I’m pretty much over my cold, except the occasional cough and continued draining of the Strategic Mucus Reserve.
The USAID revelation continues, with every left-wing, anti-American cause getting their snout into the trough of taxpayer money. Plus blows against the illegal alien and tranny pander brigades. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Second Amendment advocates have long know that “Everytown for Gun Safety” was, like all the other branches of the Brady Bunch hydra, pure Astrotruf, but thanks to database revelations, we now know that taxpayers were footing the bill.
Have you ever heard of NEO Philanthropy? They’re a left-wing group that has been around for more than 40 years. NEO wants folks to believe it is a partnership between “changemakers and funders.” They claim to provide “resources to groups accelerating change.” Race, gender and DEI are huge for them, but guns are a problem.
An incredible website database has outed NEO Philanthropy’s actual duties, and those of thousands of other similar groups. NEO, it turns out, is nothing more than a middleman. It receives money and funnels some of it to Everytown for Gun Safety as well as other leftwing, anti-gun groups.
The website database is called DataRepublican.com, and it will forever change the way nonprofits handle their funding, especially those on the left.
Snip.
On Wednesday, pro-gun official Hannah Hill “exposed taxpayer money flowing to Bloomberg gun control orgs.”
The next day, she used the website to link USAID funds that went to Everytown, Giffords and more gun-control organizations.
Yesterday, @hannahhill_sc exposed taxpayer money flowing to Bloomberg gun control orgs.
Today, @DataRepublican's tool helped 2A advocates link USAID funds to Everytown, Giffords & more.
George Soros got his nose in the trough as well. Who was bankrolling the campaign to appoint pro-crime Soros DAs? You were.
Beginning about a decade ago, George Soros began funding campaigns for people who became known as the “Soros prosecutors.” Local prosecutorial races, which once had a few thousand spent on them, suddenly started seeing hundreds of thousands, and even millions of dollars pouring in, totaling about $50 million to elect 75 prosecutors nationwide.
Every one of those prosecutors is a radical leftist who immediately set about remaking the local justice system in accordance with leftist values: Criminals are victims of the system and should not be prosecuted; Republicans are enemies of the people and should be prosecuted. Some of these prosecutors are wreaking havoc on a scale that doesn’t make the news; others have done such horrible things that their names hit the headlines:
Kim Gardner, the woman who used false charges to destroy Eric Greitens, Missouri’s Republican governor, and whose tenure was distinguished by slandering the police, violating open records laws, persecuting the McCloskeys for defending their property against BLM rioters, discriminating against employees on racial grounds, and letting the most egregious criminals walk free.
Lawrence Krasner, the Philadelphia DA who just promised to prosecute the pardoned January 6ers. He couldn’t name a crime, though. He seemed to be operating on the Lavrentiy Beria principle of “show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”
Andrew Warren, the Florida prosecutor who announced that he would no longer prosecute entire categories of criminal activities because he didn’t like the Florida laws. Governor Ron DeSantis fired him.
George Gascón, a District Attorney who managed to break both the San Francisco and Los Angeles criminal justice systems. He was finally voted out of office in L.A. this past November.
Kimberly Foxx, the Cook County Chicago prosecutor who turned the criminal justice system into a revolving door, creating a staggering wave of violence in already beleaguered Chicago.
And then there’s Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg, who brought an utterly spurious and quite obviously political case against Donald Trump for allegedly criminal hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.
Without exception, the Soros prosecutors, most of whom received money from the Tides organizations, have been disastrous for their communities and, in Bragg’s case, for America as a whole. (Although one could argue that Bragg’s manifest political persecution of Donald Trump helped return Trump to the White House, which, to date, has been an incredibly good thing.)
Thus, there’s a straight line from Soros to Tides to corrupt prosecutors.
But what does this have to do with USAID? Well, back in October 2020, when no one was paying too much attention (COVID, BLM, the election), and USAID-funded mainstream media outlets were busy quashing stories that harmed Democrat interests, USAID was Funding the Tides Center:
Nearly $170 million in government grants has passed through a liberal dark money behemoth that houses numerous left-wing groups, including the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, tax forms show.
The taxpayer-funded grants were disbursed to groups through the Tides Center, a San Francisco-based nonprofit incubator that wealthy liberal donors use to bankroll progressive causes. A number of radical left-wing groups have fallen under the auspices of the Tides Center, which acts as a “fiscal sponsor” to nonprofits by providing its 501(c)(3) tax and legal status. This arrangement lets the groups under its umbrella avoid registering with the IRS.
[snip]
[Scott] Walter [president of the Capitol Research Center] noted that the Tides Center’s recipient profile on USASpending.gov, which posts government grants, shows $34 million in federal funding since 2008. The grants were primarily from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Health and Human Services.
And Stephen Green discovered that USAID was also funding #BlackLivesMatter so they could help burn down your city.
More than $1.3 billion in taxpayer funds from the Biden administration ended up helping groups that sponsored or committed terrorism.
Federal watchdog reports and other documents show former President Joe Biden’s aid programs funneled the money toward a network of terrorism in the Muslim world — largely by reversing Trump-era policies.
Snip.
The Biden administration gave $1,053,400,000 in taxpayer money to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which claims to help war-afflicted Palestinian civilians but is tied to terrorists fighting Israel, according to U.S. and Israeli intelligence. Biden reversed a Trump-era ban on UNRWA funding in 2021 but brought back the ban last year after Israel accused UNWRA workers of participating in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
Intelligence officials later revealed that more than 1,000 UNRWA employees, or around 10%, were linked to the groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, according to documents found on the bodies of dead terrorists and other evidence. A dozen took part in the Oct. 7 massacre, including a Hamas commander who was teaching in elementary school for UNRWA and led a siege against an Israeli kibbutz that killed almost 100 people.
UNWRA’s schools have long used curriculum for Palestinian children that glorifies terrorists and martyrdom, a March 2023 report from UN Watch found.
The curriculum comes from the Palestinian Authority (PA), a governing body in the West Bank that the Biden administration considered more friendly to American interests than Hamas. The PA also made a profit from Biden’s presidency despite its program that pays Palestinians and their families as a reward for acts of terror against Jews.
Trump and Congress passed a law in 2018 blocking economic support funds for the PA due to its program. Trump later paused all remaining funding for the PA before Biden took office and resumed it.
The Biden administration in part revived the economic support fund that Trump’s law restricts. The State Department claimed in documents from 2021 that “most” of the money did not “directly benefit the PA” in violation of the law. However, officials sent $265 million straight to the PA for its “security forces and justice sector institutions” throughout Biden’s presidency, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Under Biden, the PA agreed to pay more than $97 million to reward the perpetrators of the Oct. 7 attacks, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups.
They literally never denied a payment in their entire career.
So Treasury official David A. Lebryk resigned rather than testifying. Sounds like he should be subpoenaed and/or indicted…
Another media beneficiary of USAID taxpayer subsidies: Christianity Today. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and also render unto Caesar what is God’s…as long as Caesar is paying you enough.
You’ve never heard of the “Zizians,” and neither had I until this afternoon, but you’re probably going to be hearing a lot more about them now that this weirdo California cult has been connected to the shootout in Vermont last week that left a Border Patrol agent dead. Credit to Andy Ngo for putting together the pieces of this bizarre puzzle. When the shootout went down in Vermont on January 20, the initial reports were very thin, but piece by piece, we’ve learned more about the two suspects, Teresa Youngblut, a 21-year-old from Seattle, and Felix Bauckholt, a math genius from Germany who had worked in the financial industry on an H1B visa. About seven months ago, Youngblut’s parents had reported her missing, saying she had cut off contact with them and they were concerned she might be in a coercive relationship. The police didn’t do anything, saying that as an adult, she couldn’t be considered a runaway.
