More DOGE uncovered fraud, Trump yanks security clearances for a lot of swamp creatures, the Democratic Party goes all in on antisemitism, good luck getting an MRI in Canada, Warner Bros Discovery is considering a sale that’s absolutely loony, and a member of the Very, Very, Very Heavy Brigade takes on a Tesla.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
For all the talk of trump not allowing a peaceful transfer of power, it’s lefty Biden appointees who are thwarting democracy.
On Friday, the Board of Directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace informed the group’s president, George Moose, that he was relieved of his duties. The same day, Moose’s replacement, Kenneth Jackson, arrived at the office for the congressionally funded nonprofit to assume his new role.
There was one problem: Moose refused to go.
A source intimately involved in the situation told The Daily Wire that Moose put the building on lockdown when Jackson and his team were en route. When they arrived, they were astonished to find that the doors were locked and they were unable to gain entry.
“They treated us, quite frankly, like criminals,” a person who was with the group shared with The Daily Wire.
Jackson encountered similar behavior on Monday. He was ultimately able to enter USIP with the help of the Metropolitan Police Department, and ordered all unauthorized personnel to leave — including Moose, who confirmed to The Daily Wire that he was escorted out by police.
When Jackson and the rest of his group were finally able to get into the building, they found things in turmoil. The shades were drawn, with white noise playing when they arrived. USIP employees were using walkie talkies to communicate within the building, according to the person who was with Jackson. As of Tuesday, none of the phone systems in the building were working, nor were the elevators, and the internet was down, The Daily Wire has learned.
“I’ve never seen something so broken,” the source familiar with the situation told The Daily Wire. Moose did not respond to inquiries into whether he and his colleagues tampered with these systems.
Colin O’Brien, the chief security officer at USIP under Moose, told The Daily Wire on Tuesday evening that the systems likely were not working because the building had been placed on lockdown at Moose’s orders, meaning that all the systems would shut down. O’Brien and other employees were told to exit the building, and he said he hadn’t been in contact with anyone on Tuesday, though he believes he is still employed by USIP.
O’Brien said that Moose ordered that members of DOGE were not to be admitted into the building, and that members of USIP were under the impression that there was an ongoing dispute with DOGE about who the leadership of the USIP was — “something that, in my understanding, was going to be litigated,” he said. He disputed the notion that DOGE had the authority to enter the building.
This story, based on accounts from individuals who were on the scene as Jackson attempted to gain access to the organization he’d been put in charge of, shows how federally-funded bureaucrats worked to sabotage operations to stop the Trump administration from taking control.
Moose, who allegedly “barricaded” himself in his office until police arrived, has told the media that members of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) broke into the office without warning. But a review of events and internal emails show not only that USIP leadership blocked Moose’s replacement from entering the building, but that it was preparing to resist changes for weeks ahead of their arrival.
Elon Musk, the world’s most successful businessman and President Donald Trump’s top White House adviser, said this week that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has uncovered shocking cases of fraud within the federal government.
Musk made the remarks during a Monday meeting with the president and his cabinet secretaries.
“One case of fraud was with the Small Business Administration, where they were handing out loans—$330 million worth of loans—to people under the age of 11,” Musk said. “I think the youngest, Kelly, was a 9-month-old who got a $100,000 loan.”
“That’s a very precocious baby we’re talking about here,” Musk quipped.
SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler followed up Musk’s remarks by saying, “We’re tackling the fraud, waste, and abuse at the agency.”
“We’ve seen, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud go unprosecuted, so we’re taking that on,” she said. “We have a zero-tolerance policy for fraud, and we continue to crack down on it and make sure people are held accountable.”
Trump said that they have found “far too much” fraud, waste, and abuse in the government over the last couple of months.
“It’s pure fraud,” he said. “We like to use the words ‘waste’ and ‘abuse’ because they sort of sound good, but many of these things are pure fraud.”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) said this week that the state was returning nearly $900 million to the federal government, something it tried to do repeatedly during the Biden administration.
“For years, Florida has been trying to return federal funds to the federal government due to the ideological strings attached by the Biden Administration—but they couldn’t even figure out how to accept it,” DeSantis said in a post on X.
The governor said that he met with Elon Musk on Friday and the rest of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team and was able to return the money.
“We got this done in the same day,” DeSantis said. “Other states should follow Florida in supporting DOGE’s efforts!”
The governor posted the letter that he sent to the U.S. Treasury Department alerting them that the state was formally returning $878,112,000.00 in taxpayer dollars to the federal government “as part of DOGE’s efforts.”
The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced on Wednesday that non-permanent residents will no longer be eligible for Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgages, National Review has learned, part of a broader effort by the administration to ensure that American citizens are prioritized under taxpayer-funded housing programs following massive flow of illegal immigration under former President Joe Biden.
FHA loans offer government-insured mortgages to ensure that lower-income individuals have access to home ownership. While illegal immigrants are technically ineligible to obtain FHA-backed home loans under U.S. law, HUD’s announcement will strengthen enforcement mechanisms to ensure that illegal immigrants are not abusing the program in the future. It is unclear how many illegal immigrants have obtained FHA-backed loans.
“FHA does not retain citizenship or residency data from the loan application and therefore does not maintain information on the number of non-permanent residents who have received FHA-insured loans under past policies,” General Deputy Assistant Secretary for Housing Jeffrey D. Little wrote in a March 26 mortgagee letter shared exclusively with National Review. “This update ensures that FHA’s mortgage insurance programs are administered in accordance with Administration priorities while fulfilling its mission of providing access to homeownership.”
The new policy will also prohibit government-backed mortgages for non-permanent residents moving forward. “Currently, non-permanent residents are subject to immigration laws that can affect their ability to remain legally in the country,” Little wrote in the March 26 memo. “This uncertainty poses a challenge for FHA as the ability to fulfill long-term financial obligations depends on stable residency and employment.”
HUD’s revised residency requirements for FHA-backed loans, which take effect on May 25, will apply to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients as well as individuals who are pending asylum or pending refugee status, according to HUD, since there is no guarantee that their residency status will be renewed under the current administration.
The new policy eliminates the “non-permanent resident” category entirely from the FHA’s Single Family Title I and Title II programs, and reverses a Biden-era policy which allows FHA loans for DACA recipients who provide a valid Social Security Number and work eligibility status.
I wonder if these programs were abused for helping illegal aliens buy homes in Colony Ridge.
Others named in the list are retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, former White House Russia expert Fiona Hill, former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic Norman Eisen, former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, and lawyer Mark Zaid.”
Can anyone really say America is less safe because the people on that list no longer have access to classified information?
What the support for Mahmoud Khalil, Hasan Piker and Rasha Alawieh really shows.
A few days after the anniversary of Oct 7, the New York Times reported that Columbia University Apartheid Divest officially endorsed terrorism against Jews and withdrew an apology by one of its members for threatening to kill Jews.
Over the past weeks, the paper and the entire Democratic Party, including 103 members of Congress, the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the Jewish Democratic Council of America led by Kamala’s former foreign policy advisor, went all in on fighting for Mahmoud Khalil, a leader in CUAD who had defended terrorism, from being deported.
The signatories to a letter standing up for a Syrian national who had taken part in a pro-terrorist group’s harassment of Jewish students and faculty included half of House Democrats, not only extremists like AOC and Rep. Ilhan Omar, but Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking House Judiciary Democrat, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with multiple House Democrats of Jewish ancestry and those who represent large Jewish districts including Rep. Jerrold Nadler in New York, as well as Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove and Rep. Laura Friedman who holds down Sen. Adam Schiff’s old seat, in the LA area. The same Democrat politicians who had remained silent when Jewish students and faculty were being terrorized on campuses in their areas now rushed to the barricades for a member of a group that had openly celebrated the murder of Jews.
Columbia University Apartheid Divest is a front group for the college’s suspended Students for Justice in Palestine chapter which reacted to the first anniversary of Oct 7 by promoting a statement from a Maoist publication, “October 7th was Not ‘Barbaric’ or ‘Unfortunate’—It was Strategic and Anti-imperialist” and hailed the “moral, military, and political victory of the Operation”. This is what the Democrats who condemn Trump’s proposed deportation of a CUAD leader as “authoritarian” now support. Not just terrorism: but the mass murder of Jews.
Now, Democrats rallied once more in support of Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese Hezbollah supporter, traveling to America on a visa who was refused entry into the United States.
According to Customs and Border Protection, Alawieh (pictured above) had deleted Hezbollah materials on her phone, attended the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and claimed that she followed Nasrallah’s teachings “from a religious perspective.”
Hezbollah is not only responsible for the murder of Jews, but the barracks bombing in Beirut which killed 220 Marines, the kidnapping and brutal torture of Colonel William R. Higgins, who was castrated and skinned before his body was dumped near a mosque, and the vicious killing of Robert Stethem, a Navy diver, during an airline hijacking when, as a stewardess described, “They were jumping in the air and landing full force on his body. He must have had all his ribs broken… they put the mike up to his face so his screams could be heard by the outside world.”
“A visa is a privilege not a right—glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied. This is commonsense security,” the Department of Homeland Security warned. Democrats fundamentally disagree with that position.
Judge Leo Sorokin, a Clinton appointee, barred the Hezbollah supporter from being deported, and then demanded to know why she had not been allowed into the country. Instead of reporting that Rasha Alawieh had visited a terrorist group’s event responsible for the murder of hundreds of Americans, the media claimed she had been visiting her family in her country.
Rep. Gabe Amo, along with other Dems, have stated that they intend to continue fighting for her
Brown University, which employed Alawieh and is under investigation for antisemitism, responded by urging foreign employees like her not to travel abroad because of “travel bans, visa procedures and processing, re-entry requirements” they might conceivably run afoul of if they support terrorists and the mass murder of Americans and Jews.
In the New Yorker, Andrew Marantz hyped Hasan Piker, a Muslim influencer on the video game streaming platform Twitch, as the best hope for the Democrats winning over “bros” and “young men” .Somewhere in the middle of the article, after mentioning his dog’s name and his support for ‘non-binary’ people, gets around to briefly mentioning his “soft-pedalling the brutality of Hamas, or the Houthis, or the Chinese Communist Party” and being named “Antisemite of the Year” as a minor detail before pivoting to a discussion about a possible Hasan reality show.
And to Democrats today, such things are minor details, less important than anything else.
Piker, has said, “it doesn’t matter if rapes f***ing happened on Oct. 7, like that doesn’t change the dynamic for me even this much” while holding up his fingers slightly apart. “The Palestinian resistance is not perfect.” And he’s been featured on CNN, invited to the DNC, and Democrats, from Rep. Ro Khanna to AOC to Sen. Ed Markey appeared on his podcast. Buttigieg has been trying to get on. Expect most other Democrats aspiring to run in 2028 to do likewise.
This week, the Texas Legislature took steps to strip power from the Texas Lottery Commission, possibly setting the agency up for abolition, and Las Vegas Sands’ casino plans suffered a setback in Irving at the hands of outraged citizens.
On Monday, State Sen. Mayes Middleton (R-Galveston) laid out Senate Bill 1721 in the State Affairs Committee. It would transfer the administration of bingo games in Texas from the Lottery Commission to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation.
Snip.
When introducing his measure to ban lottery couriers operating in Texas, State Sen. Bob Hall (R-Edgewood) noted that on a hierarchy of administration complexity, bingo and lottery are at the bottom of the totem pole.
During a September 2024 Sunset Commission hearing, State Sen. Judith Zaffirini (D-Laredo) noted that revenues to the state before and after the lottery was created remained flat. The state is not likely to lose money if the lottery goes away.
At two separate hearings this week in Irving, citizens showed up in force to oppose a planning variance to build a casino. Ultimately, Sands asked the city council to pull the language allowing the construction of a casino from the development request.
Sands currently operates no casinos in America and derives most of its revenue from China.
The mess at the Lottery Commission probably deserves a separate post…
In his lengthy announcement post on social media, McGregor voiced his opposition to the European Union (EU) Migration Pact, which the bloc has mandated that Ireland must ratify by June 12th, 2026. The pact would relax Ireland’s border security and make it easier for illegal aliens to claim asylum.
“Between now and 12 June 2026, several pieces of legislation have to be passed by both Houses of the Oireachtas and then signed by the President,” McGregor explained. “The next presidential election must take place by 11 [November] 2025.”
“Who else will stand up to Government and oppose this bill? Any other Presidential candidate they attempt to put forward will be of no resistance to them. I will!” McGregor declared.
