What a freaking epic (and tiring) week! I waited until Fox and Decision Desk had declared Trump the winner past 1 AM Wednesday morning, and then had to get up a few hours later to get ready to work. So we’ve got more election fallout, Israel bags more terrorist scumbags, Elon Musk and Ron Paul may team up to fight government waste, Texas continues to purge wokeness from public institutions, and a song mystery is solved.
Last time around, Trump squandered his momentum. He passed the tax bill that the establishment GOP wanted, after which they didn’t need anything from him and turned to obstructing him….
Like airplanes on a runway. Trump’s approach this time around should be what he should have done last time: Shock and awe. Shut down departments, fire bureaucrats, exercise emergency powers, all so fast that the establishment’s responses are saturated. Javier Millei’s whirlwind assault in Argentina should be the model, sometimes in specifics but also in general approach. Bureaucrats move slowly; Trump should move fast.
Elon Musk says he can cut $2 trillion easily; do it. Also, set bureaucrats competing with each other for what funds remain. Divide and conquer.
The FBI’s files on its policing of domestic dissent should be opened up, as should the details of the NSA’s illegal domestic spying. Trump should have outsiders investigate possible (likely) prosecutorial misconduct in the January 6 prosecutions – something judges have already raised – and fire those responsible, as well as subjecting them to what other legal consequences may apply. The lesson that the deep state can’t intervene in domestic politics needs to be driven home, and the only way to do that is to ruin a lot of lives on the part of people who deserve to have their lives ruined, from the top of the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies to the bottom. Likewise those involved in social media censorship programs, “Operation Chokepoint” style economic warfare, and the like. Abuse of government power against the citizenry should be treated as a criminal matter, because it is.
Trump should also announce that the federal government is waiving qualified immunity on the part of such officials.
There are lots more ideas – you can submit your own in the comments below, and the much-maligned Project 2025, though not actually a Trump initiative, contains some – and Bloomberg is already warning that if elected Trump will dismantle the White House’s gun control ministry. Oh no!
The specifics aren’t really the point here, though I should probably post another essay just about those. But the point here is rapid action across a wide variety of fronts. Trump should take advantage of the precedents that Biden has set for far-reaching executive action, though you can bet that when he does the press will pretend this is the first time anything like that has ever been done.
The story of how Harris pocketed record sums while failing to gain support from voters will be studied by campaigns for decades to come. Democrats who successfully pressured octogenarian President Joe Biden to pass the torch to the former California senator are now conducting an internal autopsy of the 2024 race, in which Trump raised and spent hundreds of millions of dollars less than Harris.
“A billion dollars paled in comparison to the increased prices Americans were seeing across the country,” Tom Fitton, president of the conservative group Judicial Watch and a longtime Trump ally, told the Washington Examiner. “Voters weren’t fooled.”
The Harris campaign and its affiliated committees dropped more than $654 million on advertising from July 22 to Election Day, whereas Trump spent $378 million, or 57% less, in the same category, according to data from AdImpact.
Future Forward, the $500 million “ad-testing factory” and super PAC that supported Harris, was a reliable clearinghouse for checks from wealthy Democrats such as Reid Hoffman, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Dustin Moskovitz. And anonymous donations, or so-called “dark money,” also benefited Harris at a faster and more substantial clip than Trump thanks to lax federal laws that progressives often criticize but, nonetheless, exploited in 2024.
The Harris campaign declined to comment on its finances. A fuller portrait will be public after the election, as the Federal Election Commission mandates post-general election reports for candidates within 30 days.
In mid-October, the Harris campaign disclosed that it had spent over $880 million this election, almost $526 million greater than the roughly $354 million that the Trump campaign had disclosed spending, according to a Washington Examiner analysis of federal filings. Much of the Harris campaign’s spending was allocated for digital media advertising, polling, and travel from state to state, including to a private jet company called Advanced Aviation.
Payroll and the taxes that accompanied it accounted for $56.6 million of the Harris campaign’s spending. In comparison, the Trump campaign reported spending $9 million on payroll — employing hundreds fewer staff members.
There was also the army of political, digital, and media consultants who were paid over $12.8 million by the Harris campaign, filings show.
One vendor, Village Marketing Agency, received over $3.9 million and reportedly worked to recruit thousands of social media influencers to boost Harris online. Others that scored lucrative consulting gigs from the campaign included the likes of Precision Strategies, a Democratic-aligned marketing agency; Ethos Organizing, founded by former Ohio Democratic Party director Malik Hubbard; and the Biden-allied SKDK communications firm.
Snip.
“Event production” was also a staple spending area of the Harris campaign, which notably hosted a star-studded lineup of musicians from Lady Gaga to Katy Perry for an election eve rally.
The campaign paid more than $15 million, according to federal filings, to companies for such services.
There was $1 million for Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions on Oct. 15 in West Hollywood, California.
Winfrey, a top Harris ally, appeared at a town hall with the vice president in September and was at her final rally in Philadelphia before Election Day.
Viva Creative, a marketing agency that has touted its work with Oprah, comedian Trevor Noah, the Washington Nationals baseball team, and American Express, scooped up $1.8 million from the Harris campaign for event production from September to October. A company called Production Management One in Maryland received $1.7 million, with large payments also going to Vox Productions, Temple University, Wizard Studios North, the Park Hyatt Chicago, and other entities for event production, filings show.
Then there was Majic Productions, a Wisconsin-based company, which has worked the NBA playoffs, the Super Bowl, and at the Bellagio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. The Harris campaign paid that company $2.3 million.
A source familiar with the matter told the Washington Examiner that the Harris campaign spent six figures on building a set for Harris’s appearance on the popular Call Her Daddy podcast with host Alex Cooper. The interview came out in October and was reportedly filmed in a hotel room in Washington, D.C.
In the end, San Francisco mayor London Breed’s recent efforts to crack down on homelessness and crime weren’t enough to save her from the wrath of voters frustrated by years of disorder and talk of a “doom loop” in the famously progressive city.
After 14 rounds through the city’s ranked-choice voting process, Breed lost decisively to Daniel Lurie, a more moderate Democrat and a wealthy heir to the Levi Strauss fortune.
Lurie was ahead from the first round, and after 14 rounds led with 56.2 percent of the vote to Breed’s 43.8 percent, according to the San Francisco Department of Elections.
With San Francisco actually restoring sanity, pretty soon Austin will be the only crazy leftwing city left in America…
“UK Conservative Party elects ‘anti-woke’ Kemi Badenoch as new leader. The UK’s Conservatives on Saturday elected Kemi Badenoch as their new leader, replacing Rishi Sunak after the party’s poor performance in July’s general election. Badenoch, a staunch “anti-woke” advocate, faces the challenge of uniting a divided party while redefining its future.”
Israel seems to be on another winning streak. Israeli Commando Raid Captures Hezbollah Naval Commander….The terrorist, identified by Lebanese media as Imad Amhaz, chief of Hezbollah’s naval operations, was picked by Israeli commandos from the town of Batroun, some 100 miles into the terrorist-held hostile territory.”
Today, the Board of Regents of Texas A&M University System pushed back against “shared governance” with woke faculty members. They voted to end 52 low-performing programs, including an LGBTQ minor.
Over the course of many months, State Rep. Brian Harrison (R-Midlothian) repeatedly criticized DEI courses and the LGBTQ studies minor at Texas A&M. In September 2024, a university spokesperson confirmed that they would deactivate 38 certificates and 14 minors, including the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies minor.
On November 7, the Board of Regents unanimously approved the deactivation of these programs by voice vote.
The only question is why it took so long to fight back against the woke mind virus…
Want to be infuriated? “A federal disaster relief official ordered workers to bypass the homes of Donald Trump’s supporters as they surveyed damage caused by Hurricane Milton in Florida, according to internal correspondence obtained by The Daily Wire and confirmed by multiple federal employees.”
“The Grift Is Ending: ESG Fund Managers Being Told To “Keep Their Lawyers Very Close.”
Green New Boom: “Lithium-Ion Battery Recycle Plant Explodes in Missouri.”
RIPeanut. “Outrage Ensues After Beloved Rescue Squirrel Seized By NY, Euthanized.”
Speaking of sickening, you might want to skip to the next LinkSwarm entry if you don’t want to hear about horrific child abuse: “Animator Bolhem Bouchiba was sentenced to 25 years in prison for ordering the torture of children on live streams, paying parents to abuse their own kids.” Now he works for Disney.
Remember all that money to was supposed to flow to semiconductor companies that fabbed chips in America thanks to the CHIPS Act? Well Intel has seen exactly jack and squat from it. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger: “As we said on our [earnings] call, we are disappointed by the time it is taking to get it done: it is well over two years since the CHIPS Act passed and over that period I have invested $30 billion in U.S. manufacturing and we have seen $0 from the CHIPS grants.” What are the odds that the money has actually been raked off into the usual Democratic pockets? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Followup: “For five years, Mickey Barreto lived in Room 2565 at the storied New Yorker Hotel without paying a dime. But the free ride ended when he was not only evicted, but also charged earlier this year with a criminal scheme to claim ownership of the Midtown Manhattan hotel. Now, two doctors and prosecutors have said that he is not mentally competent to stand trial, and a judge has given him seven days to find inpatient psychiatric care.” (Hat tip: Dwight.) (Previously.)
Kotaku lays off more writers, though ultra-woke leftist Alyssa Mercante evidently left on her own. Evidently they’re down to six fulltime staffers.
Everything you know is wrong. “A new peer-reviewed study led by Sydney-based researchers Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falleti has found that the time it would take for a typing monkey to replicate Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets, and poems would be longer than the lifespan of our universe.”
“Democrats Admit Trump Actually Won In 2020 And Is Now Unable To Serve Third Term.” “We probably should have been more up-front about the fact that we stole the election and Biden was never president, but oh well. Hindsight is 20-20. I guess Kamala wins by default now, right?”
Local GOP Sues Travis County Over Election Staffing
According to the Travis County GOP, 41 percent of locations on Election Day lack any Republican poll workers.
…UPDATE: The Travis County Republican Party has appealed to the Texas Supreme Court after the 3rd Court of Appeals dismissed the lawsuit as moot.
A lack of Republican election staffers, despite the county party having submitted over 900 names to the local election office, has caused the Travis County Republican Party to take drastic action.
According to a press release, the Travis GOP filed an emergency petition against the county elections division for refusing to staff polling locations with Republicans.
The filing alleges “the Travis County Elections Department ignored repeated requests from TCRP for polling location staffing, only delivering the information just four days before the start of early voting. The received information shows a severe lack of Republican presence at Early Voting and Election Day polling locations.”
According to the GOP, 24 percent of early voting locations have no Republican election judges, and 50 percent have no Republican election workers. For Election Day, 41 percent of locations lack any Republican poll workers.
The Texas Election Code requires polling locations to assign someone from the other major party as the alternate judge if they assign someone from one major party as the presiding judge.
“It is totally unacceptable that large portions of our county have no Republican election judges assigned, despite our providing far more than the number of available workers needed,” said Travis County GOP Chair Matt Mackowiak. “As long as I am TCRP chair, we will hold local government accountable when they violate our rights and risk election integrity. This is an egregious example, and we look forward to our day in court.”
Of course, pulling this sort of election shenanigans so close to the election gives very little time to correct the abuse. Here’s hoping the Texas Supreme Court comes back with some form of injunctive relief to have Republicans monitoring election day…
The election is bearing down like a freight train, and early voting just started in Texas. So let’s look at this year’s bond and RRISD board elections.
In August, the school board voted 5-2 to place a $998 million bond proposal on the November ballot. With interest, the bonds would cost local property taxpayers $1.5 billion—55 percent more than voters will see on the ballot.
The proposal is divided into four separate propositions:
Proposition A seeks to allot $798 million ($1.2 billion with interest) to update roofs, floors, air conditioning systems, electrical, and plumbing. It also includes money for school paint jobs and the purchase of new buses.
The proposition would further dedicate resources to constructing a Career and Technical Education facility to expand classes like automotive shop, cosmetology, and dental assistance.
Proposition B contains an estimated $125 million ($160 million with interest) to update instructional technology and infrastructure to shore up the reliability and security of the district’s network.
Proposition C includes $8.6 million ($13.7 million with interest) for the district’s fine arts programs.
Proposition D would provide $65.9 million ($104 million with interest) to update the locker rooms, lighting, and scoreboards of existing athletic facilities and add artificial turf to competition fields.