Youngblut and Bauckholt showed up in Vermont a couple of weeks ago and attracted suspicion because they were wearing black “tactical” gear and Youngblut had a pistol in a visible holster. Eventually, this led to an attempted traffic stop on I-91 in which both Youngblut and Bauckholt pulled pistols. Bauckholt was killed in the resulting shootout, but Younglut survived and will face charges.
The Department of Justice will ensure that, consistent with law, ‘sanctuary jurisdictions’ do not receive access to Federal funds from the Department,’ Bondi’s first-day memo says.
‘Consistent with applicable statutes, regulations, court orders, and terms, the Department of Justice shall pause the distribution of all funds until a review has been completed, terminate any agreements that are in violation of law or are the source of waste, fraud, or abuse, and initiate clawback or recoupment procedures, where appropriate.’
It’s no secret that Chicago has forsaken its own low-income residents to virtue signal as a so-called ‘sanctuary city’ for illegal immigrants – to the point where local residents have been excoriating city officials during official meetings, and major businesses such as Ken Griffin’s Citadel moved to Miami due to the city devolving into “Afghanistan.”
Now, the Trump DOJ is suing Chicago, the state of Illinois, local officials over laws creating said ‘sanctuary,’ and have accused the defendants of impeding federal immigration enforcement efforts. In their complaint, the DOJ has asked a judge to declare the state and local measures unconstitutional due to the federal government’s supremacy.
One of the laws challenged by the Wednesday lawsuit prohibits officials from complying with federal immigration detainers and providing certain information about noncitizens.
“The challenged provisions of Illinois, Chicago, and Cook County law reflect their intentional effort to obstruct the Federal Government’s enforcement of federal immigration law and to impede consultation and communication between federal, state, and local law enforcement officials that is necessary for federal officials to carry out federal immigration law and keep Americans safe,” reads the lawsuit.
Named in the case are Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D), Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D), as well as the city’s police superintendent and other city officials.
The case, filed in federal court in Chicago, marks one of the first major cases brought by the Trump administration in such a case, and comes after the Wednesday confirmation of Attorney General Pam Bondi, who issued a same-day memo restricting sanctuary cities from accessing DOJ funds.
The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it, and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangers, unexploded bombs, and other weapons on the site, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area.
Trump’s affinity for beachfront property aside, I don’t see how rebuilding Gaza is a proper use of American tax dollars.
Sudden Putin Death Syndrome strike again. “Russian singer who donated to Ukraine and called Putin an ‘idiot’ mysteriously falls to his death from a window.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Kamala Harris team lied about Joe Rogan’s attempt to get her on his show. Of course they did. The whole campaign was built on lies and an attempt to install Harris in the White House without enduring any scrutiny from voters.
Speaking of which, remember when CBS swore up and down they didn’t deceptively edit the Kamala Harris video They lied.
Winning. “President Trump Signs Executive Order Barring Men from Women’s Sports.”
On Wednesday, National Girls and Women in Sports Day, President Donald Trump signed an executive order barring men from women’s sports through Title IX, withholding funding from universities that insist on allowing male athletes to encroach on women’s competition.
The order will also empower women who are forced to compete against men to sue their schools and directs the Department of Homeland Security to deny visa applications from foreign athletes who identify themselves as the opposite sex in order to compete in the U.S.
At the signing ceremony, Trump specifically cited the importance of protecting female athletes at the upcoming 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles and the World Cup.
“My administration will not stand by and watch men beat and batter female athletes. We’re just not going to let it happen,” Trump said.
J.K. Rowling had something to say about it as well:
Congratulations to every single person on the left who’s been campaigning to destroy women’s and girls’ rights. Without you, there’d be no images like this. pic.twitter.com/mzR7l5k1OW
Our vile media: “Newsweek runs puff piece on gender transition of man who held family hostage, raped them, and killed their kids.
More dictates from the Texas House Cabal: “Speaker Burrows Confirms House Rules Were Written by Democrat Lawyer. The new rules mandate that all House committee vice-chairs be Democrats and expand their authority.”
Follow-up: Charges against Aaron Dunn and Wallis Nader, two of the Lina Hidalgo’s aides indicted for vote rigging, have been been dismissed by the Texas Office of the Attorney General, and a third against Alex Triantaphyllis is expected to be dismissed as well, though it’s unclear why.
Because I had to get out my book catalog last week, I’ve been as busy as Kathleen Kennedy on Ruin Star Wars Day, so this is another two-weeks crammed into one LinkSwarm. It’s just been a packed two weeks, with so many major stories breaking up not going to tease them up here, so let’s jump right in.
A new report has revealed that 21 George Soros-linked district attorneys across the United States have been replaced by “tough-on-crime” prosecutors. The report also noted that four have left office, either through recall efforts or other means.
Among those listed by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund were former Portland District Attorney Mike Schmidt, who lost a May election to Democrat challenger Nathan Vasquez, Western Judicial Circuit District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez, who lost her reelection bid to Kalki Yalamanchili, and Kim Foxx, the former Cook County State’s Attorney who in 2023 announced that she would not seek reelection.
For those who were removed from office, there is Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens, who in November was indicted on federal bribery charges, and Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, who was recalled last month after serving just 18 months in office, per The National News Desk.
Replacements also noted by the report were Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon, who lost to challenger Nathan Hochman in last month’s election, and former Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, who lost the 2022 Democratic primary election to Ivan Bates. Since her election loss, Mosby has been found guilty of one count of mortgage fraud.
All of them need to go.
Speaking of Soros tools: Subway Samaritan Daniel penny found not guilty on all charges. Just like Kyle Rittenhouse, he never should have been charged in the first place. Soros tool Alvin Bragg needs to be impeached and removed from office.
Christopher Wray steps down as FBI head. This shouldn’t keep the Trump Administration from prosecuting for his manifest interference in the political process.
More Democratic Party fundraising fraud. “ActBlue, the massive online fund-raising platform for liberal causes, has informed Congress it did not automatically block donations made with foreign-bought gift cards until recently.” Almost like the entire party is a giant money laundering scam…
Busted. “Georgia Court Removes Fani Willis from Trump Case over Relationship with Special Prosecutor.”
An appellate court removed Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis (D) from the racketeering case against President-elect Donald Trump over her romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade.
Georgia’s court of appeals ruled Thursday that Willis will be removed from the case because of the appearance of misconduct surrounding her relationship with Wade, but did not throw out the case all together.
“While we recognize that an appearance of impropriety is generally not enough to support disqualification, this is the rare case in which disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings,” the three judge panel ruled.
Left unstated is that her lawfare attack on Trump was both illegal and unconstitutional.
He also handed Iran access to $10 billion, because promoting terrorism, plotting to destroy Israel, and trying to build nuclear weapons are activities that Democrats seem eager to reward.
Winning. “ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos have reached a settlement in a defamation suit brought by President-elect Donald Trump, which requires the network to apologize, contribute $15 million to a ‘Presidential foundation and museum to be established by or for Plaintiff,’ and pay Trump’s legal team $1 million.”
The battle lines are now drawn between West Coast liberals, Bernie Sanders-socialists and moderate technocrats in the Midwest, who insist the party has completely lost touch with the average American voter.
But first, there is one thing that all sides seemingly agree on: The current political establishment must be chased out of national politics for good. A reckoning is coming.