He also said that, as president, he would pursue a nationwide referendum on the Migration Pact, allowing the people of Ireland to decide for themselves whether or not the country should be forced to abide by the deal.
In celebrating the life of Tony Dolan, President Reagan’s chief speechwriter, the most remarkable fact is that he was executing a strategy he conceived to defeat the Soviet Union.
In numerous conversations in the speechwriting office—long before any foreign policy experts dared to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and the Soviet Union itself, Tony said that he knew how to defeat the Soviets.
As a young journalist in his hometown of Stamford, Connecticut, he had exposed organized crime that, he said, had entirely corrupted the city. Tony was relentless, ultimately breaking the mob’s power and becoming one of the youngest journalists to win the Pulitzer Prize. He said that the same method would bring down the Soviets, an entirely corrupt system, another form of organized crime. Tell the truth about them; expose them as evil; let everyone—especially those in power—hear them described as what they are. It was his conviction that President Reagan, by speaking with moral clarity about the Soviets, could hasten their collapse.
In his essay How the United States Won the Cold War, Warren Norquist identifies the rhetorical moral battle, “demoralizing the Soviets and generating pressure for change,” as one of seven crucial components in the US victory over the USSR.
Tony later wrote in the Wall Street Journal that for criminal regimes, there is “one weapon they fear more than military or economic sanction: the publicly-spoken truth about their moral absurdity, their ontological weakness.”
Snip.
The Reagan administration, internally, was a battlefield of competing visions that came to a head over presidential speeches. Once the president said something, it became the official policy—which made speechwriting a critical front in these internal struggles. The battle cry of conservatives in the administration was, “Let Reagan be Reagan.” In that struggle, Tony was unwavering. He would not wobble when West Wing power players tried to intimidate him. He was himself an exceptionally skilled political infighter—usually scheming, always charming, and with a spine of coiled steel.
From the outset of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Tony helped to chisel out the rhetorical space in which the speechwriters could give voice to President Reagan’s resolve that the outcome of the Cold War would be, “We win, they lose.”
And it was not only combative phrases. At times it was subversive speech, as in Reagan’s 1981 Univ. of Notre Dame speech drafted by Tony: “The West won’t contain communism; it will transcend communism. … it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”
Or his 1982 speech in London, the Westminster address, “… one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: of all the millions of refugees we’ve seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward, the Communist world. Today, on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east—to prevent their people from leaving. … What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term—the march of freedom and democracy, which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”
California announces it will need another seven billion dollars in taxpayer money not to build a high speed rail. But I’m sure all the consultant graft will be channeled into the proper left-wing pockets… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Canadian woman gets a referral from her doctor to get an MRI to see if she has a brain tumor. So now she has an appointment for one. In 2026.
Carole Stewart Keeton McClellan Rylander Strayhorn (to use all the names she was known under), former Democratic mayor of Austin, Republican Railroad Commissioner and Comptroller of Texas, has died. In a way her career was emblematic of a certain kind of moderate politician in Texas at the time, with a huge realignment from the Democratic to the Republican Party, a change that started with John Connally, picked up speed with Phil Gramm and Rick Perry, and continues into this day with Hispanic office holders still switching over. Speaking of Perry, she was one of two prominent female Republican moderate officeholders (Kay Baily Hutchinson being the other) who destroyed their careers trying to unseat Perry from the Governor’s Mansion.
Is Warner BrothersTime WarnerAOL-Time WarnerWarnerMedia Warner Bros. Discovery putting Loony Tunes for sale? What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?
Guy who did the Vegas Tesla bomby/turns out to be a dirty Commie.
Annals of criminal genius: 5-foot-2, 449-pound drives his 4-wheeler into an Tesla. “Demarqeyun Marquize Cox was arrested after one of his alleged attacks was recorded by the Tesla he purposely ran into, police in Texarkana, Texas announced.” And yes, there’s video:
Democrats used election fraud and lawfare to strike down a glad-handing, dealmaking Trump the Grey who was treated with deep suspicion by the Republican establishment, and now he’s returned, more powerful than ever, as Trump the White with a unified GOP behind him, someone who has already unleashed a executive order blitzkrieg the likes of which the nation has never seen before. Trump now threatens the Democrats’ one-ring control of the federal bureaucracy, not to mention black and Hispanic voters, in a way previous Republican presidents never did. And Democrats have only themselves to blame for it, not only for their radical, shrieking TDS obstruction in his first term and their radical embrace of a deeply unpopular social justice agenda, but also their use of overreach in using so many executive orders to achieve their agenda. Now Trump has the blueprint and precedent to go after all their power centers. The scope and ferocity of Trump’s assault on a permanent leftwing deep state makes it seem less like The War of the Ring than The War of Wrath, in which the Valar returned to Middle Earth to finally settle Morgoth’s hash once and for all.
OK, I’ll stop making Tolkien analogies now.
Let’s just say that Trump’s first week back in the White House has unleashed a blizzard of winning, and I haven’t even remotely corralled all of it here.
In his final minutes as president, Joe Biden issued preemptive pardons to his two brothers, James and Francis, and his sister, Valerie, to protect them from what he predicts will be politically motivated attacks led by President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans.
“My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me—the worst kind of partisan politics,” Biden said in a statement. “Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end.”
Biden used his presidential power to pardon five members of his immediate family: James, his wife Sara, Valerie, her husband John Owens, and Francis. The outgoing president said the pardons “should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that they engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.”
James and Sara, in particular, were pardoned, presumably because James wrote Joe a $200,000 check on March 1, 2018 — the same day he received the funds from distressed rural hospital provider Americore.
In September 2017, James and his wife also sent his older brother a $40,000 check that used funds originating from a Chinese energy firm CEFC in addition to other transactions involving Joe that caught the attention of the Republican-led House Oversight and Judiciary Committees. Both checks were classified as loan repayments.
The other family members were pardoned to ensure they aren’t targeted by the incoming administration. The clemency act covers any nonviolent offenses they may have committed since January 1, 2014.
Like running an illegal pay-for-play graft mill for foreign governments. Which is what the Biden Crime Family did.
The federal government’s method of searching through information incidentally collected on U.S.-based individuals violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, a federal judge has ruled.
“To countenance this practice would convert Section 702 into precisely what Defendant has labeled it – a tool for law enforcement to run ‘backdoor searches’ that circumvent the Fourth Amendment,” U.S. District Judge LaShann Dearcy Hall said in the ruling, which was released on Jan. 21.
Government officials acquired information on the defendant, Agron Hasbajrami, a legal permanent resident who they arrested in 2011 and charged with providing material support to a terrorist organization. The information was gathered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which lets authorities spy on people.
After Hasbajrami pleaded guilty, authorities disclosed that some of the evidence they used in the case was the fruit of information they obtained without a warrant under a FISA supplement called Section 207, which enables authorities to conduct surveillance on non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States.
Donald Trump won the 2024 election in part because the Left’s hysterical style of attacking Trump no longer worked.
After a decade of this unhinged furor, it proved worthless in winning public support — and for two simple reasons.
One, after years of Russian collusion hoaxes, the laptop disinformation farce, and the warped lies about the “suckers” and “fine people on both sides” — the shrill Left became predictable.
So, the bored public began tuning them out, switching channels, hitting the mute button, and pulling the plug.
Like the deleterious effects of inflation that eventually render a currency worthless, nonstop hectoring, hysterics, pontification, and distortion finally made all such criticisms of Trump mostly as valueless as 1930s German marks.
Second, the wearied public never heard reasoned counterarguments from the likes of a Rachel Maddow. Instead, on spec, she kept mouthing, “The walls are closing in” on Trump.
Former President Joe Biden did not explain why his open border was a better idea than Trump’s closed one. He preferred mumbling about “semi-fascists!” and the “ultra-MAGA!”
The Never Trumpers did not critique the Trump deficits. Instead, they hammered away that Trump was Hitler, or Mussolini, or Putin — or just a dangerous dictator or autocrat.
Angry retired generals never demonstrated why Trump was, in their view, an existential threat to democracy. Instead, they shouted nonstop in op-eds and interviews that he was a fascist, Nazi-like, no different from the guards at Auschwitz, a pathological liar, and should be summarily removed.
Worn-out voters began to understand that these psychodramas were substitutes for substantive criticism or occasions for legitimate debate.
Indeed, the exhausted public finally concluded that the hysterics increased in direct proportion to the poverty of the charges.
So, what did 10 years of such derangement achieve for the Left?
Trump now has control of the White House and both houses of Congress operate under Republican majorities.
The Supreme Court is mostly conservative. Almost all of Trump’s issues — the border, immigration, the economy, foreign policy, and crime — poll well over 50 percent.
No matter, the Left is still hammering away at the trivial and irrelevant — and remains paralyzed in furor and hysterics.
Former Okaland mayor Sheng Thao was “indicted [last] Friday. Also indicted: Andre Jones, who the NYT describes as her ‘boyfriend,’ David Trung Duong, and Andy Hung Duong. David Duong is the head of a local waste management company, and Andy is his son.”
“Starbucks Lost $25 Million Lawsuit Because They Fired An Employee For Being White.” Good. Don’t be racist and don’t violate anti-discrimination laws. It’s not rocket science.
Left UK Guardian newspaper staffers: We’re striking for better wages! Guardian management: Enjoy being replaced by AI.
And another huge Russian oil facility goes up in a giant fireball, this one in Ryazan, some 476 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.
Biden: Stop attacking American ships. Houthis: LOL. Trump: Stop attacking American ships…or else. Houthis: “Yes, Mr. President. Please don’t kill us.”
“West Texas Teacher, Coach Charged With Continuous Sexual Assault of a Child. Justin Esquell is accused of sexually abusing a victim for four years, starting when the child was under the age of 14.”
This could be a very big story. “Trump Announces Tech Companies Will Invest $500 Billion in AI Infrastructure.”
President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced a joint venture between three large tech companies to invest as much as $500 billion into building out U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The joint venture, known as Stargate, involves Oracle, Open AI, and Softbank and will see the companies join together to build out American data centers to power artificial intelligence systems, including ChatGPT. Stargate, which could cost up to $500 billion over a four-year period, will begin with a data center in Texas, a state friendly to crypto and other parts of the tech industry.
The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI are the key initial technology partners. The buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements.
That’s a lot of heavy hitters, but some of them (I’m looking at you Microsoft) have embraced wokeness. Hopefully their AI project won’t be infected with it.
If they need a technical writer, I know one who’s going to be available soon… (Update: I’m hearing it will be built out in Abilene.)
An end to flag madness. “State Department implements “one flag policy,” meaning no more Pride or BLM flags flown at U.S. facilities.”
CNN laid off 210 people or about 6% of it’s staff of 3,500. That still seems an unsustainably high staff for a network that averages less than a million viewers. Indeed, it’s something like 286 viewers per staffer. What advertisers are willing to pay money to reach so few people?
Lies trying to hide how bad the Biden Recession sucks continue to unravel, a mini Texas-vs.-California update, Ukraine makes another oil refinery go boom, true depths of human depravity, some Bill Burr and Critical Drinker links, and two tons of Murica. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Against expectations of a small improvement from -11.3 to -10.0, the headline sentiment gauge dropped to -14.4 (the lowest end of analysts’ forecasts).
Furthermore, the production index, a key measure of state manufacturing conditions, fell five points to -4.1, a reading that suggests a slight decline in output month over month.
Other measures of manufacturing activity also indicated declines this month.
The new orders index – a key measure of demand – dropped 17 points to -11.8 after briefly turning positive last month.
The capacity utilization index edged down five points to -5.7, and the shipments index plunged from 0.1 to -15.4.
The decline in new orders came alongside a surge in prices as raw materials costs rose to 13-month highs…
That has the stench of stagflation lathered all over it.
Also worse than reported: employment numbers. “Philadelphia Fed Admits US Payrolls Overstated By At Least 800,000.”
We first have to go back to December 2022, when we reported something shocking: as part of its data analysis of the “more comprehensive, accurate job estimates released by the BLS as part of its Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) program”, the Philadelphia Fed found that the BLS had overstated jobs to the tune of 1.1 million! This is what the Philadelphia Fed wrote in its quarterly Early Benchmark Revision of State Payroll Employment report at the time:
Our estimates incorporate more comprehensive, accurate job estimates released by the BLS as part of its Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) program to augment the sample data from the BLS’s CES that are issued monthly on a timely basis. All percentage change calculations are expressed as annualized rates. Read more about our methodology. Learn more about interpreting our early benchmark estimates.