Seems like a lot of maintenance updates for schools that are relatively new. The parents who have come out against bonds note that the demographics of the district are shrinking, not growing.
In 2018 the district had long term projection done by a company called Templeton Demographics. They projected we would have 24,136 elementary school students this year. The daily attendance reports available on the district website show 20,536 students. The districts enrollment peaked in the 2019-20 school year. The newest projections done by Zondra Education show the potential of a continued decline in enrollment through 2033.
More from Don Zimmerman in Texas Scorecard: “The purpose of the $1.3 billion (including interest) bond tax election is to fund a greedy partisan political machine and its partisan cronies who profit from the obscene taxes and even more obscene sexualization and religious indoctrination of children while their academic achievements decline.”
I recommend voting No on all RRISD bond proposals.
For the board election, the choices are easy: Estevan Jesus “Chuy” Zárate (Place 1), Melissa Ross (Place 2), and Dr. Mingyuan “Michael” Wei (Place 7) are are radical social justice warriors who call their opponents “fascists” for opposing DEI and the transsexual agenda. RRISD voters should vote for:
Harris plagiarizes Wikipedia and blows off Catholics, Gwen Walz assigns America homework, social justice groomers keep trying to trans your kids, Williamson County’s sheriff gets accused of pay-for-play corruption, another Hamas leader eats a last meal of kosher drone, Columbia U wants to silence a pro-Israel professor, and a meat recall expands to my local supermarket.
The Biden-Harris administration announced [last] Friday that it was filing a lawsuit against the state of Virginia for enforcing voter integrity laws in the state that aim to curb illegal voting in elections.
Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who has a history of espousing racist views, claimed without evidence that Virginia’s move to increase election integrity was an “eleventh hour effort” intended, in part, to “disenfranchise qualified voters.”
The DOJ claimed that it was doing so because it was “too close to the Nov. 5 general election” to remove voters:
Section 8(c)(2) of the NVRA, also known as the Quiet Period Provision, requires states to complete systematic programs aimed at removing the names of ineligible voters from voter registration lists no later than 90 days before federal elections.
However, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s executive order requiring that non-citizens be removed from voter rolls was signed on August 7, 2024 — exactly 90 days before Election Day.
The problem is the people who are being removed from the voter rolls are not, in fact, voters because they are not citizens, said Youngkin.
“With less than 30 days until the election, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice is filing an unprecedented lawsuit against me and the Commonwealth of Virginia, for appropriately enforcing a 2006 law signed by Democrat Tim Kaine that requires Virginia to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls – a process that starts with someone declaring themselves a non-citizen and then registering to vote,” Youngkin said.
Youngkin said that the lawsuit was a “desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy of the elections in the Commonwealth, the very crucible of American Democracy.”
At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.
However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)
Let’s consider a selection of these excerpts from Harris’s book, beginning with one in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here, she lifted verbatim language from an uncited NBC News report, with the duplicated material marked in italics:
In Detroit’s public schools, only 25 percent of the students who enrolled in grade nine graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis public schools and 34 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District. Overall, about 70 percent of the U.S. students graduate from public and private schools on time with a regular diploma, and about 1.2 million students drop out annually. Only about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation’s largest cities receive diplomas.
There’s more. In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim. Here is the excerpt, with the airlifted material in italics and abbreviations, such as percentages and state names, treated as verbatim substitutions:
High Point had its first face-to-face meeting with drug dealers, from the city’s West End neighborhood, on May 18, 2004. The drug market shut down immediately and permanently, with a sustained 35 percent reduction in violent crime. High Point repeated the strategy in three additional markets over the next three years. There is virtually no remaining public drug dealing in the city, and serious crime has fallen 20 percent citywide.
The High Point Strategy has since been implemented in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Raleigh, North Carolina; in Providence, Rhode Island; and in Rockford, Illinois. The U.S. Department of Justice is launching a national program to replicate the strategy in ten additional cities.
In a section about a New York court program, Harris stole long passages directly from Wikipedia—long considered an unreliable source. She not only assumes the online encyclopedia’s accuracy, but copies its language nearly verbatim, without citing the source. Here is Harris’s language, with duplicated material in italics, based on the page as it appeared in December 2008, before she published the book:
The Mid-town [sic] Community Court was established as a collaboration between the New York State Unified Court System and the Center for Court Innovation. The court works in partnership with local residents, businesses, and social service agencies to organize community service projects and provide on-site social services, including drug treatment, mental health counseling, and job training. What was innovative about Midtown Court was that it required low-level offenders to pay back the neighborhood through community service, while at the same time it offered them help with problems that often underlie criminal behavior.
To make matters worse, in duplicating Wikipedia’s language, Harris seems to have missed critical information and misstated a relevant detail. She claims, in prose identical to the online encyclopedia’s, that “illegal vending was down 24 percent” as a result of the court’s policies. Early in the paragraph, Harris cites the Bureau of Justice Assistance report to substantiate the figure. But she made a mistake: On Wikipedia, the “24 percent” figure was apparently tied to a different report, which found that “arrests for unlicensed vending,” rather than unlicensed vending as such, “fell by 24 percent” (emphasis mine). Her reliance on Wikipedia, an unreliable source, led to an unreliable conclusion.
While the BJA report was not the proper source for the “24 percent” claim, it did appear in the Wikipedia entry’s list of citations, and apparently was a fruitful resource for Harris and her coauthor, as they reproduced substantial portions of its sentences.
Nothing says “commitment to rigorous academic scholarship” quite like not just quoting verbatim from Wikipedia, but doing so incompetently.
Host of Fox News “Special Report” Bret Baier finally snagged that interview with Vice President and selected Democrat nominee Kamala Harris. Harris was campaigning in Washington Crossing, PA and was proud of the former Republicans and Trump administration people who took the stage with her and happy with their endorsement, delighted in their support of her as a presidential candidate.
The entire interview was a train wreck, but there were particular moments that were exceptionally cringeworthy, damaging, and proved with glaring certainty why she is unfit to lead.
Baier started off with the topic of illegal immigration, and you could visibly see Harris deflate like a balloon before the first question was asked.
Immediately Harris tried to filibuster Baier and do this interview’s version of “I’m speaking.” Harris brought up the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, which she claimed addressed the flaws in the asylum system with more judges, 15 million more border agents, increased penalties, stemming the flow of fentanyl, shore up entry points, and how she has worked toward bipartisan efforts to strengthen the border.
Baier gently pushed back with documented facts, and Harris briefly got that deer in headlights look she gets when she is desperately trying to find her talking points. Then she jumped on her supposed record as California Attorney General (not her current position as VP) as proof that she knew how to handle this crisis. Failing to understand that the fact that a crisis exists is proof that you have no ability to correct it.
But the most purely evil and damning part of this topic of illegal immigration was the fact that Harris could not even form the words to apologize for allowing criminals into the country that resulted in the senseless deaths of Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, and Rachel Morin.
Former president Donald Trump poked fun at vice president Kamala Harris during the Al Smith dinner on Thursday evening, criticizing his political rival for failing to show up at the charity event in person.
Harris addressed the crowd at the white-tie event, which raises funds for Catholics charities, in a pre-recorded video – a highly unusual move for a presidential candidate. It has become a tradition for presidential candidates to speak at the event since Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy appeared together in 1960.
The vice president is the first presidential contender to skip out on the dinner since Walter Mondale in 1984.
There’s an auspicious precedent.
“I guess you should have told her the funds were going to bail out the looters and rioters in Minneapolis and she would have been here, guaranteed,” Trump said.
He went on to joke that Harris must be “out receiving communion from Gretchen Whitmer,” a reference to a viral video from earlier this month of the Michigan governor feeding a chip to a leftist influencer on her knees.
Trump accused the vice president of being “disrespectful to Catholics.”
He also quipped about the Democratic nominee’s odd’s of winning the election, saying, “There’s a group called White Dudes for Harris but I’m not worried about them. Their wives and their wives’ lovers are voting for me.”
Does Kamala Harris need a mea culpa in PA? Or does her disconnect from voters in the Rust Belt go beyond state lines and religion?
That question has rolled around in my head since reading William McGurn’s column yesterday at the Wall Street Journal. McGurn uses Gretchen Whitmer’s bizarre mockery of the Catholic Eucharist while wearing a Harris-Walz hat to argue that the Democrat anointee for the presidency now has a Whitmer-created problem. But is that entirely true, or does it go beyond Whitmer’s blasphemy?
McGurn recognizes a broader problem, but perhaps not its scope. First, he outlines the direct issues with Catholics, who comprise 30% of Pennsylvania:
As California’s attorney general, Ms. Harris signed several friend-of-the-court briefs opposing religious exemptions for private employers such as Hobby Lobby and religious nonprofits such as the Little Sisters of the Poor. She said she was “proud” to have co-sponsored California’s Reproductive FACT Act, which compelled pro-life pregnancy centers to display notices about where women could get an abortion. The Supreme Court in 2018 rejected the law as a likely violation of the First Amendment.
But perhaps Ms. Harris’s most notorious Catholic moment came after she was elected senator. When Brian Buescher was nominated for a federal judgeship, she grilled him about his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s fraternal organization. Although President John F. Kennedy was also a Knight, Ms. Harris treated the group as though it were the Ku Klux Klan.
She would later co-sponsor the Equality Act, which the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops said could force doctors and hospitals to perform abortions they oppose. Last month she snubbed New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan by declining to attend this Thursday’s Al Smith dinner, an election-year staple that has brought Democratic and Republican candidates together in a civil setting for decades.
Those are the direct issues, and those aren’t limited to Pennsylvania. Overall, Republicans now have a statistically significant edge in party ID among Catholics, according to Pew polling this year, 50/44. Nationally, Catholics accounted for 25% of the vote in 2020, although apparently pollsters didn’t include data on religion in state-level exit polling. One can expect a similarly significant number of Catholics in Wisconsin and Michigan, and perhaps slightly lower levels in states like Arizona and Georgia. In every state, however, Catholics make up a far larger part of the electorate than the Arab-Americans did in Michigan, and yet both Biden and Harris obsessed over their support all year long.
That’s one problem, but that’s not the only problem. A more recent Pew poll shows Harris trailing Donald Trump with Catholics by five points, even worse than Hillary Clinton performed in 2016. But the issue isn’t entirely religious:
Mr. Biden may be the last of the big-time Democrats whose base was the white working class. But it confers a sensibility Ms. Harris is conspicuously lacking. …
Politico reports that Ms. Harris’s prospects are “considerably dicier” because of a “cultural dissonance” between her progressive San Francisco persona and white working-class Catholic Pennsylvanians.
That gets closer to the real danger for Democrats, but it has less to do with “white” and “Catholic” than it does to working class. Biden had a political and cultural connection to working-class voters, not just because of his Catholicism but because of his background. He fit into that milieu even if that mainly came as a conceit, especially after fifty years in Washington DC, but he could talk in their language too … at least before his brain turned to jelly. People keep overlooking his 2012 address to the Democrat convention, which turned out to be the best of the week, in which he artfully bridged the gap between the working class and the Academia-drenched elite that had mainly taken over the party in the current generation.
Harris simply can’t do that. Not only is she incapable of connecting at anywhere near that level, she only recently even showed a desire to do so. Her lame attempt at repeating the mantra “I was raised in a middle-class household” ad nauseam is about as close as she gets. Culturally, she comes from the Academia-drenched elite and speaks their language, to the extent she speaks any political language effectively at all. Harris tosses around clichés as a means to connect to working class voters, which initially appeared to appeal to them but have turned into a major liability now.
The Democratic Party’s naked contempt for both religious believers and the actual working class has been evident for a long, long time.
More on the subject: “Blowing Off the Al Smith Dinner Might Have Cost Harris Pennsylvania — and the Election.”
The Catholic vote is not as monolithic as it used to be. In 1928, the Catholic vote was overwhelmingly Democratic, concentrated in urban centers. By 1960, the Catholic vote was fracturing through intermarriage and economic issues, but Kennedy still received about 65% of the vote from his co-religionists.
Today, Donald Trump can expect to get about 60% of the Catholic vote. In Pennsylvania, The Catholic vote might be pivotal in a state that Harris absolutely, positively has to win.
“Her San Francisco progressive persona isn’t a good fit for Joe Biden’s native state,” William McGurn wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday.