‘The people that are responsible for this s**tshow are the Obama people. They’re just grifters,’ a well-connected Democratic donor exclusively told Daily Mail. He singled out Jen O’Malley Dillon, who went from Biden 2024 campaign chair to serve in the same role for Harris’s camp, and David Plouffe, an ex-Obama 2008 campaign manager turned top Kamala adviser.
“Trump sues Des Moines Register, pollster for ‘brazen election interference’ over faulty polling in presidential race.” I think it’s very unlikely that Trump will win this lawsuit, thanks to First Amendment protections and the “absence of malice standard.” Plus pollster Ann Selzer can always just claim “I just sucked at my job.” She retired after the election.
Israel pounded Syrian army bases on Tuesday in strikes it says aim to keep weapons from falling into hostile hands, but denied its forces had advanced into Syria, toward Damascus, beyond a buffer zone at the border.
Regional security sources and officers within the now-fallen Syrian army who spoke to Reuters described Tuesday morning’s airstrikes as the heaviest yet, hitting military installations and airbases across Syria, destroying dozens of helicopters and jets, as well as Republican Guard assets in and around Damascus.
The rough tally of 200 raids overnight had left nothing of the Syrian army’s assets, said the sources.
The Israeli Air Force has carried out over 300 airstrikes in Syria since the collapse of the regime, destroying advanced weapons and other capabilities.
Strikes reportedly carried out by Israel in Damascus’s Barzeh area completely destroyed a defense ministry research center, AFP correspondents reported on Tuesday. Western countries including the United States struck the facility in 2018, saying it was related to Syria’s “chemical weapons infrastructure.”
Plus they sunk the entire Syrian navy.
Speaking of pounding the snot out of things:
According to a US official, the US used B-52 bombers, F-15 fighter jets and A-10 aircraft to strike ISIS leaders, operatives and camps in central Syria. pic.twitter.com/QreZe4ATau
“Palantir CEO Alex Karp Eviscerates Democrats: Voters ‘Do Not Want To Hear Your Woke Pagan Ideology.'”
Alex Karp, the co-founder and CEO of Palantir, said late last week that Democrats lost the 2024 election because they did not understand the fundamental human desire to feel safe.
Karp made the remarks during a panel discussion at the Reagan National Defense Forum while talking about what Americans expect out of the U.S. government.
“Americans are the most loving, God-fearing, fair, least discriminatory people on the planet,” he said. “They want to know that if you’re waking up and thinking about harming American citizens, or if American citizens are taken hostage and kept in dungeons, or if you’re a foreign power sending fentanyl to poison our people, something really bad is going to happen to you and your friends and your cousins, and your bank account and your mistress, and whoever was involved.”
He continued, “When Americans are spending a trillion dollars on ‘defense,’ what I want and what I think my peers want is: why are these people keeping our citizens as hostages, torturing our people, attacking our allies, maligning us in what was once called the United Nations — basically a discriminatory institution against anything good? We need to stand up and those people need to be scared.”
He said that it was critical for the U.S. to dominate because “we have the best products in the world, and we can not have parity.”
“Our adversaries do not have our moral compunction,” he said. “If it is even, they will take advantage of our niceness, our kindness, our desire to be at home in Nebraska and New Hampshire or wherever we live, in our peaceful environments.”
“They need to wake up scared, and go to bed scared, and if you give that to the American people, the American people will go back and say — and honestly, I probably shouldn’t say this, this is why I thought the Democrats were going to lose the election, and why they did, because people want to live in peace,” he continued. “They want to go home. They do not want to hear your woke pagan ideology. They want to know they’re safe. And safe means the other person is scared. That’s how you make someone safe.”
Democrats are now, finally, pissed at Obama. “There are people there are people who are now multi-millionaires as a result of the Harris campaign, and we know exactly who they are. And I just want to say that half a billion dollars in advertising went to just four well-heeled Democratic firms. This whole thing is deeply incestuous.”
“Ozy Media Founder Carlos Watson Sentenced To Hefty Prison Term For Defrauding Investors. [He] was sentenced to 116 months, or nearly ten years, in prison for conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in an unusual case that briefly captivated the media world.”
More of that voting fraud Democrats swear doesn’t exist. “2020 Carrollton Mayoral Candidate Admits to Mail Ballot Fraud. Zul Mohamed pleaded guilty Monday to 109 voter fraud felonies.”
“After Donald Trump flipped his county for the first time in a century, longtime Democratic Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina has announced he is switching parties to the Republicans saying that “the [Democratic] party left me, and the people of South Texas behind.”
Three U.S. Army soldiers have been arrested in Texas on criminal charges relating to smuggling illegal aliens.
The three soldiers were based at Fort Cavazos, which is near Killeen in Central Texas.
Fort Cavazos is The Fort Formerly Known As Fort Hood. I might have been a little more worked up over the name change if Hood hadn’t been such a shitty general.
U.S. Border Patrol agents made an initial traffic stop of a suspicious vehicle in the city of Presidio, located in West Texas on the Rio Grande. As an agent approached the vehicle’s passenger side, the driver sped away—hitting a second Border Patrol vehicle and injuring the agent inside.
The vehicle was eventually stopped by local law enforcement officers who detained four individuals in the car. Three were illegal aliens, and one was identified as U.S. Army soldier Emilio Mendoza Lopez.
The driver of the vehicle was reported as being another soldier named Angel Palma, who fled on foot from the vehicle but was located in Odessa a day later.
Presidio is nearly 500 miles away from where the soldiers were stationed.
“Mendoza Lopez and Palma allegedly traveled from Fort Cavazos to Presidio for the purpose of picking up and transporting undocumented noncitizens,” announced the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas. “A third individual, Enrique Jauregui, is alleged to be the recruiter and facilitator of the human smuggling conspiracy.”
Three Texas teachers made news last week over charges of child pornography—also known as child sexual abuse material, as the images and videos depict sex crimes being committed against minors.
The educators worked in Dallas, Leander, and Wall Independent School Districts. Two of the three taught band.
On December 13, Dallas Police arrested Sean Turner, 34, and charged him with possession of pornography featuring a child younger than 10 years old—a first-degree felony.
Snip.
Retired principal Curtis John Locklear was arrested December 12 and charged with felony possession of child porn.
Locklear was arrested by the Montgomery County Precinct 3 Constable’s Office working with the Houston-area Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force.
Snip.
Also on December 12, a federal judge sentenced Joshua Carroll to 30 years in prison for possessing and producing child porn.
Carroll was an assistant band director in Wall ISD from January 2022 until his crimes were discovered earlier this year.
Texas Republican Congressman Dan Crenshaw got dinged by the Internet for insider trading. So then Crenshaw attacked the Internet. It didn’t go well for him.
Google on Monday introduced a new chip called Willow, which solved in five minutes a computing problem that would take a classical computer more time than the history of the universe.
Tech companies are chasing quantum computing in hopes of developing systems that perform at speeds far faster than traditional silicon-based computers.
The building blocks of quantum computers, called “qubits”, while being fast, are error-prone, making it hard to ensure quantum computers are reliable and commercially viable.
The more qubits used in quantum computing, the more errors typically occur. But Google said on Monday it found a way to string together qubits in the Willow chip so that error rates decline as the number of qubits rise, adding that it can also correct errors in real time.
My understanding of how quantum computers work is limited to popular explanations, but D-Wave is evidently still in business, so maybe they work?
The trailer for James Gunn’s Superman dropped. I’ve never seen a Superman film in theaters, and this will not be getting me in. But you’ve got to give Gunn credit for thinking way outside the box and including Krypto the Superdog and Hawkman, two characters that absolutely no one in the greater viewing public was clamoring for.
The Trump witchunt trial is suspended, PA Democrats give up the steal, the ruble collapses, a real estate developer is busted for bribery, thrash metal TDS, and an unexpected voice of sanity and reason from…Cenk Uygur?
Judge Juan Merchan indefinitely postponed the sentencing hearing in President-elect Donald Trump’s New York criminal case, which had been planned for next week, in light of Trump’s election.
Merchan is giving Trump’s legal team more than a week to file its motion asking for a dismissal under the argument that his return to office provides him a new host of immunity-related defenses.
Trump’s lawyers will be required to file by December 2, after which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will have until December 9 to respond.
Snip.
While Trump could face up to four years in prison, the more likely sentence in the case — should it move forward — would be probation, which could include some combination of a fine or community service, as the former and future president is a first-time offender.
“Just as a sitting President is completely immune from any criminal process, so too is President Trump as President-elect,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in a letter filed Tuesday.
Trump’s team had requested a December 20 deadline to file.
Bragg, for his part, has argued in favor of freezing the case for the entirety of Trump’s term in office, and then revisiting the sentencing at the end of Trump’s tenure.
But Trump attorneys Todd Blanche and Emil Bove have argued dismissal of the case “is necessary under the Constitution and federal law to facilitate the orderly transition of Executive power — and in the interests of justice — following President Trump’s victory in the Electoral College and the popular vote in the 2024 Presidential election.”
To paraphrase Instapundit, we’ve entered some sort of hellworld where Cenk Uygur is a voice of moderation and reason, calling out far left pollster Allan Lichtman for blowing his election call, whereupon Lichtman shrieks that Uygur is committing “blasphemy” against him. Everyone and their dog has posted this, but I’m linking to the Asmongold clip because his seems to be the shortest.
US President-elect Donald Trump’s administration is preparing to reinstate its “maximum pressure” strategy against Iran, targeting Tehran’s economic stability and its ability to support militant proxies and nuclear development, The Financial Times reported on Saturday, citing sources close to the transition team.
The sources revealed that the administration plans to impose stricter sanctions, particularly on Iran’s oil exports, which serve as a critical revenue source.
The anticipated sanctions could drastically reduce Iranian oil exports, which currently exceed 1.5 million barrels per day, up from a low of 400,000 barrels per day in 2020. Experts suggest that these measures would severely impact Iran’s economy. Bob McNally, an energy consultant and former US presidential adviser, indicated that reducing exports to a fraction of current levels would leave Iran in a far worse economic position than during Trump’s first term.
In a followup to yesterday’s story, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has ordered state entities to divest from investments in Communist China. “One investment group specifically highlighted in Abbott’s letter is the University of Texas/Texas A&M Investment Management Company (UTIMCO), which manages billions of dollars in assets for both university systems. UTIMCO has come under scrutiny after a Texas Scorecard investigation revealed its investments in more than 50 Chinese companies.”
El Salvador’s gang prison doesn’t play around. A whole lot of this would (rightfully) be considered cruel and unusual punishment, but we should veer more in this direction rather than putting illegal alien rapists up in hotels…
Sherman Roberts, who led the City Wide Community Development Corporation, was indicted four years ago for a bribery scheme involving former Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway and former City Council Member Carolyn Davis for their support of loans and low-income housing tax credits for his apartment projects.
He now faces up to five years in prison and is expected to be sentenced in March.
Roberts paid Davis several thousand dollars in cash, and promised future payments after her council tenure ended, in return for Davis’ support of his projects — Serenity Place, Runyon Springs, and Patriot’s Crossing — according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas.
Roberts was a Democratic Party donor, but in fairly piddling amounts for a real estate developer…
The DOJ wants Google to sell off Chrome. Well, that would be a start in addressing their monopoly position in Internet searches, but would hardly be sufficient. They should also have to spin off YouTube. And because consumers were directly harmed by their monopoly, they should be required to add 2GB of storage a year for every Gmail user for 20 years, he said self-interestedly. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The time of the turning: “Sold-out NYC crowd ERUPTS, chants USA as President Trump attends UFC 309 with Elon Musk, RFK Jr, Speaker Johnson.”
Shocking news from the world of science: Weed isn’t good for you. “According to their findings, exposure to cannabis was associated with a range of cancers – breast, pancreatic, liver, thyroid, testicular and lymphoma – that also develop quickly and are more aggressive.”
Sweden’s Gender Equality Minister Paulina Brandberg is deeply afraid of…bananas.
More evidence of the Biden Recession, California’s welfare state goes extra crazy, Chicago has to spend mad money to produce illiterate children, an Assistant DA resigns, a cyberattack hits car dealers nationwide, a Brazilian thief gets ventilated, and God unites the entire world in hatred of the New York Yankees. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Taxpayers are funding a new high-rise building in Los Angeles where homeless people will enjoy skyline views, a cafe, a gym, and an art studio, not to mention the free rent.
The fancy new building is 19 stories high and has 278 units, each costing about $600,000. The total cost was $165 million, according to the Los Angeles Times. It is the first of three new high-rise buildings that will soon house homeless people.
Snip.
This modern tower for the homeless includes a TV in each apartment, a gym, an art room, a soundproofed music room, a computer room with a library, a TV lounge, a courtyard, and a cafe that will host movie nights. There are also six common balconies, four of which have dog runs.
Where are politicians getting all the money for this project? The buildings are funded by the city’s supportive housing loan program, Proposition HHH, which was approved by city voters in 2016, as well as state housing funds and $56 million in state tax credits.
The three apartment buildings will be located around the headquarters of the Weingart Center, a nonprofit that assists homeless people. Kevin Murray, a former California state senator, is the man behind the project. He serves as the chief executive of the nonprofit.
I’m sure all the Homeless Industrial Complex members involved got generously paid for their efforts. Once again, the message of the Democratic Party is: You’re suckers for working for a living.
Illinois Policy just issued a report showing that while CPS has doubled spending per student since 2012, grades are down by 60-80%, depending on the subject. “Just 1-in-4 CPS students can read or perform math at grade level,” the report says. “The percent of students enrolling in college after high school graduation is decreasing. And for those who do enroll, another study found many are struggling to finish college in four years – just 30% get their bachelor’s in four years compared to 47% nationally.”
By every other measure… there’s no other way to put this… CPS is falling apart.
In 2023, 26% of students in grades 3 through 8 across all of CPS could read at grade level and about 18% could do math proficiently. For 11th grade CPS students, only 22% could read at grade level and 19% do math proficiently.
CPS’ failure to engage students shows in the chronic absenteeism rate. Chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed.
According to ISBE data, 86.3% of teachers in CPS were rated as proficient or excellent in 2023, down from 91.4% in 2019. Yet many students in CPS are struggling to reach proficiency in core subjects.
There’s much more at the link, all of it tragic. An entire generation of Chicago students is failing — and being failed by their schools and, let’s be brutally honest, by their families.
If you’re thinking that CPS must be seriously underfunded to achieve such dismal results, you must have been living in a cave for the last 40 or 50 years. CPS will spend a jaw-dropping $29,028 per student this year. My family lives in a lovely exurb of Colorado Springs and our district spends roughly one-third of what CPS does — $10,214 per student — and we get much better results. It isn’t about the money. It rarely is.
The case began in November 2022, when Loper Bright Enterprises, a fishery based out of Cape May, New Jersey, appealed a district court opinion to the Supreme Court. The conflict between Loper Bright and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) started after the agency decided to require private fisheries like Loper Bright to pay their regulatory inspectors for their time observing fishery practices.
While the law doesn’t explicitly allow this practice, the Fishery Service cites the Chevron Deference, a precedent set by a 1984 Supreme Court case, which states that an ambiguous law can be interpreted by government agencies as they see fit. In short, the Fishery Service wants private companies to pay their salaries and found a legal loophole to justify it.
While this may seem like an isolated incident, it is just one example of a long history of government agencies infringing on individual liberty. The outcome of this case holds supreme importance for the future of our republic and the preservation of our financial and civil freedoms.
Since 1950, the federal government has steadily grown in size. Today, it has over 2.9 million civilian employees, more than Walmart has worldwide. This growth has paved the way for the creation of a governmental pseudo-branch denoted the “administrative state.” The administrative state contains government employees who have a significant impact on people’s everyday lives but yet aren’t held accountable to citizens in the form of elections. These unelected bureaucrats undermine the central ethos of a republic, where elected officials are supposed to seek the good of their constituents or risk not being re-elected.
The problem with this system was made evident during the pandemic. During the COVID shutdown, hundreds of millions of Americans were sentenced to lockdowns, impacting their schools, churches, and families. Many of the people behind this policy were members of the CDC, one of the government agencies that comprise the administrative state. The decisions they made were not subject to the traditional checks and balances which typically constrain the US government. Instead, America found itself under a tyranny of the unelected.
This overreach extends beyond individual liberty into private business. When businesses can be encroached upon at a whim by unelected authorities, long-term investment becomes a much riskier endeavor. When the COVID shutdown occurred, many small businesses, with their small profit margins and high overhead, were unable to weather the storm. For the companies that survived, the blatant government intervention and the severe consequences that followed left a sour taste in their mouth for future capital investments. You’re not going to build a new business if a bureaucrat can shut it down the next day. All of these factors contribute to government agencies having a negative impact on financial markets and investor portfolios.
The Chevron Deference precedent, which is at the center of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, gives even more power to these governmental agencies. When ambiguity exists, this precedent allows courts to simply defer to agencies’ interpretations, even if those interpretations favor the agencies’ own interests. It also allows courts to seek out ambiguity in order to give near-unbridled power to these agencies.
If the Supreme Court upholds Chevron, it will further entrench the power of unelected bureaucrats and make it increasingly difficult for individuals and businesses to challenge agency overreach. However, if the Court rules against Chevron, it would represent a shift toward increased restraint of the administrative state, leading to a reevaluation of the scope and authority of federal agencies.
Israeli arms exports hit record sales. Funny how having products that actually work stimulates sales. I’m betting Russia is enjoying the opposite right now…
Baseball game announcer: We will not be singing the national anthem. Crowd: The hell we won’t! Patriotism ensues.
Speaking of DA’s behaving badly, a followup: Assistant Travis County DA Joseph Frederick, who was charged with aggravated assault, has resigned before he could be fired, his lawyer saying this was to maintain his health benefits, because he has Parkinson’s. Which is strange, because COBRA covers involuntary termination as well.
Argentine President Javier Milei has a glorious rant about how you can’t negotiate with leftists.
This week’s California restaurant chain closing due to the minimum wage hike: Arby’s. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“CDK Global, a major software provider to auto dealerships in the U.S., has been hacked, forcing the company to shut down most of its systems temporarily. This cyberattack effectively halted sales operations at approximately 15,000 car dealerships, including those under General Motors, Group 1 Automotive, and Holman.” Without this software, there’s essential dead in the water. (More details.)
Speaking of money-losing MSM outlets, the incoming editor of the Washington Post says thanks but no thanks after the staff there preemptively published a hit piece on him. How’s that letting the inmates run the asylum working out for you, Jeff Bezos?
George R. Nethercutt Jr., the Republican who ousted Democratic Speaker Thomas S. Foley in the Newt Gingrich Contract with America wave of 1994, dead at 79 (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Is olive oil good for your brain? I hope so, since it’s an Atkins-compliant dressing for my salad, so I generally get more than the recommended teaspoon a day.
Happy Good Friday! The Biden Recession continues it’s downward spiral…
…a deep dive into how the Russian Conspiracy Hoax has corrupted institutions, Chicago doubled down on failure, and unions want to take your packages away. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
“Small Businesses File For Bankruptcy At Record Pace, Surpassing COVID Crash.” So much for a Biden presidency helping the little guy…
They could either keep doing what reporters had done since the beginning of time, confining themselves to saying things they could prove. Or, they could adopt a new approach, in which you can say anything is true or confirmed, so long as a politician or intelligence official told you it was.
We know how that worked out. I was never invited back, nor for a long time was any other traditionally skeptical reporter, while Nance — one of the most careless spewers of provable errors ever to appear on a major American news network — became one of the Peacock’s most familiar faces.
I don’t know Malcolm and don’t mean to get nasty about this, but: even before that January 2017 broadcast, he had an extraordinary record, one that should have scared away any retraction-averse producer. On August 20th, he went on with Joy Reid and said the Green Party’s Jill Stein “has a show on Russia Today.” This wasn’t true, as Stein quickly pointed out, but MSNBC refused to acknowledge the error. Media watchdog FAIR repeatedly asked for a correction, as did friend Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept, but they refused to budge.
This may not seem a big deal, but at the time it was still weird and something of a pioneering move for a major news organization to just refuse to fix a clear error.
Nance went on to make a lot more, some I would classify as important. A tweet of his in late 2016 was a major source for the pre-election misconception that the Wikileaks-leaked emails of Clinton campaign chief John Podesta were “riddled with forgeries” and “#blackpropaganda.” He would regularly make all sorts of claims without evidence, like that the K.G.B. had “been surveilling Donald Trump since 1977,” and that “little” comes from Trump’s mouth that isn’t “carefully planned to benefit the Russian Republic,” and all sorts of other nonsense.
I was quiet until he said Glenn “shows his true colors as an agent of Trump and Moscow,” “reports in to his masters in Russia,” and is “deep in the Kremlin pocket.” This was outrageous. I was shocked MSNBC didn’t fire him on the spot. Still, I voiced objections in a measured way I hoped might get through, either to Nance or to someone at the network. “I’ve been on the air with Malcolm Nance and he seemed like a nice guy,” I tweeted, “but this awful practice of calling people traitors and foreign agents based on no evidence has really gotten out of hand.”
Nance’s response was “Ok, you’ve convinced me. You need to be blocked. #Bye.” He remained a regular guest on the network, which didn’t cool on booking him until the Russia story fell apart with the release of the Mueller report the next year.
The Nance situation was symbolic of what happened at the network from the beginning of Trump’s term, really beginning in early 2017. It went from being a place where you had to be at least in the ballpark of demonstrably true to being a place where the factual standard was, “Whatever dogshit drops out of the mouth of any hack or spook.”
Moreover the network didn’t just re-report this stuff, it became the favored launching pad for all the most blatant blue-Anon disinformation, like California congressman Adam Schiff saying he had “more than circumstantial” evidence of collusion, or former Obama defense official Evelyn Farkas suggesting the Trump administration would try to destroy evidence if they “found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians.” Farkas later testified under oath that she “didn’t know anything” about collusion.
Snip.
As we later found out, among other things via Jeff Gerth’s gigantic piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, the FBI said nothing about many stories it knew to be wrong, including the influential New York Times exposé, “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.” The possibility that officials can lie to us in this way — leaking, asking that attribution be limited to uncheckable “sources familiar with the matter,” then saying nothing as stories start taking water — is exactly why we don’t stick our necks out for such people.
Snip.
the network doubled down, seemingly hiring as contributors every unemployed prosecutor or natsec official they could find, especially from failed Russiagate probes. They’d already spent on names like ex-CIA head John O’Brennan, former assistant FBI counterintelligence chief Frank Figliuzzi, House Intel Director of Investigations and future congressman Dan Goldman (who met Adam Schiff in an MSNBC green room), and federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner. Now, they added cadaverous Mueller sidekick Andrew Weissmann and, astonishingly, Weissmann’s deputy, the fired FBI lawyer Lisa Page. They also began bringing in Page’s lover, fellow FBI firee Peter Strzok, as a commentator.
America became familiar with Page and Strzok after their texts — referring to the Trump-Russia investigation as an “insurance policy,” and ripping “sandernistas,” among other things — became public. These were living monuments to press excesses of the Trump era. As Gerth wrote, Strzok quietly reported to bosses after the Times’s “repeated contacts” story came out, saying, “We are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.” Strzok in other words was exactly the kind of person to whom Rachel might have been referring when she rhapsodized about FBI “not saying anything” to dissuade us from believing errors.
Page on April 10, 2017 got a text from Strzok, saying he wanted to talk to her “about [a] media leak strategy with DOJ.” This was a day before a Washington Post story that cited “law enforcement and other U.S. officials” in saying the secret FISA court found probable cause to believe former Trump aide Carter Page (no relation) was an “agent of a foreign power.” Whoever leaked this was sabotaging not just the Post, but every downstream media org picking up the story, because the story at its roots was wrong: Carter Page was not an “agent of a foreign power,” as the FISA court had been misled, by Steele and the FBI. MSNBC was one of the first outlets to regurgitate this thing.
When sources lie to you, you should be mad. At minimum, you should be ripping their names out of your Rolodex (or modern equivalent). MSNBC did the opposite, hiring seemingly everyone who’d helped them down this reputation-tarnishing path.
MSNBC bet everything on its switch in 2017, and though it paid handsomely at first — in spring of 2017 they became the first cable network in two decades to unseat Fox for the #1 spot, with Rachel owning the top-rated non-sports program on cable — the collapse of the Mueller investigation triggered a long, frankly earned, post-trout-fishing slide. No doubt the indictment of Donald Trump will reanimate things, but prior to that it was grim, as Fox was beating CNN and MSNBC combined by the end of January. The ratings picture for March showed that MSNBC’s top show was The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, rated 11th, followed by The Beat With Ari Melber at 16th.
After all this, after throwing away all their standards, clowning themselves with years of wrong stories, doling out rice bowls to the procession of spooks who now clog their airwaves, and watching as their ratings predictably collapsed, now they want to give me a hard time. Not because I got anything wrong, but because they don’t like my opinions, or where things like the Twitter Files reports came from.
Stuck on stupid. “Far-Left Democrat Brandon Johnson Wins Chicago Mayoral Race.”
Johnson, 47, is a Cook County commissioner, a former social studies teacher, and a paid lobbyist for the radical Chicago Teachers Union. He ran as a decidedly far-left activist, and was backed by Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Johnson campaigned on promoting racial justice and uplifting the working class. He is an opponent of charter schools. In order to pay for a variety of new social programs, he has called for increased taxes on large corporations, wealthy residents, and suburbanites who visit the city. During his campaign, Johnson promised $1 billion in new spending.
Because Lori Lightfoot’s administration wasn’t enough of a disaster…
Speaking of unions behaving badly, the Teamsters are planning a UPS strike.
Yet another reason for the Trump charges to be thrown out. “The progressive daughter of judge presiding over Donald Trump’s hush money case in Manhattan who worked for Kamala Harris and Joe Biden…Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter, Loren, 34, works for progressive digital strategies firm Authentic Campaigns. She was a digital director for Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign and has worked for a slew of other Democratic campaigns.”
Dispatches from the Soros-funded decline of New York City: “On Saturday, the New York Police Department announced that a man who shot a thief in self defense will be charged with attempted murder despite being shot twice and having to wrestle the firearm away from the thief.” (Update: Soros tool Alvin Bragg changed his mind.) (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
“Texas Bill Would Create State-Issued Gold-Backed Digital Currency.” This would be a super-interesting story if I thought there was a snowball’s chance in hell of this passing and the Federal Reserve not quashing it.
Democrats flee, lettuce wins, a flood of extra executives, and Musk gets out the hatchet. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
People leaving the Democratic Party describe it as cancer:
While Democrat voters have been leaving the party for years, their reasons have become more urgent.
“When people were feeling pushed away years ago, to the point where they were starting to walk away, there was more of a casual tone about it,” former liberal Democrat Brandon Straka, founder of #WalkAway told The Epoch Times.
“People were beginning to feel the effects of leftist, communism, Marxism infiltration into our society, our culture, and our politics.”
Straka founded #WalkAway in 2018 after making his personal decision to leave the party public while inviting others to join him. Since then, thousands of exiting Democrats made social media videos explaining why they were choosing to #WalkAway, giving Straka a window into the minds of these voters.
At that time, people were just noticing changes in the party, he said. They weren’t always identifying what it meant, but they knew they didn’t like how it felt, and quietly left.
“But now, it’s akin to cancer. Cancer doesn’t stop growing and spreading just because people don’t like it. And what’s happening with the left is no different,” Straka said. “Particularly with them getting rid of Trump, installing Biden, and the Democrats taking full control of the government. This is a cancer that’s rapidly growing and spreading now. And it’s becoming not just uncomfortable, but I think intolerable, for a lot of people.”
Drugs dealers openly selling on Broadway. Thinks to mayors Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams, and the feckless actions of Soros-backed DA Alvin Bragg, Democrats have undone not only all the hard-won law-and-order gains of Rudy Giuliani’s broken windows police, but they’ve actually brought NYC back to the nadir of the crime-ridden New York of the 1970s. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke is heading to his third high-profile defeat in five years. But he and Planned Parenthood have an ace of their sleeve: registering dead voters.
A Texas firearms dealer is suing the Biden administration for weaponizing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to shut down law-abiding gun retailers over paperwork errors discovered during audits.
President Joe Biden ordered the Department of Justice in June of 2021 to enforce “zero tolerance for willful violations of the law by federally licensed firearms dealers that put public safety at risk,” but after a 500 percent increase in federal firearm license revocations for retailers over the last year, it’s clear the Biden administration isn’t just going after gun sellers who intentionally violate the law.
Punishing minor slip-ups, the lawsuit argues, draws on a drastically different interpretation of the law than the definition federal courts have held based on the Gun Control Act of 1968.
The lawsuit, to which the federal government has 60 days to respond, also argues that the Biden administration’s new policy sets an unreasonably high standard that is not applied to any other industry.
That’s why Michael Cargill, owner of Central Texas Gun Works in Austin, chose to bring this case.
Those energy-hostile Democratic Party policies just keep paying dividends: “New England facing natural gas shortages, rolling blackouts this winter.”
The reality is that the normal flow of natural gas into the region is limited and has been unable to keep up with increasing demand levels over the past decade. That means that utility operators have to rely on liquid natural gas (LNG) imports to make up the difference during peak demand periods. During such times, LNG accounts for as much as one-third of the total natural gas used for heating and electricity.
But why is that? You won’t need an ace detective to figure that out. Utility companies in New York, Connecticut, and other New England states projected supply shortfalls more than a decade ago. Fortunately, New York and Pennsylvania sit on some of the richest natural gas resources in the country, found in the Marcellus shale deposits. The companies requested new, higher-volume pipelines to carry natural gas to meet the spiraling demands of New York City, particularly at the furthest end of the gas lines in Long Island. They also urged the development of local gas production to feed those lines. Similar situations were noted all across New England.
