Government leftists at USAID call to break the law to cover their tracks, DOGE uncovers still more outrageous examples of government waste, Democratic bagman john Podesta showered billions on newly created NGOs, billions in LA homeless funds are unaccounted for, Syrian jihadis slaughter civilians, more pedo teachers get caught, lobbyists rake in big bucks, and the heart-stopping thrills of a man…baking.
A senior USAID official on Tuesday ordered the agency’s remaining staff to report to their now-former headquarters in Washington DC for an “all day” group effort to destroy documents, many of which contain sensitive information, Politico reports.
The materials marked for destruction include “classified safes and personnel documents” at the Ronald Reagan Building, according to an email sent by USAID’s acting executive director, Erica Carr.
“Shred as many documents first, and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break,” read the email instructing staff to label the burn bags with “SECRET” and “USAID/B/IO” (which stands for “bureau or independent office”) in dark sharpie.
Again, how is this not breaking the The Federal Records Act and other laws against destroying evidence?
Legal Insurrection readers may recall that late last year, Brent Efron, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) special advisor implementing Biden’s climate agenda, made many controversial statements during an undercover video about the agency’s actions in anticipation of a potential Trump administration.
Efron reportedly told Project Veritas that the EPA was rapidly distributing billions of dollars in grants to nonprofits as an “insurance policy” against Trump winning the election. He described the situation as “throwing gold bars off the Titanic,” referring to the urgency with which the agency allocates funds.
Now the Trump Administration has followed those gold bars. An exclusive report by the New York Post indicates the trail of those bars led back to Deep State Obama/Biden minion, John Podesta.
The story began in September 2022, when Biden named Podesta to helm the $375 billion climate fund, which resulted from the Inflation Reduction Act, a 2022 law that was basically “Green New Deal” poison hidden beneath a wrapper of sweet economic promises.
Here is how The New York Times announced the 2022 fund creation:
As a senior adviser to Mr. Biden on clean energy innovation, Mr. Podesta will shape how the government disburses billions of dollars in tax credits and incentives to industries that are developing wind and solar energy, as well as to consumers who want to install solar panels, heat and cool their homes with electric heat pumps or buy electric vehicles.
..In an interview, Mr. Podesta described his new job as “throwing the weight of federal government policy behind a cycle of investment and innovation that we haven’t seen before in the United States, and that is almost unique in the world.”
There was absolutely no questioning by The New York Times as to where these monies would go, or how the funds would be used to help either our climate or energy industry.
On the other hand, the New York Post has a map of the gold bar trail. Apparently, billions went to “Non-Governmental Organizations” that were founded after the fund was created.
The Biden administration funneled at least $20 billion dollars into environmental groups, most of which had only recently been founded, The Post has discovered.
In one case, former Vice President Kamala Harris handed over a check for nearly $7 billion to Bethesda, Maryland, based group Climate United Fund, which does not appear in the IRS’s charities database, and has no federal filings.
The non-profit fund had only been incorporated in Delaware on November 30, 2023, according to public records, five months before Harris handed over the cash in April 2024.
The Climate United Fund then announced “the historic investment” in a press release, noting the group’s work “delivers benefits like cleaner air…and increased energy security.”’
However, because the company is so new, there is no publicly published accounting of how it plans to spend the $7 billion.
Climate Fund, which received nearly $7 billion in Biden Climate Gold, was just one of eight similarly set-up entities. Others are:
Coalition for Green Capital: Received $5 billion
Power Forward Communities: Received $2 billion
Opportunity Finance Network: Received $2.29 billion
Inclusiv: Received $1.87 billion
Justice Climate Fund: Received $940 million
Appalachian Community Capital: Received $500 million
“Exposed: Secret Pact Between 14 Blue States, Left-Wing Groups, and NYC Law Firms.”
Well, well, well. It’s hardly a surprise to discover that the wave of lawsuits against Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is no coincidence. The Oversight Project at the Heritage Foundation has obtained a copy of a secret agreement outlining a coordinated legal offensive—an alliance between 14 blue states, left-wing activist groups, and prominent NYC law firms—all targeting DOGE and Musk himself.
What is surprising, however, is that they actually formalized their nefarious intentions.
Signed less than a month after DOGE began operations, this agreement is yet another example of the Democrats’ “whatever it takes” brand of political warfare.
The document begins:
This Common Interest Agreement (“Agreement) is made and entered into by and between the States of New Mexico, Arizona, Michigan, Califomia [sic], Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington and State Democracy Defenders Fund (the “Parties”). The Parties have agreed that they have a common interest in developing legal strategies to challenge the creation and actions of the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE) and the actions of Elon Musk as a special government employee and a common interest in existing or future investigative, regulatory, administrative, and judicial actions or inactions, including but not limited to any administrative or judicial proceedings related to or arising from those legal strategies (“Matters of Common Interest”).
“The Democrats are on the wrong end of an 80-20 issue, fighting tooth and nail to block a federal government audit that has already uncovered more than $105 billion in fraud, waste, and abuse. A recent Harvard/Harris poll shows that 76% of voters support DOGE’s efforts, yet Democrats—whose job is to represent the interests of their constituents—have gone to extraordinary lengths to obstruct it, even putting their opposition in writing.”
1. Billions in “Dark Money” Outpacing Political Parties
Arabella’s network raised $2.4 billion in the 2020 election cycle, dwarfing the combined fundraising of the Democratic and Republican National Committees. This tax-exempt cash, hidden from public scrutiny, fueled anti-Trump campaigns and progressive agendas, all while average Americans had no clue their tax system enabled it. It’s a shadow operation that makes traditional political spending look like pocket change.