Snip. “In an election in Pennsylvania that will almost certainly be decided by less than 100,000 votes, Harris skipping the Al Smith Dinner was not only stupid but might be the mistake that cost her the White House.” Eh, probably not. Harris will probably lose the election because she’s part of an administration had presided over a wretched economy and let in millions of illegal aliens. Plus she’s a horrible candidate that literally nobody voted for. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Google is up to its old tricks, “hiding Conservative news on election 23 pages deep.””When using the search term “donald trump presidential race 2024,” researchers had to scroll through 23 pages of results before they come to a U.S.-based right-leaning news source, a single Fox News video six results down on the 23rd page.”
An excerpt from the book Walz' wife was reading to children shows them all riding the gay dad while he puts a vacuum cleaner up to his mouth. I'm sure it's nothing. From: Bathe the Cat. pic.twitter.com/2npr5s6mDN
Gwen Walz also seems to feel that the best way to get men to the polls is assigning them homework.
Can you put some really money behind that and put it on air? Maybe during college football?
There are still men out there who don’t hate this campaign with every fiber of their being, and I think this ad could be enough to nag them right into Trump’s arms. https://t.co/vk6jwJY9oM
Yes, social justice warrior teachers do want to trans your kids. “Court Shuts Down BLM Teacher Trying To Force Trans Ideologies On Kids.”
Megan Williams is a first-grade teacher who forced her 6 and 7-year-old students to “observe” so-called Transgender Awareness Day. This Black Lives Matter activist subjected these small children to non-curricular propaganda about “gender identity” and sex changes.
Williams disturbingly went so far as to tell these kids that their “parents ma[d]e a guess whether they’re a boy or a girl” and may have been wrong. Parents complained, but Williams was backed by her school principal and superintendent.
Three mothers fired back by filing a lawsuit against Williams, the school, the district, and district officials in June of 2022. Their goal was to obtain a moratorium “on gender dysphoria and transgender transitioning,” parental notice and opt-out rights on the topic absent such a prohibition, compensatory damages, and punitive damages.
Thankfully, Judge Joy Conti of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania just ruled largely in favor of these mothers.
Judge Conti stated that “parents have a constitutional right to reasonable and realistic advance notice and the ability to opt their elementary-age children of noncurricular instruction on transgender topics and to not have requirements for notice and opting out of those topics that are more stringent than those for other sensitive topics.”
Here’s the remarks in the aired clip shared by Johnson:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the FEMA Director says there’s only $11 billion left from that $20 billion that was allocated. So that’s a different accounting than this 2% you say was distributed.
SPEAKER JOHNSON: Yeah. So they’ve obligated some funds, but they’ve only distributed 2%…The rescue and recovery efforts are still going on, and then we address the rest of it.
And here — I’ll put it in bold — is what CBS edited out for the broadcast:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the FEMA Director says there’s only $11 billion left from that $20 billion that was allocated. So that’s a different accounting than this 2% you say was distributed.
SPEAKER JOHNSON: Yeah. So they’ve obligated some funds, but they’ve only distributed 2%, and when I was there on the ground, and you should go, I mean, bring the cameras and talk to the people there, they’ll tell you, don’t- don’t take politicians words for this or the administration’s word, talk to the people there on the ground they had not been provided the resources almost two weeks out from the storm that they desperately needed. And when I was there 13 days, post- you know, post the storm hitting that state, people are still being rescued. They’re stuck in the higher elevations in the mountains because the roads are down and all the rest. So they need every- every available resource and all hands on deck. The rescue and recovery efforts are still going on, and then we address the rest of it.
Issues in the debate ranged from abortion to the border crisis, and allowing boys in girls’ sports.
On abortion, Cruz said he supported Texas’ pro-life laws while acknowledging that other states would make different decisions.
“In Texas, we overwhelmingly support that parents should be notified and have to consent before their child gets an abortion. In Texas, we overwhelmingly agree that late-term abortions in the eighth and ninth months, that’s too extreme. And I’ll tell you, in Texas, we overwhelmingly agree that taxpayer money shouldn’t pay for abortions,” said Cruz.
He went on to attack his opponent’s position on abortion as extreme, noting that Allred “voted in favor of striking down Texas’ parental notification law. He voted in favor of striking down Texas’ parental consent law. He voted to legalize late-term abortions, including the eighth and ninth months.”
Allred, meanwhile, said he would fight to “restore a woman’s right to choose” and to “make Roe v. Wade the law of the land again.”
Snip.
One of the biggest issues playing out in the campaign thus far has been Allred’s position on allowing boys in girls’ sports. The issue has been the target of Cruz’s campaign ads and led to Allred denying the accusations, despite voting against legislation to protect girls sports.
“I know a lot of y’all at home, for example, saw two biological men competing in women’s boxing at the Olympics,” said Cruz. “That was wildly unfair. You know, my youngest daughter plays volleyball. It’s not fair for a biological boy or man, a teenage boy, to spike the volleyball at her, and he has voted repeatedly in favor of that.”
FEMA’s entanglement with the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous open southern border policies by diverting storm relief funds ($1.4 billion, according to NYPost) for illegal and legal aliens may have undermined the federal agency’s ability to effectively manage emergencies, such as the Katrina-like disaster unfolding in the US Southeast.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas dropped the bombshell [two weeks ago]: FEMA “does not have the funds” to see Americans through the rest of this Atlantic hurricane season. The federal agency drained the funds by prioritizing taxpayer funds for illegal and legal aliens versus US citizens as the Biden-Harris globalist team rolled out the red carpet to anyone, even terrorists, via the open southern borders.
Connect the dots, if you can,” Tim Murtaugh, an adviser to former President Trump’s campaign, wrote on X, adding, “DHS says FEMA might not have enough cash to help people through hurricane season. But in 2 years of a new Biden-Harris program, they’ve spent $1 BILLION on housing and other services for migrants.”
Shedding a whole heck of a lot of color on the situation, Savanah Hernandez, a reporter for Turning Point USA, wrote on X that she has uncovered some of the “first looks” inside fully furnished luxury apartments for migrants that received free rent and utilities for two years.
Hernandez wrote in a note on The Post Millennial:
The Brunswick Landing apartments in Maine sparked controversy earlier this year when it was discovered that homeless migrants in the area were getting the opportunity to live in the units rent-free for up to two years. Migrants living in the apartments shared that not only is the rent-free, the utilities are paid and we got an inside look at the furnished apartments that would run the average American about $2,300 dollars.
“FEMA: Disaster Relief No Longer About Emergency Response, It’s About ‘Disaster Equity.'”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is supposed to be the government’s premier emergency relief organization in times of disaster, like the situation now faced by victims of Hurricane Helene’s aftermath in North Carolina and Tennessee.
But according to the FEMA website, the agency now places higher priority on instituting Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity guidelines than on easing the suffering of Americans displaced by disaster.
Among the goals listed in FEMA’s strategic plan are to:
Instill equity as a foundation for emergency management
Lead whole of community in climate resilience
Promote and sustain a ready FEMA & prepared nation
What does that look like in action?
Here’s an example of a FEMA disaster preparedness meeting where participants discuss how LGBTQIA individuals were suffering disproportionally before the storm compared to other disaster victims.
Notice how the focus shifts from doing the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people to ensuring that they are promoting “equity in disaster relief.”
Social justice is racist poison that ruins everything, and now it’s costing Americans their lives.
Here we go again. “Report: Migrant Caravans Leaving Southern Mexico Headed Toward US Border.”
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has declared a “blood feud” against three federal lawmakers from neighboring North Caucasus republics in his first comments on last month’s deadly shooting outside the Moscow headquarters of Russia’s largest online retailer Wildberries.
Kadyrov has vowed to help Vladislav Bakalchuk, the estranged husband of Wildberries CEO Tatiana Kim — Russia’s wealthiest woman — to return his wife and block the merger of their e-commerce giant with the smaller outdoor advertising group Russ.
The family and business dispute escalated last month when Bakalchuk led a group of men to Wildberries’ Moscow offices and allegedly tried to force their way into the building. Two security guards, who were ethnic Ingush, were killed in the shootout and multiple felony charges, including murder, were filed against Bakalchuk and several other ethnic Chechens involved in the incident.
Kadyrov is a piece of work, but one with a sufficiently strong independent power base that Putin has felt compelled to buy him off. Kadyrov declaring a blood fued against Russian officials probably isn’t a sign of harmony in Russia’s government…
Sinwar is only the latest high-profile terrorist to meet his fate at the hands of the IDF. His predecessor at the top of Hamas’s hierarchy, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in Tehran when a bomb covertly smuggled into an Iranian diplomatic safehouse exploded in July. Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, was neutralized in a July airstrike after seven unsuccessful IDF attempts to deliver him to justice. Hamas deputy commander Marwan Issa met his fate in March, two months after his deputy, Saleh al-Arouri, was cut down in the suburbs of Beirut by an Israeli drone.
A little over a year after the war Hamas inaugurated against Israel on 10/7 in the deadliest one-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the terrorist organization has been entirely decapitated. Its fighters are scattered, disorganized, and reduced to chaotic rearguard actions against the Israeli troops busily rolling them up. Critics of Israel’s campaign like to insist that Hamas is an idea and therefore cannot simply be dispatched like the thousands of its fighters the IDF has cut down. True enough, but an idea cannot shoot at you or launch rocket attacks on your cities. That requires well-connected, deeply embedded commanders with years of experience conducting asymmetrical insurgent attacks on a superior force. Those commanders are all dead.
The Israeli officials who have pursued Hamas’s barbarians until the end have done so without much encouragement from the West. Indeed, the death of every Hamas commander was fretted over in the West as though it created a new impediment to peace and to the negotiations over the hostages Hamas itself captured on 10/7 — 97 of whom still have not yet been located. Joe Biden’s administration withdrew almost all rhetorical support for Israeli operations in places like Rafah, where Sinwar himself was taken out. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government deserves the gratitude of the civilized world for rejecting these entreaties seeking Israel’s surrender in its righteous war.
The Israelis did not choose the way this war began, but they will be the authors of its conclusion. And the end is near. The Israelis have brought the Gaza Strip closer to its day of liberation from the tyranny of an illegitimate terrorist regime than all the combined efforts of the peace processors in the global diplomatic corps ever achieved. It is a shame that the American administration that stood so stalwartly with Israel at the outset of this campaign willingly sacrificed its ability to celebrate alongside its Israeli counterparts. This should be America’s victory, too. But by spending months on end agonizing over how Israel was achieving its honorable objective, the Biden White House and its allies lost sight of our shared strategic goals.
We hit the Houthis with B-2s. I didn’t have that on my 2024 dance card…
“Williamson County’s Democrat Sheriff Accused of Accepting Pay-to Play Donation. On September 24, the Williamson County Commissioners Court issued a contract for over $500,000 to Family Hospital Management Company for ‘Jail Inmate Psychological Services’. Just four days before a county contract was issued, [Democrat Sheriff Mike] Gleason received a $20,000 campaign donation from the founder and CEO of the company that received the contract.” “Jail Inmate Psychological Services” sounds like a great avenue for leftwing graft…
“A North Carolina Democratic county leader, who is also running for a seat in the state House, was arrested after allegedly stealing Trump signs near a road last week. Moore County, North Carolina, County Chair Lowell Simon, 68, was charged with two counts of misdemeanor larceny of political signs after he admitted to removing Trump signs and keeping them in his car.”
“The Young Turks’ Ana Kasparian says she ‘woke up’ after being molested by LA homeless man and ‘the good people’ slammed her for talking about it. Kasparian described feeling “politically homeless” and shared how the backlash she received from liberals after the assault played a key role in her reevaluation.” Seems like social justice warriors feel that being molested by a homeless man or raped by an illegal alien is a small price to pay for taxpayer-subsidized abortion…
Boy dressed as girl assaults actual girl, gives her a concussion and blurred vision. You know what the school administrators did, don’t you? That’s right, they suspended the victim.
“Edgewood ISD Superintendent Gets Raise While Students Are Failing. Edgewood ISD extended Superintendent Eduardo Hernández’s contract until 2029 and raised his annual salary to $291,923.””Only 23 percent of Edgewood ISD students can read, write, and do math at or above grade level.” Edgewood is on the west side of San Antonio.
Columbia U is trying to make their campus Judenfrei.
Columbia University is temporarily suspending a prominent pro-Israel business professor’s access to campus after he publicly criticized school officials for permitting anti-Israel campus demonstrations on the anniversary of the October 7 massacre.
