The Biden Recession bites deeper, Soros’ hands are all over the pro-Hamas protests, California fast food wage hikes hurt workers (but help robotics companies), and some Harris County legal followups. Plus some Zack Snyder bashing. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
For the first time in our history, a 30-year-old man or woman isn’t doing as well as his or her parents were at 30. That is the social compact breaking down.
People aged 30-34, 60% of them in 1990 had one child. Now it’s 27%. People are opting out of America, they’re not optimistic about it, they’re not having kids. Young people aren’t having sex. They’re not meeting, they’re not mating. The pool of emotionally and economically viable men shrinks every day. Which lessens household formation.
They (millennials and Gen Z) look up, they see wealth, exceptional wealth, across my generation and people in certain industries, and they are really struggling. Their purchasing power is really going down…
We get very concerned with housing and traffic once we own the housing. Housing permits are sequestered from young people, housing prices have gone from $290,000 to $420,000 in the last 4 years.
So a young person, a house, stocks that I don’t own, skyrocket in value, let’s have Covid relief and flush the markets and take assets way up because a million people dying would be bad, would be tragic if I got less wealthy, and we’re doing it on their credit card.
Bill Maher is, if anything, clever about his timing like most comedians. His rebellion against the woke mob has been carefully crafted in a way that has allowed him to avoid outright cancellation. It’s not as impressive a revolt as Gina Carano’s because the risk today is far less, but at least he’s willing to address the obvious hypocrisy within the social justice crowd and admit that maybe, just maybe, conservatives had it right all along.
His latest surprising monologue covers an issue everyone has known about for years but almost no one in the media has been willing to address seriously because it involves many of their friends in the entertainment industry. Hollywood was quick to jump on the feminist bandwagon at the helm of the “Me Too Movement”, but this only exposed a small part of Hollywood’s degeneracy. Actresses trading sex for favors from producers and executives is hardly that shocking a revelation. The thing they really don’t want to talk about is the industry’s penchant for pedophilia…
The money quote from that video that’s not in the ZeroHedge article: “The left will overlook child-fucking if a guy from the wrong party points it out.”
One of the deepest darkest secrets of film, television and music media is that the business has long been used as a vehicle for child abusers to target kids in an environment where parental supervision is limited (and lots of money can be gained). This reminds us of yet another environment where parental supervision is limited: Public schools. The political left has also targeted these institutions as ample ground for grooming. Why? As Bill Maher notes, the groomers are naturally gravitating to where the children are.
“Leave the kids alone” is a mantra that the woke movement simply refuses to understand or accept. The reason is relatively transparent – Leftists are less inclined to have children of their own, and so, in order to increase their numbers and power they are required to indoctrinate your kids instead. This is all done under the guise of “inclusion” and the “greater good” but the results of this kind of activism are becoming deeply disturbing. Even moderate liberals are noticing that woke behavior is destroying what remains of their image.
Newly unsealed documents in Donald Trump’s classified documents case reveal that the Biden White House colluded with the National Archives (NARA) and the FBI to concoct a case against the former president.
What’s more, Special Counsel Jack Smith sought to conceal this – telling Judge Eileen Cannon in February that Trump’s counsel isn’t entitled to discovery on documents between the White House and NARA, that the court should toss requests for evidence of the alleged coordination, and that the court should deny Trump’s request for evidence related to secure facilities at his residences. Further, Trump’s request for unredacted discovery of materials should be denied.
Seems like a substantial due process rights violation, doesn’t it?
Immediately after Biden’s signature, the Pentagon announced $1 billion of military assistance to Ukraine from the Presidential Drawdown Authority.
Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, ammunition for HIMARS rocket systems, 155mm artillery rounds, 60mm mortary rounds, and Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles, are among the U.S. capabilities being provided to Ukraine, the Pentagon said.
The foreign-aid legislation will send roughly $60 billion in aid to Ukraine, with $23 billion being used to replenish U.S. weapons stockpiles and $11 billion to fund U.S. military operations in the surrounding area.
Israel will receive $26 billion including $4.4 billion to fund its Iron Dome and David’s Sling missile defenses. Over $9 billion of the Israel aid will go towards humanitarian relief.
While I support military aid to Ukraine, Republicans should not have dropped their demand that border security be addressed first, nor should we be raising the national debt to do it. And if we’re going to be paying for David’s Sling and Iron Dome, then we better damn well be getting the tech back to use in our own weapons.
At three colleges, the protests are being encouraged by paid radicals who are “fellows” of a Soros-funded group called the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR).
USCPR provides up to $7,800 for its community-based fellows and between $2,880 and $3,660 for its campus-based “fellows” in return for spending eight hours a week organizing “campaigns led by Palestinian organizations.”
They are trained to “rise up, to revolution.”
The radical group received at least $300,000 from Soros’ Open Society Foundations since 2017 and also took in $355,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 2019.