2. Fake Grassroots “Pop-Ups” Everywhere
The Sixteen Thirty Fund, an Arabella spoke, spins up temporary “pop-up” groups like Floridians for a Fair Shake or Opportunity Wisconsin, which vanish after their mission—say, attacking a senator or pushing a ballot measure—is done. These tax-exempt fronts, funded by anonymous donors, masquerade as local movements while redirecting millions to sway elections, leaving taxpayers blind to the manipulation. It’s a conveyor belt of synthetic activism, exploiting 501(c) loopholes.
3. Funding Supreme Court Protests
Demand Justice, birthed by the Sixteen Thirty Fund, spent millions opposing Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation, complete with costumed activists and aggressive ad blitzes. This tax-exempt war chest didn’t just influence public opinion—it tried to bully the judiciary, all subsidized by a tax code Americans fund. Most folks never connected the dots to Arabella’s puppet strings behind the chaos.
4. Zuck Bucks’ Election Meddling
Arabella’s New Venture Fund funneled $25 million to the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which then got $350 million from Mark Zuckerberg to “administer” 2020 elections—read: juice Democratic turnout in swing states. Tax-exempt dollars turned local election offices into partisan tools, and the public was none the wiser about this backdoor power grab. It’s a masterclass in using charity status to rig the game.
5. Foreign Billionaires Pulling Levers
Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss has pumped at least $208 million into the Sixteen Thirty Fund since 2016, exploiting tax laws that let foreigners bankroll U.S. political causes through “dark pools.” This foreign cash—untouchable by direct campaign finance rules—shapes American policy, yet taxpayers footing the system’s bill don’t even know his name. It’s a loophole so big you could drive a Swiss bank vault through it.
he report painted a grim picture of Los Angeles’ homeless program managed by Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), which was established in 1993.
“Repetitive information gaps, coupled with a lack of accurate and complete data and documentation, posed significant obstacles to this assessment,” the report states.
“Insufficient financial accountability led to an inability to trace substantial funds allocated to the City Programs. Fragmented data systems across LAHSA, the City, and the County and inconsistent reporting formats made it challenging to verify spending and the number of beds or units reported by the City and LAHSA, track participant outcomes, and align financial data with performance metrics.”
The report also cites a paucity of uniform data standards and real-time oversight, which limited the ability of the auditor to fully assess the true impact of homeless programs and raised concerns of resource misallocation.
A&M found that key stakeholders failed to monitor homelessness programs, and that LAHSA was unable to identify relevant service provider contracts and expenses. It also found gaps in documentation.
Of course there are gaps in documentation. That’s to hide the graft disappearing into leftwing pockets…
Crimea, Sevastopol, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Luhansk — these are regions of Russia. They are written into the constitution. This is a given fact,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. That amounts to one-fifth of Ukraine’s legitimate, internationally recognized pre-war territory. Putin demands that Ukraine permanently renounce any claim to these territories.
Ukraine must disarm itself of any NATO weapons. Of course, the top suppliers of the Ukrainian military are the United States with $69.7 billion worth of weapons systems and ammunition since the start of the war, Germany with $13.7 billion worth, the United Kingdom at $10.8 billion worth, Denmark at $8.1 billion worth, Sweden at $5.1 billion worth, Poland at $3.9 billion worth, France at $3.8 billion worth, and Canada at $2.8 billion worth. (All figures from the Kiel Institute’s Ukraine support tracker, converted from Euros to dollars, and as of December 31, 2024.) All those countries are NATO members, and thus, under the Russian demands, Ukraine would have to give up all weapons systems received from those countries. This amounts to a unilateral disarming of the Ukrainian military, in exchange for a promise from a former KGB lieutenant colonel that he will not start the war again.
Putin also demanded that Ukraine cap its military size. Previously, Putin had demanded Ukraine limit the size of its army to 50,000 troops. As of January, the Ukrainian army is 880,000 troops, meaning that Russia wants the Ukrainian army to be reduced to less than 6 percent of its current size.
According to CNN, “Putin also suggested that Ukraine halt mobilization and any training of its troops, and that other nations stop supplying weapons to Kyiv during the ceasefire.” Halt any training of troops.
Putin insisted no foreign peacekeepers can enter Ukrainian territory.
Ukraine must abandon the idea of NATO membership. While the Trump administration had already made this concession before negotiations began, note that Putin is establishing a system where he gets a veto over which countries NATO can accept.
The U.S. must return six diplomatic compounds that Russia contends were seized illegally by the United States between 2016 and 2018.
All Western economic sanctions upon Russia are illegal and must be lifted.
Bob [Robert B.] Laughlin, who’s a physics professor at Stanford, he got a Nobel Prize in Physics 1998. And he suffered from the extreme delusion that once he got a Nobel Prize in Physics, he’d be free to look at anything he wanted to. And the area of science that he went after was: he was convinced that most scientists, even at a place like Stanford, weren’t really doing very much work, weren’t doing very much science, were stealing money from taxpayers…This was a more this was a more taboo question, more taboo topic, than just going narrowly after climate science, or, you know, or any of these things. And obviously, he got promptly defunded and his grad students couldn’t get PhDs anymore. [My] sort of hermeneutic of suspicion is that if there’s a topic you can’t discuss, if there ideas you aren’t allowed to articulate, my shortcut is they’re just true.
Remember all the way back in 1986, when the New York Times blithely asserted as fact that evangelicals are “more easily led than other kinds of voters?” Well, just last we they asserted that “a majority of gun owners are white, conservative, male and from rural areas.” The first three are probably true, and the fourth definitely not, and no one who was even passingly familiar with gun culture would make that mistake…
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz pinned the massacre on the country’s new leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the leader of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) terrorist group, which was an offshoot of Al-Qaeda and was close to ISIS.
“Al-Julani took off his [robe], put on a suit, and presented a moderate facade,” Katz wrote in a post on X that included a video of scores of people who had been massacred. “Now, he has removed the mask, revealing his true face: a jihadist terrorist from the Al-Qaeda school, committing atrocities against the Alawite civilian population.”
Murdering members of other religions is never far from the average jihadi mind.
Just a day after the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) had seized Damascus, and Bashar Assad had fled to Moscow, Assad’s army crumbled into dust, with soldiers ripping off their uniforms so as to avoid being killed by vengeful, and now triumphant, rebels. Those soldiers left largely unattended huge quantities of weaponry. The IDF seized the occasion to improve its defensive posture against Syria. There was a brief window of just a few days, between the fall of Assad and the regime in Damascus stabilizing and taking control of those abandoned weapons, during which the IDF did two things. First, it moved Israeli soldiers into Syria, where they established two new military outposts, one on the Syrian side of Mt. Hermon, and one extending further into Syria from the pre-existing buffer zone separating Israeli and Syrian troops on the Golan. Now the IDF controls the commanding heights that extend into Syria; the Israelis have a clear unimpeded view of Damascus — now literally in their sights — far below.
The second undertaking, which began just as soon as Assad had left for Russia, was the IDF’s systematic destruction of the Syrian army’s weaponry. The Israelis knew exactly where the weapons were located; they had long been preparing for a possible war against Assad, and had their target bank ready.
The IDF announced on December 10 that its air force and navy had conducted over 480 strikes in Syria in the span of 48 hours, 350 of which targeted airfields, anti-aircraft batteries, missiles, drones, fighter jets, tanks, and weapon production sites, destroying between 70% and 80% of Syria’s strategic weapons. It also sank Syria’s navy. And there was nothing that Ahmed al-Sharaa and the men of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham could do about it. Now Israel has not only made itself much safer, having removed Syria as a viable military threat to the Jewish state, but also has “demilitarized” the Jihadists in Damascus.
We have just seen that after al-Sharaa’s repeated promise that Syria’s minorities had nothing to worry about, decently, the jihadist “security services” — as they call themselves — entered Latakia to capture or kill Alawite members of Assad’s army. They were apparently ambushed by Alawite veterans of Assad’s army, and suffered a loss of 125 men. At that point, they decided to take revenge on the civilian population, killing more than 1,000 Alawite civilians — some reports claim up to 4,000 civilians have now been killed, and they also have been killing Christians — mostly Greek Orthodox but including some Melkites — because, of course, that’s what jihadists like to do. More than a thousand civilians, possibly as many as 4,000 according to some Alawite sources, have been killed in the space of two days.
The Texas Association of School Boards is a lobbying organization that is funded almost exclusively by Texas taxpayer dollars through school district dues.
According to TASB’s most recent 990 form, at least 16 of its employees make more than the governor of Texas, who earns just over $153,000 each year.
TASB paid a combined total of $927,644 to just two of its employees during fiscal year 2023.
Executive Director Dan Troxell was paid $412,101 in direct compensation by TASB. Another $64,154 is listed as “other compensation from the organization and related organizations.”
Similarly, TASB paid First Public Managing Director William Mastrodicasa $351,224 in direct reportable income. He was also paid an additional $100,165.
Nice work, if you can get it…
Mess with the bull, get the horns. “Trump admin cancels $400 million in grants to Columbia University.” How’s that pro-Hamas antisemitism working out for you?
“US House Members Push for Ban on Student Visas for Chinese Nationals.” “U.S. Rep. Riley Moore (R-WV) is spearheading the push to secure higher education institutions against espionage and intellectual theft.” I’m sure universities will panic over having to give up all that sweet commie dough…
“X Takes Down Network Of Chinese Accounts Amplifying NYT Attacks On Dissident Arts Group. The accounts, which exhibited inauthentic activity, had been used to boost articles published by The New York Times that targeted a religious group persecuted in China. One of the articles, a Chinese-language version of an attack piece on Shen Yun Performing Arts, was boosted so much it became the most shared New York Times article on X in more than a year, according to data from BuzzSumo, a social media analytics tool.” The question is, why was the NYT so eager to carry the CCP’s water attacking Falun Gong?
“Texas Awards SpaceX Over $17 Million Grant for Semiconductor R&D.” My opposition to the CHIPS Act has been noted before, but this may be already allocated money that the state is contractually obligated to award. Why would SpaceX need semiconductor research? My guess would be for advances in space radiation hardened (“rad hard”) chips. This was traditionally property of Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) rather than silicon-based chips. GaAs chips are generally orders of magnitude more radiation resistant than consumer grade chips, but GaAs is extremely brittle and difficult to work with, so much so that 6″ (150mm) wafers are the largest size for GaAs, and there still a number of older 4″ (100m) fab lines running GaAs out there. GaAs is such a pain that a lot of different substrates have been explored over the years, but I’m not sure any match GaAs’ extreme rad hard properties.
During a tornado warning, a Florida news station broadcasting the warning is hit by a tornado.
Critical Drinker didn’t care for Micky 17. “We’ll just make it dumb as fuck and hammer home the messaging with as much subtlety as a dump truck full of retarded sledgehammers.”
The Supreme Court lands on both sides of the same case, more fraud uncovered by DOGE, the Russo-Ukrainian War continues despite the White House dustup, Mark Steyn catches a break, and strange cell(block) fellows.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The Supreme Court giveth: “Supreme Court pumps brakes on order forcing Trump to shell out $2B in foreign aid.”
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts pumped the brakes on a lower court order that gave the Trump administration a midnight deadline Wednesday into Thursday to unfreeze $2 billion worth of foreign aid.
Roberts paused the order Wednesday until further notice and gave plaintiffs suing the Trump administration until noon Friday to respond, marking the first time the Supreme Court has dealt with a case involving the president’s push to overhaul the federal government.
The question at hand is the Trump administration’s 90-day freeze on US Agency for International Development spending amid a review to ensure the outlays were aligned with the president’s policies.
District Judge Amir Ali, who was appointed to the bench by former President Joe Biden, temporarily mandated that the funds continue flowing while considering the case.
Plaintiffs argued that the Trump administration did not properly unfreeze all of the money, which led to Ali giving the Trump administration a deadline of 11:59 p.m. Wednesday to fully comply.
And the Supreme Court taketh away. “The Supreme Court has *upheld* a lower court’s order forcing USAID/State to immediately pay ~$2 billion owed to contractors for work they’ve already performed….The court in a 5-4 decision upheld Washington-based U.S. District Judge Amir Ali’s order that had called on the administration to promptly release funding to contractors and recipients of grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department for their past work.”
The US Justice Department revealed Thursday evening that Mexico has begun extraditing dozens of high-level cartel leaders to the US, as President Trump reiterated that 25% tariffs on Mexican goods will take effect next Tuesday.
“The defendants taken into US custody today include leaders and managers of drug cartels recently designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists,” the DoJ wrote in a statement, adding these terrorists are facing charges including racketeering, drug-trafficking, murder, illegal use of firearms, money laundering, and other crimes.
Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office and Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection released this statement: “This morning, 29 people who were deprived of their liberty in different penitentiary centers in the country were transferred to the United States of America, which were required due to their links with criminal organizations for drug trafficking, among other crimes.”
The tariffs are currently on hold. CNN has a list of who was exchanged, including Rafael Caro Quintero, Alder Marin-Sotelo, Andrew Clark, José Ángel Canobbio Inzunza, Norberto Valencia González, José Alberto García Vilano, Evaristo Cruz Sánchez, Miguel and Omar Treviño Morales.
We touched on this in a previous LinkSwarm, but here’s more details on Stacey Abrams EPA-backed multi-billion dollar slush fund.
Three short weeks ago, a newly confirmed Lee Zeldin got to his office at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and hit the broom closet to start sweeping.
Thanks to the previous braggadocious occupants and their already well-documented pre-exit shoveling of cash and grants out the door, he had an inkling there might be plenty of questionable transactions to uncover that hadn’t exactly been notated ‘on the books’ or done ‘by the book’ either.
I mean, what were the odds?
It didn’t take long for Zeldin to find himself a whopper of a honeypot hidden away that made quite a splash when he announced it, particularly as it was tied to an infamous Project Veritas video from December boasting about its very surreptitious creation.
David covered the reveal.
Project Veritas dropped a shocker of a video back in December, in which an EPA manager was bragging that the Biden administration was metaphorically ‘dropping gold bars off the Titanic.’ They were shoving every dime they could out to their NGO buddies so they could harass the Trump administration and continue to suck off the taxpayers’ teat for years to come.
We all know such things happen, but to have it so vividly described was revealing.
Well, Lee Zeldin is retrieving those gold bars, and it turns out to be a lot of them. $20 billion, all sitting in the equivalent of a bank vault.
The massive scale of this scam–which as with so many things is SOP at government agencies–blows your mind. Pushing $20 billion out the door to friends of the administration with little to no financial controls, zero accountability, and lots of malice aforethought is only different in scale and not in kind.
Snip.
…It’s a green slush fund. $20B parked at an outside bank towards the end of the Biden administration, given to just eight NGOs…These NGOs were created for the first time, many of them just to get this money. And their pass-throughs…So the EPA entered into this account control agreement with these entities, Treasury enters into a financial agent agreement with the bank, and they design it to tie the EPA’s hands behind their back -to tie the federal government’s hands behind its back. So when the money goes through the NGOs to subgrantees, many of them also pass-throughs, we don’t know where it’s going. We don’t have the proper amount of oversight. And, as you pointed out, it’s going to people in the Obama and Biden administrations, it’s going to donors. It’s not going directly…to remediate that environmental issue…deliver that clean air…’
This is just some stunning stuff. As Zeldin told the NY Post:
…As Zeldin told The Post: “Of the eight pass-through entities that received funding from the pot of $20 billion in tax dollars, various recipients have shown very little qualification to handle a single dollar, let alone several billions of dollars.”
He’s called for the EPA’s inspector general to investigate; who knows what other rank misuse that might turn up.
Bondi and Patel are already on the case, and I hope someone from Scott Bessent’s Treasury IG thinks they should be as well.
Crawl up their collective butts, the lot of them.
No wonder Democrats continued to treat Abrams like a rock star despite high profile electoral flameouts. She’s evidently a vitally important nexus in their graft distribution schemes. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
At some point, some president was going to have to stop the unsustainable spending and borrowing.
To have any country left, some president would eventually have had to restore a nonexistent border and stop the influx of 3 million illegal aliens a year.
Some commander-in-chief finally would have to try to stop the theater wars abroad.
But any president who dared to do any of that would be damned for curbing the madness that his predecessors fueled.
And so none did—until now.
Not since Franklin Roosevelt’s rapid and mass implementation of the New Deal administrative state have Americans seen such radical changes so quickly as now in Trump’s first month of governance.
Americans are watching a long-awaited counter-revolution to bring the country out of its madness by restoring the common sense of the recent past.
It is easy to run up massive debts and hard to pay them back. Politicians profit by handing out grants and hiring thousands with someone else’s money or creating new programs by growing the debt.
Yet it is unpopular and considered “mean” to spend only what you have and to create a lean, competent workforce.
1776, not 1619, is the foundational date of America.
Biological men should not manipulate their greater size and strength to undermine the hard-won accomplishment of women athletes.
Affordable fossil fuels, when used wisely, are still essential to modern prosperity.
American education must remain empirical and inductive, not regress into indoctrination and deduction. If college campuses no longer abide by the Bill of Rights, then perhaps they should pay taxes on income from their endowments and guarantee their own student loans.
If American citizens are arrested and arraigned for violent assaults, destroying property, and resisting arrest, then surely foreign students who break the laws of their hosts should be held to the same account—and if guilty, go home.
Tribalism and racialism, and government spoils allotted by superficial appearances, are the marks of a pre-civilized society. Such racialism leads only to endless factions and discord.
It is easy to destroy a border, and hard to reconstruct it. And it was not Trump who invited in 12 million unaudited illegal aliens, a half million of them criminals.
Who is the real culprit in the Defense Department—the new secretary with the hard task of restoring the idea among depleted ranks that our race, religion, and gender are incidental, not essential, to defeating the enemy and ensuring our national security?
Is it really wise to divert money from needed combat units and weapons to indoctrinate recruits with social and cultural agendas that do not enhance, but likely undermine, our national defenses?
Who is the real callous actor—Elon Musk, who is trying to prevent the country from insolvency by eliminating fraud and waste, or those who bloated the bureaucracy in the first place with jobs and subsidies for their constituents, friends, clients, and fellow ideologues?
No one likes to fire FBI agents.
That certainly is an unpleasant job for the new FBI Director, Kash Patel.
But again, who are the true culprits who so cavalierly turned a hallowed agenda into a weaponized tool to warp elections, harass political enemies, lie under oath, surveil parents at school board meetings, doctor court documents, and protect insider friends?
Massive borrowing is an opiate addiction that needs shock treatment, not more deficits to break the habit. An unchecked administrative state becomes an organic organism that exists only to grow larger, more powerful, and more resistant to any who seek to curb it.
“DOGE reveals most savings at Dept. of Education with nearly $1B cut. DOGE claims to have saved the most money at the U.S. Department of Education out of any government agency through cuts in wasteful spending. DOGE launched an ‘Agency Efficiency Leaderboard’ that ranks government agencies based on how much wasteful funding has been cut, and the Dept. of Education is ranked in first place.”
Campus Reform reported that DOGE has canceled nearly $900 million in contracts and training grants at the Department of Education.
This includes “over $600 million in grants to institutions and nonprofits that were using taxpayer funds to train teachers and education agencies on divisive ideologies” such as critical race theory (CRT) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), according to a press release from the department.
“Diversity” had already been around for many years, its hustler scratching at the university door. Not actual diversity, mind you, but the skin-deep diversity of noxious racialism tarted-up with fake Enlightenment discourse. This concept of “diversity, equity, inclusion” quickly metastasized until it was everywhere, and this was no accident. It was a bureaucratic initiative designed to anchor a new raft of social justice programs as an inescapable presence on the campus.
It was no accident that it was violence and the threat of violence that opened the door for this effervescence of DEI. It sounded absurd. I knew it was absurd; I knew it was a con. Most people likely knew it was a con but then most people on the campuses also knew to keep their mouths shut in a time of hair-trigger tempers and performative chaos unleashed by well-funded activist groups. No college administration wanted the summer violence of 2020 overflowing onto the campuses. And so they opened the university to barbarian ideas rather than the barbarians themselves.
This was the madness of crowds brought en masse onto the campuses, and it was wildly successful. It achieved this success with a superb combination of psychological factors—relentless hustling, a primitive ideology suffused with mysticism and “indigenous knowledges,” and the barely concealed violent urges of quasi-communist and terroristic revolutionaries. All of this shielded from criticism and even the mildest of questioning.
You knew something was terribly wrong with it.
Anyone on a college campus subjected to the mediocrity of a DEI hustler knew there was something wrong with it.
It was not noble. It was not idealistic. It was not the many wonderful things its proponents said. It was one thing to the public, and it was another altogether when enacted on the campuses. It was weird and alien and hateful at its core, but the public is rarely exposed to any of this. It was the classic Potemkin village offering, with a façade masking a brute, racialist substance.
In other words, it was a con. In fact, it was the biggest Con Story of the 21st century, with America’s universities the biggest suckers imaginable. And the crowning achievement of Western civilization—the modern university—tottered under the assault of mediocrity, racialism, and pseudoscience.
I suppose that folks duped by the big cons will eventually retreat in their embarrassment at having been fooled by one of the shadiest Con Stories ever deployed. Even now, DEI is in retreat. As it plays out in its final act, I assure you that it will dissipate in a flurry of new acronyms and new labels designed to hide its failure.
Its proponents will roll out new slogans to replace the vapid “Diversity is our strength.” Already, “inclusive excellence” is supplanting DEI as this trusty acronym becomes freighted with failure. The Con Story will morph and adapt. Reluctantly. Buzzwords will change, new slogans will be coined, but the underlying ideology will remain the same as it always has. It must serve yeoman’s duty for the Big Con.
A bill came up in the senate to block men from women’s sports and every Democrat voted against it. The social justice hive mind is still controlling the Democrat party.
California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, however, has broke ranks on men playing women’s sports. Sort of. Kinda. “Notice that at no point does Newsom add, ‘And thus, I will be pushing to repeal the 2013 law that gave students the right to participate in sex-segregated programs, activities and facilities based on their self-identification and regardless of their birth gender.’ He feels that those born male participating in women’s sports is unfair, but not quite strongly enough to do anything about it.”
Guaranteed Income scheme once again fails to improve lives of recipients. “Receiving guaranteed income had no impact on the labor supply of full-time workers, but part-time workers had a lower labor market participation by 13 percentage points.” And recipients smoked more. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The first and most important question is whether Russia has lost the war. Wars are fought with an intent formed by an imperative. A prudent leader has to take steps to avoid the worst possible outcome, and Putin, as a prudent leader, prepared for the possibility that NATO would choose to attack Russia. He expressed this fear publicly so the only question was how to block an attack if it occurred. He needed a buffer zone to significantly impede a possible assault.
That buffer was Ukraine, and he on several occasions expressed regret that Ukraine had separated from Russia. The distance from the Ukraine border to Moscow, on highway M3, is only about 300 miles (480 kilometers). Russia’s nightmare was that Germany could surge its way to Moscow. Three hundred miles by a massive force staging a surprise attack is not a huge distance. He rationally needed Ukraine to widen the gap.
I predicted years before the war that Russia would invade Ukraine to regain its buffers. That Russia wanted to take the whole of Ukraine is confirmed in its first forays into the country. The initial assault was a four-pronged attack, one thrust from the east, two from the north and one from the south via Crimea. The two northern prongs were directed at the center of Ukraine and its capital, Kyiv.
Details of the failure of that plan snipped since I covered that as it was happening.
It is clear that the Russians intended to take all of Ukraine. They made minor gains in the east, but their northern penetration failed, as did any attempts to turn westward. It is true that they have gained territory in Ukraine, but it is far from what their initial war plan was designed for. Now their argument is that they never wanted more territory in other parts of the country.
To call this a Russian success is false, and to call a failed war plan a defeat is reasonable. The war was meant to gain a buffer against NATO, and in that, Moscow failed. But it was also intended to be a demonstration that Russia was still a great power. After three years, a major commitment and, by most reports, close to a million dead Russian soldiers, Russia has little more than 20 percent of Ukraine. It also failed to demonstrate the power of the Russian army. Therefore, except for its nuclear capabilities, it is not a military threat or a great power.
The issue now is whether Russia, assuming it agrees to some kind of negotiated settlement, can launch another war. Here it’s important to note that while Putin is powerful, he is not an absolute ruler. He cannot govern Russia the way, say, Stalin did. Under Stalin, Moscow ruled Russia down to the smallest homes in the smallest villages. He ruled not only through military and law enforcement but also through the rank-and-file members of the Communist Party who drew benefits from their membership in return for vigilance. They reported misdeeds, real and imagined, to the internal police, which was controlled by the party, which was controlled by the Politburo, which was controlled by Stalin. Later iterations would be slightly less deadly, but the instruments of oppression were always there.
The collapse of the Soviet Union meant the collapse of the Communist Party. The structure of terror no longer functioned.
Putin’s goal was to resurrect Russia. But with the Communist Party gone, the state structure was also gone. Putin had to find a new base. He had only one source of power: the oligarchs. Between Mikhail Gorbachev and Putin, the party’s assets were sold off to private citizens on the basis of their relationship with the government. The agreement was simple: Putin and his subordinates distributed vast industries and other things of value to the new oligarchs, who pledged to support the regime with money and deference, as well as a network of political and economic relationships that gave them significant influence.
Putin handled the politics — and apparently was well paid. The oligarchs became fabulously wealthy, and for most Russians life improved, as the new arrangement ended the terror and created employment. Disagreement was no longer a capital offense, and the media was comparatively independent and reliable. It was not long before the new private enterprises started entering the global market.
Putin was in charge at first, but in short order power was transferred to the oligarchs who underwrote the regime. They depended on access to European markets for their revenue, and many lived outside of Russia and expected Putin to facilitate trade. But when Putin’s initial invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 failed, many of the most lucrative markets closed their doors to the oligarchs and Western investment cratered. Putin ordered the oligarchs to return to Russia, which many did. However, some of the oligarchs were not happy with their former patron and left Russia permanently, or until the political and economic environment would shift. That this has gone on for three years has created serious problems for them. They wanted the war over and a settlement reached long ago.
Snip.
Putin must end the war and hope for the best. The best way to end a failed war is to declare victory and go home. Putin is declaring victory by saying he got all he wanted. But only Americans believe that. The Russians know they lost. The question is not how Putin will suppress dissent. It is how he will deal with the devils he created, and how the country responds if he doesn’t. A reign of terror might help, but there is no mechanism to carry it out now, and later is too late.
U.S. President Donald Trump knows the game that is playing out. The one who blinks loses. It won’t be Trump. He will take every bit of power and every cent he can from Putin’s weakness. Like a good hedge fund manager, one moment he says he is Putin’s friend, the next moment he will walk away from the deal. Then, after the borrower really starts sweating, he will come back. Trump holds the cards in this business. And he wants some of Putin’s economic and geopolitical power.
What SpaceX is building is more than just a rocket. Starship is a strategic weapon, not as a one-off but as a fleet. A fully reusable heavy-lift system capable of hauling 200 tons per launch per rocket is not just an engineering marvel: it’s a military revolution.
Why? Because a fleet of Starships could land an entire armored division anywhere on Earth in under an hour and keep it supplied in the field.
Just as the speed of tanks revolutionized warfare between the World Wars, this development changes everything. Forget C-17s and cargo ships: you might as well use horses and wagons. A fleet of Starships is not just an incremental improvement in logistics: it’s a fundamental shift in the nature of warfare. The ability to almost instantaneously create and reinforce a whole combat theater anywhere on Earth will give the United States overwhelming power, unlike anything heretofore seen outside of science fiction.
And let me stress: we’re not just talking about the initial deployment. The bigger deal is the resupply. It took six months in 1990-91 for the United States to get its forces in position to invade Kuwait. Maintaining them in the field required a constant stream of slow-moving cargo ships from U.S. ports halfway around the world. A decade later, and for 20 years thereafter, a similar supply chain ran through Karachi, Pakistan, up a rail line, then on truck convoys over the Khyber Pass. Since that was often impractical (there were these pesky Taliban guys about), the military frequently had to rely on the only available alternative, a grueling 36 hours on a C-17 (including layovers). All of this depended on deals with shady, unfriendly countries, subsidies (bribes), and endless risk of attacks on our personnel.
What if you could ship everything you wanted anywhere in the world straight from Texas? Or Florida? Or anywhere else? In under an hour?
Wars are often won by those who can move the fastest, supply the best, and sustain their forces longest. A conflict in Taiwan or the Baltics could see adversaries complete their objectives before the U.S. military can even begin meaningful counter-operations.
Starship negates all these timelines. Instead of waiting days or weeks for military assets to arrive by conventional means, forces could be on the ground on the same day as an invasion. No need for prepositioned stockpiles, forward operating bases, or painfully slow sealift capabilities. Those days are over.
In a Taiwan crisis, Starship could land American armor and mechanized infantry before the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) finishes crossing the Strait. It would change the strategic calculus entirely. Every U.S. war game predicting Taiwan’s fall under a rapid Chinese assault assumes conventional response times. Starship forces a complete rethink, for both sides. It will allow American forces to arrive in time to fight the decisive battle, not the delayed counter-offensive.
I think the Starship assembly timeline is a bit optimistic, but point-to-point global logistics really is a game-changer. (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)
California is getting the energy policy it deserves, good and hard.
Back when I served in the California State Assembly from 2004 to 2010, California ranked 7th or 8th in the nation for electricity costs. At the time, the Democratic majority in Sacramento was pushing bill after bill mandating greater reliance on renewable energy, assuring everyone that these policies would make us look like “geniuses” when the price of fossil fuels inevitably soared.
I warned that these laws, regulations and subsidies would instead drive up electricity costs for Californians, making the grid less reliable and California’s economy less competitive.
Now, two decades later, the results are in. In 2024, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that California had the second-highest electricity prices in the nation for the second year running, behind only Hawaii. The Golden State’s misguided energy policies have steadily increased the price of electricity as green energy mandates, grid instability and regulatory burdens have taken their toll. Meanwhile, states with more balanced energy policies — natural gas, coal and nuclear power — have fared far better.
What’s worse, California’s natural advantage in AI will be lost to Texas and other low-cost energy states. California’s industrial electricity prices averaged 21.98 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2023 vs. 6.26 in Texas, a whopping 251% price premium that no electricity-hungry AI installation or server farm operator is going to pay.
The core issue is simple: California’s policymakers prioritized renewable energy mandates over affordability and reliability. Over the years, they have forced utilities to integrate ever-growing amounts of wind and solar power while discouraging natural gas, nuclear and large-scale hydroelectric projects. These decisions ignored the reality that intermittent renewables require extensive grid upgrades, costly backup power sources and expensive storage solutions — all of which drive up costs for consumers and industry.
California’s high electricity prices are not an accident; they are a direct consequence of these policies. The state’s cap-and-trade system, restrictive permitting laws and mandates like the Renewable Portfolio Standard (which requires utilities to generate 60% of their electricity from renewables by 2030) have all contributed to rising rates.
At the same time, bureaucratic obstacles have made it nearly impossible to build new natural gas plants or modernize existing infrastructure. From 2014 to 2024, California approved or built only five natural gas plants, four of which replaced older facilities for a total output of up to 4 gigawatts. By comparison, in the prior 10 years, California commissioned dozens of plants totaling more than 20 gigawatts of nameplate capacity.
Follow-up: Remember the guy who opened fire at a band competition before being tackled by four band parents? He died in the hospital.
“Honors student sues Connecticut school district for not teaching her to read and write. Meet Aleysha Ortiz, a 19-year-old who graduated with honors from Hartford Public High School in Connecticut. It would seem congratulations are in order … except she says she’s functionally illiterate.”
Israel rolls on in Gaza, Democrats get indicted on election fraud, Sam Bankman-Fried found guilty, censorship schemes get busted, and George Soros’ evil fingers are everywhere. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Israel’s ground offensive has surrounded Gaza City, where it seems to think most of Hamas infrastructure is located.
The blue circles indicate Israel military activity, which does rather suggest they’re pounding the snot out of Hamas.
House Republicans on the GOP’s “weaponization” subcommittee said in a Friday report that the IRS has agreed to end its “abusive” policy of surprise visits to taxpayers’ homes following pressure from the panel.