Columbia notified Israeli-American business professor Shai Davidai on Tuesday that he will be banned from campus for violating university policy on harassing school employees.
On Tuesday night, Davidai posted a video on social media accusing Columbia of retaliating against him for posting a video of himself asking Columbia’s chief operating officer Cas Halloway why he allowed pro-Hamas demonstrators to protest on the anniversary of October 7.
“Right now I was supposed to be at the school of social work at Columbia, where the Jewish students are holding their own memorial service for the senseless violence of October 7th. But then I got a call from my lawyer, who says the university has decided to not allow me to be on campus anymore,” Davidai said.
“Why? Because of October 7th. Because I was not afraid to stand up to the hateful mob. And because I was not afraid to expose Mr. f**king Cas Holloway for not doing anything about it.”
Davidai should sue them over equal rights violation for millions. Let a thousand lawsuits bloom.
Researchers have unearthed two sophisticated toolsets that a nation-state hacking group—possibly from Russia—used to steal sensitive data stored on air-gapped devices, meaning those that are deliberately isolated from the Internet or other networks to safeguard them from malware.
One of the custom tool collections was used starting in 2019 against a South Asian embassy in Belarus. A largely different toolset created by the same threat group infected a European Union government organization three years later. Researchers from ESET, the security firm that discovered the toolkits, said some of the components in both were identical to those fellow security firm Kaspersky described in research published last year and attributed to an unknown group, tracked as GoldenJackal, working for a nation-state. Based on the overlap, ESET has concluded that the same group is behind all the attacks observed by both firms.
The practice of air gapping is typically reserved for the most sensitive networks or devices connected to them, such as those used in systems for voting, industrial control, manufacturing, and power generation. A host of malware used in espionage hacking over the past 15 years (for instance, here and here) demonstrate that air gapping isn’t a foolproof protection. It nonetheless forces threat groups to expend significant resources that are likely obtainable only by nation-states with superior technical acumen and unlimited budgets. ESET’s discovery puts GoldenJackal in a highly exclusive collection of threat groups.
Then there’s this: “The basic flow of the attack is, first, infecting an Internet-connected device through a means ESET and Kaspersky have been unable to determine.” There’s a 99% chance that these air-gaped systems are being attacked through the usual human engineering or security lapse vectors. Which leaves a 1% chance of some form of electromagnetic witchcraft…
“WeightWatchers Squeezes Higher After Unveiling New Low-Cost GLP-1 Treatment…WW announced the addition of a new compounded semaglutide to its lineup to beat America’s obesity crisis sparked by the processed foods industrial complex. The new treatment starts at $129 per month, and each additional month will cost $189. This is significantly less than GLP-1 obesity treatments from big pharma, which cost north of $1,000 a month.”
Fiat/Stellantis merged with Chrysler in 2014, and now they’re threatening to shut it down in two years.
BrucePac listeria meat recall expands, now includes some HEB items.
Disney plans to slash budgets on Marvel movies going forward. On the one hand, that’s probably prudent, since it gets harder and harder to turn a profit with soaring budgets. On the other hand, Marvel’s recent problems aren’t a product of big budgets, they’re a product of wokeness and crappy scripts.
Rick Beato has an interesting video with R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills. I didn’t realize that the other three members wrote the music then handed it off to Michael Stipe, who would go off and create the lyrics by himself.
The official Austin unemployment rate is 3.6%. But having just attended a job fair at an area Texas Workforce Commission which was geared toward older workers, I can give you firsthand evidence that things are a lot worse than official statistics let on, because that place was slammed.
The main room with employer tables was so crowded they had to wait for would-be applicants to leave before letting more in. And if I had known it was going to be that hot and crowded, I wouldn’t have worn the suit. Most attendees didn’t, and seemed to be looking for blue collar and service jobs.
The fair was dominated by City of Austin departments (and APD was even there looking for recruits), but no technical writing positions (I didn’t expect there to be), and IT positions in general seemed thin on the ground. Most of the jobs there seemed to start in the high teens per hour.
Now, it’s been a long, long time since I last attended a job fair, but Back In The Day I never saw one as busy as this one. Nor do I think the statistical understatement of the true magnitude of job losses under the Biden Recession is limited to Austin. With companies hiring illegal aliens rather than Americans, the problem is only likely to get worse.
Treat this as a data point, for whatever its worth.
Since we’re on the subject, I’ve been unemployed for one year now, so feel free to hit the tip jar.
We’ve had a lot of stories of Harris County Democratic Party corruption, but don’t forget another Democratic establishment in the People’s Republic of Travis County, which Texas Attorney General is suing for funding an illegal partisan voter drive.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued members of the Travis County Commissioners Court as well as the Travis County tax assessor-collector and voter registrar, asking the court to “prevent them from giving a partisan organization thousands of taxpayer dollars to identify the names and addresses of potentially unregistered voters without statutory authority.”
In the suit, Paxton alleges that Civic Government Solutions (CGS), a voter outreach company, was hired to “conduct services for the County that the County is unauthorized to perform.”
Paxton’s lawsuit explains that CGS CEO Jeremy Smith has made public comments about “getting people to vote for progressive candidates.” Smith is also listed as CEO of Civitech, a company that Axios described as a “progressive data startup.”
And what do you know! A search of Open Secrets shows that of 142 political donations, all went to Democrats.
“Travis County has blatantly violated Texas law by paying partisan actors to conduct unlawful identification efforts to track down people who are not registered to vote,” said Paxton in a press release.
“Programs like this invite fraud and reduce public trust in our elections. We will stop them and any other county considering such programs.”
Paxton is arguing that the Travis County officials acted ultra vires — beyond their legal authority, in other words — by contracting with Smith and his company to collect personal information and target unregistered voters.
He further claims that these officials only have the powers explicitly granted to them by law, and argues that nothing in the Election Code allows them to identify and reach out to potentially unregistered voters, some of whom may not be eligible to vote.
Paxton argues that this action could harm the integrity of Texas elections by encouraging ineligible people to register to vote. As a result, Paxton is asking the court to issue a temporary and permanent injunction to stop Travis County from moving forward with the contract.
Pushing to get ineligible people to vote for Democrats seems to be the Democrats’ top goal this year, be it illegal aliens or convicted felons, and they’ve been pursuing it by varied means. Paxton has also fought voter fraud with search warrants in Bexar County and preventing similar “justice” organizations from soliciting voter registration outside DPS offices.
Paxton seems to determined that the voting fraud that happened in 2020 won’t be happening here in Texas.
The fake Kamala bubble evaporates, another would-be Trump assassin is arrested, more Chinese spies on the staff of high profile Democrats, more NYC corruption raids, Ukrainian drones heat things up around Moscow, Intel and Stellantis layoff thousands each, another Harris County Democrat double-dips, a bit about Idaho, and some really stupid sailor shenanigans.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Evidently jailing Trump right before an election was a kangaroo too far even for this kangaroo court, so Trump’s sentencing has been pushed to after the election. “Judge Juan Merchan ruled Friday that Trump’s sentencing will take place on November 26, three weeks after election day, ensuring that Trump will not be sentenced in any of his criminal cases leading up to the election.”
In the friendliest possible format — a joint interview with VP nominee and emotional-support midwesterner Tim Walz, conducted by Dana Bash with the delicacy of an ornithologist gently hand-feeding hatchling chicks — Harris has revealed that her gaseously mindless word-cloud of a campaign is in fact an accurate reflection of her own personal vacuousness.
To be sure, Harris did not memorably self-destruct tonight. Whatever her failings, they are not those of Joe Biden, who couldn’t even articulate his words without slurring by the end. Her inarticulateness tonight was of the sort already known to be a Harris trademark, the endless jumble of nonsensical, comically vapid stock language. When she could fall back on a memorized list of talking points, she presented somewhat normally; the second she was required to respond directly to a question, then she began to spin out otiose nonsense like a pasta chef catering a Sicilian banquet. You could practically see the gears turning inside her head as she cast her eyes downward, stared laser-beams into the floor, and groped for cliches. She was more muted tonight than usual — her aides clearly ordered her never to display mirth under any circumstances, for fear the Kamala Kackle might emerge — and as a result, while she simulated sobriety for the most part, her body language was pronouncedly downbeat.
And all throughout she offered no answers to any policy questions whatsoever, nor any explanation for her various changes of position between 2020 and now. In theory, Bash asked most of the “right questions”; in practice, the way she solicitously asked them — sometimes even helpfully offering in advance a multiple-choice list of acceptable answers for Harris to choose from — turned them into cream puffs that Harris immediately used to serve up word salad.
Bash’s most pointed moment was when she pushed Harris about why she changed her position on a national fracking ban between 2020 and the present campaign. Harris’s answer was little more than, “Well, because I changed my mind when I became Joe Biden’s VP.” In the real world, anyone familiar with politics well understood that her “position” changed because Joe Biden — the presidential nominee — demanded it, and no other reason. Which of course is why it’s impossible to believe her when she says this is now her sincerely held view, as opposed to something to later be discarded once she can set her own priorities.
Eric Weinstein told Chris Williamson on the “Modern Wisdom” podcast that Donald Trump’s presidency has disrupted the old “rules-based international order,” which many view as an attempt to control global stability and wondered if the Republican nominee will “be allowed” to reenter the White House if elected in 2024. Weinstein argued that Trump’s unorthodox approach challenged the status quo, exposing flaws in the system and revealing that the impact of populist leaders on democracy and international agreements is more complex and significant than previously understood.
CHRIS WILLIAMSON: When we spoke at the start of the year, I said it was way too close to November to switch anybody out. Turns out that I was wrong.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Beginner’s luck.
CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You said what are the odds that Joe Biden has a debilitating event between now and November including death, so he runs a one in 20 chance of dying in any given year or above that. I don’t think you know whether he’s even going to make it to November debilitating event could have been a debilitating public event
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I purposefully left it vague. I didn’t say the other part of it, which I now feel comfortable saying, which is…
CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do you mean by that?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I think there’s a remarkable story, and we’re in a funny game, which is: are we allowed to say what that story is? Because to say it, to analyze it, to name it, is to bring it into view. I think we don’t understand why the censorship is behaving the way it is. We don’t understand why it’s in the shadows or why our news is acting in a bizarre fashion. So let’s just set the stage, given that that was in February.
There is something that I think Mike Benz has just referred to as the rules-based international order. It’s an interlocking series of agreements, tacit understandings, explicit understandings, and clandestine understandings about how the most important structures keep the world free of war and keep markets open. There has been a system in place, whether understood explicitly or behind the scenes or implicitly, that says the purpose of the two American parties is to prune the field of populist candidates so that whatever two candidates exist in a faceoff are both acceptable to that world order.
From the point of view of, say, the State Department, the intelligence community, the defense department, and major corporations involved in international issues—from arms trade to, oh, I don’t know, food—they have a series of agreements that are fragile and could be overturned if a president entered the Oval Office who didn’t agree with them. And if the mood of the country was, “Why do we pay taxes into these structures? Why are we hamstrung? Why aren’t we a free people?” So what the two parties would do is run primaries with populist candidates and pre-commit the populist candidates to support the candidates who won the primaries. As long as that took place and you had two candidates that were both acceptable to the international order—that is, they aren’t going to rethink NAFTA or NATO or what have you—we called that democracy. And so democracy was the illusion of choice, what’s called magician’s choice, where the choice is not actually, you know, “pick a card, any card,” but somehow the magician makes sure that the card that you pick is the one that he knows.
In that situation, you have magician’s choice in the primaries, and then you’d have the duopoly field: two candidates, either of which was acceptable, and you could actually afford to hold an election. That way, the international order wasn’t put at risk every four years because you can’t have alliances that are subject to the whim of the people in plebiscites.
Under that structure, everything was going fine until 2016, when the first candidate ever to not hold any position in the military nor any position in government in the history of the Republic, Donald Trump, broke through the primary structure. Then there was a full court press: “Okay, we only have one candidate that’s acceptable to the international order. Donald Trump will be under constant pressure—he’s a loser, he’s a wild man, he’s an idiot, and he’s under control of the Russians.” And then he was going to be, you know, a 20-to-1 underdog, and then he wins. There was no precedent for this. They learned their lesson: you cannot afford to have candidates who are not acceptable to the international order and continue to have these alliances. This is an unsolved problem.
A Missouri man is facing federal charges following a series of alleged violent threats made via social media against former President Donald Trump, Republicans at large, and law enforcement officers, according to a criminal complaint filed in the Western District of Missouri on Aug. 30.
Justin Lee White, 36, is accused of using interstate communication to spread a slew of online threats to injure Trump, Republicans, and law enforcement in violation of federal law, culminating in a multi-agency investigation led by the FBI, according to the complaint.
Speaking of Trump assassination attempts, DHS personnel assigned to the protective detail for Trump’s Butler rally were given rigorous training. And by “rigorous training” I mean “they sat through a two hour webinar.”
Remember that “Harris Surge” in polls? Yet again, it was a case of oversampling.
As we’ve been highlighting since 2016, polls are not to be trusted thanks to various ‘tricks of the trade’ – most commonly, oversampling.
Last month we noted how the founder of the main outside spending group backing Kamala Harris for president says their own internal opinion polling is “much less rosy” than public polls.
“Our numbers are much less rosy than what you’re seeing in the public,” said Future Forward super PAC president Chauncey McLean said during a Monday event hosted by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.
Now, the Washington Times reports that some pollsters are even sounding the alarm over Vice President Kamala Harris’ so-called ‘surge’ in the polls – which Harris pulled ahead in after replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee on July 21.
Since the switch, Harris is leading Trump nationally by nearly 2 percentage points and is either leading or tied with him in all seven battleground states. However, Republican analysts argue that these polling numbers may not accurately reflect voter sentiment due to biased polling methodology…
Critics point out that many polls have been sampling a disproportionately smaller share of Republican voters compared to exit poll data from the 2020 presidential election. The result, they say, is a misleading “phantom advantage” for Ms. Harris. According to them, this skewed sampling could be a strategic move to boost enthusiasm and fundraising for Ms. Harris’ campaign.
Trump campaign strategist Jim McLaughlin echoed this sentiment, stating, “They undersample Republicans” intentionally “to tamp down support and donations for Trump.” He added that the polls are part of a larger effort to create a narrative that favors Harris.
Trump has openly criticized the poll results. “It’s fake news,” Trump declared during a rally in Michigan. “They can make those polls sing.”
“Billionaire Mark Cuban Asked His Followers If They’d Prefer Their Kids Be Like Trump or Harris.” Turns out they preferred Trump by more than 2-1. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Another week, another high profile Democrat’s aide turns out to be a Chinese spy.
Linda Sun, a former aide to New York governor Kathy Hochul, acted at the direction of Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party officials while serving in state government, federal prosecutors alleged in an indictment Tuesday.
In a statement, the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York said that Sun was arrested Tuesday morning with her husband, Christopher Hu. They were expected to be arraigned later in the day.
Sun is a former deputy chief of staff to Kathy Hochul and has served in numerous roles throughout New York State government since her first post under the administration of former governor Andrew Cuomo in 2012. Before that, she served as Representative Grace Meng’s chief of staff, when the Queens Democrat served in the New York State assembly.
“As alleged, while appearing to serve the people of New York as deputy chief of staff within the New York State Executive Chamber, the defendant and her husband actually worked to further the interests of the Chinese government and the CCP,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said.
The federal government is alleging that Sun was an unregistered agent of the Chinese government and that her husband engaged in money-laundering while they benefited from millions of dollars in bribes from Chinese officials.
The indictment details a shocking pattern of collaboration with China’s consulate general in New York, with Sun at one point in 2020 letting a Chinese diplomat listen in on a private conference call for New York officials regarding the state government’s response to the Covid pandemic.
Chinese-government and CCP officials directed her to block Taiwanese officials from engaging with officials from New York. Beijing views the current government of Taiwan as a traitorous separatist movement and wants to annex the country.
According to court documents, Taiwan’s de facto consulate in New York City invited an unnamed politician, a description that matches the profile of then-governor Andrew Cuomo, to attend a banquet honoring then-Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen during her stopover in the city in 2019. Sun forwarded information about the invite to a Chinese official, telling that individual, “I sent you an email / Just an FYI / I already blocked it.” She then declined the invitation without consulting other New York executive chamber officials.
When Sun later asked a colleague to check if the politician was registered for the banquet, that staff member said that it was not on the schedule. Sun replied: “Perfect!”
She also manipulated messaging from the New York governor’s office, while consulting Chinese diplomats, the indictment stated.
Federal agents on Wednesday zeroed in on the highest ranks of Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, searching a home and seizing the phones of the New York City police commissioner, the first deputy mayor, the schools chancellor and others, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The police commissioner. They seized the police commissioner’s phones. Wow.
Among the other officials the federal investigators sought information from were the deputy mayor for public safety and a senior adviser to the mayor who is one of his closest confidants, the people said. Both men have had other legal challenges.
The agents also searched the home and seized the phone of a consultant who is the brother of both the schools chancellor and one of the deputy mayors, the people said.
The nature of the investigations is unclear, but it appears that one is focused on the senior City Hall officials and the other touches on the police commissioner, the people said.
…
Representatives of the City Hall officials — the first deputy mayor, Sheena Wright; her partner, Schools Chancellor David C. Banks; the deputy mayor for public safety, Philip Banks III; and a senior adviser to the mayor, Timothy Pearson — could not be reached or declined to comment.
The consultant, Terence Banks, a brother of Philip Banks and David Banks, recently opened a government and community relations firm aimed at closing a gap “between New York’s intricate infrastructure and political landscape.” He, too, could not be reached for comment.
Several of the officials had their phones seized or records of their communications subpoenaed.
…
In addition to the police commissioner, Edward A. Caban, several other department officials, including Mr. Caban’s chief of staff and two Queens precinct commanders, also had their phones taken by federal agents, two of the people said.
Says Dwight: “It sounds like the whole Adams administration is so packed with corruption, they can’t even keep the lid screwed on.”
Behind the statistics: “August: 635K Foreign-Born Workers Gained Jobs as 1.3 Million Americans Lost Jobs.”
Germany’s conservative, populist, pro-border security Alternative for Germany won big in this week’s elections. Of course, the media, in unison, denounces anyone who objects to the mass importation of unassimilated Muslims into any European country as “far right.” And in Germany, this means they invariable compare Alternative for Germany to a certain mustachioed National Socialist.
President Trump endorses marijuana decriminalization vote. “Florida’s Amendment 3, titled Recreational Marijuana, would allow adults who are at least 21 years of age have up to 3 ounces of marijuana (a ‘small amount’?) and up to 5 grams of marijuana concentrate. At present, the state only allows medical patients with qualifying conditions to legally buy and possess cannabis.” Marijuana prohibition hasn’t worked. Full-bore marijuana legalization seems to have brought a whole host of problems, especially in blue states. Florida will provide another statewide laboratory of democracy to calibrate an approach.
Lowes may be getting out of the culture wars, but Home Depot is still in, having “partnered with LGBTQ mafia organization Human Rights Campaign on a school program that taught radical gender theory to elementary school kids.”
That budget deficit might also cause the Labour government to pull out of the F-35 procurement program. “Despite previous plans to acquire 138 F-35s, only 48 have been ordered.”
The head of Harris County’s Public Health Department, who was fired last week, has also been working for a California county since last January. Questions are swirling about her work in Texas, including her role in awarding a contract for sending mental health workers instead of police on some 911 calls.
Sources also say there is a pending criminal investigation into the county’s health department and related contracts.
County officials announced last Friday that Executive Director of Harris County Public Health Barbie Robinson had been dismissed, just days after the Houston Chronicle reported on communications surrounding a $6 million contract awarded to DEMA, a California-based company, to run the county’s Holistic Assistance Response Teams (HART).
The Texan has learned that in January 2024, Robinson also contracted with Yuba County, California to provide services for a three-year period. Robinson’s work for Yuba County’s public health department provides her with nearly $200,000 in compensation for hundreds of hours of work, all while managing Harris County’s public health department.
Sources familiar with the matter say that Robinson claimed to have obtained approval from former County Administrator David Berry and the County Attorney’s Office to engage in the additional work, but that current County Administrator Diana Ramirez was unable to confirm Robinson’s claims.
Other sources indicate that the Harris County District Attorney’s Office (HCDAO) has been investigating Robinson and nearly a dozen other individuals with the county, HART, and DEMA for several months.
This week, the McLennan County District Attorney’s Office dismissed murder charges against two Houston men involved in the self-defense incident at a party near the Baylor University campus, finally determining it was a justifiable homicide. While that was good news to Calvin Nichols Jr., it hardly makes up for the 635 days the man spent locked up in jail while the DA’s office slowly dragged its feet over the case.
According to police reports, on the night in question Nichols and his cousin, Jaytron Damon Scott, were invited to a party attended by a number of Baylor students, including football players. According to partygoers, Joseph Craig Thomas Jr. showed up uninvited and began threatening others with a gun, including a female student who asked him to move his car.
He later stuck a gun under the chin of a Baylor football player. And when Scott and Nichols were leaving the party, Thomas began to pistol whip Nichols.
That’s when Scott, acting in defense of his cousin, fired his pistol at Thomas, striking him multiple times and killing him. Murder charges were then filed against Scott and Nichols, a fact that Scott’s attorney, Bryan Cantrell, found unbelievable.
“I don’t know how this case got indicted,” Cantrell told KWTX.com. “This was the clearest self-defense case I have ever seen. And I think the problem is a lot of attorneys and, certainly the people of the community, don’t understand the law of self-defense.”
You would hope that the end of Abel Reyna’s term as McLennan County DA put a stop to this sort of thing, but evidently not.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is preparing to implement the Biden-Harris administration’s Sustains Act which aims to regulate who will own environmental services.
According to private property rights advocates, American Stewards of Liberty (ASL), examples of environmental services include “the air we breathe, photosynthesis, pollination, and even the health benefits of open space.”
Specifically, the new law allows private funds to be used for conservation efforts on private land. The USDA will oversee the program, and the Secretary, preparing its implementation, will also decide who owns the environmental service.
Although the public may still provide the USDA with comments about the plan until September 16, 2024, ASL refers to the new law as “critical for proponents of the United Nations’ sustainable development agenda to achieve.”
The private property rights advocates see the program as a means to “provide the path to transfer America’s real assets from private citizens to federal and international interests.”
Screw both the Biden Administration and the UN.
The latest Stolen Valor Democrat is Maryland governor Wes Moore, who didn’t earn the Bronze Star he claimed he did.
Speaking of Idaho, how Micron defied the odds to become one of the biggest DRAM manufacturers in the world.
Intel just cancelled their 20A (2nm) node and will be fabbing their Arrow Lake processor at TSMC. “Intel projects it will save half a billion dollars by skipping the 20A node. The announcement comes as Intel embarks on a vast restructuring in the wake of troubling financial results last quarter. The company continues to lay off 15,000 workers, among the largest workforce reductions in its 56-year history.” It’s supposedly going full speed ahead with its 18A node, theoretically due in 2025. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Intel and Japan are teaming up to work on EUV. Hard to see them making much progress given how large a lead ASML has…
Rael Enteen, Vice President of the Washington Commanders football team (AKA The Artist Formerly known As The Washington Redskins) has been fired.
He told…that, “over 50% of our roster is white religious, and God says, ‘F— the gays.’ Their interpretation. I don’t buy any of that. Another big chunk is low-income African Americans that comes from a community that is inherently very homophobic.”
…Enteen also said some players are “dumb as hell” and said some who were smart don’t stay that way after getting hit in the head too many times. He also said those who “get their heads knocked around a few times” are more susceptible to conspiracy theories.
Enteen also said, “I don’t think the commissioner of the NFL hates gay people, hates black people. Jerry Jones, who really runs the NFL, I think he hates gay people, black people.”
And James O’Keefe claims another scalp…
Legal Insurrection’s William A. Jacobson just got dis-invited from speaking on antisemitism at a synagogue in Tampa. “How could any Jew look around at the current geopolitical landscape and conclude that it’s safe to ignore all the various threats to their existence — not just Hamas terrorists in Gaza, but also the various murderous entities backed by the Islamic radical regime in Iran, to say nothing of Democratic primary voters in Dearborn, Michigan — because Trump is the real danger? What kind of cocoon are these people living in?”
We had previously covered the various failures of Austin’s toy train Project Connect light rail project to achieve its stated goals. Now a lawsuit has been filed to put the light rail tax out of our misery.
A new class action lawsuit filed in Travis County 126th District Court claims that the City of Austin is collecting annual property tax illegally to fund Project Connect since the project is not following through on delivering the public transit development that voters agreed to in 2020.