More on that theme:
TERROR: The occupation of college campuses across the US is a well organized and funded operation led by Soros-backed groups including Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR). The Soros-backed NGOs pay outside agitators $7800 and… pic.twitter.com/6wzpjBksBs
A lot of Jewish friends, especially those who are finally awake after 10/7, say things like "how is this America?" or "It's so scary that this Jew-hatred is happening everywhere." But it's very much NOT "America" and it absolutely is NOT happening "everywhere." In south Florida,…
A lot of Jewish friends, especially those who are finally awake after 10/7, say things like “how is this America?” or “It’s so scary that this Jew-hatred is happening everywhere.” But it’s very much NOT “America” and it absolutely is NOT happening “everywhere.” In south Florida, Jews wear the dinner plate Magen Davids and no one says one word. In rural Michigan, churches put “pray for Israel” on the signs outside. I’m not naive, obviously Jew-haters can and do live anywhere. But they’re only thriving, open, proud, in blue areas and I’m not going to let people ignore that. A lot of liberal Jews are trying to parse things right now. They imagine they are still of the left but just on this one tiny little thing, their right to exist, they disagree. No, my friends. It’s a house of cards and you’re pulling the one from the very bottom. The whole left ideology is corrupt and you’re going to have to face it. You can’t spread the blame around. The hatred, the rage, the violence, the dehumanization is all coming from one side: yours.
When Democrat judges go rogue. “Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The state of California seems hellbent on making life a living hell for middle-class residents, as evidenced not just by their soft-on-crime policies but by the minimum wage increase that went into effect at the beginning of April.
Though the $20/hour wage was ostensibly designed to help minimum wage workers, it has had the opposite effect, with fast food restaurants in the Democrat-run state slashing jobs and hours, implementing hiring freezes, and/or bringing in self-serve kiosks to ease the financial burden.
Something else they’ve had to do is raise prices on the food they serve, with prices going up as much as eight percent at some locations.
While the fast-food industry was founded on utilizing technology to increase efficiency, the robot revolution seems to be speeding up.
Last year, Sweetgreen, a Los Angeles-based fast-casual salad chain, debuted its fully automated Infinite Kitchen at a restaurant in Illinois. Like Mezli, the Infinite Kitchen moves bowls down a conveyor belt where its system automatically portions out ingredients. The technology is “expected to cut labor costs in half while boosting throughput,” according to a trade magazine.
Similarly, the founder of Chipotle recently launched a new fast-casual chain, Kernel, that utilizes robots to heat and assemble vegetarian meals.
In December, a CaliExpress burger joint opened in Pasadena, complete with robot arms that cook burgers and fries, and AI-powered kiosks that allow customers to order and pay (and tip, of course), with their faces. Leaders at Miso Robotics, one of the companies behind CaliExpress, have said it is the first restaurant where all the ordering and cooking is fully automated.
The robots “don’t call in sick, they don’t get drunk the night before work and come in with a hangover,” one CaliExpress leader told a local TV station. “They’re a little bit more reliable.”
Other restaurants, including Cajun Crack’n in Concord, Calif., are experimenting with robots that can deliver food, bus tables, and may soon be taking orders. Robot bartenders and baristas are also in the works.
While restaurant sales are forecasted to increase this year and the restaurant workforce is expected to grow, owners are continuing to struggle with slim margins, in part due to food inflation and rising labor costs. According to the National Restaurant Association’s 2024 State of the Restaurant Industry report, 98 percent of restaurant operators are struggling with higher labor costs, and 38 percent say they weren’t profitable last year.
Biden Recession + union-backed wage hikes = boom times for robots
El Paso Democratic judge: Eh, there’s not enough evidence to put these illegal aliens on trial for assaulting state troopers. Just let them go. Grand jury: Nope! We’re indicting 141 of them for that riot.
Another Harris County follow-up: DA Kim Ogg announced that the legal cases against Lina Hidalgo staffers will now be prosecuted by the Texas Attorney General’s office because Democratic DA nominee Sean Teare, who defeated Ogg in the March primary, “works for the Cogdell Law Firm, which is defending Hidalgo’s former Chief of Staff Alex Triantaphyllis in the case, and that he had sought and received Hidalgo’s endorsement.”
The Biden Administration wants to waste taxpayer money pushing radical transgenderism in other countries. “The Biden administration wants to train at least 200 activists to advocate for transgender rights in India as part of a program ostensibly designed to advance America’s ‘national interests,’ according to a federal grant posting.”
More Biden Administration madness: “A popular US convenience store chain has been hit with a civil rights lawsuit accusing it of discriminating against minority job seekers because it requires applicants to have no criminal record.”
A dust storm of political madness is brewing in Phoenix as Grand Canyon University faces the continued threats of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.
Christians have watched as the Biden administration attacks biblical views left and right, with a particularly vehement disregard for the sanctity of life and marriage. As such, it can’t be too surprising that Cardona, a part of this leftist administration, has vowed to shut down America’s largest Christian university.
In late October, Grand Canyon University was hit with “a $37.7 million fine brought by the federal government over allegations that it lied to students about the cost of its programs,” The Associated Press reported—an accusation that GCU President Brian Mueller described as “ridiculous.”
Around the same time, Liberty University, America’s second-largest Christian university, also was fined $37 million “over alleged underreporting of crimes.”
Grand Canyon University appealed its fine in November even though a hearing is not expected until January 2025. But the question Mueller has is one of integrity. Is this genuine consideration for the well-being of students, or is this a targeted attack against religious institutions?
“It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the two largest Christian universities in the country, this one and Liberty University, are both being fined almost the identical amount at almost the identical time?” GCU’s president speculated in a speech. “Now is there a cause and effect there? I don’t know. But it’s a fact.”
Trader Joe’s organic basil has an extra organic ingredient: salmonella.
Critical Drinker wasn’t impressed with Rebel Moon 2: “Comically inept…boring and tedious..derivative cliched and unoriginal. It takes a special kind of cinematic anti-genius to bring all these things together into one movie. You have to actively work to make a film this bad”
The Biden Recession hits boardgaming. This is not a field I have much experience with, as the last boardgame I bought was the Kickstarter for the Designer Edition of Ogre. But I have noticed a similar decline in what science fiction book collectors are spending. Still, the idea that boardgames manufacturers are close to $1 billion in debt is pretty staggering.
The Onion sold. “The Onion has a new owner: a company called ‘Global Tetrahedron,’ which is a real thing based on a fake entity invented by the satire site more than two decades ago….The Onion’s new owner is Jeff Lawson, co-founder and former CEO of Twilio, a customer-service software company, he announced Thursday on X (formerly Twitter).” When last we read about Jeff Lawson, he was dumping money on the Dem side in the 2020 Texas Senate race, to no effect. Now people are wondering whether they’ll shut down zombie SJW gaming site Kotaku…
Live in Florida? Ron DeSantis would like you to adopt this cute border dog:
Essentia is a lab/shepherd mix who was rescued from the southern border, where the border crisis affects everyone—even our canine friends. Please consider giving Essentia a great home by adopting her from Big Dog Ranch Rescue.https://t.co/2ATqP5DPQNpic.twitter.com/qMO8JD1zUw
If you follow news on conservative blogs, you’ve probably read about antisemitic riots roiling liberal campuses like Columbia, where Jewish students have been assaulted or threatened by Hamas supporters who loudly proclaim their desire to “destroy Zionists” throughout the world.
The usual gang of idiots tried that at the University of Texas and quickly found out that Texas isn’t New York.
More than 20 people have been arrested, including a FOX 7 Austin photographer, by law enforcement on the University of Texas at Austin campus Wednesday.
UT Police have issued a dispersal order directing everyone to leave the South Mall area immediately.
Hundreds of students walked out of class Wednesday to rally for Palestine and attempt to occupy the South Lawn on campus.
The students gathered on the South Lawn and set up tents while chanting “Free Free Palestine” and other slogans, including ones aimed at the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and even Austin police.
DPS said in a release on social media that it responded to the campus at the request of the University and at the direction of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott “in order to prevent any unlawful assembly and to support UT Police in maintaining the peace by arresting anyone engaging in any sort of criminal activity, including criminal trespass.”
UTPD is warning people to avoid the area in the 2200 block of Speedway for “police activity”. This area is between the South Lawn and the Gregory Gymnasium where the march began.
On Wednesday afternoon, Gov. Greg Abbott vowed that the arrests would continue until the crowd dispersed.
“These protesters belong in jail. Antisemitism will not be tolerated in Texas. Period. Students joining in hate-filled, antisemitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled,” said Abbott.
State Sen. Brandon Creighton (R–Conroe), who chairs the Senate Education Committee, noted in light of the protests nationwide that the First Amendment does not protect violence or harassment.
“Let’s be real: if campuses witnessed protests with anti-LGBTQ+, anti-Asian, or anti-Hispanic slogans, the backlash would be fierce and immediate. Yet, when protests challenge Israel’s existence, they’re often waved off as acceptable political speech. It’s an unacceptable double standard, one that’s been fueled significantly by DEI programs,” he wrote in a post on X.
Creighton was the author of the state’s ban on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs and departments on college campuses that went into effect earlier this year.
“And let’s not forget what Israel is fighting against —Hamas, a known terrorist organization, carried out the Oct. 7th attack—the worst attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust. This isn’t about politics; it’s about recognizing and condemning terrorism and violence,” Creighton added.
The first amendment affords these morons the right to protest for their incredibly stupid causes. However, the right to protest is not the right to break the law, and clearly leftwing campuses across America have been letting their radical darlings break laws at will. Eugene Volokh has additional information on what is and isn’t lawful protest and both public and private universities. “There is no First Amendment right to camp out in any university, public or private. Indeed, there is no First Amendment right to camp out even in public parks (see Clark v. CCNV (1984)), and the government’s power to limit the use of property used for a public university is even greater than its power as to parks (Widmar v. Vincent (1981)).” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Disruptive protests that break the law are not constitutionally protected. Pro-Hamas protestors may get away with that sort of thing in deep blue cities and states, but that sort of thing doesn’t fly in Texas.
A petition filed in the 455th Travis County District Court on Apr. 8. calling for the removal of Travis County District Attorney José Garza was granted Friday afternoon by Dib Waldrip, the 433rd District Judge in Comal County and Presiding Judge of the 3rd Administrative Judicial Region.
Waldrip, who was appointed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to serve as the Presiding Judge of the 3rd Administrative Judicial Region in 2022, was assigned the case on Apr. 10 before granting the application for the issuance of a citation with an order for Garza to answer and appear in Travis County District Court on May 16.
Additionally, Waldrip appointed the Office of the Bell County Attorney and the Honorable Jim Nichols to represent the State as “a qualified and appropriate prosecuting attorney from within the region.”
Nichols is a Republican.
According to the court records, Nichols was selected by Waldrip after considering available options in accordance with Texas’ statute stating “the county attorney of the jurisdiction serves as counsel for the State in actions to remove an officer, except when such an action seeks removal of a prosecuting attorney.”
KXAN reached out to Waldrip, Abbott and Nichols about the matter and will update this story once a response is received.
The petition argues “Incompetency and official misconduct” related to the policies enforced by Garza about the who and what criminal offenses his office prosecutes.
Specifically, the petition references three issues supporting these allegations:
Defendant singles out law enforcement officials by automatically, indiscriminately, presenting charges against them to grand juries;
Defendant maintains a “do not call to testify” list of law enforcement officials who he deems unfit to testify and disqualifies from serving as witnesses for the State of Texas and
Defendant refuses to prosecute a class or type of criminal offense under state law.
The 21-page petition goes on to detail policies and evidence that allegedly show violations of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure such as presenting cases to grand juries that are not supported by probable cause and discriminatory practices specific to law enforcement officers.
Israel’s Iran strike is shrouded in mystery, California is shockingly “permissive” on sex trafficking children, Warhammer goes woke, and a new Doom speed-running record. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Senior US military sources:The target of the Israeli strike was an Iranian military base in Isfahan near Natanz, not the nuclear facilities themselves. “The Israelis hit what they intended to strike,” The targets within this strike included Iranian air defense systems at the air base including those used to protect their nearby nuclear facilities. It was a message to the Iranians, “We can reach out and touch you.” The Russian made air defense systems were shown to be ineffective. There was one target but multiple strikes within that target. The Israelis used missiles and unmanned aircraft – in other words no manned aircraft (F35’s or others) were used as part of this strike
Both Israeli and Iranian sources are being cagey about what actually was hit. Right now it’s looking like it was a very limited strike, almost just a “See? We can hit them if we want to” strike to satisfy the Biden Administration’s endless calls for “restraint” while they continue to pound Hamas into a fine red paste. But it does offer a certain amount of support for the Kayfabe theory of Middle East politics…
The penalty for the equivalent of child trafficking in “progressive,” “forward-thinking,” “compassionate” California is a maximum penalty of a year in jail, and a minimum of two days in jail, plus a $10,000 fine which may or may not be paid depending on sentencing details.
Plenty has been said in recent years about soft-on-crime policies in states led by Democrats, and with good reason. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that political movements that believe the execution of preborn children is morally and legally permissible would also enforce such loose penalties for child endangerment and exploitation. But this seems, even for liberals, unconscionable.
Thankfully, it’s not that way everywhere. Other states with right-leaning leadership handle child predation, shall we say, “differently.”
But California especially loves setting sex offenders free if they’re illegal aliens.
It turns out that Katherine Maher is no ordinary ascendant progressive media executive. No, this woman’s social-media history reveals her to be the Kwisatz Haderach of white wokeness, presumably bred through generations of careful genetic selection to be the supernaturally perfect embodiment of Affluent White Female Liberalism. (As many have noted, she not only acts but looks like Titania McGrath.) It’s vaguely unreal: If there was a trendy progressive take floating around on Twitter and popular within media circles, then you can reliably bet she was there to voice it in the most preeningly insulting way possible.
(Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, who also offers lots of choice Chris Rufo commentary on tweets from Maher.)
“Texas Congresswoman Beth Van Duyne (R-TX-24) has taken out a full-page advertisement in the New York Post in an effort to recruit law enforcement from New York City, encouraging them to ‘escape New York and move to Texas. Sadly, the corrupt and crumbling Empire State is so purposefully anti-law and order, that you should no longer put your careers and lives in the hands of politicians who couldn’t care less about you or your families,’ the advertisement states.”
I’ll take “Headlines You Don’t Want To Read At Breakfast” for $400: “New York Suffers Record Rise in Potentially Deadly Disease Caused by Rat Urine. New York City has seen a record jump in the number of human leptospirosis, a disease caused by rat urine that can cause kidney damage, liver failure, and even death.”
“A far-left extremist that firebombed a pro-life office in Wisconsin in 2022 has been sentenced to 7.5 years in federal prison, along with three years of supervised release and a $32,000 fine.”
Republicans aim to use ballot initiatives to overturn unpopular Democratic Party policies. “Republicans in Washington are moving to get three major ballot initiatives passed. These measures will repeal Democrat-passed policies that are becoming unpopular among locals. The three changes would repeal the state’s sanctuary status for illegal immigrants, end an attempt to ban natural gas, and a change to the laws to strip squatters of their rights.”
You’ll need to click Show More for this one:
i remember in feb and march of 2020 being astonished by this lockdown idea and loudly yowling "do you have any idea what shutting down the world for 2 weeks would do to global supply chains and economic function?"
Has Warhammer gone woke? “I can’t help thinking that you finally started to bow to pressure from ‘Modern Audiences,’ and you were almost certainly encouraged to do this by a sudden infusion of investment money from BlackRock.”
The moment you make any concession, no matter how tiny, you’ve already given the game away. You’ve made it known that you’re prepared to bow down to their demands if they put enough pressure on you. And so, inevitably, their demands are never going to end. They’ll literally never be happy because there’s always going to be some other thing, some other piece of problematic lore, some other rule or exclusionary detail that has to be altered to comply with their constantly evolving demands, and all in the name of inclusion and diversity.
Because these people don’t care about your hobby, they don’t care about integrating into a community of like-minded individuals. All they care about is that the community bends and reshapes itself to suit them, until eventually they bend it so much that it breaks. People like that are complete and utter poison for any hobby, any fandom, any franchise. All they ever manage to do is stir up conflict, resentment and division, driving people away and turning fans against the very company that tries to pander to them, because their very reason for existing is to undermine and destroy the thing they claim that they’re trying to save.
And if you’ve got any common sense whatsoever or any love for the fandom that you’re so passionate about, you’ll think very carefully before bending the knee to them.
Sunday I watched Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire at the local Alamo Drafthouse. All of the trailers shown before the movie were for sequels or reboots:
Furiosa
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
The Crow reboot
Bad Boys Ride or Die
Twisters
I understand there’s a certain amount of irony in complaining that all the trailers were a sequel or a reboot before a movie that was a sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a reboot, but usually Alamo has more varied trailer fare.
But that lack of originality, along with wokeness, the red ink carnage of the streaming wars, and the lingering effects of the most recent strikes, has led to a deep recession in Hollywood, so much so that Deadline has a regular Hollywood Contraction feature.
How bad is it? “Employment in “motion picture and sound recording” has grown nationwide, but the share of workers in LA or New York went from just under half at the beginning of 2023 to just one-third earlier this year.”
All this activity peaked in 2022, when 600 original scripted shows were in production, according to the network FX. That gave lots of opportunities to everyone who makes a film shoot possible: Writers, crew members, caterers, and actors, like Haddad Tompkins. But it didn’t last.
“When the beginning of 2023 happened, it seemed like there was this chill on production and making things and buying things,” she said.
Per FX’s count, the number of scripted shows dropped to 516 last year. Studios pulled back for a few reasons, according to Patrick Adler, an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong and head of the consulting firm Westwood Economics, which issued a recent report on the film industry workforce.
First, investors started feeling the effects of rising interest rates.
“Wall Street just got significantly less patient with the spending by the studios on streaming platforms as soon as money started to be more expensive,” Adler explained.
Second, he said, studios realized that consumers might not have as much capacity as they anticipated for lots of new streaming subscriptions.
Then, in May of last year, the Hollywood writers’ union went on strike, followed by the actors’ union…
The resulting work stoppages effectively shut the industry down for six months. But once both unions reached contract agreements with studios, many people in the industry expected production would pick back up. Maybe not to the level of the streaming bubble, but an uptick.
But in LA and New York, that hasn’t really happened. Actor Janie Haddad Tompkins said when studios were pumping out shows in the midst of the streaming bubble, she’d get one or two auditions per week.
“Now, it’s like I’ve had maybe one a month,” she said. “So it’s been bleak.”
The studio whose wokeness seems to have wrecked hardest is Disney. “Its last four high-profile releases bombed at the box office, losing over $1 billion between them. Once Hollywood’s most successful film studio, Disney was dethroned last year by Universal Pictures.” And Elemental was the worst performing film in Pixar history.
It’s so bad that even Hollywood regulars who tick all the proper intersectionality boxes are being laid off. Quel dommage! Here’s a Critical Drinker round-table on the subject.
“Every IP is dead. The snake has eaten its own tail. There’s no more tail left to eat.”
If Disney just could have avoiding injecting wokeness, it could have milked Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar and its own IP for decades. Instead, its wokeness and poor quality has alienated its core demographics, possible for a decade or more. And the rest of Hollywood hasn’t been far behind.
Conservative have been asserting for years that Biden’s illegal alien invasion is to create new Democratic voters. Now there’s more proof.
The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project posted an image on X of what they say is a flyer from a non-governmental organization operating in Mexico encouraging migrants to vote for President Biden once they arrive in the United States.
“Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open,” part of the flyer read.
The Oversight Project said the flyer was initially discovered by a Muckraker journalist while touring the site of Resource Center Matamoras in Mexico.
“They [flyers] also appear to be handed out when illegal aliens use the RCM for assistance in coming to the USA,” the group said.
RCM founder Gaby Zavala told one of Muckraker’s journalists that she is trying to flood the US with as many illegal aliens as possible before former President Trump is reelected.
“RCM bills itself as an operation which houses functions for Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which helps illegal aliens enter the United States,” Oversight Project said, adding that disgraced Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas “is a former board member of HIAS, which received numerous grants from Soros’ Open Society Foundation over the years.”
Soros! What are the odds?
Given the lousy economy of the Biden Recession, Democrats know they can’t win this election without cheating, so they’re going all out on that front, and amnestying illegal aliens is a key part of their strategy, no matter how many black and Hispanic American voters it alienates in the process.
Exactly how much is California spending to combat homelessness — and is it working?
It turns out, no one knows. That’s the result of a much-anticipated statewide audit released Tuesday, which calls into question the state’s ability to track and analyze its spending on homelessness services.
The state doesn’t have current information on the ongoing costs and results of its homelessness programs because the agency tasked with gathering that data — the California Interagency Council on Homelessness — has analyzed no spending past 2021, according to the report by State Auditor Grant Parks. Three of the five state programs the audit analyzed — including the state’s main homelessness funding source — didn’t even produce enough data for Parks to determine whether they were effective or not.
The audit also analyzed homelessness services in San Jose and San Diego, finding both cities failed to thoroughly account for their spending or measure the success of many of their programs.
“The lack of transparency in our current approach to homelessness is pretty frightening,” said Assemblymember Josh Hoover, a Republican from Folsom who co-authored the request for the audit.
To the Democrats running the program, that “lack of transparency” is a feature, not a bug.
That means state policymakers have little data to go on when they make funding decisions related to what has become one of California’s most dire challenges.
“The State Auditor’s findings highlight the significant progress made in recent years to address homelessness at the state level, including the completion of a statewide assessment of homelessness programs,” the Interagency Council on Homelessness wrote in an emailed statement. “But it also underscores a need to continue to hold local governments accountable, who are primarily responsible for implementing these programs and collecting data on outcomes that the state can use to evaluate program effectiveness.”
As the homelessness crisis has intensified, California under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s leadership allocated an unprecedented $24 billion to address homelessness and housing during the last five fiscal years, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
Nine state agencies administered more than 30 programs aimed at preventing or reducing homelessness. Some of those programs did such a poor job tracking their outcomes that it’s impossible to tell if they’ve been successful, according to the audit, which marks the first such large-scale accounting of the state’s homelessness spending.
The report evaluated five state homelessness programs and found two “likely” are cost-effective. Newsom’s signature Homekey program helps cities and counties turn hotels and other buildings into homeless housing at an average cost of $144,000 per unit (in the program’s first round), compared to the $380,000-$570,000 it would cost for new construction. The CalWORKS Housing Support Program, which gives financial help to families who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless, also saves the state money because it’s much cheaper to help someone stay housed than it is to help them find housing once they become homeless.
The auditor found the CalWORKS program spent an average of $12,000-$22,000 per household, while a single chronically homeless person can cost taxpayers as much as $50,000 per year.
Funny how Democrats are always willing to spend more to help drug-addicted transients than many taxpaying citizens make in a year.
But for three other programs, the state hasn’t collected enough data for the auditor to make an assessment: the State Rental Assistance Program (which helped people pay rent and other expenses during the COVID-19 pandemic), the Encampment Resolution Fund (a program Newsom launched to help cities clean up specific encampments) and the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention program (the state’s main source of general homeless funding, also known as HHAP).
“Fundamentally, the audit depicts a bit of a data desert,” Sen. Dave Cortese, a Democrat from Santa Clara County who joined Hoover in asking for the audit, said during a media call.
For example, nearly one-third of people who left placements funded by the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention program left for “unknown” destinations, according to the auditor’s analysis of round-one funding in Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Clara and San Francisco counties. That ambiguous data makes it impossible to tell if the program has been successful, the auditor wrote. Even so, the state authorized billions of dollars for four additional rounds of funding.
I’m sure the programs are considered a “success” by Democrats because they provide a giant bucket to dole out graft and fraud to the leftwing activists working in the Homeless Industrial Complex.
But I have a deep suspicion that things are even worse than we think. Remember the effort to recall Newsom, and how Democrats from across the country sprang immediately to his aid? At the time, Scott Adams said that protecting Newsom was “the top process in the system.” I suspect that California’s homeless programs are not just a channel for graft and fraud to left-wing activists in California, but a way to rake off money directly to Democratic Party campaigns and coffers nationwide. (Though certainly not the only source. Remember how $850 million in the hands of New York City Democratic mayor Bill de Blasio’s wife just sort of magically disappeared?)
If Trump wins in November, a law should be passed allowing federal audits of state social programs that accept federal block grants. Money from the American taxpayer is being siphoned off, and we deserve to know where.
It’s been a week of petty frustrations, with simple things like paying for online transactions made impossible by websites that send out the wrong information despite the right information being on file. Speaking of frustration, Americans continue to be battered by high inflation, blacks continue to abandon Biden, and it turns out that the Pope might, just might, be Catholic after all.
A hotter-than-expected consumer price index report rattled Wall Street Wednesday, but markets are buzzing about an even more specific prices gauge contained within the data — the so-called supercore inflation reading.
Along with the overall inflation measure, economists also look at the core CPI, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, to find the true trend. The supercore gauge, which also excludes shelter and rent costs from its services reading, takes it even a step further. Fed officials say it is useful in the current climate as they see elevated housing inflation as a temporary problem and not as good a measure of underlying prices.
Supercore accelerated to a 4.8% pace year over year in March, the highest in 11 months.
Tom Fitzpatrick, managing director of global market insights at R.J. O’Brien & Associates, said if you take the readings of the last three months and annualize them, you’re looking at a supercore inflation rate of more than 8%, far from the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal.
According to a Wall Street Journal Swing State Poll, blacks, especially black males are abandoning Biden in huge numbers.
While most Black men said they intend to support Biden, some 30% of them in the poll said they were either definitely or probably going to vote for the former Republican president. There isn’t comparable WSJ swing-state polling from 2020, but Trump received votes from 12% of Black men nationwide that year, as recorded by AP VoteCast, a large poll of the electorate.
That’s an 18 percentage point swing, minimum, for black males, if the national results and the swing state voting is similar.
By confirmed, I mean those who said they intended to vote for Trump.
The gap is even larger if we factor in undecided voters. Biden is down by a massive 30 percentage points vs 2020.
Good: A teacher helping her son with homework. Bad: A teacher helping her son force female students into sex trafficking. “Klein Cain High School cosmetology teacher Kedria McMath Grigsby is accused of helping her son, Roger Magee, force the troubled teens into prostitution.”
Investigative science writer Paul Homewood last year discovered considerable tampering in 2022 with the recent CET record. He initially found that in version one, the summer of 1995 had been 0.1°C warmer than 2018. In version 2, the two years swapped places with 1995 cooled by 0.07°C and 2018 warmed by 0.13°C. Alerted to these changes, Homewood then analysed the full record from version 1 to 2, and the graph below shows what he found.
As can be seen, the adjustments up to 1970 are small with ups and downs offsetting each other. Homewood then found that the years from 1970 to 2003 had been cooled markedly, followed by significant rises to 2022. Homewood concludes that “unfortunately it is part of a much wider tampering with temperature globally – and the tampering is always one way, cooling the past and heating the present”. Given that we now know that the Met Office has been using class 4 statistics for two thirds of its database since 2006, the recent higher adjustments would seem to call for clarifying explanations from the state-funded Met Office.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has announced his interim charges for the Senate, a set of 57 issues he is calling on Senate Committees to investigate and research ahead of the legislative session next year.
The list of charges runs the gamut of issues conservatives have called on the legislature to address, including property tax relief, protecting Texas land from hostile foreign ownership, and strengthening laws preventing electioneering by school districts and other political subdivisions.
Some of the biggest reform proposals, however, have been reserved for higher education.
Patrick has asked the Higher Education Subcommittee to study and make recommendations regarding the role of ‘faculty senates’, antisemitism on college campuses, as well as to review the implementation of a new state law banning DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in state universities that went into effect earlier this year.
“The Senate’s work to study the list of charges will begin in the coming weeks and months. Following completion of hearings, committees will submit reports with their specific findings and policy recommendations before December 1, 2024,” said Patrick.
When you think Houston Democratic Congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee has already said the stupidest thing she possibly can, she goes out and proves you wrong.
Thanks to New York City’s idiotic rent control laws, not only would a hotel guest refuse to pay rent or leave, but a court actually ruled that he was the owner of the hotel.
First class stamps are going up to 73 cents. Thanks, Joe Biden.
If the commies running Vietnam accuse someone of a crime, I don’t automatically trust them, but Truong My Lan may actually be guilty.
Behind the stately yellow portico of the colonial-era courthouse in Ho Chi Minh City, a 67-year-old Vietnamese property developer was sentenced to death on Thursday for looting one of the country’s largest banks over a period of 11 years.
It’s a rare verdict – she is one of very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white collar crime.
The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court’s way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.
The habitually secretive communist authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case, going into minute detail for the media. They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved.
The evidence was in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes. Eighty-five others were tried with Truong My Lan, who denied the charges and can appeal.
All of the defendants were found guilty. Four received life in jail. The rest were given prison terms ranging from 20 years to three years suspended. Truong My Lan’s husband and niece received jail terms of nine and 17 years respectively.
Snip.
By 2011, Truong My Lan was a well-known business figure in Ho Chi Minh City, and she was allowed to arrange the merger of three smaller, cash-strapped banks into a larger entity: Saigon Commercial Bank.
Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.
They accused her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.
The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% of all the bank’s lending.
According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.
That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam’s largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.
I've been waiting 29 years to tell this story about OJ and his days at USC. Now that he's dead (may he burn in hell) I have a story that I signed an NDA for that is no longer valid. I was a junior at USC working in Topping Student Center on campus in 1995. I was an administrative…
Remember when a whole lot of blue locales legalized shoplifting, either de jure (California) or de facto (a whole bunch of cities that elected Soros-backed prosecutors), and then were shocked, shocked when shoplifting soared?
Tuesday Morning Governor Ron DeSantis signed a retail theft bill into law, instituting a severe crackdown on the Sunshine State’s high levels of shoplifting and porch piracy.
“We’re a law and order state. If you do the crime, you do the time,” DeSantis said. He hosted his press conference at a Walgreens in Stuart, telling Floridians they will no longer have to deal with a “Fort Knox” style situation to simply buy toothpaste.
“It’s all under lock and key for basic items. You gotta get a clerk to come and open it and all this stuff just to do basic shopping. That is not something that is good for quality of life,” he said.
HB 549 makes it a third-degree felony to work with five or more people to commit retail theft. Using social media to plan these thefts would be a second-degree felony, and committing a second offense lands offenders a first-degree felony.
The bill follows Florida’s 2022 loss of $5.421 billion in revenue to theft, meaning retailers lost $302.05 in sales per capita. In 2023, destination city Miami ranked in the top 10 areas for the highest rates of retail theft.
The new law also targets porch pirates, or people who steal packages off of other people’s doormats. Stealing someone’s item worth less than $40 is now a first-degree misdemeanor, and doing it again or stealing property worth over $40 becomes a third-degree felony—up to five years in prison.
“Florida has set the blueprint for other states,” Attorney General Ashley Moody said Tuesday, lauding the effort to be “proactive” in fighting crime.
DeSantis has maintained that Florida is the “law and order state”, stressing that this is not the first time he’s signed off on severe penalties for lawbreaking. He passed a comprehensive “Law and Order” legislation package last year, targeting drug-related crimes, human smuggling, child rapists, and sex criminals, and easing the process to sentence offenders to death.
Being soft on crime gets you more crime. This isn’t exactly rocket science. You have to be a Democrat to ignore this most basic of truths.
Texas should look at DeSantis’ crime initiatives, and think about implementing then in places where we’ve fallen behind in keeping people safe, and to keep Soros prosecutors from inflicting higher crime rates on citizens in the name of “reform.”
— The Redheaded libertarian (@TRHLofficial) March 29, 2024
I was particularly struck by the phrase “fundamentally unwifeable.” Add “social justice” to “feminism” for the reason. As for “Disney Princess programming,” the Disney Princess thing has been around for over half a century. So why have things gotten so much worse on that front over the last 20 years?
On the flipside, here’s a 20-something girl complaining that she can’t afford rent. She apparently deleted the original tweet, but she said her rent had jumped from something like $1,200 a month to $1,600 a month, and she was having trouble affording food. Thanks, Joe Biden! Rent inflation is real, especially in blue cities where regulation prevents new housing being built to meet demand, but if your rent is that much, then you either need to move further out, find roommates to share rent with, or you need to consider moving to a less expensive city entirely.
During an Austin City Council meeting on public safety, Austin-Travis County Emergency and Medical Services (EMS) spoke about the rising rates of opioid deaths in the county.
“Travis County now has twice as many opiate overdose deaths than any other county in Texas, per capita,” said Steven White, acting assistant chief for Austin-Travis County EMS.
White explained how the opioid crisis began in the community in 2016, “with a severe increase in 2017.”
White elaborated that in 2018 there were about 30 overdoses per month, and “now we’re averaging about 100 overdoses a month.”
He went on to show a heat map of where the overdoses are occurring, stating that “opioids do not seem to be contained by geographic barriers or financial barriers.”
“It really gets into every part of our community and touches every family [and] at some point will be affected by the opioid crisis.”
White also highlighted that “30 percent of all the opioid users who die of an overdose, at some point had contact with EMS in the previous 12 months before their death, which gives us an intersection point where we’re actually meeting these patients who have the potential to overdose and die.”
Another statistic he presented is that “patients that receive Narcan in the field by EMS have a 10 percent chance of having a fatal overdose in the next 12 months.”