So what did this “more accurate”, “more comprehensive” report find? It found that…
In the aggregate, 10,500 net new jobs were added during the period rather than the 1,121,500 jobs estimated by the sum of the states; the U.S. CES estimated net growth of 1,047,000 jobs for the period.
Lots of detailed analysis snipped.
Putting it all together, we now know – as the Philly Fed reported first – that the labor market is far weaker than conventionally believed. In fact, no less than 800,000 payrolls are “missing” when one uses the far more accurate Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data rather than the BLS’ woefully inaccurate and politically mandated payrolls “data”, and if one looks back the the monthly gains across most of 2023, one gets not 230K jobs added on average every month but rather 130K.
Of course, none of that paints Bidenomics in a flattering picture, because while one can at least pretend that issuing $1 trillion in debt every 100 days to add 3 million jos per year is somewhat acceptable, learning that that ridiculous amount buys 800,000 jobs less is hardly the endorsement that the White House needs.
I think I link a story like this every year: “California Leads Among U.S. States Sending People to Texas in 2022. Florida and New York combined sent fewer people to Texas than California.” Leave any leftwing politics behind when you move…
California has a $55 billion deficit. But don’t worry, for the 24-25 fiscal year, it’s a $73 billion deficit.
A Russian-backed “propaganda” network has been broken up for spreading anti-Ukraine stories and paying unnamed European politicians, according to authorities in several countries.
Investigators claimed it used the popular Voice of Europe website as a vehicle to pay politicians.
The Czech Republic and Poland said the network aimed to influence European politics.
Voice of Europe did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.
Czech media, citing intelligence sources, reported that politicians from Germany, France, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Hungary were paid by Voice of Europe in order to influence upcoming elections for the European Parliament.
The German newspaper Der Spiegel said the money was either handed over in cash in covert meetings in Prague or through cryptocurrency exchanges.
Pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk is alleged by the Czech Republic to be behind the network.
Mr Medvedchuk was arrested in Ukraine soon after the Russian invasion, but later transferred to Russia with about 50 prisoners of war in exchange for 215 Ukrainians.
Czech authorities also named Artyom Marchevsky, alleging he managed the day-to-day business of the website. Both men were sanctioned by Czech authorities.
“$100M missing from Bay area trust fund management company. A Bay area father who counted on a local non-profit to handle a trust fund designed for his daughter’s long-term care feels duped.” And this is a trust for special needs kids.
The radical leftists in control of Baltimore City Hall have plunged the metro area just north of Washington, DC, into apocalyptic levels. We advise readers to entirely avoid the metro area as violent crime spirals out of control.
Failed social justice reforms, defunding the police, and widespread mistrust of the police have resulted in a skeleton police force that will no longer be able to protect residents in some regions of the city.
Fox Baltimore reported last Tuesday that only three police officers were on duty for the Southern Police District, which includes more than 61,000 residents.
Joe Lieberman, RIP. One of the least reprehensible Democratic senators of the last 30 years or so. But I still remember this:
Don’t click on this link unless you want to plumb the depths of human depravity. Noteworthy: “He and his husband.”
Stellantis, AKA The European Monster That Ate Chrysler, just just laid off a whole bunch of white collar workers. Note their mention of focusing on “implementing our EV product offensive.” Oh yeah, they’re boned.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declares victory over Disney, as the latter has dropped their lawsuit over the the elimination of their special district status.
Sean Combs, AKA “Puff Daddy,” AKA “Diddy,” raided by the FBI. “A source close to the investigation told NBC News that the raid was connected to allegations of sex-trafficking and sexual assault and the solicitation and distribution of illegal narcotics and firearms.” “Source close” caveats apply.
The federal government is going to allow a shuttered nuclear power plant to be restarted. “The federal government announced that it would provide a $1.5 billion loan to restart a nuclear power plant in southwestern Michigan. NJ-based Holtec International acquired the 800-megawatt Palisades plant in 2022 with plans to dismantle it, but with support from the state of Michigan and the Biden administration, the emphasis has shifted to restarting the nuclear power plant by late 2025 instead.” Not wild about the loan part, but restarting America’s nuclear energy growth is long overdue.
Used Japanese homes are worthless Not just because of the shrinking population, but because they’re designed to be.
The Critical Drinker is not impressed with the Road House remake. “The Patrick Swayze original wasn’t exactly peak cinema. It was dumb and over-the-top and silly, and I don’t imagine people were exactly crying out for a remake. But damn, man, it’s like Citizen Kane compared to this version.”
School tries to ban American flag from truck. Result: Two tons of Murica.
Twitch is cracking down on streams that “focus on intimate body parts.” After watching this, I have one question: Where exactly did the lady featured obtain her “automatic butt jiggler?”
Feel-good crime aftermath story:
Dog shot during the robbery given a warm send off by hospital staff after undergoing multiple surgeries..pic.twitter.com/OnSjqmRt2u
Remember the WNBA? The women’s basketball league the NBA started to draw more women into watching basketball? In its inaugural season, the WNBA finals drew 2.85 million viewers, when the Houston Comets won the first of their four championships.
It’s never reached those heights again, and the Comets folded in 2008. There was a mild uptick to 728,000 viewers last year.
So you’d think the league would welcome an exciting, highly skilled new breakout player.
You’d be wrong.
“For almost three decades the WNBA has been a laughing stock and disgrace of a professional sports league that only survives due to NBA subsidies.”
“A possible turning point for this sad existence of a league has arrived in the form of a basketball messiah.”
“Caitlin Clark, the greatest and most popular female college basketball player of all time, has announced she’ll be joining the WNBA this upcoming season, and some think she can do for the WNBA what Larry, Magic or Jordan did for the NBA.” I think she can make it more popular, but I sincerely doubt she can produce the same boost that trio gave to the NBA’s fortunes.
“The WNBA’s players don’t want Caitlin Clark to succeed.”
“The WNBA is made up primarily of players who’ve been infected with the false ideas of modern feminism, which heavily focuses on issues related to race, sexuality, gender identity and participating in the oppression Olympics.” I would say “Get woke, go broke,” but the WNBA was already broke without NBA subsidies.
“The players that have been infected with this ideology don’t want Clark to be the face of the league and will do everything in their power to stop it from happening.”
“The first problem Clark will face is that she will be a straight player in a primarily LGBT dominated league, which some of you may think is nonsense and won’t have any effect.”
“But don’t take it from me, take it from former WNBA champion and number three overall draft pick Candace Wiggins, who claimed that 98% of the league is gay and that the toxic environment within the the league affected her as a straight woman and made her retire early.”
“From her first moment in the league, she was targeted and harassed because she was straight and a nationally popular figure, and that many of the other players were jealous and consistently tried to hurt her.”
“After Wiggins came out with these comments, the media didn’t support her. Instead they tried to tear down and diminish her.”
“If you look at viewership numbers since the start of the league, you’ll see viewership is still down tremendously. But the league and the media will still try to create a positive narrative by saying things like how this year’s finals had the highest viewership for a game three in 18 years, without mentioning it was still over 200,000 viewers short of the game three 18 years ago, and one of the teams that played in that game [doesn’t] even exist anymore.”
“Even worse for Caitlin Clark is that, unlike Wiggins, in the minds of those who participate in the oppression Olympics, Clark bears the ultimate sin of being white.”
“We’ve already seen this be a problem for other WNBA Stars. For example Sabrina Ionescu. She’s of course the player who took Steph Curry to the wire in the Three-Point Contest, which was probably the most exciting thing of that dumpster fire of an All-Star weekend.”
“Like Clark, Sabrina was a dominant college player who won awards and consistently pulled in higher attendance numbers for her college game than the average WNBA game, yet ever since she’s been in the league she’s faced criticism from players and the media because she’s white.”
“With an Emmy-nominated sportscaster [Chris Williamson] straight up saying the reason people aren’t rocking with Sabrina is because she leans into her white privilege and benefits from her whiteness and doesn’t use it to uplift and amplify her black co-workers voices in the WNBA.”
Plus the usual accusations of racism for putting her on the NBA2K24 cover. (Which is, I think, a special WNBA edition available only at Gamestop? I don’t play sports video games, so I have no idea how these various editions work.)
“This past year, Sabrina was ranked six by the fans and media among guards for All-Star voting, but was ranked 19th by the players.”
“Articles have already started to emerge which claim Clark’s whiteness is the reason she has been elevated to superstar status instead of, you know, the fact that she’s actually a legit college superstar who’s scoring points at a level not seen since Pistol Pete and bringing in more fans to the women’s game than ever before.” This is hyperbole. Though quite impressive, Clark’s 27.8 points per game in NCAA Division 1 doesn’t come close to Pete Maravich’s insane 44.5 points per game, and Chris Clemons averaged 30 points a game 2018-19.
“Those in and around the league subscribe to beliefs that simply don’t allow them to build the WNBA around Caitlin Clark, but rather instead actually urge them to tear her down.”
Is the commenter (TooLazyToHoop) overselling Clark? Maybe. I’m hardly an expert on the WNBA or women’s college basketball. (Although, since I could, in fact, name five past WNBA players with a gun to my head, I probably do know more than 99% of the American public.) But the video shows Clark does have a very sweet 3-point stroke.
And now Bill Burr’s quite relevant WNBA rant:
“Nobody in the WNBA got Covid.”
“We gave you a fucking league! None of you showed up! Where are all the feminists? None of you went to the fucking games. You failed them, not me.”
“Women failed the WNBA.”
“Meanwhile, the Kardashians are making billions. Those Real Housewives shows are making money hand over fist. That’s what women are watching.”
My Hunter Biden corruption evidence, a Democratic Senator catches federal corruption charges, more blue cities suffering from Biden’s open border policies, California goes looking for cops in Texas, and a new Bill Burr movie looms. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The person who paid as much as six figures for “artwork” by an untrained painter also received a prestigious government appointment from the artist’s father, President Joe Biden.
Now congressional investigators want to know if Biden’s decision to name Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad was in any way related to her purchase of artwork by Hunter Biden, a middle-aged man who paints as a hobby.
House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-KY) is now asking Naftali and White House Counsel Stuart Delery to answer questions as to whether the Biden family is using Hunter’s “art” as a means of selling White House access.
The White House has previously claimed the identity of Hunter Biden art purchasers would be concealed to prevent any undue influence, but nothing prevents the purchaser from identifying themselves to Joe Biden when seeking an appointment, and now at least one purchaser has been identified as someone who sought White House access.
Senator Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was indicted on corruption charges by federal prosecutors on Friday morning in a Manhattan court in an influence-peddling scheme involving Egypt.
The unsealed indictment revealed that Menendez’s wife, Nadine, New Jersey real estate mogul Fred Daibes, and two other business associates are being charged along side the lawmaker.
Led by Southern District of New York attorney Damian Williams, in June 2022, investigators conducted a search of Menendez’s residence in New Jersey and found $100,000 worth of gold bars, nearly half a million dollars in cash, “much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe,” and a brand new Mercedes-Benz C-300 convertible.
“Menedez and Nadine Menedez agreed to and did accept hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes in exchange for using Menedez’s power and influence as a Senator to seek to protect and enrich” his allies “and to benefit the Arab Republic of Egypt,” the indictment reads. “Among other actions, Menendez provided sensitive U.S. government information and took other steps that secretly aided the Government of Egypt,” the filing notes.
New York City will cut overtime pay for its police officers and three other agencies to help reduce costs driven by the city’s unprecedented migrant crisis, City Hall announced Monday.
Jacques Jiha, the budget director for Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, told the city’s police, fire, corrections, and sanitations departments in a Saturday memo to each submit an overtime pay reduction plan “to reduce year-to-year OT spending.”
He also wrote the four departments must submit monthly reports “to track overtime spending and their progress in meeting the reduction target” once Adams issues the order.
Jiha also noted the current assistance provided by President Joe Biden and New York governor Kathy Hochul is not enough, prompting City Hall’s decision to cut overtime pay among other financial measures.
“The amount of aid we have received from the federal government and the state has been grossly inadequate and there has been no progress on a statewide or national decompression strategy,” Jhia wrote in the memo, first reported by Politico. “The city can no longer continue to shoulder these skyrocketing costs and balance the budget without making very difficult choices.”
Crime has risen in New York in recent months as more than 100,000 illegal immigrants have poured into the city.
The leader of a police union said the overtime pay cuts will lead to fewer cops patrolling the streets, resulting in more staffing shortages.
“It is going to be impossible for the NYPD to significantly reduce overtime unless it fixes its staffing crisis,” Patrick Hendry, head of the Police Benevolent Association, told the New York Post. “We are still thousands of cops short, and we’re struggling to drive crime back to pre-2020 levels without adequate personnel.”
“If City Hall wants to save money without jeopardizing public safety, it needs to invest in keeping experienced cops on the job,” he said.
The Homeless Illegal Alien Industrial Complex pays very, very well in Chicago:
BREAKING: NBC 5 reports that private shelter employees that house illegal immigrants make from $135 per hour up to $200 per hour.
A manager of a migrant facility made $14,000 in one week and a nurse earned $20,000 in a week. pic.twitter.com/6P0a7Ae67F
“The Biden admin cut the razor wire Gov. Greg Abbott put along the Rio Grande, so Abbott immediately sent the Texas National Guard to put up even more.”
Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson switches to the Republican Party. “While Dallas has thrived, elsewhere Democratic policies have exacerbated crime and homelessness.”
“I have been mayor of Dallas for more than four years. During that time, my priority has been to make the city safer, stronger and more vibrant,” Johnson wrote in his article.
“That meant saying no to those who wanted to defund the police. It meant fighting for lower taxes and a friendlier business climate. And it meant investing in family friendly infrastructure such as better parks and trails.”
Johnson said he does not plan to alter his “approach” to being mayor but is switching his party affiliation.
“When my career in elected office ends in 2027 on the inauguration of my successor as mayor, I will leave office as a Republican,” Johnson said.
The mayor was a leading opponent of calls to decrease funding for the Dallas Police Department after the 2020 demonstrations against police violence. Johnson proposed cutting salaries at city hall instead.
In his announcement, he also touted Dallas’ decreasing crime rate and the Dallas City Council’s reduction of the property tax rate.
While city mayors are nonpartisan officeholders in Texas, Johnson was a Democrat during his nearly five terms in the Texas House of Representatives.
This is both unexpected and big news. Lots of Hispanic politicians in Texas have switched to the GOP, but this is the first case I can remember of a high profile black Texas Democratic politician switching to the GOP.
A 35-year-old Renton man was sentenced on Sept. 13 in U.S. District Court to 40 months in prison for his role in a plot to burn the Seattle Police Officers Guild building in downtown Seattle during the September 2020 protests.
The defendant, Justin Christopher Moore, pleaded guilty in September 2022.
At the sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Lauren King said, “What you did showed a complete disregard for human life. Our ability to peacefully assemble is a fundamental right to our society. Your acts of violence can deter people from exercising that fundamental right.”
According to records filed in the case, Moore made and carried a box of 12 Molotov cocktails in a protest march to the Seattle Police Officers Guild building on Sept. 7, 2020. Ultimately the marchers were moved away from the building in downtown Seattle. Police smelled gasoline and grew concerned about the intentions of protesters. The box containing the 12 gasoline devices was found in the parking lot next to the Seattle Police Officers Guild building.
Using video from that day and from other protests, as well as information from the electronic devices of other co-conspirators, Moore was confirmed as the person seen carrying the box of destructive devices.
In June 2021, law enforcement executed a search warrant at Moore’s residence. They seized clothing that is consistent with the images of what Moore was wearing when he carried the Molotov cocktails. From the basement storage area, they also recovered numerous items that are consistent with manufacturing explosive devices. Law enforcement recovered a notebook in which Moore had made entries related to the manufacturing of destructive devices and the ingredients necessary.
University of North Texas tries to cancel musicology professor. Professor wins in court. Again.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has handed down another defeat to the University of North Texas and a victory to Allen Harris in a lawsuit defending the First Amendment rights of Professor Timothy Jackson, after UNT shut down his journal, The Journal of Schenkerian Studies. The decision can be located here.
In January of last year, Allen Harris had already prevailed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. The District Court Judge Amos Mazzant rejected UNT’s motion to dismiss the complaint of Professor Timothy Jackson in a strong decision available here.
Ordinarily, the case would then proceed to discovery and eventually to trial. But UNT invoked its right to a special appeal (called an interlocutory appeal) that is allowed only to the state under the doctrine of sovereign immunity. At first, Texas was expected to make an argument defending UNT’s right to do whatever it wanted with Timothy Jackson’s journal.
The Journal of Schenkerian Studies is dedicated to a late 19th/early 20th-century Austrian-Jewish music theorist, Heinrich Schenker, and his systematic, graphic methods of music analysis. In July 2020, Timothy Jackson defended Schenker in the pages of the Journal from an attack by Hunter College Professor Philip Ewell. Professor Ewell labeled Schenker a “racist” and, indeed, the entire tradition of Western classical music as “systemically racist.” This dispute would have remained a typical academic tempest in a teapot, but the University of North Texas swiftly condemned Jackson’s defense of Schenker and classical music. At UNT, defending classical music and its theory against charges of “racism” is a “thought crime.”
Graduate students quickly condemned Professor Jackson for “racist actions” and various other derelictions that they claimed hurt their feelings. Calls for Professor Jackson to be fired quickly escalated, and the vast majority of Jackson’s fellow faculty members jumped on the bandwagon. Sixteen of them signed a graduate student petition calling for his ouster and for censorship of the Journal. Discovery revealed that at least one did so without even reading or understanding what the petition said.
The most important thing at the University of North Texas was to demonstrate pious commitment to “anti-Racism,” no matter how irrational or lacking in substance–or contrary to evidence. As the Dean of the College of Music admitted in open court, the Journal was “put on ice.”
In July 2020, Professor Jackson stood alone against this tide. Had the case been allowed to proceed after Mazzant’s strong decision on the motion to dismiss, the Journal would likely be back in publication by now. Yet censorship is so important at the University of North Texas that the state exercised its right to a special appeal in order to halt discovery in its tracks.
Some technical legal analysis omitted.
The ruling is a clear warning to do-nothing boards of trustees and boards of regents that they have an affirmative duty to ensure that public universities uphold constitutional rights in education. From now on, they will also enjoy a no qualified immunity from personal suit, at least in the Fifth Circuit. UNT’s Board of Regents had direct governing authority over all UNT officials. They too can therefore be held accountable under the Ex Parte Young for sitting idly by while career university bureaucrats trampled Professor Jackson’s free speech.
Unfortunately, the federal government continues its misguided attempts to control an industry regulators know little to nothing about. But today’s attempts tend to focus more on something they understand even less than trucking: technology.
The electronic logging device (ELD) has been around since the late 1980s. The devices were first adopted by large nationwide fleets to simplify managing their plethora of drivers, and eventually became a way to lower insurance costs. Manufacturers and employers claimed the devices prevented drivers from driving longer than legally allowed, therefore reducing the number of tractor-trailer-related crashes. It was under the latter premise that the DOT mandated that all trucks be equipped with ELDs no later than the end of 2017. Unfortunately, fatal accidents involving tractor-trailers have seen a recent increase following a sharp decline. This correlation suggests that mandating ELDs has not had the promised or intended safety improvements.
More recently, environmental regulations requiring manufacturers to reduce emissions gave us the diesel particulate filter (DPF), an exhaust treatment system that replaces a standard muffler. While there is no current federal mandate requiring a DPF, the filters are required by the 2008 California Statewide Truck and Bus Rule, which has incentivized many nationwide fleets to adopt them. The problem with DPFs is the filter system clogs. A lot.
When DPFs go down, trucks roll to a stop. Truckers report having to have a DPF serviced as often as every 5,000 miles, which means lots of lost productivity and stranded cargo. I’ve had four breakdowns over the past two years, and three were due to my DPF. A tow truck driver I spoke to on one of those occasions told me half of his business comes from malfunctioning DPFs. Repairs are a specialized affair, and replacements can cost up to $2,000. When my truck isn’t moving, I’m not earning. And these regulators have required that my truck stand still far too often.
Next up on the government’s list of ways to make truckers’ lives miserable are proposed speed limiters. Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, wants to limit all tractor-trailers to the same speed. Imagine being stuck behind a pair of tractor trailers side by side, who can’t speed up to pass each other. It’s relatively rare right now, but it will become the norm. Every single interstate nationwide will be populated by moving roadblocks, inspiring road rage and blocking critical services. What happens when the fire truck or ambulance is stuck behind these unbreakable pairs?
Also in the California “Hall of Ls,” after ruing its own police department through defunding, San Francisco is trying to hire cops in Texas.
San Francisco slashed its police department’s budget by $120 million in 2020. Almost immediately, crime rose in the city. Crime has gotten so bad in San Francisco, that residents are reportedly leaving their car doors unlocked, so crooks won’t smash their windows.
Mayor London Breed promised to reverse her “defund” policy by restoring and increasing the police budget. However, the city is struggling to recruit qualified officers. Recently, the San Francisco Deputy Sheriff’s Association accused the mayor of continuing to make cuts to the sheriff’s department.
Despite this, the city went to four universities in Texas to recruit police officers. This appears to be the first time San Francisco looked for candidates outside of California.
Those four universities are Texas Southern University, Sam Houston State University, Prairie View A&M University, and Texas A&M University.
Murder suspect who broke into a Georgia home find out that gun beats knife. “Once he is released from the hospital, he will be confronted with charges including burglary, home invasion, and theft by receiving in Georgia, as well as murder charges in Ohio.”
Bill Burr has a new film called Old Dads coming to Netflix next month. Looks promising. “Just go on Twitter and share the story where you’re the hero.” Knowing Burr, there will be something here to offend everyone…
A Chinese company based out of Hong Kong which paid at least $3 million to several members of the Biden family has since been revealed to have ties with the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
According to the Daily Caller, State Energy HK Limited sent $3 million via wire transfer to Robinson Walker LLC, a company run by an associate of the Biden family named John Robinson Walker. The wire transfer took place in March of 2017, shortly after Joe Biden’s term as Vice President came to an end, according to a report released on Thursday by the House Oversight Committee.
One of the direct subsidiaries of State Energy HK is State Energy Group International Assets Holdings Limited (SEIAH). At the time of the wire transfer, SEIAH’s chairman was Ren Qingxin, who previously worked for the CCP as a representative at a business organization.
Shortly after the $3 million transfer, Ren was succeeded in his leadership position by Lei Donghui, who had been a member of the CCP since 2002, where he served as Secretary General of the International Engineering Business Bureau of China State Construction (CSC). CSC has since been designated by the Department of Defense as a “Communist China military company.”
Subsequently, the $3 million sent to Robinson Walker was then transferred to four different members of the Biden family: Joe Biden’s son Hunter, brother James, daughter-in-law Hallie, and a fourth unidentified family member, the Oversight Committee reports. The transfers were sent in several transactions, both to the family members directly and to several of their companies, including Owasco PC, JBBSR Inc, and RSTP II, LLC.
The previously-unknown involvement of Hallie – the widow of Biden’s elder son Beau, who later became Hunter’s girlfriend after Beau’s death – has proven to be one of the biggest bombshells yet in the GOP’s investigations into Biden family corruption.
Dutch Farmer’s Party poised to win 16 or 17 seats in parliament thanks to opposing that country’s mad global warming anti-meat mandates. “The Boer-Burger Beweging (BBB), or Farmer-Citizen Movement, is set to become the largest party in the country’s senate, winning more seats than Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s ruling conservative VVD party.”
Red Guards come to Maine. “Kristen Day said students affiliated with one of RSU 14’s Civil Rights Teams harassed her daughter. When her daughter refused to speak about her sexuality, two students affiliated with the club began to bully her and call her homophobic.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Eric Weinstein on Joe Rogan about what really happened with Kayne West. He suggests that West’s Hitler comments were simply him trying to channel Thomas à Kempis.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine grinds on, Hunter Biden’s bestie’s going to the big house, a massive voting problem (and possible fraud) winds up in court in Harris County, and a tiny bits on both Amazon and anime.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Not in this LinkSwarm: links on the Zaporizhzhia Ukrainian nuclear reactor, since I’m not sure I can trust any of the information sent out by either side.
It is not foreordained that Russia wins and Ukraine loses. Winning a war is not merely an exercise in numbers or technology. As General George S. Patton observed, “Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.”
Since Russian President Vladimir Putin failed to quickly topple the Ukrainian government and kill President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the war has widened into a contest involving almost the entire border region shared by the combatants along with the stretch of border between Belarus and Kyiv some 80 miles to the north of Ukraine’s capital city.
Much media attention has been given to Russia’s advances along the Sea of Azov in the south and on the approach to Ukraine’s third-largest city, Odessa, on the shores of the Black Sea as well as the remarkable attack that captured Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia. These Russian successes are discouraging for Ukrainian defenders but, in the grand contest, they matter far less than the battle for Kyiv.
