrid has risen to 64, Bloomberg reports, placing it among Spain’s deadliest rail disasters. For context, the 2013 Santiago de Compostela derailment killed 80 people.” I’m beginning to think that safety of high speed rail has been oversold…
  • Members of liberal “forever cruise to escape Trump” get stranded in Cambodia due to rising fuel costs.” Time to pull out this classic:

  • Illegal alien woman brings a knife to a gun fight, gets arrested.
  • Patrick Stewart, RIP. The problem with writing a proper memorial is that he was great in everything he was in, and he was in so much.
  • Stolen from Sarah Hoyt:

  • James May drives the new Slate electric pickup truck. He likes the basic-ness of it, but that bed is so short it’s hard to see it meeting a lot of American use cases. And the breaking system sounds bit strange.
  • Nobody wants to buy The Stahl House. My theory is that the wealth tax proposal has spooked all the people who might have enough money to buy it…
  • All of my Halloween posts on my other blog can be found here.
  • “Millions Of 12-Foot-Tall Lawn Skeletons Discovered On Dem Voter Rolls.”
  • “Abdul El-Sayed Promises To Any Jews Who Vote for Him That He’ll Kill Them Last.”
  • “DHS Agents Seize Ilhan Omar’s Phone But Decide To Let Her Keep Pager.”
  • “Voter Turnout In Minnesota Expected To Be Over 130%.”
  • “After Late-Night Ballot Drop, Joe Biden Wins Brazilian Presidency With 81 Million Votes.”
  • “Cowboys Fans Concerned Another Loss Could Make It Difficult For Team To Choke In Playoffs.”
  • Escape artist:

    • I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





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    Hinojosa: Give Me All Communication Between Musk And Abbott. Appeals Court: LOL, No

    Posted on October 29, 2026 by Lawrence Person

    Given all the attention paid to the Texas senate race, you could be forgiven for forgetting that Texas also has a gubernatorial race this year, with Republican incumbent Greg Abbott expected to handily throttle his little-known Democrat challenger, state rep Gina Hinojosa, en route to Abbott’s record-breaking fourth term election as governor. But while she’s still theoretically in election contention, and a state rep, Hinojosa decided that would be a great time to demand all the communication between Elon Musk and Abbott, because that’s a totally normal request and not an outburst of far left Musk Derangement Syndrome.

    Appeals court: LOL. No.

    The Fifteenth Court of Appeals has blocked a district court ruling that would have granted Democrat gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa access to communications between Gov. Greg Abbott and Elon Musk.

    Travis County District Judge Catherine Mauzy, a Democrat, had ordered the governor’s office to allow Hinojosa to read more than 1,300 pages of unredacted communications between Abbott and Musk.

    Bloomberg Law reported that Mauzy donated $500 to Hinojosa on June 24 for her race against Abbott, and more than $700 to Hinojosa’s campaign for the Texas House in 2016.

    Hinojosa claimed her request was for transparency: “The people have the right to transparency, and that’s why I’m continuing to fight for the documents between Elon Musk and Greg Abbott.”

    However, Mauzy’s order did not give Hinojosa permission to share confidential information with the public.

    Instead, she argued that Texas law gives lawmakers the power to inspect government records. Hinojosa is currently a sitting state representative whose term expires in January.

    The 1,300 pages of communications allegedly involve Musk’s Texas business interests, school tax breaks, broadband infrastructure, and state grants.

    According to KVUE, court documents argue that Hinojosa, whose term ends January 12, 2027, “is suffering present, continuing, imminent injury” because she has not been granted access to the requested communications between Abbott and Musk.

    Abbott’s office stated that the district court’s order would have allowed Hinojosa to use her office to violate state public records laws.

    “This was a sham lawsuit in a rigged district court,” said the governor’s press secretary Andrew Mahaleris. “The trial court judge refused to follow the law and rubber-stamped an illegal fishing expedition into the Governor’s Office. The appeals court rightly froze this abuse of process.”

    Though Hinojosa’s gambit was thwarted, I can’t help thinking there’s a grand bargain to be made here. Elon Musk can share his communication with all Republican office holders…as long as George Soros, Neville Roy Singham and all their minions do the same for all Democrat office holders.

    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments