Posts Tagged ‘Tim Walz’

LinkSwarm For August 9, 2024

Friday, August 9th, 2024

There’s too damn much going on in the world right now! Compiling the LinkSwarm used to be more like hunting and gathering, but the last few weeks have been like drinking from the firehose.

The real unemployment rate is crushing ordinary Americans, another Trump assassin thwarted, Maricopa cues up illegal alien voter fraud again, Tim Walz’s own National Guard unit accuses him of stolen valor, Ukraine captures a chunk of Russia, Google is declared a monopoly, a global censorship organization immediately folds at the first sign of scrutiny, the leader of Bangladesh flees, and California fines a business for daring to fly Old Glory.

It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Stephen Green is shocked at the real unemployment rate.

    There are lies, damned lies, and government statistics — and maybe none is more damnable than the official unemployment rate which is half the actual rate, according to Rasmussen. Worse, the number of Americans who are neither retired nor employed is more than four times higher than July’s official rate of 4.3%.

    I’ve been writing for months now in quick-hit Instapundit items that this country has been in a jobs recession since the COVID lockdowns and, thanks to Bidenomics, never recovered from. Well, the latest Rasmussen unemployment survey has the numbers.

    The report is paywalled, but I pay the subscription fee (and take the tax write-off) so you don’t have to if you ever wondered where some of your VIP membership dollars wind up.

    Rasmussen surveyed nearly 9,000 American adults and found that in July the percentage of Americans who are unemployed and looking for work — this is the number that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) should report each month — was 8.4%. The BLS reported a rosy 4.3% unemployment rate last month, up from June’s equally imaginary 4.1%.

    From there, things only get worse. Because under Bidenomics, of course, they do.

    One in four adult Americans is retired, which is nice for them. Fifteen percent say they’re entrepreneurs (that can be anything from driving an Uber to launching a Silicon Valley startup), and just under 30% are employed by a private company.

    Nearly one in 10 work for the government at one level or another. Those workers are supported entirely by tax dollars without producing any material wealth. Every government employee involved in regulation makes it harder for the rest of us to do so.

    If you’ve been keeping track of these numbers in your head, you might notice they don’t add up to anything close to 100%. About three percent of adults surveyed answered “not sure” about their employment situation, the kind of answer that I assume involves smoking weed. The remaining 9.7% said they were unemployed but not looking — i.e., “Not in Workforce.”

    That means the percentage of Americans who could be working and perhaps would really like to be working but either can’t find work or have given up finding work is 18.1%. That’s more than four times the official unemployment rate.

  • Another week, another assassination attempt against Donald Trump.

    An alleged Iranian agent plotted to hire hitmen to assassinate US government officials — including possibly former President Donald Trump, according to sources and a federal criminal complaint.

    Pakistani national Asif Merchant, 46, is accused of planning political assassinations in New York City in August or early September, and paid $5,000 in advances to men he believed to be contract killers, according to US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace.

    “The Iranian indicted in Eastern District today is 100% an agent of the Iranian government,” a law enforcement source told The Post.

    The plot was allegedly in retaliation to the 2020 Trump-ordered killing of prominent Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani, US Attorney General Merrick Garland confirmed Tuesday.

    Trump has been a known target of previous Iranian-backed assassination plots, and the feds believe he may have been one of Merchant’s targets, law enforcement sources told The Post. But, the accused terrorist never divulged the name of who he planned to kill during his meetings with undercover agents — instead cryptically saying only that the target would have “a lot of security.”

  • Last week’s plea bargain deal to let 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and accomplices Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi avoid the death penalty broke a little late to include in the last LinkSwarm, but defense secretary Lloyd Austin has nixed the deal.
  • The Harris bubble is all magical thinking.

    Although the last few weeks have had their alarming aspects – chief among which was the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13, the odds-on favorite candidate for president – they have also had their amusing moments.

    In the latter category, I place the sudden queen-for-a-day-like coronation of Kamala Harris.

    True, that coronation was in the nature of an anti-democratic semi-soft-coup (or anti-democratic “inversion of a coup”). Biden and his handlers, right up until the morning of July 21, were insisting that he was not dropping out, that he was “in it to win,” etc. But someone made him an offer he couldn’t refuse and out he went.

    Here’s the amusing bit. Until the moment Biden was chased out of the race, Kamala Harris functioned primarily as political life insurance. “You might not like me,” Biden communicated, “but if I go, you’re stuck with her.”

    Biden’s polls were in the toilet and, following his catastrophic debate with Donald Trump, were circling the drain, poised for oblivion. But Kamala’s polls were even worse. She was cordially disliked by—well, by everyone. Her staff, her colleagues, but above all, by voters. In the 2020 race, she got no delegates: none, zero, zip. She dropped out of the race for president but was then tapped to be VP only because this half Indian, half Jamaican woman was swarthy enough to pass as black and Biden had promised to select a black female as a running mate. Kamala truly is, as Biden himself acknowledged recently, a DEI vice president.

    And sure enough, Kamala was every bit the disaster people predicted she would be. As a matter of clinical interest, she proved that senility is not the only cause of supreme rhetorical incoherence. Some people, and she is one, come by it naturally. Her tenure as vice president is littered with examples, and she provided another doozy just a couple of days ago when she attempted to comment on the prisoner exchange with Russia.

    It’s painful, as are all the many video clips of Harris angrily denouncing people who say “Merry Christmas,” of her presiding as “border czar” over the disaster of our non-existent southern border, of her outlining how she wants to give Medicare, as well as the franchise, to all illegal immigrants, and how she wants to develop a national data base of gun owners so that she can confiscate firearms by force.

    Can such a person win the presidency? No.

    Then, how can we explain the sudden efflorescence of Harrismania? Democrats are wetting themselves with glee over their sudden fundraising windfalls ($200 million in a week, it is said) and sudden surge in the polls. New York magazine just beclowned itself with a cover showing Kamala sitting on top of the world with Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and even Joe Biden dancing and whooping it up below. “Welcome to Kamalot,” we read: “In a matter of days, the Democratic Party discovered its future was actually in the White House all along.”

    Was it? Again, the answer is no. It is a temporary sugar high caused partly by the feeling of liberation following the sudden release from Joe Biden, partly by the slobbering media jumping all over the reinvention of Kamala like dogs vibrating over a bitch in estrus. The feeling of intoxication may linger through the Democratic convention, but there are already signs that it is fading. I think James Piereson is correct. Kamala’s position now is akin to that of Michael Dukakis (remember him?) in 1988.

    Dukakis was way ahead of George Bush in the summer of 1988. Then it all unraveled.

  • The puppeteers have stopped pretending. “Obamaites Take Over Team Kamala.”

    Ho hum, nothing to see here, just another cycle in which Barack Obama runs for president. What is this, five in a row now?

    In this case, though, we may have to give Kamala Harris a pass. It’s not as if she developed a team of campaign experts on her own. Or that they’d stick around for long if she did (via Memeorandum):

    Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris hired a battery of new senior advisers to her campaign this week, moving swiftly to replace lifetime loyalists of President Biden with Democratic campaign veterans, including multiple leaders of Barack Obama’s presidential bids, according to people briefed on the campaign shifts.

    David Plouffe, a top strategist on both of Obama’s presidential campaigns, joins Harris as senior adviser for strategy and the states focused on winning the electoral college. Stephanie Cutter, the deputy campaign manager for Obama’s reelection who has been working in recent months with Harris, is the new senior adviser for strategy messaging. Mitch Stewart, a grass-roots organizing strategist behind both Obama wins, will become the senior adviser for battleground states. David Binder, who led Obama’s public opinion research operation and previously worked for Harris, will expand his role on the Harris campaign to lead the opinion research operation.

    All of the new hires will report to campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, another veteran of Obama’s two campaigns. She managed Biden’s 2020 campaign and built his 2024 operation from the White House before moving to Wilmington, Del., this year. Harris took control of Biden’s campaign as soon as Biden announced he would not seek reelection, an operation consisting of more than 1,300 employees and more than 130 offices. She asked O’Malley Dillon to remain in charge.

    O’Malley Dillon tried gaslighting this right off the bat, although the Washington Post doesn’t put it that way. “This team is a reflection of the vice president,” she declared, but the Post’s reporting makes it abundantly clear that it reflects Obama rather than Harris. Harris’ existing staffers will remain in place, but the reporting strongly suggests that they will be eclipsed by people who [checks notes] know how to get to Iowa in a primary cycle.

    On one hand, this is smart politics, especially given Harris’ record of abysmal performance on the campaign trail. Until now, Harris has only faced one significant competitive election against a Republican, the AG race in California, which she almost lost while other Democrats won statewide races by double digits. Thanks to California’s jungle-primary system, she won her Senate seat against a fellow Democrat in the general election. She then failed to get to a single primary contest in 2020 after entering that primary cycle as one of the favorites, melting down in two debate exchanges with Tulsi Gabbard and utterly failing to inspire Democrat primary voters.

    If anyone needs an Obama rescue, it’s Kamala.

    Still. During most of Biden’s presidency, Obama’s team largely drove policy, especially in foreign affairs, and Biden’s clear cognitive decline made it appear that someone pulled the strings behind the scene — and Obama was the most likely suspect. Then Biden got humiliated in a debate he demanded and suddenly Obama became even more of a public puppeteer in forcing Biden to withdraw. And now practically his entire political team has taken over Team Kamala even more than they had with Team Biden.

    And not to be too conspiratorial about it, but how did we find out about this? In the oh-so-traditional Friday afternoon news dump.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Appeals Court Paves the Way for Illegals to Potentially Steal the Election in Arizona.”

    It seems like the Democrats’ rule of thumb is: if you can’t win, cheat.

    On Thursday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed itself and will now allow Arizonans to register to vote in federal races without having to prove citizenship.

    “It’s another dizzying swerve in the legal battle over a 2022 law that aims ultimately to reverse a portion of the National Voter Registration Act and require all Arizona voters to show proof of citizenship to register to vote,” reports USA Today. “The order reopens a path for potential voters who just two weeks ago were barred from using the state voter registration form to sign up to vote unless they could produce proof of U.S. citizenship. It comes with two months left before the Oct. 7 registration deadline for the high-stakes presidential election.”

    The order means people can again use the state-issued voter registration form even if they don’t produce proof of citizenship. Instead, they attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens, and are limited to voting in federal races only.

    In the first 10 days after the July 18 ruling that required the documentary proof, the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office said it had rejected 200 voter applications.

    On Thursday, the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office clarified the impact of the ruling.

    “Election officials may not reject voter registration applications submitted without DPOC, regardless of which form is used,” communications director Aaron Thacker said. DPOC is shorthand for documentary proof of citizenship.

    There is only one reason to allow Arizonans the ability to register to vote without proving citizenship: to let illegals vote. That’s why Joe Biden opened up the border, and that’s why the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed itself.

    (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • Result? Lawsuit.

    America First Legal (AFL) has filed a lawsuit against Maricopa County, Arizona recorder Stephen Richer for failing to remove non-citizens from county voter rolls.

    On Monday the legal organization founded by former senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller sued Richer and Maricopa County on behalf of the Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona and a registered voter and naturalized citizen, for allegedly refusing to verify the citizenship of voters registered in the county, Just the News reports.

    On July 16, AFL sent letters to all 15 Arizona counties demanding that election officials follow state and federal law by ensuring that non-citizens were unable to vote, and warned of legal action if they didn’t by the following week.

    America First Legal (AFL) has filed a lawsuit against Maricopa County, Arizona recorder Stephen Richer for failing to remove non-citizens from county voter rolls.

    On Monday the legal organization founded by former senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller sued Richer and Maricopa County on behalf of the Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona and a registered voter and naturalized citizen, for allegedly refusing to verify the citizenship of voters registered in the county, Just the News reports.

    On July 16, AFL sent letters to all 15 Arizona counties demanding that election officials follow state and federal law by ensuring that non-citizens were unable to vote, and warned of legal action if they didn’t by the following week.

    Richer replied via his legal counsel, claiming that he’s following the law by verifying the citizenship of voters – however AFL says he’s lying, as voter rolls have had an increase in the number of registered voters without confirmed citizenship under his watch, and that databases have not been accessed which would verify voters’ citizenship.

  • CNN: “Do you think Kamala Harris is black?” Actual black people in a barbershop: “Nope.” CNN: “You black people have no idea what you’re talking about.”
  • Democrats go searching for Republican praise for Harris and end up committing self-parody. It’s like when National Parks created posters based on their worst Yelp reviews.
  • Michael Malice calls Harris “America’s Wine Mom”:

  • “Tim Walz’s first order as Minn governor was to create DEI council, make himself the chair.

    Tim Walz’s first executive order as the Democratic governor of Minnesota governor was establishing a diversity, equity and inclusion council for all of the state government’s actions and designated himself as the chair. On Tuesday, Waltz was selected to be Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate in the 2024 presidential election.

    The Democratic Vice Presidential nominee told The Associated Press in 2019 that the “One Minnesota Council on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity” would ensure the “lens of equity” for all state government businesses, including “recruiting; retaining and promoting state employees; state government contracting; and civic engagement.”

    “Walz told reporters Wednesday he’ll chair the council,” the AP said at the time, “patterned on a similar council formed by former Gov. Mark Dayton, but expand its scope to include geographic diversity and other considerations.” Walz said that the point of the council, per AP, was to “work to ensure that all Minnesotans have the opportunity to fully participate in the development of state policy. He says it will ensure that the ‘lens of equity’ is focused on everything the state does, whether it’s transportation projects or hiring.”

    He has spoken many times about the “privilege” he’s been given as a “white man.” “I understand the privilege I’ve been given as a white man,” he said during his leadership, saying that he was in office “not just to talk about the problem” of racial disparity “but the solve the problem.”

  • Walz’s Fellow Guardsmen Set the Record Straight on Veep Candidate’s Military Career: ‘He Bailed Out’.

    It was late in the spring of 2005 when Tom Behrends, a farmer in his mid 40s with three kids, got the call from his superiors: The Minnesota National Guard’s 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery was being sent to Iraq. Tim Walz, the unit’s command sergeant major, had just resigned to run for Congress. Behrends was in line to take his place.

    He’d need to talk with his family, Behrends told his bosses. He had a farm to run and his youngest child was still in elementary school. Because he wasn’t in the unit when it was activated, technically Behrends had to volunteer to go.

    But Behrends told National Review it was clear what he needed to do.

    “My first reaction was, I’m not going to let my soldiers down,” he said.

    Behrends ended up spending 17 difficult months in Iraq with the unit. Among the unit’s tasks was maintaining a key supply route, keeping it clear of explosives. Three of his soldiers were killed and dozens more were injured during the tour, he said.

    Although they were both first sergeants in the Minnesota Guard, Behrends said he didn’t really know much about Walz. They were in meetings together. “The only thing I knew about him is he talked too much, and he liked to hear himself talk,” Behrends said.

    When Democrats decide they need a veteran to help disguise their radical nature, they inevitable seem to pick a “blue falcon,” dating back at least as far as tapping John Kerry in 2004.

  • Stolen Valor: Tim Walz launched political career on false claim as combat veteran in the War on Terror.”

    The Tim Walz Stolen Valor story goes back to the very beginning of his political career. From the onset of his foray into national politics, Walz sold himself to the public and the media as a combat veteran of the Global War on Terror, masking the reality that he quit the military to run for office and avoid being deployed to Iraq.

    Thanks to some quality reporting, we know that the Minnesota governor — who yesterday officially joined the Kamala Harris campaign for President as its VP on the ticket — quit the military in 2005, after learning that his battalion was about to be sent to Iraq. Walz spent his entire career in the Army National Guard learning to lead people into battle, with training and his lone six month overseas deployment to Italy provided at U.S. taxpayer expense. He then retired when he learned he was going to be leading people into battle in Iraq, leaving Minnesota’s 125th Field Artillery Regiment high and dry for a career in politics.

    But that’s not what Tim Walz told the public when he decided to run for public office upon abruptly leaving the military.

    Just months after leaving his battalion to go to Iraq without him, he announced a run for Congress, and the dissembling about his service record began immediately.

    Instead of being honest about his early departure from the military, Walz told the media a much more heroic tale, one that was entirely fictitious.

    To this day there are Democrats who believe that Walz served in Iraq, when he never got closer than Italy.

  • More on the subject.
  • Boom:

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • “The Minnesota National Guard has disputed Governor Tim Walz’s military biography, saying that his claims of retiring at the rank of command sergeant major is untrue.”

    Minnesota National Guard spox Army Lieutenant Colonel Kristen Augé told Just the News that Walz, Kamala Harris’ vice presidential running mate, was demoted and did not retire as a command sergeant major as he has claimed for years – including on his official gubernatorial biography – as he failed to complete a 750-hour course in the Army’s Sergeants Major Academy, a mandatory course for E-9s, the Army’s highest enlisted rank.

    While Walz temporarily held the title of command sergeant major he “retired as a master sergeant in 2005 for benefit purposes because he did not complete additional coursework at the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy,” Army Lt. Col. Kristen Augé, the Minnesota National Guard’s State Public Affairs Officer, told Just the News.

    The statement reignited a controversy that began during his 2018 election for governor in which National Guardsman claimed on social media and in a paid ad that Walz declined to deploy to Iraq for combat duty in 2005 and forfeited his title of command sergeant major. Walz chose to run for Congress that year. -Just the News

    The governor’s biography, however, says that “Command Sergeant Major Walz” retired from the Minnesota National Guard in 2005. At the time he was serving as one of the highest ranking members of the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion.

    How is it that stolen valor and career embellishment are so endemic among Democratic office holders? Is it status anxiety, or the arrogance of the entitled? “It’s OK to lie about my record, because I deserve this!”

  • Ukraine has launched a substantial invasion of Kursk oblast in Russia. Update.
  • Ukraine successfully attacks oil depot 2,000km inside Russia with a drone.
  • Massive drone strike hits Morozovsk Airbase and and oil depot, and the ammo cookoff was evidently epic.
  • Ukrainian drones also finished off Russia’s Rostov-on-Don submarine.
  • FBI raids NY home of ex-UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter.

    Ex-UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter’s home in upstate New York was raided by the FBI as part of a federal investigation, Wednesday, officials said.

    An FBI spokeswoman confirmed to The Post that agents conducted a raid on the Delmar home as part of a federal investigation. She declined to comment further, citing the ongoing probe.

    Ritter, a convicted sex offender, told reporters outside his Delmar home after the raid that the warrant focused on potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the Times Union reported.

    He recently had his passport seized by the US Department of State as he tried to fly to Russia for a conference – a brouhaha he contended in the Russian propaganda site RT was a spiteful move against his pro-Russia stances.

    The raid came a day after Ritter, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, palled around with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was in an Albany courtroom for a hearing over whether the independent presidential candidate should be on New York’s November ballot, the Times Union reported.

    Ritter is indeed a Russian tool, but the timing from our increasingly politicized FBI does seem a tad suspicious…

  • Israel Attacks Airbase In Central Syria Known To House Russian Troops.” Do you get the feeling that the more Iran tries to goad Israel into a full-scale war, the less likely they are to enjoy the results?
  • Google has been declared a monopoly.

    Google has engaged in illegal activity by using its search-engine dominance to thwart competition, a federal judge ruled on Monday in a landmark decision that could have major implications for the way Americans consume information.

    The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled against Google this week, after the Department of Justice and a coalition of state attorneys general challenged the tech company’s market dominance in 2020. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said in the decision that Google is a “monopolist” that has “acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” Google paid $26.3 billion in 2021, for example, to promote its search engine as the default option on smartphones and browsers.

    “The default is extremely valuable real estate,” Mehta wrote. “Even if a new entrant were positioned from a quality standpoint to bid for the default when an agreement expires, such a firm could compete only if it were prepared to pay partners upwards of billions of dollars in revenue share and make them whole for any revenue shortfalls resulting from the change.”

    “Google, of course, recognizes that losing defaults would dramatically impact its bottom line. For instance, Google has projected that losing the Safari default would result in a significant drop in queries and billions of dollars in lost revenues,” he added.

  • Once again, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took a leading role in bringing the lawsuit. “The legal battle began in October 2020 when Paxton announced that Texas had sued Google for utilizing business strategies to squelch competition for search advertising and internet searches.”
  • In very much related news, the U.S. House moved forward in investigating the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM).

    We have been discussing media rating systems being used to target advertisers and revenue sources for certain cites and companies. NewsGuard and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) have been criticized as the most sophisticated components of a modern blacklisting system targeting conservative or dissenting voices. I recently had a series of exchanges with NewsGuard after a critical column. Now, the House Judiciary Committee under Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) is moving forward in demanding documents and records from leading companies utilizing the GARM system, a company that I have previously criticized. It is a welcomed effort for anyone who is concerned over the use of these blacklisting systems to curtail free speech. However, time is of the essence.

    The demand to preserve evidence went to various companies, including Adidas, American Express, Bayer, BP, Carhartt, Chanel, CVS and General Motors.

    In my new book, I discuss the rating systems as a new and insidious form of blacklisting.

    It is an effort to strangle the financial life out of sites by targeting their donors and advertisers. This is where the left has excelled beyond anything that has come before in speech crackdowns.

    Years ago, I wrote about the Biden administration supporting efforts like the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) to discourage advertisers from supporting certain sites. All of the 10 riskiest sites targeted by the index were popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents. That included Reason.org and a group of libertarian and conservative law professors who simply write about cases and legal controversies. GDI warned advertisers against “financially supporting disinformation online.” At the same time, HuffPost, a far-left media outlet, was included among the 10 sites at lowest risk of spreading disinformation.

    Once GDI’s work and bias was disclosed, government officials quickly disavowed the funding. It was a familiar pattern. Within a few years, we found that the work had been shifted instead to groups like the GARM, which is the same thing on steroids. It is the creation of a powerful and largely unknown group called the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which has huge sway over the advertising industry and was quickly used by liberal activists to silence opposing views and sites by cutting off their revenue streams.

    Notably, Rob Rakowitz, head of GARM, pushed GDI and embraced its work. In an email to GARM members obtained by the committee last month, Rakowitz wrote that he wanted to “ensure you’re working with an inclusion and exclusion list that is informed by trusted partners such as NewsGuard and GDI — both partners to GARM and many of our members.”

    GARM is being used by WFA to achieve what GDI failed to accomplish. The WFA sites refers to Rakowitz as “a career change agent” who will “remove harmful content from ad-supported digital media.”

    Rakowitz’s views on free speech are chilling and his work shows how these systems can be used to conceal bias in targeting the revenue of sites with opposing views.

    Rakowitz has denounced the “extreme global interpretation of the US Constitution” and how civil libertarians cite “‘principles for governance’ and applying them as literal law from 230 years ago (made by white men exclusively).”

    He appears to be referring to free speech.

  • Know who else isn’t wild about GARM? Elon Musk, who’s suing them for coordinated boycott of Twitter/X.

    Elon Musk’s X sued a coalition of advertisers leading a boycott against the social platform, accusing the group of conspiring to “collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue.”

    The suit takes aim at the World Federation of Advertisers and its initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), which led a boycott against the platform formerly known as Twitter after it was acquired by Musk in 2022.

    “The boycott and its effects continue to this day, despite X applying brand safety standards comparable to those of its competitors and which meet or exceed those specified by GARM,” reads the lawsuit, which was filed Tuesday in Texas federal court.

    X accused the coalition and several specific advertisers, namely Unilever, Mars and CVS, of violating antitrust law and circumventing the competitive process with their boycott.

    “The brand safety standards set by GARM should succeed or fail in the marketplace on their own merits and not through the coercive exercise of market power by advertisers acting collectively to promote their own economic interests through commercial restraints at the expense of social media platforms and their users,” the platform argued.

    Since Musk’s takeover of the platform, X has struggled to retain advertisers, which were wary of the tech billionaire’s early decisions to roll back content moderation policies and reinstate previously banned users, like former President Trump.

  • So what was GARM’s response to the lawsuit and increased scrutiny? It shut down immediately.

    An advertising industry initiative targeted by an Elon Musk lawsuit is “discontinuing” its activities and has deleted the member list from its website.

    On Tuesday, Musk’s X Corp. sued the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) over what X claims is an illegal boycott spearheaded by a WFA initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM). The WFA isn’t disbanding but is halting GARM’s activities, and the GARM member page now produces a 404 error. An archived version of the page from yesterday shows the initiative members, including X.

    X’s antitrust lawsuit has drawn skeptical responses from law professors, who say it will be difficult to prove that companies violated antitrust laws by stopping advertisements. But while X may never obtain financial damages from the advertising group or corporations like CVS and Unilever that it also named as defendants, fighting the lawsuit could be costly.

    Business Insider reported on the GARM shutdown today:

    The advertising trade group The World Federation of Advertisers told its members on Thursday that it was “discontinuing” activities for its Global Alliance for Responsible Media initiative following an antitrust lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s X against the company earlier this week.

    Stephan Loerke, the CEO of the WFA, wrote in an email to members, seen by Business Insider, that the decision was “not made lightly” but that GARM is a not-for-profit organization with limited resources. Loerke said that the WFA and GARM intended to contest the allegations in X’s suit in court and were confident the outcome of the case would “demonstrate our full adherence to competition rules in all our activities.”

    If that’s not an open admission of guilt, it will do until one comes along. In the meantime, expect this censorship hydra to put up again under another same.

  • What has all that investment in “green” energy gotten California? “Since January 2014, residential average rates for the PG&E service area have jumped by 110%, those of SCE have surged by 90%, and SDG&E rates have soared by 82%….A total of 18.4% of the customers of the three investor-owned utilities are in arrears in their energy bills.”
  • “Bangladesh Leader Flees Country In Helicopter As Protesters Storm Parliament.” “Bangladesh’s long-serving Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, resigned and fled the country on Monday, after protesters defied a military curfew and stormed her official residence. Hasina, who had been in power for 15 years, fled the capital Dhaka along with her sister by a helicopter to India, the daily newspaper Prothom Alo reported, after weeks of violent crack downs on protesters left nearly 300 people dead.”
  • “Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus took charge of Bangladesh’s caretaker government on Thursday, hoping to help heal the country that was convulsed by weeks of violence, forcing Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to quit and flee to neighbouring India. Known as the ‘banker to the poor’, Yunus is the pioneer of the global microcredit movement. The Grameen Bank he founded won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for helping lift millions from poverty by providing tiny loans to the rural poor who are too impoverished to gain attention from traditional banks.” I’d be more enthused about Yunus if their bank hadn’t been a contributor to the Clinton Global Initiative.
  • “The Israeli army killed Abdel-Zarii, the economy minister of Hamas in Gaza.” Good.
  • The U.S. is sending F-22s to the Middle East, just in case Iran gets spicy.
  • Two Chinese Nationals In U.S. Illegally Stopped With $250,000 In Gold Bars On Them In Texas.”

    Just a normal everyday traffic stop: pulling over a couple of Chinese nationals, driving through Texas, with $250,000 worth of gold bars on their person.

    That was the scene last week in Van Zandt County, according to KETK NBC.

    Sgt. Charlie Hughes of the Wills Point Police Department was monitoring traffic on I-20 near the 533-mile marker when he saw a White Chevy Malibu with Michigan plates committing a traffic violation.

    He then stopped the vehicle and identified the driver as 25-year-old Weijian Chen.

    KETK writes that due to a language barrier, Hughes asked Chen to use a translator app in his patrol vehicle to communicate.

    The officer said that during the interview he “observed multiple factors that lead [him] to believe there was criminal activity afoot.”

    The driver said that he was heading to Dallas and had also been in Florida to “play”.

    The vehicle was rented under the name of the passenger, 46-year-old Wenqiang Lin, who consented to a search but appeared uncertain. A K9 unit alerted to the front passenger door.

    Inside, officials found a Spirit Airlines boarding pass indicating that Weijian Chen had flown from Los Angeles to Atlanta on July 30-31 without any bags. The rental agreement showed the car was rented in College Park, Georgia, on July 31 and was due in Los Angeles by August 3, the report continued.

    A bag behind the driver’s seat contained gold bullion bars worth an estimated $200,000 to $250,000, including:

    • Seven 1-ounce 999.9 gold bars
    • Three 5-gram 999.9 gold bars
    • One 1-gram 999.9 gold bar marked with 20 squares
    • Eight 10-ounce 999.9 gold bars

    After arresting Chen and Lin, Sgt. Hughes contacted U.S. Homeland Security, which revealed both men had entered the country illegally. Lin entered on September 15, 2023, and was awaiting immigration processing in Los Angeles. Chen entered on December 17, 2023, and is also pending immigration judicial action.

  • “Austin ISD Chief Financial Officer Arrested on Insurance Fraud Charges. Austin Independent School District (ISD) Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Eduardo Ramos has been placed on paid leave following his arrest on charges of insurance fraud unrelated to district activities.” Maybe. But I’d still say a forensic audit is in order…
  • New York’s Supreme Court says that New York City has to suck it up and take in more illegal aliens.

    The New York State Supreme Court has denied New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s request for a preliminary injunction against busing illegal immigrants from Texas to the city.

    Adams, who faces challenges from New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and others in his reelection bid next year, filed a lawsuit against 17 charter bus companies in January.

    His goal was to stop the companies from busing migrants, many of them undocumented, from communities in Texas to New York. The mayor cited Social Services Law 149, which stipulates that any person “who knowingly brings, or causes to be brought, a needy person from out of state into this state for the purpose of making him a public charge” has an obligation “to convey such person out of state or support him at his own expense.”

    But in her nine-page July 29 ruling, Judge Mary V. Rosado found that the lawsuit was “unconstitutional.”

    Maybe if NYC hadn’t gone out of its way to declare itself a “sanctuary city” I might feel a tiny more smidge of sympathy. Who am I kidding, no I wouldn’t. This is all on Adams’ Democratic Party. Choke on it.

  • Ken Paxton says that ActBlue swears they’ll stop breaking the law.

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has provided an update to an investigation related to allegations that the Democratic fundraising operation ActBlue is involved in illicit activities.

    “ActBlue has cooperated with our ongoing investigation. They have changed their requirements to now include ‘CVV’ codes for donations on their platform,” Paxton said in the press release.

    “This is a critical change that can help prevent fraudulent donations.”

    Paxton added that “suspicious activity on fundraising platforms must be fully investigated to determine if any laws have been broken.”

    This alleged “suspicious activity” by ActBlue in Texas has been an ongoing point of contention.

    Current Revolt first reported on the investigation into ActBlue and the allegedly illegitimate donations last week.

    Journalist James O’Keefe recently produced a series of videos where he purported to show alleged money laundering by ActBlue in Texas.

    According to O’Keefe, some individuals in Texas are being reported by ActBlue to have made thousands of individual donations, but said individuals deny them when asked if they made those contributions.

    O’Keefe received a statement from the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office regarding some of these incidents.

    “It appears that both donors made voluntary contributions through ActBlue. One donor was reimbursed after contesting some of the charges, while the other cannot recall whether all or only some of the donations were authorized,” the sheriff’s office told O’Keefe.

    I suspect ActBlue will drop any reforms just as soon as they need to launder more money.

  • “Federal Court Orders California College To Drop Censorship Policy. A federal judge ordered a California community college on Aug. 2 not to enforce a poster policy that was used against three students whose anti-communist posters were taken down. U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston found that the poster policy of Fresno-based Clovis Community College violated the students’ First Amendment and 14th Amendment rights.”
  • Warner Brothers Discovery took $9.1 billion write-down on it’s network TV assets. As many have observed, this means that not only is CNN worthless from the standpoints of truth, philosophy and morals, but that it’s quite literally worthless as an economic asset as well. It may actually be worth less than your grandmother’s closet full of Beanie Babies…
  • Actually, it could be worth considerably less than nothing. “CNN Could Be Forced to Pay Upwards of $1 Billion from Defamation Suit from Tapper Show.”

    The case may not be as well known (yet), but CNN could be facing a defamation liability rivaling or exceeding the $787 million Fox News paid out to Dominion Voting Systems. NewsBusters recently reported on Florida’s First District Court of Appeals affirming that plaintiff Zachary Young could seek punitive damages, in addition to economic and emotional damages, from the Cable News Network in a civil trial after they allegedly defamed him regarding his work in getting people out of Afghanistan. The total could near or exceed $1 billion.

    For that outcome to be remotely in the cards, Young needed to prove malice and according to the ruling, he’s done exactly that. “Young sufficiently proffered evidence of actual malice, express malice, and a level of conduct outrageous enough to open the door for him to seek punitive damages,” Judge L. Clayton Roberts wrote in the court’s ruling.

    The court felt the high bars for actual and expressed malice were met because of internal CNN messages that were extremely vicious toward Young. Correspondent Alex Marquardt, the “primary reporter” expressed in a message to a colleague that he wanted to “nail this Zachary Young mfucker” and thought the story would be Young’s “funeral.” On that declaration of wanting to “nail” Young, CNN editor Matthew Philips responded: “gonna hold you to that cowboy!”

    Alongside Marquardt, CNN senior editor Fuzz Hogan, who’s a member of CNN’s internally lauded “Triad” of editorial, legal, and standards/practices oversight personnel, described Young as “a shit.”

    In an interview with NewsBusters, Vel Freedman, the lawyer representing Young, said that “everyone makes mistakes” but what CNN’s messages showed was a “systemic problem” inside the network. He added that their internal mechanism for accountability had “clearly failed” and opened themselves to “massive, massive liability.”

    Freedman told NewsBusters that his client had lost between $40-60 million in economic opportunity over the course of his now-damaged career as a security contractor since people in the field no longer wanted to work with him. If a jury awarded his client for emotional damages, the upper end could be as high as $600 million. The court recognizing the malice and outrageous conduct by CNN, effectively removed the cap on punitive damages in the State of Florida.

    All of that meant CNN could be facing upwards of $1 billion in total damages.

  • Dell lays off 12,500 employees. The Biden Recession is bad for everyone, but especially tech workers.
  • “65% of Texans support the adoption of legislation that would provide school vouchers to all parents in Texas, with 33% strongly supporting this legislation. 69% of Texans support the adoption of legislation that would create Educational Savings Accounts (ESAs) for all parents in Texas, with 30% strongly supporting this legislation.” (Hat tip: TPPF.)
  • Bisexual woman dates other women and comes to realize what guys already know: Women are jerks.
  • Northern California business fined for flying the American flag.
  • “Six Christians arrested in Paris for driving around in bus marked ‘Stop attacks on Christians.'” Note: Not the Bee.
  • “Drunken Kamala Mistakenly Picks Wrong Shapiro For VP.”
  • “Democrats Worried Choosing Jewish Vice President May Cost Them The All-Important ‘Death To America‘ Vote.”
  • “Josh Shapiro Annoyed He Got This ‘Death To Israel’ Neck Tattoo For Nothing.”
  • “Tim Walz Vows To Make America As Great As Minneapolis.” “As the governor who presided over the looting and burning of Minneapolis during the summer of 2020, I have full confidence that I will be able to apply my experience stirring up race riots on the national scale as well as I have in my home state.”
  • “Woman Who Lost To Male Boxer Says Everything’s Fine, She Just Fell Down Some Stairs.”
  • “Taylor Swift Jet Launches Retaliatory Strike On ISIS Stronghold.”
  • Good dog!
  • Speaking of which:

  • I think these LinkSwarms have gotten too long. Since I’m I’m still between jobs, I have more time to waste on read the Internet. “Oh, there’s a link I should include!” Wash, rinse, repeat. I’m either going to have to start cutting these down in size or start doing multiple LinkSwarms a week.

    Hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    Waltzes With Wokeness

    Tuesday, August 6th, 2024

    Anointed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has selected (or had selected for her) woke leftist Governor Tim Walz as her running mate.

    ice President Kamala Harris selected progressive Minnesota governor Tim Walz on Tuesday to be her running mate for her 2024 presidential campaign, a move meant to placate the far-left faction of her party and appeal to the midwesterners Harris needs to win in November.

    “I am proud to announce that I’ve asked @Tim_Walz to be my running mate,” Harris said on X, with a link to donate to the Harris-Walz campaign.

    “As a governor, a coach, a teacher, and a veteran, he’s delivered for working families like his,” she added.

    “It’s great to have him on the team.”

    Snip.

    A military veteran and former teacher, Walz began his political career with a narrow victory over a Republican incumbent in a 2006 congressional race. He won reelection five times and became a reliably liberal Democratic member.

    In 2018, Walz won the Minnesota gubernatorial election, and four years later comfortably held the seat after presiding over the race riots sparked by the death of George Floyd. Minnesota Democrats secured a legislative trifecta in 2022, and Walz subsequently signed progressive legislation on issues ranging from abortion and guns to school lunches and noncompete agreements.

    Republicans will likely highlight Walz’s progressive record and the fraud scandals the Minnesota government has suffered under his watch. They will also point out that, as Minnesota governor, Walz failed to stop the 2020 riots, allowing widespread looting and property damage, including the ransacking of a police precinct.

    “It’s no surprise that San Francisco Liberal Kamala Harris wants West Coast wannabe Tim Walz as her running-mate – Walz has spent his governorship trying to reshape Minnesota in the image of the Golden State,” said Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt.

    “From proposing his own carbon-free agenda, to suggesting stricter emission standards for gas-powered cars, and embracing policies to allow convicted felons to vote, Walz is obsessed with spreading California’s dangerously liberal agenda far and wide.”

    By selecting Walz over Shapiro, Harris is hoping the progressive wing of the Democratic party will continue backing her candidacy as she quietly walks back the radical stances she took four years ago, when she lurched to the left for a short-lived presidential run.

    Shapiro, a Jew, would have received major backlash from progressives for his support for Israel’s war against Hamas. While his position on the war itself is mainstream among establishment Democrats, he did condemn antisemitic protests on college campuses and volunteered for a non-combat role with the IDF when he was in college.

    Walz, by contrast, has spoken sympathetically about the left-wing anti-Israel protests that have become a fixture across America since Hamas slaughtered 1,200 civilians and took 25o hostages on October 7th.

    My reading of the tea leaves led me to believe that Josh Shapiro would be the pick, but it seems that in the 24 years since Al Gore picked Joseph Lieberman as his running mate, the increasing pro-Jihad radicalization of the Democratic Party base has made it impossible to pick a Jewish running mate.

    Using old-fashioned “first to 270 wins” reasoning, picking Walz over Shapiro doesn’t make much sense. Nailing down Pennsylvania (which the Shapiro pick wouldn’t guarantee, but which would at least give the Democrats a better chance at) would be a big help in getting to 270. Democrats also need Minnesota to win, but if they actually need Walz to secure blue-leaning Minnesota, the last midwestern “blue wall” state still standing in 2016, then the ticket has already lost.

    No, the Walz pick indicates that the powers behind the throne in the Democratic Party are all-in on wokeness and social justice, even if it means losing the 2024 election to Trump. Because Walz has relentlessly pursued a woke agenda as governor.

    For starters, Walz is all in on stealing children from parents who refuse to allow them to be mutilated.

    Vice President Kamala Harris’ newly announced running mate — Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — signed a bill in April of 2023 allowing the state to make custody determinations if a child is denied access to sex-change procedures.

    The “Trans Refuge Bill” allows for “temporary emergency jurisdiction” if a parent denies their child sex-change procedures, according to the bill’s text. The bill defines the interventions, which include sex-changes, hormone replacement and cosmetic surgeries, as “medically necessary” so long as it “respects the gender identity of the patient, as experienced and defined” by the child.

    Snip.

    The bill amends “child custody and child welfare provisions” pertaining to out-of-state laws that would interfere with Minnesota’s “gender-affirming health care” laws.

    Minnesota’s bill provided a loophole allowing individuals, including children, from other states to receive transgender treatments and asserted that out-of-state provisions “interfering” with access to these procedures “must not be enforced or applied within the state.” At the same time, Minnesota law gives the state “temporary emergency jurisdiction” to make a custody determination if the child “has been unable to obtain” these transgender treatments.

    The bill defined transgender treatments for children as “medically necessary” physical health care or mental health care that “respects the gender identity of the patient, as experienced and defined by the patient.” This includes interventions that “suppress” the development of their biological sex like hormone therapy, procedures that “align” the patient’s physical body with their “gender identity” through cosmetic surgeries and sex-change surgeries.

    Via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit comes news that the Trump campaign has already unleashed a video targeting Walz’s pro-child-mutilation stance:

    Walz is also all in on flooding the country with illegal aliens and laying the groundwork for a mass amnesty.

    President Biden’s “border czar,” Veep Kamala Harris, has chosen a fellow soft-on-illegal-immigration politician as her running mate.

    Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, 60, who was named Harris’ vice-presidential pick Tuesday, has supported efforts to turn his home state into a sanctuary state while also backing other stances that cater to undocumented migrants.

    “My position on Minnesota becoming a sanctuary state boils down to who has the responsibility for enforcing immigration laws,” Walz told CBS News in 2018.

    “Here’s what I believe: Congress has given federal agencies the authority to enforce immigration laws in Minnesota, and I support their doing so,” he said. “Congress has not given local law enforcement that same authority. The role of law enforcement is to enforce state and local laws, not federal immigration laws, and I strongly believe that they should not do so.”

    Translation: Democrats love illegal aliens a whole lot more than natives, and want to keep as many here as possible.

    “Sanctuary state” is an unofficial term that refers to states that limit or deny local law-enforcement cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

    As governor, Walz also has signed several pieces of legislation to provide state-funded health care, driver’s licenses and free college tuition to illegal migrants.

    “Ensuring drivers in our state are licensed and carry insurance makes the roads safer for all Minnesotans,” Walz said in 2023 after signing the bill to allow thousands of illegal migrants in his state with driver’s licenses.

    Walz is also all in on supressing the speech of his political enemies.

    The plan for what some have deemed a “bias registry” was first hatched in January, in the 2024-25 budget request by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights. Department leaders requested $395,000 in fiscal 2024 and $250,000 every year after to add two full-time staffers and to upgrade the department’s “data tracking capabilities.”

    There is “currently a void,” they wrote, “with respect to tracking and reporting on both criminal and non-criminal discrimination and hate incidents in Minnesota.” They believed it was critical to collect more information about allegations of hate that weren’t technically criminal or likely to be investigated by law enforcement — someone in a car yelling a derogatory comment at a passerby was one hypothetical example cited by supporters of the plan.

    Snip.

    No longer would the human-rights department be tasked to “solicit, receive, and compile” information about allegations of discrimination or bias. The new language said the human-rights department would instead:

    Analyze civil rights trends pursuant to this chapter, including information compiled from community organizations that work directly with historically marginalized communities, and prepare a report each biennium that recommends policy and system changes to reduce and prevent further civil rights incidents across Minnesota.

    Translation: We’re going to give social justice warriors a way to use the power of the state to suppress conservative speech.

    And of course, Walz notoriously let his state burn rather than confront #BlackLivesMatter/Antifa rioters in 2020:

    It was 6:29 p.m. on the last Wednesday in May 2020, when Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey phoned Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Riots had erupted the day before over the police killing of George Floyd, and the city was overwhelmed.

    Frey pleaded with Walz to call in the National Guard.

    Less than three hours later, the city made a written request to Walz’s office for 600 guardsmen to help quell the chaos that was engulfing the Twin Cities.

    Rioters were burning buildings. They were shooting at police officers and attacking them with Molotov cocktails, fireworks, bricks, and bottles filled with cement. At least three people died during the riots.

    Faced with one of the most serious public emergencies in Minnesota history, Walz froze.

    “He did not say yes,” Frey said of his request to Walz. “He said he would consider it.”

    The far-left governor did not agree to call in the Guard until late the next day, according to a blistering postmortem, the Review of Lawlessness and Government Responses to Minnesota’s 2020 Riots, released in October 2020 by the Minnesota senate.

    Instead of sending in the 600 guardsmen that Minneapolis had requested, Walz sent in only 100 late that Thursday. The Guard wasn’t fully mobilized until Saturday, four days after the first building burned, according to the senate review.

    Walz claims that he thought the riots would “die down organically,” but I think that’s a lie. The same far left social justice cabal that’s trying to foist Harris and Walz off on America without a primary is the same one that helped pay for, plan and execute those riots for their own purposes.

    But Jim Geraghty would like you to remember that Walz isn’t just woke, he’s also manifestly incompetent, with many vast fraud schemes occurring on his watch.

    The dirty, not-so-little not-so-secret about Walz is that he’s not a good manager. On his watch, the Minnesota government has endured one embarrassing scandal after another entailing mismanagement, fraud, waste, and abuse….

    Let’s start with the state’s handing hundreds of millions of dollars to Minnesota’s Feeding Our Future, the largest Covid-aid fraud scheme in the country.

    The Feeding Our Future fraud scandal. Announcing the federal fraud indictment against the Feeding Our Future nonprofit, FBI director Christopher Wray called it “an egregious plot to steal public funds meant to care for children in need in what amounts to the largest pandemic relief fraud scheme yet. The defendants went to great lengths to exploit a program designed to feed underserved children in Minnesota amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, fraudulently diverting millions of dollars designated for the program for their own personal gain.” The nonprofit reportedly used a quarter of a billion dollars in federal funds to purchase luxury cars, houses, jewelry, and coastal resort property abroad.

    What does this have to do with Governor Tim Walz, you ask? Well, a state legislative audit concluded that the Minnesota Department of Education was asleep at the wheel and for years had ignored red flags concerning the nonprofit.

    From those noted right-wingers at, er, the local CBS News affiliate:

    The report from the legislative auditor found that the Minnesota Department of Education’s last review of Feeding Our Future was in 2018, and while it found serious issues with the nonprofit’s operations — including that it did not collect enrollment information from sites — it failed to follow up. . . .

    Over the course of several reviews, the department found that Feeding Our Future lacked financial resources and dedicated accounting staff, and noted that staff salaries were above average.

    Still, the report said that by 2019, the nonprofit managed more than six times the number of sites than the average multi-site sponsor participating in the program. The department’s payments to Feeding Our Future also increased by 2,800% between 2020 and 2021.

    “Time and time again over the four years it participated in the federal nutrition programs, MDE missed opportunities to hold Feeding Our Future accountable,” Legislative Auditor Judy Randall told the Legislative Audit Commission Thursday.

    Between June 2018 and December 2021, the department received more than 30 complaints about the organization — ranging from unethical practices to demanding kickbacks from vendors — which must be investigated by law.

    But the department’s investigation procedures were “of limited usefulness” in the context of alleged fraud, the auditor found. At one point, the education department asked Feeding Our Future to investigate complaints about itself.

    Some of the complaints weren’t looked into at all, “despite their frequency and seriousness.”

    Every state government deals with waste, fraud, and abuse. But no other state has ever gotten taken to the cleaners to the tune of a quarter of a billion dollars.

    But we’re just getting started.

    “Hero pay” wasted on dead people. In 2022, Walz signed into law a plan to pay Minnesota’s frontline workers “hero pay” for their hard work during the pandemic. The state’s initial estimate was that roughly 667,000 people were eligible for hero pay, meaning they would receive $750 each. But within a few months, the state announced that more than a million Minnesotans had qualified, reducing the payment to $487.45.

    If an estimate that’s off by roughly 333,000 people raises your eyebrow, you have good instincts.

    Not only were a significant portion of recipients ineligible, some of them didn’t have a pulse.

    Alas, the “Department of Labor and Industry, the agency tasked with overseeing and implementing the Minnesota Frontline Worker Pay Program, did not comply with requirements for the program,” according to a state auditor. The auditor’s report concluded that less than 60 percent of recipients of the bonuses were eligible, the eligibility of 32 percent of recipients could not be verified, and 9 percent were definitely ineligible, including some who were deceased.

    The full report can be read here. Notable detail: “Based on our initial data analysis, one individual was deceased for more than two years prior to the application submission date.”

    Look at the bright side. Tim Walz isn’t going to let Minnesota’s hardworking frontline zombies go unrewarded.

    “Didn’t follow procedures for avoiding conflicts of interest.” The same pattern is evident in the Minnesota state government’s handing out of grants for arts and behavioral health:

    Minnesota Department of Human Services Behavioral Health Division did not comply with certain grants management policies, matching similar findings of a 2021 audit.

    The audit, released Thursday, found the agency didn’t follow procedures for avoiding conflicts of interest and gauging whether nonprofits were financially stable enough before awarding grants. . . .

    The audit found the DHS Behavioral Health Division failed to complete financial assessments for more than 40 percent of grants reviewed. The grants ranged from $49,000 to nearly $1 million, and totaled $11.5 million. A 2021 audit had a similar finding.

    Wait, there’s more.

    State agencies have not resolved inaccurate retroactive payments for 30 percent of employees tested by the Office of the Legislative Auditor. The Minnesota Board of Firefighter Training and Education and the Department of Public Safety didn’t retain documentation for overtime paid during Covid-19 leave and didn’t comply with state policy for using state-issued credit cards or reimbursing employee expenses.

    Back in 2019, Minnesota’s Department of Human Services admitted that it paid $29 million over a period of five years for opioid treatments that were never administered. The payments involved federal money that the state agency distributed.

    In another oddity, Walz’s text messages mysteriously disappeared despite public-records laws, his appointed state cannabis director was selling products that violated state law, and one of his appointments to the gubernatorial Task Force on Broadband stepped down after allegations of domestic abuse came to light.

    Walz is terrible. And we haven’t even gotten to his ideology, which has pushed the state’s policies hard to the left.

    It’s not just that he’s a leftist. He’s an incompetent leftist.

    Of course one man’s incompetence is a Democrat’s “tasty trough of graft.” From Pigford on, Democrats have demonstrated that they’re happy for ineligible people to feed at the trough as long as they check the right social justice boxes.

    Together, Harris and Walz represent the worst of the modern Democratic Party’s radical far left agenda and endemic corruption.

    LinkSwarm For August 3, 2024

    Friday, August 2nd, 2024

    More signs of the Biden Recession, the DOJ wants to put its thumb on the scale against Trump again, more Secret Service incompetence comes to light, more Kamala cringe, a bunch of lawsuit news, and a metric ton of Babylon Bee links. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

    I keep thinking I’ll keep the LinkSwarms to shorter lengths, and the world continues not to cooperate.

  • Dispatches from the Biden Recession: “US Manufacturing Surveys Collapsed In July”

    The start of the third quarter saw a deterioration in business conditions at US manufacturers as new orders declined for the first time in three months, according to S&P Global.

    This makes sense as we have seen ‘hard’ US macro data serially disappoint for three months.

    • S&P Global US Manufacturing PMI falls to 49.6 in July, dropping into contraction for the first time since Dec 2023.
    • ISM Manufacturing PMI plunged to 46.8 (48.8 exp) – weakest since Nov 2023 (near post-COVID lockdown lows)
  • The FBI announces that they’re willing to resume their censorship of conservatives in an attempt to drag Karmala’s cackling husk over the finish line. Though the words they used were slightly different.

    The FBI is going to resume its coordination with social-media companies on content moderation ahead of the 2024 election, after the Supreme Court dealt a blow to free-speech advocates who argue the federal government’s close cooperation with Big Tech firms violates the First Amendment.

    According to a Department of Justice memo drafted earlier this month, the FBI “will resume regular meetings in the coming weeks with social media companies to brief and discuss potential [Foreign Malign Influence] threats involving the companies’ platforms.”

    By “Foreign Malign Influence,” what they mean, of course, is “the possibility of a Trump victory.”

    The memo is featured in a report from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz on the effectiveness of the department’s information-sharing system for monitoring foreign threats to U.S. elections. National Review has reached out to the FBI for comment on the memo.

    Horowitz recommended the DOJ increase its transparency around the policies it put in place to ensure information sharing does not trample on the First Amendment, and to ensure the coordination strategy evolves to keep up with ever-changing foreign threats. The report’s appendix says both of the recommendations have been taken up by the DOJ, and requests documentation of the FBI’s outreach to social-media companies over the coming months.

    The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and local offices will be tasked with building relationships with social-media companies in areas under the purview of various FBI field offices. As part of this outreach strategy, FBI officials are being instructed to make companies aware of the new standard operating procedure for monitoring suspected foreign influence operations online.

    I’m so old that I remember when the primary duty of the FBi was to solve crimes, not to aid the Democratic Party…

  • Speaking of public agencies trying to destroy Trump:

    Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe was directly involved in denying additional security resources and personnel, including counter snipers, to former President Trump’s rallies and events – despite repeated requests by the agents assigned to Trump’s detail in the two years leading up to his July 13 attempted assassination, according to several sources familiar with the decision-making.

    Rowe succeeded former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned last week after bipartisan calls following her widely panned testimony before the House Oversight Committee. But both Rowe and Cheatle were directly involved in decisions denying requests for more magnetometers, additional agents, and other resources to help screen rallygoers at large, outdoor Trump campaign gatherings.

    It was Rowe’s decision alone to deny counter sniper teams to any Trump event outside of driving distance from D.C., these sources asserted.

  • Criminal negligence all the way down:

  • The FBI: The Trump shooter’s social media accounts show he was an anti-immigrant extremist. Actual social media company: You’re lying out your ass.
  • “The Bloodless Coup of Joe Biden Will Not Work Out Well for Democrats.”

    The Democratic Party ruling class’s bloodless coup of their own democratically elected presidential nominee, who also happens to be the nominal sitting president of the United States, is one of the most astonishing political developments of my lifetime. Joe Biden, though clearly physically and mentally impaired, has sought the presidency for quite literally longer than I have been alive. Biden had been defiant ever since the June 27 presidential debate debacle that he was not going anywhere, despite overwhelming pressure from party elites and sycophantic media lapdogs demanding he do precisely that. He has a Lady Macbeth-like wife who craves power, and he has a felonious son in desperate need of a presidential pardon.

    Yet the coup succeeded. Biden became the first incumbent president to not seek reelection after his first term since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. Biden made the much-anticipated announcement—not with a solemn Oval Office address—three days later, and he didn’t even explain his decision. Rather, he issued a bedridden tweet from a personal, not even official, account. It’s the equivalent of divorcing your wife over text message. As if that weren’t crazy enough, the announcement came smack in the middle of a five-day period in which Biden was not publicly seen and during which he apparently experienced an unspecified medical emergency. Suspicious much?

    The Democrats’ decision to coup their own president is a curious one, on the political merits.

    Hold aside the galling hypocrisy of the purported party of “democracy” trying to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot under an outlandish constitutional theory while simultaneously attempting to bankrupt, prosecute and incarcerate him on equally spurious grounds. Hold aside the self-proclaimed party of “democracy,” feigning ignorance over how its overheated rhetoric laid the seeds for their political opponent’s recent near-assassination and its continuing to depict that opponent as an existential threat to the American constitutional order. And hold aside that purportedly “democratic” party deposing its own presumptive elected nominee—a stark reversal from its presidential primary, when party poobahs worked hard to shut out all viable competition. Somewhere in Minnesota, Dean Phillips would like a word.

    Hold all that aside. Because even on its own terms, the coup of Biden for cackler-in-chief Kamala Harris is going to spectacularly backfire on the Democrats.

    Already, Democrats and the corporate media have been working hard to “define” Harris for the American people. At times, this has included some rather dubious retconning, such as magically pretending she wasn’t the Biden administration’s appointed “border czar.” (She was.) But the even bigger problem for Democrats is that Harris is not an unknown commodity. On the contrary, she is a very well-known commodity—one who just happens to be about as popular with the American public as venereal disease.

    Harris’ current average approval rating is under 38%, and an NBC News poll last June found her to be the single least popular vice president in American history—only 32% of Americans had a positive view of her, putting her 17 points underwater. Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign was an absolute dud, self-imploding well before the first primary votes were cast. And as recently as a month or two ago, Democratic elites were openly discussing whether she could still be dropped as Biden’s 2024 running mate. Funny how quickly one can go from the weakest link to the great savior of “Our Democracy.”

    Practically, the path to winning 270 Electoral College votes still runs through the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. It is frankly bizarre for Democrats to swap out the man who talks ceaselessly about his hardscrabble Scranton upbringing for a Californian who boasts the most left-wing voting record of any presidential nominee in modern history. Do Democrats really think Harris’ support for the Green New Deal and a national fracking ban will play well in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania or in the auto factories of Detroit? Will white working- and middle-class voters concerned about skyrocketing crime look favorably upon Harris’ enthusiastic support for the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, which racked up $2 billion worth of property damage?

  • Harris officially anointed Democrat nominee.
  • “Astronaut Mark Kelly, one of the favorites to be Kamala’s VP pick, literally owns a spy balloon company funded by a Chinese venture capitalist.”

    Tucson-based World View, cofounded by now-U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly in 2012, received venture capital from Tencent — among the largest tech companies in China — both in 2013 and 2016. Tencent, like most Chinese tech giants, has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party….

    Spy balloons partially funded by ChiComm ties? Like, how is this considered a totally normal business for a Senator to be in?

  • Not sure how much you can trust Seymour Hersh, but he says that Obama is the one who finally pushed Slow Joe out, threatening to invoke the 25th Amendment on him. He also says Obama is pulling Kamala’s strings. So there’s that.
  • Trump notes that Kamala Harris only used to promote her Indian heritage. “I didn’t know she was black.”
  • Indeed, “Kamala Harris’s Indian Background Was Once a More Prominent Part of Her Curated Image.” You don’t say. (Hat tip: Instapundit.”
  • More on that theme:

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • FBI raids home of New York Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul’s aide.

    Early in the morning, the FBI raided the home of Linda Sun, a former official for Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration. Sun served as Hochul’s deputy chief of staff for a year. Before that, she was the deputy superintendent for intergovernmental affairs and chief diversity officer under disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo. The federal officers searched the $3.5 million home, which resides in the exclusive neighborhood of North Shore.

    That’s on top of a raid aimed at Winnie Greco, a top aide to New York Mayor Eric Adams.

  • Never forget that Kamala Harris is a radical.

    While the left is trying it’s hardest to recast Kamala Harris as a moderate Democrat – quietly scrubbing her public record over the past 5 years – her actual positions have always been radical.

    For starters, she’s on record wanting to abolish ICE (which she compared to the KKK), letting criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber and rapists vote, ban fracking and offshore drilling, defund the police, provide US taxpayer subsidized healthcare to illegals, and ban private health insurance.

    Meanwhile, during 2020 Democratic primary debate Harris said that if elected president, she would “ban by executive order the importation of assault weapons.”

    She also said she would reinstate Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status and DACA protection for illegal immigrants, and end other Trump-era immigration policies.

    And in multiple speeches and interviews, Harris insisted America needed racial ‘equity’ as well as ‘equality.’ In other words, she endorses ‘equality of outcomes’ over ‘equality of opportunity.’

    As The Federalist pointed out on Tuesday:

    • She Supported Bailing Out 2020 Rioters
      Accused rapists, repeat offenders, and rioters alike benefitted in June 2020 when Harris encouraged her social media followers to donate to a bail fund dedicated to those arrested for their months-long, $2 billion siege of cities like Minneapolis. The vice president later lied about her involvement in the money-raising scheme.

    • She Put Other Countries’ Borders Before Her Own
      Harris traveled thousands of miles away from the U.S. border invasion she was tasked with handling to deliver “peace and security” to the borders of Ukraine, which “is a country.”

    • She Proudly Enabled the Jussie Smollett Race Hoax
      Harris called the staged hate crime an “attempted modern-day lynching.” She did not apologize even after Smollett was found guilty of felony disorderly conduct and making false police reports.

    • She Sponsored Legislation That Would Codify Abortion Through All Nine Months
      As a senator, Harris was a proud co-sponsor of the original version of the “Women’s Health Protection Act,” which sought to codify abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.

    • She’s Openly Anti-Catholic
      As a senator in 2018, Harris smeared Brian Buescher, a nominee for the U.S. District Court in Nebraska, for his affiliation with the famous Catholic fraternal organization Knights of Columbus and its historically pro-life views.
  • Flip, meet flop, as Kamala Harris tries to walk back all her radical positions.

    In 2019, Kamala Harris was rated the ‘most liberal’ Senator in a now-scrubbed rating from GovTrack. She’s on record wanting to abolish ICE (which she compared to the KKK), letting criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber and rapists vote, banning fracking and offshore drilling, defunding the police, providing US taxpayer subsidized healthcare to illegals, and banning private health insurance.

    According to the NY Times, “video clips of her old statements and interviews are being weaponized as Republicans aim to define her as a left-wing radical who is out of step with swing voters.”

    “The archive is deep,” said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and ad maker who is working with David McCormick, the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, among other campaigns. “We will run out of time before we run out of video clips of Kamala Harris saying wacky California liberal things. I’m just not sure that the rest of this campaign includes much besides that.”

    To that end, McCormick’s campaign has produced one of the first TV ads to attack Harris on her longstanding positions.

    Yet, according to the Times, nevermind all that- Harris is now a reformed moderate – and has suddenly reversed course on virtually all of her most radical views.

    On Friday, the Harris campaign announced that she no longer wants to ban fracking – a ‘significant shift’ from where she stood four years ago. She’s also reversed course on funding for border enforcement, no longer supports a single-payer health insurance program, and has walked back liberal fever dreams of a mandatory gun buyback.