Snip.
There are fascinating signs coming out of what may be a decisive battle to the northwest of Kyiv on the long, winding, secondary road from Chernobyl. This is the road where a 40-mile-long column of Russian vehicles was spotted by satellite. Most of the vehicles are supply trucks. They would be carrying fuel, ammunition, and food for the Russian forces that have advanced to the very outskirts of Kyiv itself but have seemingly been stalled for several days.
Snip.
Out of this come three reports that, if true, suggest the beginnings of a devastating reversal for Russian forces operating northwest of Kyiv.
First, reports today in multiple outlets that Russian Major General Andrei Sukhovetsky was killed in combat by a sniper. Sukhovetsky, 47, was an elite Russian Spetsnaz commando and veteran of Russia’s war in Syria. The commander of the Russian 7th Airborne Division, he was assigned the mission of leading the Russian thrust from Belarus to Kyiv. Men like Sukhovetsky have an outsized presence on the battlefield. They’re inspirational. Their personal leadership at the point of the spear often means the difference between victory and defeat during the fast-paced controlled violence of war. His loss would be devastating to his men and to the organizational momentum of the forces he commanded.
That Sukhovetsky was killed by a sniper suggests that he was personally trying to regain the initiative against Ukrainian forces who had fought him to a standstill.
The second report of merit is the heavy damage sustained in the town of Irpin on the northwest border of Kyiv’s city limits. The damage to this city suggests a major battle — an effort by the Russians to breakthrough. They didn’t.
The final piece of the puzzle is the Battle of Bucha. Ukrainian forces claimed the recapture of Bucha hours after the devastation visited on Irpin. The timing is important here. The Russians tried and failed to take Irpin and then the Ukrainians retook Bucha two miles to the northwest of Irpin.
The roughly 80-mile route from the Belarus-Ukraine border from the Chernobyl salient to Kyiv on the western side of the Dnieper River runs over a secondary asphalt road. This road frequently crosses rivers, runs through small villages, or is bordered on both sides by the eastern extent of the mighty Pripyat Marsh — the geographical feature which defines the border between Ukraine and Belarus.
The road is not able to support a large military force, even if unopposed in an exercise, especially during the spring and fall months during a time the locals call “Rasputitsa” — the mud season. Unfortunately for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his military commanders, Ukrainian soil never froze solid this winter, so the fall Rasputitsa is still a factor.
This is why there have been so many photos coming out from the conflict that show all manner of Russian military vehicles bogged down in the mud. As soon as a vehicle on a narrow road becomes disabled or is destroyed in combat, or as the vehicles maneuver off-road in response to combat, they risk becoming mired. Even if they don’t get stuck in the mud, they end up consuming far more fuel that must be delivered to them than they would were the ground frozen solid.
Thus, that 40-mile-long column of “tanks” is more likely mostly trucks carrying fuel, ammunition, and food to the advanced forces of the Russian 20th Combined Arms Army on the outskirts of Kyiv. That this column hasn’t apparently moved much may mean that the Russian forces just north of Kyiv are running low on basic supplies.
This greatly increases the importance for the Russian army to achieve success to the east of Kyiv where the road network is far more developed and, if the terrain is captured and secured, capable of bringing in the volume of supplies needed to properly surround Kyiv and place it under siege.
In the meantime, the forces near Kyiv may be vulnerable to a Ukrainian counterattack. While some of the Russian conscript soldiers and even the veteran contract troops may be more likely to surrender due to low morale exacerbated by a lack of food and fuel.
In about three weeks, we’ve seen a Vladimir who was “off” go from chess to raising on a busted flush in something that is well beyond “off.” The nuclear escalation is not exactly unexpected, at least if you know a bit about the Soviet playbook for such things. What matters is if he still has full control, and/or the extent to which Dead Hand has been brought online. All I will say is that if his ability to give certain orders has been unofficially curtailed, it would not be the first time. If it hasn’t, it is not a good idea to poke the crazy man with the button via official actions.
And there are a lot of official actions out there that are not going to help in regards the deteriorating man. Among others is Switzerland deciding that they are neutral, but not that neutral. Add to it firm allies who have told him no, even after he just helped them out literally a few weeks ago… Even Xi has said no on some fronts. None of this is likely to slow down the deterioration. Or provide enough of a reality check to get through to him as he rages in his bunker with his captive oligarchs.
And while we are at it, let’s look at the attack itself and the absolute fuck up that it, and subsequent actions by STAVKA (call it what it is), truly are. It was billed as a demonstration of the new Russian way of war, their version of “Shock and Awe.” Problem is, S&A or any other form of blitz is heavily dependent upon superior logistics, something the Soviets nor the Russians have ever had. You need massive amounts of ammo, fuel, parts, and replacement troops to pull it off. Replacement troops not only because of losses, but the need to detail out troops to hold key points as you go. It also requires highly trained troops who know land nav inside and out.
From what I am learning, the order went out to make this happen. The actual order, however, may not have even approached what would be given for a small-unit special ops strike. Contingency plans? Decap. No? Then try for decap again. Decap. Decap. Try it again damnit! There are differing reports on the number of Wagner troops killed or captured, but a good number were sent in on assassination missions. They were not alone. Problem was, they were all alone as the original push down got bogged down; the efforts to do airmobile and airborne ops were shot down (literally in some cases); and, the public is now on high alert to the saboteurs and assassins roaming major cities trying to mark targets, etc. Don’t expect rules of war for those caught marking civilian buildings for strikes. For now, expect a return to grinding Soviet bombardment, civilian casualties be damned.
The fact is, Vladimir has already lost simply because he didn’t win. He is committed, and is committing Russia and all its people, to a long, grinding, bloody slog that is going to have severe economic impacts. Just replacing ammunition, gear, people, is going to have a severe impact. Add to it the growing official and unofficial sanctions? The Russian people are going to feel this one, in ways they never have before. Current Vladimir does not care. He’s lost to that. He has no way to go in and control the country, or even the parts he’s tried so desperately to annex. Even those are likely to slip from him given the current state of “uppitiness” on the part of the Ukrainians.
The Ukrainians have not won. At best they have pushed things into a long grind with some chance of a stalemate. Yet, by doing this they have won. They have prevented the cheap and easy victory on which Vladimir counted. They have forced him into committing military and economic resources he does not have over the long term. Heck, even the short term. Russia’s economy was already teetering, current operations and responses are going to crater it unless something major happens. I’ve lived through a couple of power struggles in the Kremlin; under these circumstances, I hope we all do live through what is to come. A quick clean change of leadership seems unlikely given the Keystone gang we’ve seen so far, but it may be our best hope.
All we can do is wait and see what happens. While current circumstances are not new or unique on many levels, I will note that in my lifetime I’ve never seen a situation like this where key leadership was this insecure. Xi is in some ways hanging by a thread, and knows his enemies in the CCP are looking for any excuse to bring him down. Vladimir we’ve discussed. The Europeans, particularly the Germans? They are not secure either, especially since the Green policies have caused them to firmly place their mouth around Putin’s, er, finger, in regards energy. To see them decide to fund their own military, back off on the idiocy of green (maybe), and truly support the Ukraine strikes more as a desperation move than a rational push. Johnson is a non-entity right now, and not to be taken seriously. Our own dementia patient? Hell, he’s just waiting for his ice cream and to be allowed to go back upstairs to watch Matlock. Those behind him, however, are desperate beyond belief. Not one major stable leader anywhere in the world. That’s a new one and I thought I had about seen it all after watching the Soviets/Russians for more than 40 years now.
No NATO no-fly zone. Good. I very much want to see Putin defeated, but clearly NATO can’t be expected to respond to an attack on a non-member country, and that would be a dangerous escalation.
“More than a year” for $60 million in fraud? Seems a little lite.
The defendant, Devon Archer, was sentenced to one year and one day in federal prison by Manhattan Judge Ronnie Abrams, who said the crime was “too serious” to let him just walk.
“There’s no dispute about the harm caused to real people,” Abrams said, noting that the defrauded tribe, the Oglala Sioux, is one of the poorest in the nation.
Archer will also have to pay more than $15 million in forfeiture by himself and more than $43 million in restitution with his co-defendants in the case.
The convicted fraudster has maintained his innocence and intends to appeal the conviction and sentence, his attorney, Matthew Schwartz, said in court Monday.
In brief statements to Abrams just before Archer was sentenced, he and Schwartz claimed he was taken advantage of by corrupt businessmen who wanted to use him in the scheme.
“He came under the influence of a person he trusted too much and didn’t ask enough questions,” Schwartz said.
“Trusted too much.” Yeah, he trusted he wouldn’t get caught because of his powerful friends.
What are the odds this was the only crooked deal Archer had his fingers into? I’d say pretty close to zero.
The Democrats will suffer historic losses in the November midterms.
This disaster for their party will come about not just because of the Afghanistan debacle, an appeased Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the destruction of the southern border, the supply chain mess, or their support for critical race theory demagoguery.
The culprit for the political wipeout will be out-of-control inflation—and for several reasons.
First, the Biden Administration is in such denial of inflation that it sounds to Americans simply callous and indifferent to the misery it has unleashed.
Biden officials have scoffed at price spikes as “transitory.” Or they have preposterously claimed spiraling costs are a concern only to the elite. They blame the Ukraine crisis. Or they fault the out-of-office bogeyman, Donald Trump.
The administration assures us that consumer prices are only rising at an annualized rate of 7.5 percent—as if the steepest increase in 40 years actually is not all that bad.
Yet the middle class knows that inflation is far worse when it comes to the stuff of life: buying a house, car, gas, meat, or lumber.
Second, inflation is an equal opportunity destroyer of dreams. It undermines rich and poor, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals. It unites all tribes, all ideologies, all politics against those who are perceived to have birthed the monstrous octopus that squeezes everything and everyone it touches.
The conservative passbook holder sees his meager life savings eaten away. The liberal teacher’s car payments stretch from six to 10 years.
The prospective Republican home buyer sees his hard-earned potential down payment eaten away each month. The Democratic carpenter feels his new higher wages buy even less.
Third, inflation is ubiquitous, inescapable, omnipotent—and humiliating. It destroys personal dignity. And its toxicity is insidious, sort of like seeping, odorless, colorless, but nevertheless lethal carbon monoxide.
Unlike now-unpopular critical race theory, it cannot be avoided for a day. You cannot tune it out like one does the mess in Afghanistan or the now nonexistent southern border. Inflation attacks everyone in 24/7, 360-degree fashion.
It belittles you at the gas station. It downsizes you at the food market. It humiliates you in the obscene real estate market. It makes you look stupid when you are paying for a new car. It ridicules you when you buy lumber. Suddenly you apologize that you really cannot afford your child’s braces.
Fourth, inflation undermines a civil and ordered society. It unleashes a selfish “every man for himself” mentality, the Hobbesian cruelty of a “war of all against all.”
Inflation is the economic and emotional equivalent of smash-and-grab or carjacking. It is a brazen robber in broad daylight that so infuriates Americans by its boldness. It convinces them their very civilization is dying.
“Federal Court Declares Diversity Initiative At Thomas Jefferson High School To Be Unconstitutional.” “Judge Claude Hilton ruled that the county unconstitutionally engineered the reduction of Asian-American students to achieve greater racial diversity.”
Did you know that one of the biggest freight management companies in America was temporarily locked down by a cyberattack? “Expeditors International, a top-five freight management company by revenue, disclosed Wednesday that last month’s cyberattack will have a “material adverse impact” on finances and that it will be late filing its 2021 annual report because of difficulty accessing information on its accounting systems.”
Once again Harris County has drawn scrutiny over a slew of election day problems and may need a court order to continue counting votes beyond a state proscribed deadline.
Issues with elections procedures began days before March 1 as election judges found that supplies were not available for pickup at the appointed time on Friday, February 25. Even after the delayed distribution of supplies on Saturday, election workers complained that many kits were lacking essential equipment.
The situation worsened by Tuesday, and during a conference call with the Texas Secretary of State’s Office (SOS) and representatives from the local Democratic and Republican parties, Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria notified the state that her department may not be able to count all early and election day ballots by the statutory deadline of 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 2.
According to a statement from Secretary of State John Scott, the counting delay was “due only to damaged ballot sheets that must be duplicated before they can be scanned by ballot tabulators at the central count location.”
“Our office stands ready to assist Harris County election officials, and all county election officials throughout the state, in complying with Texas Election Code requirements for accurately tabulating and reporting Primary Election results. We want to ensure that all Texans who have cast a ballot in this year’s Primary Elections can have confidence in the accuracy of results.”