As KVUE reported, voter-approved Project Connect has faced legal action in the past from taxpayers and is now facing another lawsuit brought by the same group of plaintiffs who want to prevent the city from continuing to collect millions of dollars in property taxes to fund the now reduced Project Connect plan.
The plaintiff’s lead counsel, Bill Aleshire, said, “They’re pursuing what I call a ‘miniature’ Project Connect that’s not city wide.”
Aleshire explained that Project Connect “started as a $7 billion plan that included 30 miles of rail, a route to the airport and downtown, now has a more than an $11 billion price tag and half the routes.”
He also argued that the city “miscalculated” its 2024 tax rate and that the funds already collected are not being spent on the transit project.
“Not including this year’s $187 million, Austin’s Project Connect tax levy has been for over $630 million. But there is $476 million on hand, unspent, uncommitted,” Aleshire said.
Project Connect managers, the Austin Transit Partnership, described the lawsuit as “baseless” and stated the funds collected would be utilized in the future, according to KVUE.
Lead plaintiff Cathy Cocco referred to the transit project as “an unaffordable, outdated, yesterday idea not suited for the 21st century city that needs to be efficient, agile, affordable, and more equitable for all Austin residents.”
While Project Connect had the potential to benefit the Austin community, Cocco sees the plan as a “bait and switch scheme.”
The group wants city leaders to stop the tax, revisit the project, and ask Austinites to vote on it again.
At this point it’s obvious that Austin voters were sold a bill of goods. They’ve coughed up a lot of taxes and gotten an underutilized toy train that doesn’t meet the promises made in the bond language. The entire project should be scrapped and money returned to taxpayers. Of course, that would mean Austin’s ruling political establishment would have to admit they were wrong and give up control of a big bucket of money, so we know that’s not happening without a fight…
On Joe Rogan, Peter Thiel has an interesting answer to conservatives wondering why California hasn’t collapsed already: California is essentially Saudi Arabia.
Joe Rogan: “California just jacked their taxes up to 14[% at the highest marginal rate], what was it, 14.4[%]?”
Peter Thiel: Something like that, yeah. 14.3[%] I think.”
JR: “You want more money for doing a terrible job, and having more people leave for the first time ever.”
PT: “But it gets away with it.”
JR: “I know! People are forced with no choice. What are you going to do?”
PT: “There are people at the margins who leave, but the state government still collects more and more in revenues. You get 10% more revenues and 5% of the people leave you still increase the amount of revenues you’re getting. It’s inelastic enough that you’re actually able to increase the revenues.”
PT: “This is sort of the the crazy thing about California. There’s always sort of a right-wing or libertarian critique of California that it’s such a ridiculous place, it should just collapse under its own ridiculousness and it doesn’t quite happen.”
PT: “The macroeconomics in it are are pretty good. 40 million people, the GDP is around 4 trillion. It’s about the same as Germany with 80 million, or Japan with 125 million. Japan has three times the population of California same GDP means one-third the per capita GDP, so there’s some level on which California as a whole is working, even though it doesn’t work from a governance point of view.”
PT: “The rough model I have for how to think of California is that it’s kind of like Saudi Arabia. They have a crazy religion, wokeism in California, Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. You know not that many people believe it, but it it distorts everything.”
PT: “Then you have like oil fields in Saudi Arabia and you have the big tech companies in California, and the oil pays for everything.”
PT: “Then you have a completely bloated, inefficient government sector, and you have sort of all sorts of distortions in the real estate market where people also make lots of money, and sort of the government and real estate are ways you redistribute the oil wealth. And that’s the big tech money in California.”
PT: “It’s not the way you might want to design a system from scratch, but it’s pretty stable. People have been saying Saudi Arabia is ridiculous, it’s going to collapse any year now. They’ve been saying that for 40 or 50 years. But you know, if you have a giant oil field you can pay for a lot of ridiculousness.”
PT: “I think that’s the way you have to think of California. There’s things about it that are ridiculous, but there’s something about it. It doesn’t naturally self-destruct overnight.”
JR: “There’s a lot of people that are still generating enormous amounts of wealth there, and it’s too difficult to just pack up and leave.”
PT: “I think it’s something like four of the eight or nine companies with market capitalizations over a trillion dollars are based in California: Google, Apple, now Nvidia, Meta…I think Broadcom is close to that.”
Thiel also points out the great weather, and notes that there’s no large enough city in a zero income tax state tempting enough (at least for him) to move to. Austin he dismisses because “Austin’s a government town and a college town and a wannabe hipster San Francisco town, so in my books, three and you’re kind of out.”
Of course, the big difference between Apple, Nvidia, etc., and Saudi Aramco, is that all those tech companies could still move to another state, as Elon Musk proved by moving much of Tesla and SpaceX to Texas. But that oil isn’t going anywhere until the Saudis (or the western companies they hire) pump it out.
Also, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudis have sidelined the Wahhabist clerics, so that the state religion is moving (if slowly) in a more modern direction.
Alas, since the pact between Muhammad bin Saud and Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab dates back to about 1745, this metaphor suggests that wokeism still has a quarter millennium to run.
Let’s hope that the poisoned cult of social justice has a much shorter stretch until its richly deserved demise.
There’s too damn much going on in the world right now! Compiling the LinkSwarm used to be more like hunting and gathering, but the last few weeks have been like drinking from the firehose.
The real unemployment rate is crushing ordinary Americans, another Trump assassin thwarted, Maricopa cues up illegal alien voter fraud again, Tim Walz’s own National Guard unit accuses him of stolen valor, Ukraine captures a chunk of Russia, Google is declared a monopoly, a global censorship organization immediately folds at the first sign of scrutiny, the leader of Bangladesh flees, and California fines a business for daring to fly Old Glory.
There are lies, damned lies, and government statistics — and maybe none is more damnable than the official unemployment rate which is half the actual rate, according to Rasmussen. Worse, the number of Americans who are neither retired nor employed is more than four times higher than July’s official rate of 4.3%.
I’ve been writing for months now in quick-hit Instapundit items that this country has been in a jobs recession since the COVID lockdowns and, thanks to Bidenomics, never recovered from. Well, the latest Rasmussen unemployment survey has the numbers.
The report is paywalled, but I pay the subscription fee (and take the tax write-off) so you don’t have to if you ever wondered where some of your VIP membership dollars wind up.
Rasmussen surveyed nearly 9,000 American adults and found that in July the percentage of Americans who are unemployed and looking for work — this is the number that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) should report each month — was 8.4%. The BLS reported a rosy 4.3% unemployment rate last month, up from June’s equally imaginary 4.1%.
From there, things only get worse. Because under Bidenomics, of course, they do.
One in four adult Americans is retired, which is nice for them. Fifteen percent say they’re entrepreneurs (that can be anything from driving an Uber to launching a Silicon Valley startup), and just under 30% are employed by a private company.
Nearly one in 10 work for the government at one level or another. Those workers are supported entirely by tax dollars without producing any material wealth. Every government employee involved in regulation makes it harder for the rest of us to do so.
If you’ve been keeping track of these numbers in your head, you might notice they don’t add up to anything close to 100%. About three percent of adults surveyed answered “not sure” about their employment situation, the kind of answer that I assume involves smoking weed. The remaining 9.7% said they were unemployed but not looking — i.e., “Not in Workforce.”
That means the percentage of Americans who could be working and perhaps would really like to be working but either can’t find work or have given up finding work is 18.1%. That’s more than four times the official unemployment rate.
An alleged Iranian agent plotted to hire hitmen to assassinate US government officials — including possibly former President Donald Trump, according to sources and a federal criminal complaint.
Pakistani national Asif Merchant, 46, is accused of planning political assassinations in New York City in August or early September, and paid $5,000 in advances to men he believed to be contract killers, according to US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace.
“The Iranian indicted in Eastern District today is 100% an agent of the Iranian government,” a law enforcement source told The Post.
The plot was allegedly in retaliation to the 2020 Trump-ordered killing of prominent Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani, US Attorney General Merrick Garland confirmed Tuesday.
Trump has been a known target of previous Iranian-backed assassination plots, and the feds believe he may have been one of Merchant’s targets, law enforcement sources told The Post. But, the accused terrorist never divulged the name of who he planned to kill during his meetings with undercover agents — instead cryptically saying only that the target would have “a lot of security.”
Last week’s plea bargain deal to let 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and accomplices Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi avoid the death penalty broke a little late to include in the last LinkSwarm, but defense secretary Lloyd Austin has nixed the deal.
Although the last few weeks have had their alarming aspects – chief among which was the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13, the odds-on favorite candidate for president – they have also had their amusing moments.
In the latter category, I place the sudden queen-for-a-day-like coronation of Kamala Harris.
True, that coronation was in the nature of an anti-democratic semi-soft-coup (or anti-democratic “inversion of a coup”). Biden and his handlers, right up until the morning of July 21, were insisting that he was not dropping out, that he was “in it to win,” etc. But someone made him an offer he couldn’t refuse and out he went.
Here’s the amusing bit. Until the moment Biden was chased out of the race, Kamala Harris functioned primarily as political life insurance. “You might not like me,” Biden communicated, “but if I go, you’re stuck with her.”
Biden’s polls were in the toilet and, following his catastrophic debate with Donald Trump, were circling the drain, poised for oblivion. But Kamala’s polls were even worse. She was cordially disliked by—well, by everyone. Her staff, her colleagues, but above all, by voters. In the 2020 race, she got no delegates: none, zero, zip. She dropped out of the race for president but was then tapped to be VP only because this half Indian, half Jamaican woman was swarthy enough to pass as black and Biden had promised to select a black female as a running mate. Kamala truly is, as Biden himself acknowledged recently, a DEI vice president.
And sure enough, Kamala was every bit the disaster people predicted she would be. As a matter of clinical interest, she proved that senility is not the only cause of supreme rhetorical incoherence. Some people, and she is one, come by it naturally. Her tenure as vice president is littered with examples, and she provided another doozy just a couple of days ago when she attempted to comment on the prisoner exchange with Russia.
It’s painful, as are all the many video clips of Harris angrily denouncing people who say “Merry Christmas,” of her presiding as “border czar” over the disaster of our non-existent southern border, of her outlining how she wants to give Medicare, as well as the franchise, to all illegal immigrants, and how she wants to develop a national data base of gun owners so that she can confiscate firearms by force.
Can such a person win the presidency? No.
Then, how can we explain the sudden efflorescence of Harrismania? Democrats are wetting themselves with glee over their sudden fundraising windfalls ($200 million in a week, it is said) and sudden surge in the polls. New York magazine just beclowned itself with a cover showing Kamala sitting on top of the world with Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and even Joe Biden dancing and whooping it up below. “Welcome to Kamalot,” we read: “In a matter of days, the Democratic Party discovered its future was actually in the White House all along.”
Was it? Again, the answer is no. It is a temporary sugar high caused partly by the feeling of liberation following the sudden release from Joe Biden, partly by the slobbering media jumping all over the reinvention of Kamala like dogs vibrating over a bitch in estrus. The feeling of intoxication may linger through the Democratic convention, but there are already signs that it is fading. I think James Piereson is correct. Kamala’s position now is akin to that of Michael Dukakis (remember him?) in 1988.
Dukakis was way ahead of George Bush in the summer of 1988. Then it all unraveled.
The puppeteers have stopped pretending. “Obamaites Take Over Team Kamala.”
Ho hum, nothing to see here, just another cycle in which Barack Obama runs for president. What is this, five in a row now?
In this case, though, we may have to give Kamala Harris a pass. It’s not as if she developed a team of campaign experts on her own. Or that they’d stick around for long if she did (via Memeorandum):
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris hired a battery of new senior advisers to her campaign this week, moving swiftly to replace lifetime loyalists of President Biden with Democratic campaign veterans, including multiple leaders of Barack Obama’s presidential bids, according to people briefed on the campaign shifts.
David Plouffe, a top strategist on both of Obama’s presidential campaigns, joins Harris as senior adviser for strategy and the states focused on winning the electoral college. Stephanie Cutter, the deputy campaign manager for Obama’s reelection who has been working in recent months with Harris, is the new senior adviser for strategy messaging. Mitch Stewart, a grass-roots organizing strategist behind both Obama wins, will become the senior adviser for battleground states. David Binder, who led Obama’s public opinion research operation and previously worked for Harris, will expand his role on the Harris campaign to lead the opinion research operation.
All of the new hires will report to campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, another veteran of Obama’s two campaigns. She managed Biden’s 2020 campaign and built his 2024 operation from the White House before moving to Wilmington, Del., this year. Harris took control of Biden’s campaign as soon as Biden announced he would not seek reelection, an operation consisting of more than 1,300 employees and more than 130 offices. She asked O’Malley Dillon to remain in charge.
O’Malley Dillon tried gaslighting this right off the bat, although the Washington Post doesn’t put it that way. “This team is a reflection of the vice president,” she declared, but the Post’s reporting makes it abundantly clear that it reflects Obama rather than Harris. Harris’ existing staffers will remain in place, but the reporting strongly suggests that they will be eclipsed by people who [checks notes] know how to get to Iowa in a primary cycle.
On one hand, this is smart politics, especially given Harris’ record of abysmal performance on the campaign trail. Until now, Harris has only faced one significant competitive election against a Republican, the AG race in California, which she almost lost while other Democrats won statewide races by double digits. Thanks to California’s jungle-primary system, she won her Senate seat against a fellow Democrat in the general election. She then failed to get to a single primary contest in 2020 after entering that primary cycle as one of the favorites, melting down in two debate exchanges with Tulsi Gabbard and utterly failing to inspire Democrat primary voters.
If anyone needs an Obama rescue, it’s Kamala.
Still. During most of Biden’s presidency, Obama’s team largely drove policy, especially in foreign affairs, and Biden’s clear cognitive decline made it appear that someone pulled the strings behind the scene — and Obama was the most likely suspect. Then Biden got humiliated in a debate he demanded and suddenly Obama became even more of a public puppeteer in forcing Biden to withdraw. And now practically his entire political team has taken over Team Kamala even more than they had with Team Biden.
And not to be too conspiratorial about it, but how did we find out about this? In the oh-so-traditional Friday afternoon news dump.
It seems like the Democrats’ rule of thumb is: if you can’t win, cheat.
On Thursday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed itself and will now allow Arizonans to register to vote in federal races without having to prove citizenship.
“It’s another dizzying swerve in the legal battle over a 2022 law that aims ultimately to reverse a portion of the National Voter Registration Act and require all Arizona voters to show proof of citizenship to register to vote,” reports USA Today. “The order reopens a path for potential voters who just two weeks ago were barred from using the state voter registration form to sign up to vote unless they could produce proof of U.S. citizenship. It comes with two months left before the Oct. 7 registration deadline for the high-stakes presidential election.”
The order means people can again use the state-issued voter registration form even if they don’t produce proof of citizenship. Instead, they attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens, and are limited to voting in federal races only.
In the first 10 days after the July 18 ruling that required the documentary proof, the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office said it had rejected 200 voter applications.
On Thursday, the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office clarified the impact of the ruling.
“Election officials may not reject voter registration applications submitted without DPOC, regardless of which form is used,” communications director Aaron Thacker said. DPOC is shorthand for documentary proof of citizenship.
There is only one reason to allow Arizonans the ability to register to vote without proving citizenship: to let illegals vote. That’s why Joe Biden opened up the border, and that’s why the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed itself.
America First Legal (AFL) has filed a lawsuit against Maricopa County, Arizona recorder Stephen Richer for failing to remove non-citizens from county voter rolls.
On Monday the legal organization founded by former senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller sued Richer and Maricopa County on behalf of the Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona and a registered voter and naturalized citizen, for allegedly refusing to verify the citizenship of voters registered in the county, Just the News reports.
On July 16, AFL sent letters to all 15 Arizona counties demanding that election officials follow state and federal law by ensuring that non-citizens were unable to vote, and warned of legal action if they didn’t by the following week.
America First Legal (AFL) has filed a lawsuit against Maricopa County, Arizona recorder Stephen Richer for failing to remove non-citizens from county voter rolls.
On Monday the legal organization founded by former senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller sued Richer and Maricopa County on behalf of the Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona and a registered voter and naturalized citizen, for allegedly refusing to verify the citizenship of voters registered in the county, Just the News reports.
On July 16, AFL sent letters to all 15 Arizona counties demanding that election officials follow state and federal law by ensuring that non-citizens were unable to vote, and warned of legal action if they didn’t by the following week.
Richer replied via his legal counsel, claiming that he’s following the law by verifying the citizenship of voters – however AFL says he’s lying, as voter rolls have had an increase in the number of registered voters without confirmed citizenship under his watch, and that databases have not been accessed which would verify voters’ citizenship.
CNN: “Do you think Kamala Harris is black?” Actual black people in a barbershop: “Nope.” CNN: “You black people have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Tim Walz’s first executive order as the Democratic governor of Minnesota governor was establishing a diversity, equity and inclusion council for all of the state government’s actions and designated himself as the chair. On Tuesday, Waltz was selected to be Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate in the 2024 presidential election.
The Democratic Vice Presidential nominee told The Associated Press in 2019 that the “One Minnesota Council on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity” would ensure the “lens of equity” for all state government businesses, including “recruiting; retaining and promoting state employees; state government contracting; and civic engagement.”
“Walz told reporters Wednesday he’ll chair the council,” the AP said at the time, “patterned on a similar council formed by former Gov. Mark Dayton, but expand its scope to include geographic diversity and other considerations.” Walz said that the point of the council, per AP, was to “work to ensure that all Minnesotans have the opportunity to fully participate in the development of state policy. He says it will ensure that the ‘lens of equity’ is focused on everything the state does, whether it’s transportation projects or hiring.”
He has spoken many times about the “privilege” he’s been given as a “white man.” “I understand the privilege I’ve been given as a white man,” he said during his leadership, saying that he was in office “not just to talk about the problem” of racial disparity “but the solve the problem.”
It was late in the spring of 2005 when Tom Behrends, a farmer in his mid 40s with three kids, got the call from his superiors: The Minnesota National Guard’s 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery was being sent to Iraq. Tim Walz, the unit’s command sergeant major, had just resigned to run for Congress. Behrends was in line to take his place.
He’d need to talk with his family, Behrends told his bosses. He had a farm to run and his youngest child was still in elementary school. Because he wasn’t in the unit when it was activated, technically Behrends had to volunteer to go.
But Behrends told National Review it was clear what he needed to do.
“My first reaction was, I’m not going to let my soldiers down,” he said.
Behrends ended up spending 17 difficult months in Iraq with the unit. Among the unit’s tasks was maintaining a key supply route, keeping it clear of explosives. Three of his soldiers were killed and dozens more were injured during the tour, he said.
Although they were both first sergeants in the Minnesota Guard, Behrends said he didn’t really know much about Walz. They were in meetings together. “The only thing I knew about him is he talked too much, and he liked to hear himself talk,” Behrends said.
When Democrats decide they need a veteran to help disguise their radical nature, they inevitable seem to pick a “blue falcon,” dating back at least as far as tapping John Kerry in 2004.
The Tim Walz Stolen Valor story goes back to the very beginning of his political career. From the onset of his foray into national politics, Walz sold himself to the public and the media as a combat veteran of the Global War on Terror, masking the reality that he quit the military to run for office and avoid being deployed to Iraq.
Thanks to some quality reporting, we know that the Minnesota governor — who yesterday officially joined the Kamala Harris campaign for President as its VP on the ticket — quit the military in 2005, after learning that his battalion was about to be sent to Iraq. Walz spent his entire career in the Army National Guard learning to lead people into battle, with training and his lone six month overseas deployment to Italy provided at U.S. taxpayer expense. He then retired when he learned he was going to be leading people into battle in Iraq, leaving Minnesota’s 125th Field Artillery Regiment high and dry for a career in politics.
But that’s not what Tim Walz told the public when he decided to run for public office upon abruptly leaving the military.
Just months after leaving his battalion to go to Iraq without him, he announced a run for Congress, and the dissembling about his service record began immediately.
Instead of being honest about his early departure from the military, Walz told the media a much more heroic tale, one that was entirely fictitious.
To this day there are Democrats who believe that Walz served in Iraq, when he never got closer than Italy.
When the US Marine Corps asked me to go to Iraq to serve my country, I did it.
When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, he dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him. I think that's shameful. pic.twitter.com/Dq9xjn4R51
Minnesota National Guard spox Army Lieutenant Colonel Kristen Augé told Just the News that Walz, Kamala Harris’ vice presidential running mate, was demoted and did not retire as a command sergeant major as he has claimed for years – including on his official gubernatorial biography – as he failed to complete a 750-hour course in the Army’s Sergeants Major Academy, a mandatory course for E-9s, the Army’s highest enlisted rank.
While Walz temporarily held the title of command sergeant major he “retired as a master sergeant in 2005 for benefit purposes because he did not complete additional coursework at the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy,” Army Lt. Col. Kristen Augé, the Minnesota National Guard’s State Public Affairs Officer, told Just the News.
The statement reignited a controversy that began during his 2018 election for governor in which National Guardsman claimed on social media and in a paid ad that Walz declined to deploy to Iraq for combat duty in 2005 and forfeited his title of command sergeant major. Walz chose to run for Congress that year. -Just the News
The governor’s biography, however, says that “Command Sergeant Major Walz” retired from the Minnesota National Guard in 2005. At the time he was serving as one of the highest ranking members of the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion.
How is it that stolen valor and career embellishment are so endemic among Democratic office holders? Is it status anxiety, or the arrogance of the entitled? “It’s OK to lie about my record, because I deserve this!”
Ex-UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter’s home in upstate New York was raided by the FBI as part of a federal investigation, Wednesday, officials said.
An FBI spokeswoman confirmed to The Post that agents conducted a raid on the Delmar home as part of a federal investigation. She declined to comment further, citing the ongoing probe.
Ritter, a convicted sex offender, told reporters outside his Delmar home after the raid that the warrant focused on potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the Times Union reported.
He recently had his passport seized by the US Department of State as he tried to fly to Russia for a conference – a brouhaha he contended in the Russian propaganda site RT was a spiteful move against his pro-Russia stances.
The raid came a day after Ritter, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, palled around with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was in an Albany courtroom for a hearing over whether the independent presidential candidate should be on New York’s November ballot, the Times Union reported.
Ritter is indeed a Russian tool, but the timing from our increasingly politicized FBI does seem a tad suspicious…
Google has engaged in illegal activity by using its search-engine dominance to thwart competition, a federal judge ruled on Monday in a landmark decision that could have major implications for the way Americans consume information.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled against Google this week, after the Department of Justice and a coalition of state attorneys general challenged the tech company’s market dominance in 2020. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said in the decision that Google is a “monopolist” that has “acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” Google paid $26.3 billion in 2021, for example, to promote its search engine as the default option on smartphones and browsers.
“The default is extremely valuable real estate,” Mehta wrote. “Even if a new entrant were positioned from a quality standpoint to bid for the default when an agreement expires, such a firm could compete only if it were prepared to pay partners upwards of billions of dollars in revenue share and make them whole for any revenue shortfalls resulting from the change.”
“Google, of course, recognizes that losing defaults would dramatically impact its bottom line. For instance, Google has projected that losing the Safari default would result in a significant drop in queries and billions of dollars in lost revenues,” he added.
Once again, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took a leading role in bringing the lawsuit. “The legal battle began in October 2020 when Paxton announced that Texas had sued Google for utilizing business strategies to squelch competition for search advertising and internet searches.”
We have been discussing media rating systems being used to target advertisers and revenue sources for certain cites and companies. NewsGuard and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) have been criticized as the most sophisticated components of a modern blacklisting system targeting conservative or dissenting voices. I recently had a series of exchanges with NewsGuard after a critical column. Now, the House Judiciary Committee under Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) is moving forward in demanding documents and records from leading companies utilizing the GARM system, a company that I have previously criticized. It is a welcomed effort for anyone who is concerned over the use of these blacklisting systems to curtail free speech. However, time is of the essence.
The demand to preserve evidence went to various companies, including Adidas, American Express, Bayer, BP, Carhartt, Chanel, CVS and General Motors.
In my new book, I discuss the rating systems as a new and insidious form of blacklisting.
It is an effort to strangle the financial life out of sites by targeting their donors and advertisers. This is where the left has excelled beyond anything that has come before in speech crackdowns.
Years ago, I wrote about the Biden administration supporting efforts like the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) to discourage advertisers from supporting certain sites. All of the 10 riskiest sites targeted by the index were popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents. That included Reason.org and a group of libertarian and conservative law professors who simply write about cases and legal controversies. GDI warned advertisers against “financially supporting disinformation online.” At the same time, HuffPost, a far-left media outlet, was included among the 10 sites at lowest risk of spreading disinformation.