    She is no longer pushing for a single-payer health care system, and on Friday her campaign said she would maintain Mr. Biden’s pledge not to raise income taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. -NYT

    Packing the Court? Nah…

    On Monday, as Mr. Biden prepared a speech in Texas calling for term limits and ethics guidelines for Supreme Court justices, the Trump campaign resurfaced statements Ms. Harris made in 2019 saying she was “open to this conversation” about expanding the Supreme Court. Ms. Harris, in a statement released by her campaign, endorsed Mr. Biden’s proposal, which does not call for adding additional justices to the court.

    According to Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank, Harris has ‘evolved’ into a Biden style centrist (if centrism is defined as letting 20+ million illegals into the country and cooking Americans with inflation).

    “There’s a tremendous difference in changing one’s policy ideas and changing one’s principles,” said Bennett. “She has not changed her principles. She still thinks climate change is an existential threat — she just doesn’t think the Green New Deal is the way to address it.”

    Sure Matt.

    The Times also hints that Harris is essentially an idiot who didn’t really understand her own positions while running for president in 2020.

    …during that race, Ms. Harris also often appeared as if she were not sure what she believed. In a CNN town-hall event the day after what was widely viewed as a successful campaign rollout in Oakland, Calif., she appeared tentative while discussing health care policy, eventually saying she would eliminate private health insurance and institute a single-payer health care program.

    She would go on to propose an array of policies popular with progressives. She sought to increase pay for public-school teachers by an average of $13,500 through a bump in the estate tax.

    She also called for an assault weapons ban and said she would sign an executive order mandating background checks for customers of any dealer who sold more than five guns in a year.

  • Harris VP Short-Lister Comes Loaded with Baggage.”

    Minnesota governor Tim Walz is on the short list to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate. This is almost laughable when you look at Walz’s record running the state government, which somehow manages to combine the honesty of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, the competence of former Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco, and the sharp-eyed ethical-watchdog instincts of soon-to-be-former New Jersey senator Bob Menendez. A whole lot of shady and unethical people in Minnesota see the state government as a giant pile of money just waiting to be taken, with a sleepy guard in the form of the governor.

  • Segregation now, segregation forever!” “White Dudes for Harris” was born cringe…
  • More on that cringe: “Only Democrats can gather in whites-only affinity groups with matching hats.”

  • Another poll oversamples Democrats by a lot…and Trump still wins 48-45.
  • J. D. Vance is weird.” Yeah, the modern Democratic Party is the last set of people who should be accusing others of weirdness…
  • “Did the Israelis just take out two key leaders in Iran’s proxy armies? Just hours after announcing that a strike in Beirut killed Hezbollah’s top military commander, the Iranian state media announced that Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh had been “martyred” in Tehran. Haniyeh had just arrived there to meet the newly elected president.” Reports say he stayed in the same room in the same complex every time he visited, so Israel managed to sneak a bomb under his bed several months ago…
  • First F-16s sent to Ukraine.
  • Ukraine hits Olenya Air Base near Finland with drones some 1,800KM away from Ukraine. Tu-22M reported hit.
  • Ukraine also hit another Russian airbase…in Syria.
  • Ukrainian drones hit Russian oil depot in Polevaya, Kursk.
  • Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan threatens to send troops if Israel enters Lebanon to fight Hezbollah. You would think having some three regional wars happening on its periphery would be enough for Turkey…
  • “Canada’s standard of living is on track for its worst decline in 40 years, according to a new study by Canada’s Fraser Institute. The study compared the three worst periods of decline in Canada in the last 40 years – the 1989 recession, the 2008 global financial crisis, and this post-pandemic era. They found that, unlike the previous recessions, Canada is not recovering this time. Something broke. In fact, according to the Financial Post, since 2019 Canada’s had the worst growth out of 50 developed economies. Inflation-adjusted Canadian wages have been flat since 2016.” That’s what happens when you elect socialist asshats like Justin Trudeau.
  • “Dan Patrick Says Dade Phelan Intends to Kill School Choice Legislation Again. Patrick says Phelan refused to join him and Gov. Greg Abbott in a budget letter prioritizing school choice.” Leopard, meet spots.
  • But Texas House Republicans simply aren’t that into him any more.

    Like the electoral blowout feared by national Democrats with Biden at the top of the ticket, Phelan’s abysmal record of the Texas House under his mismanagement resulted in a political disaster; more incumbent Republicans lost their primary re-election campaigns than any time in modern history.

    Phelan himself is damaged goods, politically. He outspent his primary opponent by a 5-to-1 margin yet garnered a “win” of less than 700 votes in a race that saw a couple of thousand Democrats flip primaries, clearly to “help” him.

    Everyone in the House knows that their defeated colleagues earned challengers because Phelan made them vulnerable… and then left them to go down in defeat.

    But he is, for now, still the speaker… in name, anyway.

    Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was publicly done with Phelan more than a year ago after the speaker and his cronies sent a deeply flawed, legally problematic, and factually vacuous “impeachment” of Attorney General Ken Paxton to be sorted out by the Senate.

  • DEA’s Most Wanted Sinaloa Drug Cartel Leader ‘El Mayo’ Arrested Near El Paso. Federal authorities arrested the notorious drug lord Ismael Zambada-Garcia, who is already under indictment for his role in leading a multi-billion dollar narcotics empire.”
  • The Democratic Party’s social justice agenda in action: “At least eleven transgender-identifying male felons are currently housed at a formerly women-only prison in Washington State. Many of them committed violent crimes against women and children before they entered the Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW), colloquially known as ‘Purdy.'”
  • “Organization Fighting Radical Gender Ideology in California Sues School District for Withholding Public Records.”
  • Female boxer quits after 46 seconds into a match against a biological man at the Olympics.
  • NRA’s New York trial “Ends With A Whimper And Not A Bang.” Severe negligence on the NRA’s part, but no special monitor.
  • Some interesting charts that break down how U.S. sports teams make money.
  • Speaking of which, the NFL’s $4.7 billion antitrust judgement was just overturned. “The jury’s damages verdict was otherwise unsupported by the evidence.”
  • “A Bakersfield College professor who was investigated and disciplined after he questioned the use of grant money to fund social justice initiatives at his school has agreed to a $2.4 million settlement to resolve his lawsuit.” Keep hitting them in the pocketbook…
  • Chevron moves its headquarters from California to Houston. Wonder what took them so long…
  • Texas oil pipelines nearing capacity, could reach 94% or 95% of capacity next year.
  • Boar’s Head recalls $7 million pounds of meat over Listeria.
  • Ford lost $47,585 for every electric car sold in Q2. (Hat tip: TPPF.)
  • Comedian wins court case brought by Australian government over offensive joke.
  • Bungie games, of Destiny and Halo fame, just laid off a bunch of staff. Official line says 17% of the company, but elsewhere I’m hearing the true total is closer to 40%. Microsoft bought then spun out Bungie, and Sony bought them in 2022.
  • GreensPoint Mall, RIP.
  • Congratulations to Dwight for fifteen years of blogging.
  • The worst safety video ever. Actually, only the second worst, behind Staplefahrer Klaus
  • “FBI Director Suggests Trump’s Ear Just Spontaneously Exploded.”
  • “Democrats Continue Long-Standing Tradition Of Large Whites-Only Gatherings.”
  • “Kamala Admits She Can’t Remember If She Was In Charge Of Border As She Was Pretty Drunk These Last 4 Years And Honestly It’s All A Bit Hazy.”
  • “Exhausted Journalist Finally Gets To Bed After Long Day Of Copying And Pasting Democrat Talking Points.”
  • “Behavioral Scientists Now Believe Feminists Are Always Angry Because They Don’t Have A Man To Tell Them To Calm Down.”
  • “Imane Khelif Wins First-Ever Gold Medal In Freestyle Domestic Violence.”
  • Sodom And Gomorrah Set To Host 2028 Olympics.”
  • “The dog just wants to be a dog, and they are trying to turn it into a Social Justice Warrior.”
  • I’m still between jobs, so hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    LinkSwarm for May 8, 2020

    Friday, May 8th, 2020

    The lockdowns are finally ending for Americans (at least in states without Democratic governors), and the lockdown also ended for Michael Flynn, who was finally freed from his Kafkaesque prosecution:

  • Finally! Justice prevails for Michael Flynn:

    The Justice Department has moved to withdraw its case against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, citing “newly discovered and disclosed information,” according to a new court filing.

    The move, first reported by The Associated Press, comes less than an hour after the top prosecutor on the case, Brandon Van Grack, submitted his withdrawal from the case. The decision said that the White House interview Flynn gave to the FBI, which ultimately led to his guilty plea, was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis.”

    “The Government is not persuaded that the January 24, 2017 interview was conducted with a legitimate investigative basis and therefore does not believe that Mr. Flynn’s statements were material even if untrue,” the decision states, citing Flynn’s 2017 guilty plea of lying to federal investigators. “Moreover, we do not believe that the Government can prove either the relevant false statements or their materiality beyond a reasonable doubt.”

    Jeff Jensen, the U.S. attorney tasked by Attorney General Bill Barr in February to reviewing the case, recommended that it be dropped. Flynn moved to withdraw his guilty plea in January, saying he “never lied” to FBI agents over his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

    “Through the course of my review of General Flynn’s case, I concluded the proper and just course was to dismiss the case,” Jensen said in a statement. “I briefed Attorney General Barr on my findings, advised him on these conclusions, and he agreed.” The DOJ’s filing states that Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak “were entirely appropriate on their face.”

    In recent weeks, additional information released in the case has shed scrutiny on the way the case was conducted. Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell claimed last month in a court filing that Van Grack had made a “side deal” with Flynn’s former defense team that was withheld from the retired Army general, citing heavily-redacted emails that show Flynn’s former lawyers discussing why the deal needed to be “kept secret,” implying that Flynn would be used to testify in further criminal cases.

    Further documents released last week showed handwritten notes from an FBI official questioning the goal of Flynn’s White House interview with FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka, suggesting the intent was “to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired.”

    Another release revealed that Flynn had been the subject of a spinoff surveillance operation under the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” probe of the 2016 Trump campaign.

    Given all the dirt that has come out about Crossfire Hurricane, AKA the Russian Collusion Hoax, AKA The Plot Against the President, this is not the last we’re going to hear about that conspiracy…

  • The Wuhan coronavirus is the disaster that bankrupt blue cities and states have been waiting for:

    The people running states like New Jersey and cities like Chicago know they’re broke. Ridiculously generous public employee pensions – concocted by elected officials and union leaders who had to have understood that they were writing checks their taxpayers couldn’t cover – are bleeding them dry, with no political solution in sight.