Instead of doing that, New York refused to approve new gas lines and passed a moratorium on natural gas drilling in the state. This brings us to the current situation where the same amount of natural gas is being used, but increasing amounts of it come in the form of LNG that has to be imported either from other regions of the country or from overseas. The energy crunch in Europe is eating up a lot of the available LNG, so there may not be enough for New England this winter.
A star reporter for ABC News has been missing since an April 27 FBI raid at his Arlington, Virginia apartment.
Emmy award winner James Gordon Meek – a deep-dive journalist who was also a former senior counterterrorism adviser and investigator for the House Homeland Security Committee, abruptly quit his job of 9 years and “fell off the face of the earth,” after the raid, one of his colleagues told Rolling Stone.
A recent proliferation of phony executive profiles on LinkedIn is creating something of an identity crisis for the business networking site, and for companies that rely on it to hire and screen prospective employees. The fabricated LinkedIn identities — which pair AI-generated profile photos with text lifted from legitimate accounts — are creating major headaches for corporate HR departments and for those managing invite-only LinkedIn groups.
Last week, KrebsOnSecurity examined a flood of inauthentic LinkedIn profiles all claiming Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) roles at various Fortune 500 companies, including Biogen, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Hewlett Packard.
Since then, the response from LinkedIn users and readers has made clear that these phony profiles are showing up en masse for virtually all executive roles — but particularly for jobs and industries that are adjacent to recent global events and news trends.
Does the Federal Reserve swapping some $6 billion worth of dollars for Swiss Francs with the Swiss National Bank mean a global financial crisis is coming? Boiling down his argument: A.) The Swiss National bank has a weekly dollar auction every Wednesday. 99%+ of the time, no one shows up for them. B.) Last Wednesday, 15 parties (meaning banks) showed up for them to the tune of some $6 billion. C.) The only reason they would do that is if they don’t trust their current repo counterparties, and D.) This is what happened when Flu Manchu hit and before the Subprime Meltdown in 2008. If it’s any consolation, they first started showing up for the latter in December of 2007, so you might have nine months to buy gold, ammunition and canned goods…
“According to the latest campaign finance reports, Republican Alexandra del Moral Mealer has raised a record-setting $4.9 million dollars in support of her campaign for Harris County Judge, outraising Democratic incumbent Lina Hidalgo 4 to 1.”
Related: “Hidalgo Booed Exiting Meeting Where GOP Commissioners Continue Boycott of Tax Increase.”
Woke reporter: Are you just super excited to coach against another black coach? Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Todd Bowles: “We don’t see color…the minute you guys stop making a big deal about it, everyone else will as well.”
California is (still) broke, Stacey Abrams is (still) not very bright, Joe Biden tried to deal gas to the commies, and the FBI can’t be bothered to investigate such trivia as “sex crimes involving children.” It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Remember how the State of Texas came in with record revenues and a $27 billion surplus? Well, the flip side is California, which just saw 11% personal income tax revenue drop. Funny how chasing away productive taxpayers through punitive taxation and insane over-regulation isn’t a recipe for success…
Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform Committee have obtained bombshell documents proving that Joe Biden was deeply involved in the family business of selling American natural gas to the Chinese–while he was planning to run for President. According to multiple whistleblowers, the Biden family made promises to those who worked with them in 2017 and onward that they would “reap the rewards in a future Biden administration.” These explosive revelations “pose national security concerns,” Oversight Republicans proclaimed Tuesday night.
The Biden clan enriched itself by selling the natural resources to a Chinese firm closely affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—just a few years before the cost of gas in the United States hit record highs, the Oversight Republicans stated.
In a letter to United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the ranking Republican on the Oversight Committee, alleged that according to whistleblowers, Joe Biden was heavily involved in this treachery.
“This comes to light at a time when the cost of natural gas is at a 14-year high and Americans struggle to pay their energy bills,” Comer wrote in the letter to Yellen. “The President has not only misled the American public about his past foreign business transactions, but he also failed to disclose that he played a critical role in arranging a business deal to sell American natural resources to the Chinese while planning to run for President.”
Comer sent a letter to Yellen in July complaining that the Treasury Department was restricting access to over 150 Suspicious Activity reports (SARs) on Hunter Biden, amid explosive revelations that came out from Biden’s “laptop from Hell,” and iPhone.
On Sept. 2, 2022, the Treasury Department stated in a letter to Committee Republicans, that the SARs may be provided “upon a written request stating the particular information desired, the criminal, tax or regulatory purpose for which the information is sought, and the official need for the information.”
In response, Comer said that “based on the documents provided in this letter, we request all SARs from Biden family transactions, including those involving President Biden, related to transactions with Chinese entities. We are concerned that the President may have compromised national security in his dealings with the country most adverse to U.S. interests—China. These SARs will inform our analysis of this matter.”
Comer said Oversight Republicans have obtained a “presentation” emailed to Hunter Biden’s firm Hudson West III LLC (Hudson West) on December 13, 2017. The document, translated from Mandarin Chinese, is titled, “Overview of the U.S. Natural Gas Industry Chain, and is concerned with selling American natural resources to China.”
“Jiaqi Bao, who created the presentation, was previously an employee of the CCP, and worked for Hunter Biden’s corporate entity Hudson West,” the letter states.
Comer provided Yellen with two maps that were part of a presentation emailed to Hunter Biden. The maps include sophisticated analysis written in Chinese, and show the United States carved up based on natural gas reserves “with particular emphasis on Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming.”
“The emails that accompany the transmitted maps reveal a plan to sell natural gas reserves to China via the same corporate entity branded on the presentation-Hudson West III LLC (Hudson West)–set up by Hunter Biden with officials from the Chinese company CEFC, at the time, one of the largest oil companies in China,” the letter stated.
I have only skimmed this dog's breakfast of a complaint, but what popped out at me for the parts I looked are were the lack of damages allegations, much less ones against NY, the plaintiff. You cannot sue if you did not suffer a loss. None are pleaded in the parts I looked at. 3/
So, the initial motion to dismiss will not be heard before the midterm – the real mission was accomplished by filing suit in time to influence the election, but not so early that this garbage case could be tossed out before the election.
FBI investigations of child sex abuse claims are no longer a priority with all these conservatives and Trump supporters they need to prosecute for WrongThink…
After intense backlash from local bodega workers and city tabloids, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg on Tuesday dropped all charges against bodega clerk Jose Alba, who was allegedly acting in self-defense when he fatally stabbed a man who was attacking him.
The liberal DA’s decision comes after weeks of criticism of Bragg’s decision to send the 61-year-old to Riker’s Island and charge him with second-degree murder in the death of 35-year-old Austin Simon. Bragg first requested Alba’s bail be set at $500,000 before it was lowered to $50,000 in response to criticism from the community. He was later released on a $5,000 bail bond.
Snip.
Bragg’s office said Tuesday that “a homicide case against Alba could not be proven at trial beyond a reasonable doubt” after further investigation, according to the New York Times.
This is obviously the correct decision, but this was obviously justifiable self-defense from the very beginning, and that didn’t keep Soros-backed DA Alvin Bragg from charging Alba with murder in the first place. Indeed, chances are good that if it weren’t not for widespread outcry from other politicians (like Mayor Eric Adams), it’s quite possible that Alba would still be languishing in Riker’s Island awaiting trial.
The Defund The Police wing of the Democratic Party won’t give up their war on legal self-defense without a lot more fights.
Friday’s LinkSwarm mentioned the plight of New York City bodega clerk, who was viciously attacked by the convicted-felon boyfriend of a patron whose credit card had been refused. Defending himself from the attack, Alba stabbed his attacker to death, and was charged with murder.
GoFundMe has deleted the legal defense fund page for the hard-working Manhattan bodega worker holed up at Rikers Island on a whopping $250,000 bond after he fatally stabbed a violent ex-con he was trying to fend off.
Jose Alba, 51, is currently languishing behind bars at the notorious jail despite surveillance video capturing the alleged victim, Austin Simon, 35, storming behind the counter of the bodega to attack him Friday night.
Alba’s family insist he was acting in self-defense when he grabbed a knife to fight off Simon inside the Hamilton Heights Grocery.
Relatives immediately launched a GoFundMe page to help raise funds to cover Alba’s sky-high bail and legal fees after he was hit with a second-degree murder charge — but the page was mysteriously removed Wednesday night.
“Our terms of service prohibit fundraising for the legal defense of a violent crime. At this time, the fundraiser has been removed and all donors have been refunded,” GoFundMe said in a statement Thursday.
The page had already raised $20,000 for Alba when it was suddenly removed, the Daily Mail reported.
Under GoFundMe’s terms of services, the platform can’t be used for the legal defense of “alleged crime associated with hate, violence, harassment, bullying, discrimination, terrorism.”
Controversial Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has faced backlash over Alba’s case after his office brought the charges — and then pushed for $500,000 bail for the father-of-three at his arraignment Saturday.
This is just the latest example of a Soros-backed Democrat DA filing charges against law-abiding citizens daring to defend themselves from violent attacks by felons. (See also: Kyle Rittenhouse.)
Former New York City resident Louis Rossmann has a nice video rant on the subject.
“If you are a criminal, Alvin Bragg has your back!”
You have felonies that have been, in many cases, decreased to petty misdemeanors. So if you commit a felony, it’ll get decreased to a petty misdemeanor. However if you are one of the people that allow society to function, one of the people that puts in work every day, a law-abiding citizen that simply wants to go home without getting killed by somebody half his age, who has a criminal record, who is beating you up, we throw the book at you this is sickening and tiring and it has to stop!
“They will always simp for the criminal.”
He’s right about everything, but the name “George Soros” never appears anywhere in his rant. Pretty much every-time you see this sort of coddling of criminals and throwing the book at the law-abiding, a George Soros-backed DA is the one making the prosecution decisions.
Soros-backed DAs seem intent on destroying the social fabric of America, and of prosecuting the law-abiding Americans as though the right to self-defense didn’t exist. It goes hand-in-hand with the Democratic Party’s obsession with disarming law-abiding Americans.
On May 12, Biden’s Interior Department blocked a proposal to open up more than one million acres of land in Alaska for oil and gas drilling. Two days later, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency blocked plans to expand an oil refinery in the US Virgin Islands.
Biden and his defenders said he had to block the expansion of the Virgin Islands refinery, given how polluting it was.
But had Biden’s EPA allowed the Virgin Island refinery to expand, the owners would have poured nearly $3 billion into retrofitting the plant so it produced gasoline and other products more cleanly, while significantly increasing production at the same time.
In truth, there are many things Biden could have done, and still should do, to lower energy prices. He could invoke the National Defense Act to accelerate the rate of oil and gas permits. He could set a floor of $80/barrel for re-filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which would be a powerful incentive for the industry, because it would prevent prices from falling to unprofitable levels. Biden could announce trade agreements with American allies to supply them with liquified natural gas, which would incentivize more natural gas production and lower prices.
If Biden got America on a wartime footing, as he should be given Russia’s aggression in Europe, we would see the lowering of oil, gas and petroleum prices in less than one year.
Why won’t Biden do it? Because he has declared war on fossil fuels. “I guarantee you, we’re going to end fossil fuel,” Biden promised a student climate activist in 2019. “I am not going to cooperate with them,” he said, referring to the oil and gas industry.
Joe Biden has proven once again that he has no interest in reducing the record-high costs of gasoline, which have gone up throughout his time in office.
Biden not only wants to block all new oil drilling in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, but he’s also taking steps to shut down exploration of oil and gas on federal lands.
“A plan released Friday shows the White House proposed no more than 10 potential lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico, an option for one potential lease sale in the northern portion of the Cook Inlet of Alaska, and no lease sales for the Atlantic or Pacific planning areas over the 2023-2028 period,” reports Breitbart. This plan is not finalized, however, but any potential areas of exploration or sale not mentioned in the proposal will reportedly be off-limits from 2023-2028.
Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe assassinated by a man with a homemade shotgun while giving a speech.
Abe’s Japan was a reliable ally to the United States. But we should not let the shocking assassination blind us to the fact that Abe’s much-praised (by western MSM outlets, anyway) runaway deficit spending “Abenomics” efforts to lift Japan out of its long-running recession were a colossal failure, jacking up Japan’s national debt to the highest debt-per-GDP ratio in the world while failing to measurably increase actual economic activity.
Here’s a little leadership secret that’s actually not a secret at all to competent commissioned and non-commissioned officers. There are no bad cohorts of soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen and whatever the hell Space Force people are called. There are only bad leaders, and we have the worst military leadership in American history, starting right at the top with a commander-in-chief who is less like Ike than Beavis.
In fact – and this rips me up to say because I would not trade my about 27 years in the Army for anything – the reluctance to enlist of the traditional, normal Americans who are most likely to serve and who are the most desirable for service, is entirely rational. You do have an obligation to serve your country in some way, the military being the highest and best way for those who are able. But you do not have an obligation to do so if your life is going to be squandered by a leadership whose strategies are a disaster, whose priorities are not the defense of this country but some sort of bizarre pan-global progressive ideology, and who will use you as a guinea pig in freakish and morally bankrupt social experiments, all while failing to fulfill even the most basic obligations of the leaders to the led. Our military today is failing to meet its recruiting goals because it has failed to earn the trust of normal Americans who would otherwise be inclined to raise their hands.
Snip.
That social justice nonsense is another reason we can’t recruit. Would you want to waive your civil rights and sleep in the dirt to be part of an institution that hates you? Would you feel like joining an organization whose leadership is very, very focused on mythical “white privilege” and those scary “insurrectionists?” Remember, if you are conservative, you are an official extremist threat. If you are a believer, you run afoul of the official morality of CRT. If you think men can’t become women because they feel like it, you are a horrible bigot and you will be ordered to lie and use the pronoun du jour or else.
This is your city on Woke: “Over 400,000 High-Priority Incidents In Chicago In 2021 Had ‘No Police Available To Send.'”
Speaking of Democratic Party-ruled city approaches to crime, look at the New York City case against Jose Alba, who “was sitting in his store working and was no harm to anyone. Then the perpetrator came behind the counter and attacked him.” Alba defended himself by killing his attacker with a knife. Naturally, Soros-backed DA Alvin Bragg charged Alba with murder.
The Social Justice Warrior love affair with pedophiles continues: “Top New Biden Staffer Defended Underage, Gay Prostitution Website Raided By Feds.”
“The owner of a Washington sex shop, who also serves as the director of the local school board, is hosting a pair of sex education workshops for children as young as 9 years old. Jenn Mason, the owner of the Wink Wink Boutique in Bellingham, Washington, and the director of the Bellingham School Board, is hosting a sex-ed workshop titled ‘Uncringe Academy: Sex Education Without (most) of the Awkward’ for children ages 9-18.” If the story seems familiar, it’s because she tried to do the same thing in May. According to their website, she’s still a Bellingham School Board Director.
“The ailing #WokeSuperheroes and teenagers-talking-in-hallways network The CW has been sold for zero dollars.” Plus $100 million in debt assumption. Bonus: Critical Drinker reviews Batwoman.
Yesterday, @hannahhill_sc exposed taxpayer money flowing to Bloomberg gun control orgs.
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