According to the state election code, however, any votes counted after the statutory deadline may not count unless the county obtains a court order. Furthermore, under laws in effect since 1986, failure to deliver precinct election returns by the deadline is a Class B misdemeanor.
Calling the county’s elections problems the “worst in 40 years,” Harris County Republican Party (HCRP) Chair Cindy Siegel told KPRC news, “This has been a complete mess. We’ve had equipment delays, we’ve had equipment problems, equipment wasn’t delivered, we had polls that were unable to be set up.”
In a statement to The Texan, HCRP said that after consulting with the SOS, “if the count does not appear to be near completion in all races by [Wednesday] afternoon, the parties have tentatively agreed to seek a court order to require the Harris County Election Administrator to continue counting beyond the 24-hour deadline required by law, and to enjoin the law to allow the count to continue.”
Responsibility for conducting primary elections falls to the two main political parties, but they have contracted with the Harris County elections division to administer the elections.
Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R-Houston) who formerly served as the Harris County voter registrar, called for immediate changes to the elections division.
“[Harris County Judge] Lina Hidalgo must fire her hand-picked election administrator,” Bettencourt told The Texan. “Because if she doesn’t, I don’t think we’re going to have an election in November.”
In 2020, the three Democrats on the Harris County Commissioners Court overruled objections from two Republican commissioners and the Democrat elected voter registrar Ann Harris Bennet to create the new office of elections administrator. Prior to the revamp, the elected county clerk and elected voter registrar managed elections in the state’s largest county.
The commissioners court then appointed Longoria, a former staffer for state Sen. Sylvia Garcia (D-Houston) who had previously run unsuccessfully for Houston City Council, with an annual salary of $190,000.
Under Longoria’s guidance, the county approved $54 million for the elections division last summer which included $14 million to purchase new voting equipment.
Earlier this year, Longoria told commissioners the March primary would cost more than $8.8 million.
In 2020, Harris County received nearly $10 million in grants from Mark Zuckerberg’s Center for Tech and Civic Life and another $1 million in 2021 just before the Texas Legislature restricted such private grants.
According to sources familiar with the equipment, the second page of the paper ballot has been jamming machines and now requires entry by hand. Allegedly, although the early voting period ended Friday,
The question, of course, is whether this is a sign of manifest incompetence, or a sign of widespread attempted vote fraud?
If it was a fraud attempt, we should be grateful that it was bungled so badly in the primary that a lot more attention will be paid.
And the judge didn’t sound pleased:
Update: the "court finds it is required…to impound the precinct election materials in the possession of Ms. Longoria and her staff and for the court to supervise the activities necessary to complete the count…" https://t.co/h1FL7F5XTn
Iowa Republican Governor Kim Reynolds signs bill banning men from women’s sports. I’ll take “Headlines no one would understand 20 years ago” for $400, Alex.
Democratic Party Gaslighting: The Continuing Journeys:
The party that painted this now wants you to believe they support Law Enforcement. Americans won’t forget this — especially not on Election Day. pic.twitter.com/nCBkDmI6yf
— Kari Lake for AZ Governor (@KariLake) March 3, 2022
More Democrats accepting foreign payola, Russia sabre-rattles over Ukraine, a Supreme Court justice retires, Canada revolts, Harris County’s soft-on-crime policies are getting cops killed, and the war over tranny madness spreads. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm.
Long time Democratic power broker Tony Podesta has earned $1 million over the past half year lobbying the Biden White House at the behest of a blacklisted Chinese tech giant, recent federal disclosures show. Huawei, which was placed under trade sanctions during the Trump administration, paid Podesta $500,000 in the fourth quarter of 2021 in an attempt to shake off the trade impact of the restrictions, according to the disclosure form filed on the evening of Jan. 20.
With the $500,000 Podesta made from the previous three months lobbying the White House, he has been compensated $1 million over a six-month period for the lobbying effort.
Podesta’s latest lobbying campaign targeted the Executive Office of the President and centered around “telecommunications services and impacted trade issues,” the disclosure said.
Huawei, once the world’s largest telecom makers, has been facing international scrutiny in recent years. U.S. authorities have flagged the China-based company as a national security threat, saying the company’s close ties with China’s ruling communist regime, as well as Chinese law, could make it a potential espionage tool for Beijing.
A stream of U.S. sanctions since 2019—which have barred Huawei from using U.S. technology and software, and shut out its gears from critical U.S. infrastructure—have slashed the company’s annual revenue by a third. In November, President Joe Biden signed into law a bill that further tightened restrictions on Huawei by restricting it from receiving new equipment licenses from U.S regulators.
Battered by the restrictions, Huawei has ramped up its U.S. influence operation in recent months. Podesta is one of half a dozen lobbyists the firm has engaged since July, which includes a former congressman and one former congressional aide, according to disclosure filings….
Tony Podesta’s brother, John Podesta, served as White House chief of staff to former U.S. President Bill Clinton and the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. He was also a former counselor to President Barack Obama, overseeing climate and energy policies.
There’s your swampy Democratic Party corruption and graft, right there out in the open for all to see.
Affiliates of two European companies that fund Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline contributed to the campaign of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), who Republicans say has blocked sanctions on the Kremlin-backed project.
ENGIE North America and BASF Corporation each gave $2,500 to Schumer in September through their corporate political action committees, according to newly disclosed Federal Election Commission records. ENGIE North America’s parent company and a BASF subsidiary are part of a consortium of five companies that finance Nord Stream 2, which will transport natural gas from Russia to Germany. While President Joe Biden has called the pipeline a geopolitical threat to Europe that helps Russian president Vladimir Putin, last year he waived sanctions on the project.
Republicans have pushed for legislation to enforce sanctions only to be met with resistance from Senate Democrats and the White House. Schumer for months blocked Republican requests to vote on a sanctions bill. He approved a vote on sanctions legislation proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) earlier this month in exchange for Cruz lifting holds on several State Department nominees. The bill received bipartisan support by a 55-44 vote, but Senate Democrats used filibuster rules to block its passage. Democrats say they want to use sanctions against the pipeline as a last resort should Russia invade Ukraine.
Convicted pedophile, UAE adviser and central witness in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, George Nader, has pleaded guilty to his role in helping the UAE funnel millions of dollars in illegal campaign contributions into US campaigns during the 2016 presidential election, according to The Intercept, citing federal court documents filed last month.
In a December sentencing memo, federal prosecutors disclosed that Nader had agreed months early to plead guilty to a single count of felony conspiracy to defraud the US government by pumping millions in donations to Hillary Clinton’s campaign – concealing the foreign origin of the funds.
Snip.
Nader is accused of taking instructions from UAE Crown Prince [Mohammed bin Zayed], and gave regular updates on his efforts to get close to Clinton.
In total, Nader transferred nearly $5 million from his UAE business to [Los Angeles businessperson Ahmad “Andy”] Khawaja – CEO of a Los Angeles-based payment processing company. According to prosecutors, the funds were disguised as a routine business contract between the two men. Of the total transferred, more than $3.5 million came from the UAE government and was given to pro-Clinton Democratic political committees. Prosecutors have yet to publicly identify what happened to the remaining $1.4 million Nader transferred to Khawaja.
Khawaja’s money laundering for Democrats was previously mentioned in this LinkSwarm. How many of the travails of the last five years boil down to Democrats trying to avoid going to jail for their corruption?
Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer announced he’s retiring. Biden, pandering as always, announces he’s going to nominate a black woman.
How massive would the protest have to be to make Justin Trudeau change course? Leftists hate giving up government control of people’s lives, no matter how unpopular….
Tracy Compton, a mother of two in Fairfax, Virginia, had voted for Democrats for as long as she can remember, until the COVID-related school closures.
‘I tried and went to apply to work with the Democratic Party. I was told I was not allowed to become a member of the Democratic Party [in Fairfax].’
A recording of a reorganization meeting showed fellow Democrats deeming Compton too ‘anti-school’ to be part of their political efforts.
What made Compton anti-school?
She wanted the public schools to fully reopen.
When Compton worked to collect signatures for a recall petition for the local school board, she was welcomed out of the rain by a Republican party tent, even after telling them she was a Biden voter.
In contrast, when Compton offered the petition to those inside the Democrat party tent, she was yelled at.
Now? Given a hypothetical matchup between Kamala Harris or President Joe Biden vs. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, she said she’d vote for the Republican in a heartbeat.
All Florida trends are coming up sunshine for continued freedom from Covidstan. Recently Republican registrations surpassed Democrats in the state for the first time. Net domestic migration to the state also increased during COVID. Many commentators attribute both to Governor Ron DeSantis’s pandemic management policies. Just how bad does 2022 look for Democrats in the state? According to the Miami Herald:
Evidence is piling up that Democrats in Florida have no clear bench of candidates willing to challenge Republican incumbents in South Florida, in what’s expected to be a daunting and expensive 2022 cycle for their party.
Two first-time candidates who made early announcements they would run for South Florida House seats have both since dropped their bids to pursue runs for state office. A rumored likely candidate for federal office, former state Sen. José Javier Rodríguez, was recently nominated by President Joe Biden to serve as an assistant secretary at the Department of Labor.
The three Florida seats in question represent districts in Miami, including Reps. Carlos Giménez, Maria Elvira Salazar, and Mario Diaz-Balart. Giménez is the former mayor of Miami-Dade County and an immigrant from Cuba. Salazar defeated Clinton ally Donna Shalala in 2020, and Diaz-Balart has represented his district since 2002. The Herald called these districts competitive and said redistricting provided Democrats an opportunity.
However, the only potential candidates are a few retreads who lost in 2020. Reportedly, Shalala, who is knee-deep in Clinton ick, may be considering a rematch with Salazar. She served as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Health and Human Services and as President of the Clinton Foundation from June 2015 to March 2017. Former representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who lost to Giménez in 2020, may also jump in the race. To date, neither woman has announced their intentions.
Unless you owe someone favors, why run an almost certainly losing campaign in a red wave year?
Masks don’t work:
Update from the Fargo, North Dakota masking study: Two neighboring K-12 districts (same community) both with around 12,000 students Mask mandate Masks optional (<5% masking) Y axis= % of students positive for covid Green vertical line: when went masks optional pic.twitter.com/OoU9vmsbiz
Unvaccinated people in Austria have been locked down for two-and-a-half months. I wonder if people will stop pretending they are to blame for infection rates. pic.twitter.com/AjVpp7IvNI
“During the last year’s attempts to defund the police and reduce the number of violent encounters on the street, Baltimore kicked off what they call the Safe Streets Project.” Surprise! A Safe Streets worker was one of three people killed in a shootout. Dwight would be disappointed if I didn’t include this:
In addition to looting, murder and arson, the primary accomplishment of #BlackLivesMatter seems to be making donations disappear.
No one appears to have been in charge at Black Lives Matter for months. The address it lists on tax forms is wrong, and the charity’s two board members won’t say who controls its $60 million bankroll, a Washington Examiner investigation has found.
BLM’s shocking lack of transparency surrounding its finances and operations raises major legal and ethical red flags, multiple charity experts told the Washington Examiner.
“Like a giant ghost ship full of treasure drifting in the night with no captain, no discernible crew, and no clear direction,” CharityWatch Executive Director Laurie Styron said of BLM.
BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors appointed two activists to serve as the group’s senior directors following her resignation in May amid scrutiny over her personal finances. But both quietly announced in September that they never took the jobs due to disagreements with BLM. They told the Washington Examiner they don’t know who now leads the nation’s most influential social justice organization.
Paul Kamenar, counsel for conservative watchdog group the National Legal and Policy Center, said a full audit and investigation into Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the legal entity that represents the national BLM movement, is warranted.
“This is grossly irregular and improper for a nonprofit with $60 million in its coffers,” Kamenar said.
Sundown Joe unwittingly greenlights a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Right now there’s a lot more jaw-jaw than war-war. I’ve avoid penning a thumbsucker on the situation because I’ve been too busy.
Virginia Republican Delegate Nick Freitas is done with having Critical Race Theory advocates calling all who oppose them racist:
Enough. I have had it, my constituents have had it, and I am no longer going to sit here while a member of this body accuses us of being bigots simply because we disagree on policy. pic.twitter.com/dx0uMyFmnB
Today’s unexpected ally in the war on transgender madness: actor Sean Penn.
Sean Penn is doubling down on his defense of traditional gender roles.
In two separate interviews this month, the two-time Academy Award-winner and ex of Madonna made comments bemoaning his perception that men are becoming more feminine.
“I am in the club that believes that men in American culture have become wildly feminized,” the 61-year-old told the UK-based publication The i in an interview ahead of the UK release of his new film “Flag Day.”
“I don’t think that being a brute or having insensitivity or disrespect for women is anything to do with masculinity, or ever did. But I don’t think that [in order] to be fair to women, we should become them.”
In a subsequent interview the “Milk” star did with The Independent this week, he dug his heels into the polarizing opinion, going even further in his critique of men who challenge gender norms.
“There are a lot of, I think, cowardly genes that lead to people surrendering their jeans and putting on a skirt,” he told the publication. Furthermore, he noted that the women in his life don’t seem bothered by the patriarchy.
“I have these very strong women in my life who do not take masculinity as a sign of oppression toward them,” he said.
Penn is wrong about an awful lot, but he’s right about this.
Intel to build $20 billion chip manufacturing facility near New Albany, Ohio (near Columbus), starting with two fabs. Intel had already announced a big investment initiative, and announced their were building two new fabs in Arizona last year. The Ohio location is a surprise, since there’s no fab infrastructure there, but evidently Ohio is throwing lots of money at them.
Vegetarian “meat” company Impossible Foods just laid off a bunch of people. “Technocratic elites have decided in the so-called ‘Great Reset’ in a post-COVID world that peasants should eat plant-based meat instead of the real thing as a way for ‘sustainable nutrition.'”
Yikes!
You may need to get a prescription of beta blockers after watching this video.pic.twitter.com/6GKk09DmjG
The new Superman is a “bisexual climate warrior.” Those comic book issues aren’t exactly flying off the shelf.
Speaking of comics: This comic page just sold for $3.3 million. A wee bit rich for my blood. And is possibly more than the artist made over his entire career working at Marvel…
Heh.
Yoko Ono has threatened to have her music added to Spotify unless Joe Rogan is removed
— State Line Crosser Dennis (LGB) (@Buzzsaws1990) January 28, 2022
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Biden has a bad week, another high profile Democratic politician is indicted on federal charges, and a dog goes home.
After having his business mandate overturned by the Supreme Court, Joe Biden goes on TV to plead that they have to end the filibuster because Republican election fraud prevention laws are keeping Democrats from cheating. (I may be paraphrasing a little.) Whereupon…
Arizona Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema said the same. You know, just like the last thousand times Democratic Media Complex mouthpieces asked them. “Are you sure? Are you really sure? Are you really really really sure? But we want it!”
If they vote with Schumer, Republicans will eat Kelly and Hassan alive this year and others later on, all for a vote that Manchin and Sinema have already insisted will go nowhere anyway. If they vote against the filibuster change, progressives will eat them alive in states where their support is critical. Even if these seats were salvageable, and that may not be the case already for Kelly and Hassan, Schumer’s move is guaranteed to lose seats for no purpose whatsoever. It’s the political equivalent of Pickett’s Charge.
Democrats handled Sinema’s refusal with tact and grace. Ha, just kidding! They called her a racist:
Have you tried calling her racist harder?
You're like an 8-year old kid playing a video game that only knows how to punch one button over and over again. pic.twitter.com/qpmcWxVnNY
Before she became vice president, Kamala Harris had a bad habit of ignoring prepared briefing materials.
She does not appear to have kicked this habit, even after making it all the way to the White House.
“Staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared,” the Washington Post reports.
One former staffer told the paper, “It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work. With Kamala, you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully, and it’s not really clear why.”
The 2020 presidential election was unlike any in American history.
Hundreds of laws and processes were changed in the months leading up to the election, sometimes legally and sometimes not, creating chaos, confusion, and uncertainty. Tech oligarch Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, spent $419 million — nearly as much as the federal government itself — to interfere in the government’s management of the election in key states.
Powerful tech oligarchs and corrupt propaganda press conspired to keep indisputably important news stories, such as allegations of corruption regarding the Biden family business, hidden from voters in the weeks prior to voting. Information operations were routinely manufactured about President Trump in the closing months of the campaign, including the false claim that Russians paid bounties for dead American soldiers and Trump didn’t care, and that Trump had called dead American soldiers losers. Both were disputed by dozens of on-the-record sources.
Effective conservative voices were censored by the social media arms of the Democrat Party. And all this was done after the establishment spent years running an unprecedented “Resistance” that falsely claimed Trump was a traitor who had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
It’s not surprising that polls show most Republicans are deeply concerned about the integrity of such an election. If anything, it’s surprising that all of them aren’t screaming from the rooftops about it. But it is interesting and telling how little the media and other Democrats are willing to talk about efforts to rig the election.
With the exception of a single Time Magazine article admitting there was a “conspiracy” by a “a well-funded cabal of powerful people” who worked to “change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information,” to create a “revolution in how people vote,” corporate media have largely kept silent about or downplayed how the establishment secured its victory for their man Joe Biden.
The number of people killed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6 Capitol riot is equal to the number of pro-Trump supporters who brandished guns or knives inside the Capitol. That is the same number as the total of Americans who — after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ conducting what is heralded as “the most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US history” — have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government as a result of that riot one year ago. Coincidentally, it is the same number as Americans who ended up being criminally charged by the Mueller probe of conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, and the number of wounds — grave or light — which AOC, who finally emerged at night to assure an on-edge nation that she was “okay” while waiting in an office building away from the riot at the rotunda, sustained on that solemn day.
That number is zero. But just as these rather crucial facts do not prevent the dominant wing of the U.S. corporate media and Democratic Party leaders from continuing to insist that Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory was illegitimate due to his collusion with the Kremlin, it also does not prevent January 6 from being widely described in those same circles as an Insurrection, an attempted coup, an event as traumatizing as Pearl Harbor (2,403 dead) or the 9/11 attack (2,977 dead), and as the gravest attack on American democracy since the mid-19th Century Civil War (750,000 dead). The Huffington Post’s White House reporter S.V. Date said that it was wrong to compare 1/6 to 9/11, because the former — the three-hour riot at the Capitol — was “1,000 percent worse.”
Indeed, when it comes to melodrama, histrionics, and exploitation of fear levels from the 1/6 riot, there has never been any apparent limit. And today — the one-year anniversary of that three-hour riot — there is no apparent end in sight. Too many political and media elites are far too vested in this maximalist narrative for them to relinquish it voluntarily.
Snip.
That the January 6 riot was some sort of serious attempted insurrection or “coup” was laughable from the start, and has become even more preposterous with the passage of time and the emergence of more facts. The United States is the most armed, militarized and powerful regime in the history of humanity. The idea that a thousand or so Trump supporters, largely composed of Gen X and Boomers, who had been locked in their homes during a pandemic — three of whom were so physically infirm that they dropped dead from the stress — posed anything approaching a serious threat to “overthrow” the federal government of the United States of America is such a self-evidently ludicrous assertion that any healthy political culture would instantly expel someone suggesting it with a straight face.
Snip.
Far too many centers of political and economic power benefit from an exaggerated and even false narrative about January 6 to expect it ever to end.
The Democratic Party, eager to cling to their majoritarian control of the White House and both houses of Congress, knows it has no political program that is appealing and thus hopes that this concocted drama will help them win — just as they foolishly believed about Russiagate. With the threat of Al Qaeda and ISIS faded if not gone, and the attempt to scare Americans over Putin a failure, the U.S. security state, always in need of a scary enemy, has settled on the claim that right-wing “domestic extremists” are the greatest threat to U.S national security; though they claimed this before 1/6, casting 1/6 as an insurrection allows them to classify an entire domestic political movement as an insurrectionary criminal group and thus justify greater spying powers and budgetary authorities.
CNN proudly announced that the most-watched day in the history of their network was 1/6. The dirty little secret of the liberal wing of the corporate media is that nobody benefited more from the Trump campaign, his presidency and its aftermath than they, and they are desperate to rejuvenate it and re-discover that glory. Meanwhile, coddled journalists who have never broken meaningful stories have finally found a way to claim that they stared down dangerous and risky situations — as if they spent years in the middle of an active war zone or were persecuted and prosecuted by a corrupt and authoritarian state for their intrepid reporting — and have converted Brian Stelter’s CNN show into a virtual therapists’s couch where they all get to go and talk about how they are still coping with the deep trauma of spending a few hours in the Capitol last year.
The pettiness and absurdity of this Democrat/media narrative, laughable as it often is, does not mean it is free of danger. Asserting that the U.S. suffered an attempted coup by a still-vibrant armed faction of insurrectionists is a self-evidently inflammatory claim. It has been used to allocate billions more to the Capitol Police and to radically expand their powers; justify the increased domestic use of FBI tactics including monitoring and infiltration; and agitate for the mass imprisonment of political adversaries, including elected members of Congress. Hapless defendants who are not even accused of using violence have been held in harsh solitary confinement for close to a year, then sentenced to years in prison — while self-styled criminal justice reform advocates say nothing or, even worse, cheer. If one genuinely believes that the U.S. came close to a violent overthrow of American democracy and still faces the risk of an insurrection, then it is rational to sanction radical acts by the U.S. security state that, in more peaceful and normal times, would be unthinkable.
A few years ago, the editor-in-chief of The Hollywood Reporter pitched a story to the newsroom. He had just come back from lunch with a well-known agent, who had suggested the paper take a look at the unintended consequences of Hollywood’s efforts to diversify. Those white men who had spent decades writing scripts—which had been turned into blockbuster movies and hit television shows—were no longer getting hired.
The newsroom blew up. The reporters, especially the younger ones, mocked the idea that white men were on the outs. The editor-in-chief, normally self-assured, immediately backtracked. He looked rattled.
Snipped.
So, in September 2020, the Academy launched its Representation and Inclusion Standards Entry platform (or RAISE). For a movie to qualify for Best Picture, producers not only had to register detailed personal information about everyone involved in the making of that movie, but the movie had to meet two of the Academy’s four diversity standards—touching on everything from on-screen representation to creative leadership. (An Academy spokesperson said “only select staff” would have access to data collected on the platform.)
The Academy explained that movies failing to meet these standards would not be barred from qualifying for Best Picture until 2024. But producers are already complying: In 2020, data from 366 productions were submitted to the platform.
Meanwhile, CBS mandated that writers’ rooms be at least 40 percent black, indigenous and people of color (or BIPOC) for the 2021-2022 broadcast season and 50 percent for the 2022-2023 season. ABC Entertainment issued a detailed series of “inclusion standards.” (“I guarantee you every studio has something like that,” a longtime writer and director said.)
Snip.
The old-timers accustomed to being on the inside—and the (non-BIPOC) up-and-comers afraid they’d never get there—were one-part confused, one-part angry, and 10,000-parts scared.
“Everyone has gone so underground with their true feelings about things,” said Mike White, the writer and director behind the hit HBO comedy-drama “The White Lotus.” “If you voice things in a certain way it can really have negative repercussions for you, and people can presume that you could be racist, or you could be seen as misogynist.”
Howard Koch, who has been involved in the production of more than 60 movies, including such classics as “Chinatown” and “Marathon Man,” and is the former president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, said: “I’m all for LGBT and Native Americans, blacks, females, whatever minorities that have not been served correctly in the making of content, whether it’s television or movies or whatever, but I think it’s gone too far. I know a lot of very talented people that can’t get work because they’re not black, Native American, female or LGBTQ.”
Another writer, who, like most of the writers we interviewed, was afraid to speak openly for fear of never working again, said: “I get so paranoid about even phone calls. It’s so scary. My close friends and my family are just like, ‘Don’t say anything.’ It is one of those things, ‘Will I be able to sleep at night if I say anything?’ Getting jobs in this town is so hard, and I’m very grateful to have a great job. If there’s any so-called ding on my record, that would just be an argument against hiring me.”
It is, said Sam Wasson, the author of “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood,” not so different from the McCarthy era, when everyone in Hollywood professed to believe something that they thought everyone outside Hollywood—the country, their audience—believed. “Hollywood was never anti-Communist,” Wasson said. “It just pretended to be. In fact, Hollywood was never anti- or pro- anything. It was show business. There’s no morality here.”
That amorality, coupled with a finely tuned sense of what the audience is hungry for, what’s trending, has left Hollywood more susceptible to the vagaries of the culture war.
“Now, they’ll just say, ‘Sorry, diversity quotas. We’re just not allowed to hire you,’” said a 48-year-old white, male comedy writer who was recently dropped by his agent.