    They also know that they have only two possible outs: bankruptcy, or some form of federal bailout. Since the former means a disgraceful end to local political careers while the latter requires some kind of massive crisis to push Washington into a place where a multi-trillion dollar state/city bailout is the least bad option, it’s safe to assume that mayors and governors – along with public sector union leaders – have been hoping for such a crisis to save their bacon.

    And this year they got their wish. The country is on lockdown, unemployment is skyrocketing and mayors and governors now have a plausible way to rebrand their criminal mismanagement as a “natural disaster” deserving of outside help.

  • Hate the continuing lockdowns? Blame Democrats:

    Early estimates of the COVID-19 death rate, cited to justify the lockdowns, have proven far too pessimistic. In March, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated a 3.4 percent fatality rate and Dr. Anthony Fauci estimated that the fatality rate of the coronavirus was about 2 percent. As PJ Media’s Matt Margolis reported, at least five studies have placed the death rate below 1 percent, confirming President Donald Trump’s hunch.

    Recent studies have found that far more people than expected have COVID-19 antibodies — meaning the virus has spread faster than previously thought, but also proving that it is far less deadly than previously thought.

    Furthermore, a recent study showed that Democratic governors were three times more likely than Republican governors to impose a lockdown. This would make sense, given the Democratic control over many population centers experiencing large outbreaks: New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., for example. However, the study found that “counterintuitively, the percentage of the state’s population infected with COVID-19 had the weakest effect on the governors’ decisions of all the four variables.”

    The study found that the three most significant variables were political affiliation (a heavy slant toward Democrats), “social learning” (governors of states afflicted by COVID-19 later acted much faster than governors of states who were afflicted early on), and “mini-cascades” (the actions of some governors sparked multiple other governors to order lockdowns in the next three days).

    Both social learning and mini-cascades shine a light on how news of the coronavirus’ danger spread. As states with coronavirus hot spots reacted, other states followed suit, preparing for outbreaks of their own.

    Yet the political slant is also extremely significant, especially considering the different ways state and local officials have carried out their lockdowns. Greenville, Miss. Mayor Errick Simmons notoriously defended his ban on drive-in church services that led to parishioners facing $500 fines. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio threatened to “permanently” close churches and synagogues unless they comply with his orders — and he issued a disgusting threat to the Jewish community in particular. Andy Berke, mayor of Chattanooga, Tenn., banned drive-in church services even though Tennessee’s governor permitted them. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear dispatched the State Police against a church hosting a drive-in service. Police in Virginia threatened a pastor with a year in jail for hosting a socially-distanced church service, enacting Gov. Ralph Northam’s order.

    All these political leaders belong to the same party: the Democratic Party. Not all of the onerous coronavirus restrictions that violate religious freedom have been issued by Democrats, but there is a disturbing correlation between the left-wing party and crisis orders that single out churches, synagogues, and mosques. It seems one party is more likely than the other to think of religion as less than “essential,” and much of that animus traces back to the mistaken idea that religion (Christianity in particular) and science are in conflict.

  • We’re finally getting better Kung-Flu data and weekly peak deaths are falling.
  • Michigan’s Democratic Obergrupenfuhrer Gretchen Whitmer extended the state of emergency (and the lockdown) through May 28, despite lacking authority from the legislature to do so.
  • Maine Yanks Licenses From Restaurateur Who Defied Lockdown, Went On Tucker To Castigate Governor.”

    The outrageous tyranny of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and her heavy-handed, illogical, and irresponsible Wuhan coronavirus edicts have finally been outdone by another Democrat governor, this time on the east coast.

    Maine governor Janet Mills jumped on the one-size-fits all Wuhan coronavirus bandwagon, and forced a state-wide shutdown order, including in counties that have tiny numbers of infections and zero deaths.

  • “[Of] the five Upper Midwestern states…Minnesota has both the highest unemployment rate and the worst COVID-19 death rate in the region. Heckuva job, Timmy!” That would be Minnesota’s Democratic governor Tim Walz.
  • Science 1, Social Justice 0:

    As I write this, I am surrounded by silence: not only the silence of a small university town on lockdown but, also, the silence of the feminists and postmodernists as the COVID-19 pandemic has taken over.

    Where are the usual attacks on white male-dominated science? Where’s the “standpoint epistemology” to tell us how different is the knowledge intersectionally-appropriate feminist scientists would bring to this crucial problem? How many of those labs fiercely trying to find a treatment, a vaccine, a path forward, have a demographically appropriate number of women researchers? Not to mention racially and sexually “diverse” ones? What can possibly explain the lack of attention to this terrible problem of marginalization of the already oppressed?

    On a women’s studies listserve I subscribe to, activity has been almost at a standstill for weeks. You’d think with the endless attention paid to the virus there would be vigorous debate about the need to bring feminist, queer, trans, and other such perspectives to bear, and heated discussions of how to convey this to students via distance learning. Or, at the very least, that criticisms would be voiced of the data showing that men are more vulnerable to the virus than women. If one is “assigned” the category of male or female at birth—by now a routine formulation aped even by medical organizations– how could an uncaring virus ever make such a distinction?

    Can anything positive come out of the current crisis? Or, is it strictly a negative to be reminded that reality – the actual physical world, in all its threatening materiality – is not a social construction, and that solutions to a virus must engage with that material world, and not merely attack the rhetoric of disease and the identity of those researching it.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Hydroxychloroquine helps some but not all:

    Part of the frustration in dealing with a really bad situation is a ravenous hunger for magic bullet solutions. One reader wrote in, contending that hydroxychloroquine is effective 100 percent of the time if it’s administered early enough, so why not reopen society and give everyone a prescription for hydroxychloroquine at the first sign of the virus?

    Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine actually slow down parts of a patient’s immune system by “interfere with lysosomal activity and autophagy, interact with membrane stability and alter signalling pathways and transcriptional activity, which can result in inhibition of cytokine production and modulation of certain co-stimulatory molecules” — which is a jargon-heavy way of saying it makes your immune system’s cells not work as well together.

    People might wonder why anyone would want to take a drug that weakens their immune system. Hydroxychloroquine can be an effective drug for lupus, because with lupus, the body’s immune system becomes overactive and starts attacking healthy, normal cells. It is also used to treat arthritis, because in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, their immune system attacks the lining of their joints. With patients suffering from malaria, the parasite actually can send out “messages” that distract the body’s immune system, causing it to attack healthy red blood cells and ignore the real threat: “While the immune system is busy defending the organism against fake danger, the real infection proceeds inside red blood cells, allowing the parasite to multiply unhindered at dizzying speed. By the time the immune system discovers its mistake, precious time has been lost, and the infection is much more difficult to contain.” Hydroxychloroquine effectively calms down the immune system and along the way binds to the malaria parasite, breaking it apart.

    The coronavirus identified as SARS-CoV-2 can generate a “cytokine storm” — when the body’s immune system kicks into overdrive and starts attacking healthy cells in important organs. Dr. Randy Cron, an expert on cytokine storms at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told the New York Times last month that in about 15 percent of coronavirus patients, the body’s defense mechanism of cytokines fight off the invading virus, but then attack multiple organs including the lungs and liver, and may eventually lead to death. As the patient’s body fights its own lungs, fluid gets into the lungs, and the patient dies of acute respiratory distress syndrome.

    From this, you can get a sense of how and why hydroxychloroquine might be effective in some circumstances and not others. If the patient’s immune system is strong enough to fight off the coronavirus, but is at risk of going into overdrive and setting off a cytotkine storm, administering the right amount of hydroxychloroquine might put their immune system back in the Goldilocks zone — strong enough to fight off and defeat the virus, but not so strong that it starts attacking vital organs by mistake. It’s also easy to see why we would only want people taking this drug under a doctor’s recommendation and possibly supervision — take the drug too early, and you suppress the body’s immune system just when it needs that system functioning well to fight off the invading virus. Take the drug too late, and the damage to the vital organs can’t be overcome.

  • “FDA Pulls Approval for Dozens of Mask Makers in China.” They’re garbage that doesn’t meet spec. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Hey media: Do you think you could stop publishing the same #NeverTrump piece over and over again?

    Media outlets treat conservative Americans as second-class citizens whose arguments don’t need to be listened to or engaged with. Instead, they take the vanishingly small number of column inches or pundit panel seats they have and give the “conservative” slots to people who repeatedly disparage conservative elected officials, their voters, and their policies.

    In some cases, the supposed “conservatives” have long ago renounced their conservatism. The Washington Post’s Max Boot, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, and Twitter’s Bill Kristol receive a great deal of mockery for their boring obsession with Orange Man Bad, an obsession that has led them to renounce every one of the policy positions they once held.

    Even as their positions change in response to whatever Trump has said, NeverTrump is known for writing the same column over and over again. It’s usually headlined something like “Why Trump And His Voters Are So Awful That They Forced Me To Leave the GOP But Also Remember To Please Continue Calling Me A Republican To Preserve The TV/Column Gigs That Depend On Me Claiming I’m On The Right Even Though I Am Now Aligned With Democrats, Write Columns About How I Vote For Them, And Generally Work To Help Them Gain More Political Power.”

  • “Democrat On Committee To Oversee Coronavirus Stimulus Payouts Broke Federal Law By Failing To Report Stock Sales.” That would be Florida Representative (and former Clinton Administration official) Donna Shalala.
  • “Illinois governor says churches may not fully reopen for a year or more because of coronavirus.” I don’t think the constitution is going to agree with you there, sport… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Good Samaritan health care workers: I will go to New York to help out with the crush of Wuhan coronavirus cases! Andrew Cuomo: Fark you, have some more taxes.
  • Twitter decides to Big Brother harder.
  • The Supreme Court unanimously bitch-slapped the Ninth Circuit for ruling that a federal statue that makes it illegal to encourage illegal aliens to come to the U.S. was unconstitutional. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg delivered the opinion.
  • “I’m going to eat at these places even harder now. Thanks a lot, #Karen.”
  • Friend-of-the-blog Karl Rehn offers up Ammo 101.
  • As if we didn’t have enough deadly Asian intruders this year, say hello to Murder Hornets.

  • Tengujo, the thinnest paper in the world. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Florida South Carolina woman grabs gator. It turns out exactly how you would expect. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Surprise!

  • I’m going to try to get to the Shelly Luther and Project Veritas stories this weekend.