Once GDI’s work and bias was disclosed, government officials quickly disavowed the funding. It was a familiar pattern. Within a few years, we found that the work had been shifted instead to groups like the GARM, which is the same thing on steroids. It is the creation of a powerful and largely unknown group called the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which has huge sway over the advertising industry and was quickly used by liberal activists to silence opposing views and sites by cutting off their revenue streams.
Notably, Rob Rakowitz, head of GARM, pushed GDI and embraced its work. In an email to GARM members obtained by the committee last month, Rakowitz wrote that he wanted to “ensure you’re working with an inclusion and exclusion list that is informed by trusted partners such as NewsGuard and GDI — both partners to GARM and many of our members.”
GARM is being used by WFA to achieve what GDI failed to accomplish. The WFA sites refers to Rakowitz as “a career change agent” who will “remove harmful content from ad-supported digital media.”
Rakowitz’s views on free speech are chilling and his work shows how these systems can be used to conceal bias in targeting the revenue of sites with opposing views.
Rakowitz has denounced the “extreme global interpretation of the US Constitution” and how civil libertarians cite “‘principles for governance’ and applying them as literal law from 230 years ago (made by white men exclusively).”
He appears to be referring to free speech.
Know who else isn’t wild about GARM? Elon Musk, who’s suing them for coordinated boycott of Twitter/X.
Elon Musk’s X sued a coalition of advertisers leading a boycott against the social platform, accusing the group of conspiring to “collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue.”
The suit takes aim at the World Federation of Advertisers and its initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), which led a boycott against the platform formerly known as Twitter after it was acquired by Musk in 2022.
“The boycott and its effects continue to this day, despite X applying brand safety standards comparable to those of its competitors and which meet or exceed those specified by GARM,” reads the lawsuit, which was filed Tuesday in Texas federal court.
X accused the coalition and several specific advertisers, namely Unilever, Mars and CVS, of violating antitrust law and circumventing the competitive process with their boycott.
“The brand safety standards set by GARM should succeed or fail in the marketplace on their own merits and not through the coercive exercise of market power by advertisers acting collectively to promote their own economic interests through commercial restraints at the expense of social media platforms and their users,” the platform argued.
Since Musk’s takeover of the platform, X has struggled to retain advertisers, which were wary of the tech billionaire’s early decisions to roll back content moderation policies and reinstate previously banned users, like former President Trump.
An advertising industry initiative targeted by an Elon Musk lawsuit is “discontinuing” its activities and has deleted the member list from its website.
On Tuesday, Musk’s X Corp. sued the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) over what X claims is an illegal boycott spearheaded by a WFA initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM). The WFA isn’t disbanding but is halting GARM’s activities, and the GARM member page now produces a 404 error. An archived version of the page from yesterday shows the initiative members, including X.
X’s antitrust lawsuit has drawn skeptical responses from law professors, who say it will be difficult to prove that companies violated antitrust laws by stopping advertisements. But while X may never obtain financial damages from the advertising group or corporations like CVS and Unilever that it also named as defendants, fighting the lawsuit could be costly.
Business Insider reported on the GARM shutdown today:
The advertising trade group The World Federation of Advertisers told its members on Thursday that it was “discontinuing” activities for its Global Alliance for Responsible Media initiative following an antitrust lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s X against the company earlier this week.
Stephan Loerke, the CEO of the WFA, wrote in an email to members, seen by Business Insider, that the decision was “not made lightly” but that GARM is a not-for-profit organization with limited resources. Loerke said that the WFA and GARM intended to contest the allegations in X’s suit in court and were confident the outcome of the case would “demonstrate our full adherence to competition rules in all our activities.”
If that’s not an open admission of guilt, it will do until one comes along. In the meantime, expect this censorship hydra to put up again under another same.
What has all that investment in “green” energy gotten California? “Since January 2014, residential average rates for the PG&E service area have jumped by 110%, those of SCE have surged by 90%, and SDG&E rates have soared by 82%….A total of 18.4% of the customers of the three investor-owned utilities are in arrears in their energy bills.”
“Bangladesh Leader Flees Country In Helicopter As Protesters Storm Parliament.” “Bangladesh’s long-serving Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, resigned and fled the country on Monday, after protesters defied a military curfew and stormed her official residence. Hasina, who had been in power for 15 years, fled the capital Dhaka along with her sister by a helicopter to India, the daily newspaper Prothom Alo reported, after weeks of violent crack downs on protesters left nearly 300 people dead.”
“Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus took charge of Bangladesh’s caretaker government on Thursday, hoping to help heal the country that was convulsed by weeks of violence, forcing Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to quit and flee to neighbouring India. Known as the ‘banker to the poor’, Yunus is the pioneer of the global microcredit movement. The Grameen Bank he founded won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for helping lift millions from poverty by providing tiny loans to the rural poor who are too impoverished to gain attention from traditional banks.” I’d be more enthused about Yunus if their bank hadn’t been a contributor to the Clinton Global Initiative.
Just a normal everyday traffic stop: pulling over a couple of Chinese nationals, driving through Texas, with $250,000 worth of gold bars on their person.
That was the scene last week in Van Zandt County, according to KETK NBC.
Sgt. Charlie Hughes of the Wills Point Police Department was monitoring traffic on I-20 near the 533-mile marker when he saw a White Chevy Malibu with Michigan plates committing a traffic violation.
He then stopped the vehicle and identified the driver as 25-year-old Weijian Chen.
KETK writes that due to a language barrier, Hughes asked Chen to use a translator app in his patrol vehicle to communicate.
The officer said that during the interview he “observed multiple factors that lead [him] to believe there was criminal activity afoot.”
The driver said that he was heading to Dallas and had also been in Florida to “play”.
The vehicle was rented under the name of the passenger, 46-year-old Wenqiang Lin, who consented to a search but appeared uncertain. A K9 unit alerted to the front passenger door.
Inside, officials found a Spirit Airlines boarding pass indicating that Weijian Chen had flown from Los Angeles to Atlanta on July 30-31 without any bags. The rental agreement showed the car was rented in College Park, Georgia, on July 31 and was due in Los Angeles by August 3, the report continued.
A bag behind the driver’s seat contained gold bullion bars worth an estimated $200,000 to $250,000, including:
Seven 1-ounce 999.9 gold bars
Three 5-gram 999.9 gold bars
One 1-gram 999.9 gold bar marked with 20 squares
Eight 10-ounce 999.9 gold bars
After arresting Chen and Lin, Sgt. Hughes contacted U.S. Homeland Security, which revealed both men had entered the country illegally. Lin entered on September 15, 2023, and was awaiting immigration processing in Los Angeles. Chen entered on December 17, 2023, and is also pending immigration judicial action.
“Austin ISD Chief Financial Officer Arrested on Insurance Fraud Charges. Austin Independent School District (ISD) Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Eduardo Ramos has been placed on paid leave following his arrest on charges of insurance fraud unrelated to district activities.” Maybe. But I’d still say a forensic audit is in order…
The New York State Supreme Court has denied New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s request for a preliminary injunction against busing illegal immigrants from Texas to the city.
Adams, who faces challenges from New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and others in his reelection bid next year, filed a lawsuit against 17 charter bus companies in January.
His goal was to stop the companies from busing migrants, many of them undocumented, from communities in Texas to New York. The mayor cited Social Services Law 149, which stipulates that any person “who knowingly brings, or causes to be brought, a needy person from out of state into this state for the purpose of making him a public charge” has an obligation “to convey such person out of state or support him at his own expense.”
But in her nine-page July 29 ruling, Judge Mary V. Rosado found that the lawsuit was “unconstitutional.”
Maybe if NYC hadn’t gone out of its way to declare itself a “sanctuary city” I might feel a tiny more smidge of sympathy. Who am I kidding, no I wouldn’t. This is all on Adams’ Democratic Party. Choke on it.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has provided an update to an investigation related to allegations that the Democratic fundraising operation ActBlue is involved in illicit activities.
“ActBlue has cooperated with our ongoing investigation. They have changed their requirements to now include ‘CVV’ codes for donations on their platform,” Paxton said in the press release.
“This is a critical change that can help prevent fraudulent donations.”
Paxton added that “suspicious activity on fundraising platforms must be fully investigated to determine if any laws have been broken.”
This alleged “suspicious activity” by ActBlue in Texas has been an ongoing point of contention.
Current Revolt first reported on the investigation into ActBlue and the allegedly illegitimate donations last week.
Journalist James O’Keefe recently produced a series of videos where he purported to show alleged money laundering by ActBlue in Texas.
According to O’Keefe, some individuals in Texas are being reported by ActBlue to have made thousands of individual donations, but said individuals deny them when asked if they made those contributions.
O’Keefe received a statement from the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office regarding some of these incidents.
“It appears that both donors made voluntary contributions through ActBlue. One donor was reimbursed after contesting some of the charges, while the other cannot recall whether all or only some of the donations were authorized,” the sheriff’s office told O’Keefe.
I suspect ActBlue will drop any reforms just as soon as they need to launder more money.
“Federal Court Orders California College To Drop Censorship Policy. A federal judge ordered a California community college on Aug. 2 not to enforce a poster policy that was used against three students whose anti-communist posters were taken down. U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston found that the poster policy of Fresno-based Clovis Community College violated the students’ First Amendment and 14th Amendment rights.”
Warner Brothers Discovery took $9.1 billion write-down on it’s network TV assets. As many have observed, this means that not only is CNN worthless from the standpoints of truth, philosophy and morals, but that it’s quite literally worthless as an economic asset as well. It may actually be worth less than your grandmother’s closet full of Beanie Babies…
Actually, it could be worth considerably less than nothing. “CNN Could Be Forced to Pay Upwards of $1 Billion from Defamation Suit from Tapper Show.”
The case may not be as well known (yet), but CNN could be facing a defamation liability rivaling or exceeding the $787 million Fox News paid out to Dominion Voting Systems. NewsBusters recently reported on Florida’s First District Court of Appeals affirming that plaintiff Zachary Young could seek punitive damages, in addition to economic and emotional damages, from the Cable News Network in a civil trial after they allegedly defamed him regarding his work in getting people out of Afghanistan. The total could near or exceed $1 billion.
For that outcome to be remotely in the cards, Young needed to prove malice and according to the ruling, he’s done exactly that. “Young sufficiently proffered evidence of actual malice, express malice, and a level of conduct outrageous enough to open the door for him to seek punitive damages,” Judge L. Clayton Roberts wrote in the court’s ruling.
The court felt the high bars for actual and expressed malice were met because of internal CNN messages that were extremely vicious toward Young. Correspondent Alex Marquardt, the “primary reporter” expressed in a message to a colleague that he wanted to “nail this Zachary Young mfucker” and thought the story would be Young’s “funeral.” On that declaration of wanting to “nail” Young, CNN editor Matthew Philips responded: “gonna hold you to that cowboy!”
Alongside Marquardt, CNN senior editor Fuzz Hogan, who’s a member of CNN’s internally lauded “Triad” of editorial, legal, and standards/practices oversight personnel, described Young as “a shit.”
In an interview with NewsBusters, Vel Freedman, the lawyer representing Young, said that “everyone makes mistakes” but what CNN’s messages showed was a “systemic problem” inside the network. He added that their internal mechanism for accountability had “clearly failed” and opened themselves to “massive, massive liability.”
Freedman told NewsBusters that his client had lost between $40-60 million in economic opportunity over the course of his now-damaged career as a security contractor since people in the field no longer wanted to work with him. If a jury awarded his client for emotional damages, the upper end could be as high as $600 million. The court recognizing the malice and outrageous conduct by CNN, effectively removed the cap on punitive damages in the State of Florida.
All of that meant CNN could be facing upwards of $1 billion in total damages.
Dell lays off 12,500 employees. The Biden Recession is bad for everyone, but especially tech workers.
“Tim Walz Vows To Make America As Great As Minneapolis.” “As the governor who presided over the looting and burning of Minneapolis during the summer of 2020, I have full confidence that I will be able to apply my experience stirring up race riots on the national scale as well as I have in my home state.”
I think these LinkSwarms have gotten too long. Since I’m I’m still between jobs, I have more time to waste on read the Internet. “Oh, there’s a link I should include!” Wash, rinse, repeat. I’m either going to have to start cutting these down in size or start doing multiple LinkSwarms a week.