Sounds like an opportunity to hire great talent on the cheap from someone outside the club. If only someone had the balls…
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sues Planned Parenthood:
Planned Parenthood took advantage of Texans, violated medical standards, & lied. While they’re no longer a TX Medicaid provider, they still collected millions for their bloody biz.
I’m suing to get that wrongly-syphoned money back for Texans and stand for life. pic.twitter.com/jcI5rmWAHb
For your 2024 “change” presidential candidate, would you believe none other than Grandma Death herself? If she actually gets the nomination, then we’ll know we’re living in the simulation…
What you do see are the fruits of the conquest. The admixture of confident aggression, roll-the-dice settlement, and entrepreneurial genius manifests itself with the first wells you see. The Permian is rich, a treasure-house stored up across one hundred million years, and the wells are everywhere. They appear, solitary or in pairs, and as you proceed westward they multiply. There is a particular mesa with a sharp escarpment on its south face, and every time I see it I marvel at the wells perched on its nearly vertical incline. There is new exploration and investment, too. The Permian has been exploited for nearly a century, but its yield is nowhere close to exhaustion. Yesterday, and the day before, I witnessed tremendous convoys — men, trucks, equipment — sallying forth to new wells in the creation. There is a cotton field with wells on it: acreage that produces everything America needs to keep warm. In Midland itself, there is a golf course with a well on it. There are roadside shoulders with wells on them. There are wells everywhere. Midland-Odessa works: they raise families and hell alike, and power the continent.
All of this is set in the Llano Estacado, a region of Texas ordinarily hostile to life and settlement. Most of Texas outside the verdant east is hostile to life and settlement to some degree. The Llano Estacado, though, is nearly the hardest far place there is, exceeded only by the despoblado and desert of the trans-Pecos. The land is hard. The weather is hard. The enterprise is hard too. The oil-and-gas business makes some men rich, ruins more, and perennially frustrates still more. There are the handful of energy giants around the world — the ExxonMobils, the Shells, and the handful of other names you see on gas stations and giant tankers — but that isn’t who you see in the Permian. It isn’t who you see on the road to Midland. What you see are names and signs of firms that you don’t recognize, and wouldn’t unless this was your professional world. Some are well established. Others are just starting out. All of them are the names of dreams and gambles: ideas made real but not necessarily lasting, leaps without nets. There is something admirable to it.
Spend time in Midland (and, if you’re raising hell, in Odessa) and you realize you’re seeing a way of life that is increasingly rare. It is a place where nearly everyone is working. I don’t mean sitting at a desk. I mean labor as it was once understood, things done with the hands, wearying the body, with the end product being something you could see, touch, feel. It is a single-industry town, yes, but that industry is in the business of real material creation. In our fathers’ time, we could say that about most of America. Now it it characterizes only a small proportion of our national life. Something is lost along with it. You see Midland, a town where the taquerias and coffee shops open at 3:30am, at 4am, at 5am to accommodate what passes for rush hour there — and you see a town that is too hard at work to ever indulge in the luxury of anxiety. Places where people hit the alarm at 6am, at 7am, spend an hour on a crawling commute, spend eight hours motionless in a cube, and then repeat: that’s where alienation and disconnect occur. That’s where the civic neuroses take root and blossom. That’s where we spawn the psychic illnesses peculiar to people who are physically safe and have in their whole lives risked nothing.
Read the whole thing.
Heh:
Joe Biden's presidency has fallen and it can't get up.
Things that make you go “Hmmm.” Namely Austin police finding two submerged bodies in three days…
So you want to become a warlord! Here are some handy tips on ruling your patch of the post-apocalyptic wasteland! (Though sadly, there seems to be very little information on obtaining chrome face spray after the apocalypse…)
They are artifacts that have locked into them so many messages about the aspirations, hopes, needs, and restrictions of their time. They were incredibly expensive things, and they were used as opportunities to demonstrate something about yourself, to say something about yourself to the world…[The best art is] always composed within some sort of restraints. There’s always a limit to how far you can go, and it’s within those limitations that i think human ingenuity does best.
I think this is true, and I think that the restraints and limits of various art forms are what help bring out their greatness.
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Chaos at the border and buying American military tech to oppose China are two of the themes this week:
8,000 illegal aliens await processing underneath the Del Rio bridge on the U.S./Mexican border.
Here’s a drone shot:
BREAKING: Our drone is back over the international bridge in Del Rio, TX. Per source, the number of migrants waiting to be processed has now swelled to approx 8,200. It was 4,000 yesterday AM. Doubled in one day. BP overwhelmed, & I’m told situation is “out of control” @FoxNewspic.twitter.com/ThJJJ0JWCT
Those illegal aliens are there because Democrats and the Biden Administration want them there, so they can turn those illegal aliens into Democratic Party voters via amnesty.
So damaging is that drone footage that the FAA has closed airspace over the bridge to prevent it:
NEW: We’ve learned that the FAA just implemented a two week TFR (Temporary Flight Restrictions) over the international bridge in Del Rio, TX, meaning we can no longer fly our FOX drone over it to show images of the thousands of migrants. FAA says “special security reason”. pic.twitter.com/aJrjAPO2Pz
This effort is just one part of a new partnership between the three countries, dubbed AUKUS, which is short for Australia-United Kingdom-United States, that also includes cooperation in other areas, including long-range strike capabilities, cyber warfare, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. President Biden said AUKUS would help all three countries work more closely together to help ensure peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region in the long-term.
On the whole, this is probably a good move to counter China, and I hear that Canberra was the driving force behind the agreement. All that said, the United States was already in formal alliances with the UK and Australia through other treaties, so it’s not anything like a tectonic shift.
Another sign of the new alliance: The UK is going to station new vessels in the Indo-Pacific. [Senior Royal Navy admiral Tony Radakin] “said that the Taiwan Strait is clearly ‘part of the free and open Indo-Pacific.'”
Naturally France pitched a snit fit over the deal because Australia cancelled a contract with French shipbuilder Naval Group. “This brutal, unilateral and unpredictable decision reminds me a lot of what Mr Trump used to do,” Le Drian told franceinfo radio. “I am angry and bitter. This isn’t done between allies.” Cry some more, Jean-Claude. But it isn’t like France was ever going to come to Australia’s aid in a dust-up with China, so the deal makes sense as drawing Australia closer to the regions remaining nuclear naval powers. (Russia can barely keep its own navy running these days.)
Speaking of possible China opponents buying American technology, Japan is buying more F-35s.
John Durham finally files an indictment over the Russian collusion hoax investigation. “Special counsel John Durham reportedly seeks a grand jury indictment against Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer at a Democratic-allied law firm closely linked to British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier.” That firm, of course, would be Perkins Coie, who you may remember from regular appearances in the Clinton corruption updates.
The Democrats of Texas have long, as in 30 years or more, believed that the Hispanic vote would eventually hand them total control of Texas forever. They believe they need not adjust their policies on faith, family, life, the Second Amendment, taxes — anything — because the party brand itself was enough. If it wasn’t, then they would resort to bullying. They could go all the way left to Wendy Davis and Karl Marx if they wanted to — and they have — and the Hispanic vote would save them.
But a funny thing happened along the way. People like state Rep. Aaron Peña switched parties on principle and others followed them. And more are following them. His daughter, Adrienne Peña-Garza, is quoted in this Texas Monthly story regarding how the Democrats operate when it comes to independent-minded folks like her father and herself.
Peña-Garza, the Hidalgo County Republican chair, said Hispanic South Texans, who have long been conservative, “have become liberated” to vote on their long-held beliefs. “People have been bullied into voting Democrat. If you got involved [in conservative politics], people said, ‘I’m not going to give you this contract; I’m not going to give you this job.’ But I think the bullying has backfired. People are more empowered and courageous.”
When I was reporting on border issues in Hidalgo County during my first stint with PJ Media, I’d hear about the bullying she mentions but it wasn’t provable. Rampant and endemic, but hidden with no paper trails. Tejanos and Tejanas started standing up to it a decade ago, some by running for office, others by working courageously together underground and actually going after some of the political criminality. People noticed. Groups like Hispanic Republicans of Texas and the Conservative Hispanic Society rose up to answer the call outside any party structure. One of the most popular and successful talk radio hosts in the Lone Star State is my friend Chris Salcedo, the “liberty-loving Latino.” The conservative juggernaut is heard expounding on the joys of freedom and how Democrats would take it away on the air every day in Houston and Dallas and nationally on NewsmaxTV.
People are noticing how embarrassingly paternalistic and out-of-touch the Democrats are when it comes to South Texas. They really don’t know Texas at all and haven’t bothered to understand.
Snip.
That’s because they’re not immigrants. Treating them as immigrants cancels their ancestors and their heritage. Tejanos have been in Texas for generations, from the time when it was part of the Spanish Empire. Badly misunderstood and under-reported is the fact that Tejanos are and have been part of the culture of Texas long before we Anglos showed up. By the time my ancestors arrived in Texas in the 1850s and 1860s, Tejanos had been building Texas for more than a century. They’re not immigrants in any sense of the word. They’re Texans and American citizens. They resisted elitist dictator Santa Anna, fought at the Alamo and San Jacinto, they’ve served in every major war defending the United States, they’ve won Medals of Honor and have state veterans homes named after them — and their communities are the most directly affected by the chaos that out-of-state Democrats tend to unleash on the border. They serve in the Border Patrol and the Coast Guard, and they work in the oil fields and own thriving businesses. Coyotes, cartels, drugs, and trafficking all affect Tejano communities first, while the rich Democrats who party at the Met are unaffected personally and weaponize the border as a racial cudgel. RGV citizens are not happy about that and they know whom to blame.
Gov. Greg Abbott visited Houston on Monday to sign new legislation he said would directly address lenient bail practices and rising crime in Harris County.
“Lives are being lost because the criminal justice system in Harris County is not working the way it should,” said Abbott.
Known as the Damon Allen Act, Senate Bill (SB) 6 is named after a state trooper who was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop on Thanksgiving Day 2017. Despite having a history of assaulting a law enforcement officer, the shooter was out on a $15,000 felony bond at the time of the murder.
Allen’s widow, Casey Allen, who has become an advocate for the reforms implemented by SB 6, joined Abbott at the Safer Houston Emergency Summit held by a coalition of ministry groups.
Noting that her husband had been killed by a “violent, repeat offender,” Mrs. Allen added, “The murderer still went to jail, and my life and my kids’ lives were forever changed by actions that can’t be taken back.”
The new law will create an online public safety report for judges and magistrates to access more complete information about a suspect’s criminal history before setting bail. In addition, SB 6 requires additional training for judges and magistrates, and prohibits the release of certain violent suspects or repeat suspects on personal recognizance (PR) bonds.
“Same FBI That Chased Russia Collusion Hoax for Years Covered Up Sexual Abuse of USA Gymnasts.” Why did James Comey’s FBI fail to investigate charges against Larry Nassar?
Now that the Biden EPA has rolled back the conflict-of-interest standards imposed by the Trump EPA on the agency’s outside scientific peer review panels, it has gone back to its old practice of stocking its peer review boards with agency research grant-recipient cronies who can be counted on to rubber-stamp whatever EPA wants to do. The Biden EPA most recently announced the particulate matter (PM) subpanel for the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC). As per below, 17 of the 22 members are current and/or former EPA grantees. The amounts associated with them as principal investigators are shown. Note the largest grantee (Lianne Sheppard, recipient of $60,032,782 in EPA grants) is, naturally, the chairman. Sheppard is also the chairman of the main CASAC panel as well as a member of EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB), a separate outside review panel. The Biden EPA needs a reliable multi-purpose rubber-stamper and that is Sheppard, an activist who sued the Trump EPA because it instituted conflict of interest rules under which she was ineligible to rubber-stamp agency wishes.
Here’s a UK funeral director who claims all the Flu Manchu deaths he’s seeing now are from vaccinations:
Take this with a grain of salt and in the interest of gathering data points.
What. The. Hell. “Apple threatened to kick Facebook off its App Store after a 2019 BBC report detailed how human traffickers were using Facebook to sell victims.” What’s a little sexual slavery compared to all those likes?
Busted!
It appears as though @LanceNBCSD, the assignment editor for the San Diego NBC affiliate, forgot to switch to his anti-Trump burner account… pic.twitter.com/XfAAQX31Ex
Investigators call into hospital asking for the name of the people featured in a news broadcast only to find out they weren't admitted to the hospital!
(@ImMeme0) 
– Criistodelasredes IG 
(@mamabear0521) 
Mask mandate
Masks optional (<5% masking)
(@JamesMelville) 
(@BonaFideLoDuv) 