The Committee’s and Select Subcommittee’s oversight revealed, and led to the swift end of, the IRS’s weaponization of unannounced field visits to harass, intimidate, and target taxpayers,” reads the report. “Taxpayers can now rest assured the IRS will not come knocking without providing prior notice—something that should have been the IRS’s practice all along.”
The IRS announced in July that it would end most unannounced agent visits to the homes of Americans, citing security concerns.
But it also came after the agency engaged in what appeared to be witness intimidation, after visiting the New Jersey home of journalist Matt Taibbi on the same day he appeared before Congress to testify on government abuse.
Following the incident, Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) demanded answers from the IRS, writing “In light of the hostile reaction to Mr. Taibbi’s reporting among left-wing activists, and the IRS’s history as a tool of government abuse, the IRS’s action could be interpreted as an attempt to intimidate a witness before Congress.”
Taibbi thanked Jordan on Saturday, writing in response to the report:
One of the cases outlined is my own. My home was visited by the IRS while I was testifying before Jordan’s Committee about the Twitter Files on March 9th. Sincere thanks are due to Chairman Jordan, whose staff not only demanded and got answers in my case, but achieved a concrete policy change, as IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel announced in July new procedures that would “end most” home visits.
Anticipating criticism for expressing public thanks to a Republican congressman, I’d like to ask Democratic Party partisans: to which elected Democrat should I have appealed for help in this matter? The one who called me a “so-called journalist” on the House floor? The one who told me to take off my “tinfoil hat” and put greater trust in intelligence services? The ones in leadership who threatened me with jail time? I gave votes to the party for thirty years. Which elected Democrat would have performed basic constituent services in my case? Feel free to raise a hand.
If silence is the answer, why should I ever vote for a Democrat again?
In the conversation with [Joe] Rogan, Musk then explains George Soros’ massive bet (now overseen by his son, Alexander Soros) on funding city and state district attorney elections nationwide. He said, “The value for money in local races is much higher than in national races – the lowest value for money is a presidential race.”
“Soros realized you don’t actually need to change the laws – you just need to change how they’re enforced – if nobody chooses to enforce the law – or the laws differentially enforced – it’s like changing the laws,” Musk said.
This leaves with a new interview from one Maryland sheriff, just outside of crime-ridden Baltimore City, in Wicomico County, who drops a truth bomb about radical progressive lawmakers in the state, some of whom have likely been funded by Soros, who purposely fail to enforce law and order and only embolden criminal.
“I’m in my 40th year of law enforcement, and I have never ever seen it this bad,” Sheriff Mike Lewis said.
Lewis continued: “I’ve never seen a government so ingrained – and quite frankly complicit – in the criminal activity taking place in our nation.”
Speaking of Soros: “Soros has funneled over $15M to pro-Hamas organizations through Open Society Foundations.” Of course he has.
A jury has found Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of FTX, guilty on all seven criminal fraud counts for his role in the crypto exchange’s downfall.
Those counts include wire fraud on customers of FTX, conspiracy to commit wire fraud on customers of FTX, wire fraud on Alameda Research lenders, conspiracy to commit wire fraud on lenders to Alameda Research, conspiracy to commit securities fraud on investors in FTX, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud on customers of FTX, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
He faces a maximum sentence of 115 years in prison. His sentencing is scheduled for March 28 at 9:30 a.m.
During a month-long trial in a Manhattan federal court, prosecutors claimed Bankman-Fried misled investors and mishandled billions in funds. He was accused of misusing customer funds deposited with FTX to boost his crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research.
Nicolas Roos, an assistant U.S. attorney, said Bankman-Fried committed crimes of “epic proportions.” He alleged during closing arguments that Bankman-Fried built his company on a “foundation of lies and false promises.”
Snip.
Bankman-Fried was a Democrat megadonor, giving nearly $39 million to Democrat-aligned causes during the 2022 election cycle.
Prosecutors said he “misappropriated and embezzled FTX customer deposits, and used billions of dollars in stolen funds for a variety of purposes, including … to help fund over a hundred million dollars in campaign contributions to Democrats and Republicans to seek to influence cryptocurrency regulation,” according to an August indictment.
Both Caroline Ellison, Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend and the former head of Alameda, and FTX co-founder Gary Wang, testified against Bankman-Fried during the trial. Ellison and Wang both pleaded guilty in December to multiple charges.
“The Department of Health and Human Services has sent over $800,000 to a group in Texas where they distribute crack pipes, according to the Dallas Express…The funds were sent to the El Paso Alliance, a non-profit that helps people recover from alcoholism and drug addictions, according to its website.” Knowing what I know about leftwing activists, I’m guessing that $80,000 went to crack pipe distribution, and the rest disappeared into various leftwing pockets.
California is still having trouble managing this newfangled electricity thing. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
China’s least awful communist official, former Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang, just died of a heart attack at age 68, and the CCP is banning memorial wishes for him.
Despite the Texas law against teaching Critical Race Theory, Katy ISD students are being told to reflect on their white privilege.
More than two dozen top U.S. law firms have issued a stern warning that law schools move with “urgency” to address the rising antisemitism on campus, or else it could affect recruitment, National Review has learned.
“Over the last several weeks, we have been alarmed at reports of anti-Semitic harassment, vandalism and assaults on college campuses, including rallies calling for the death of Jews and the elimination of the State of Israel. Such anti-Semitic activities would not be tolerated at any of our firms,” the statement published on Wednesday reads.
“As educators at institutions of higher learning, it is imperative that you provide your students with the tools and guidance to engage in the free exchange of ideas, even on emotionally charged issues, in a manner that affirms the values we all hold dear and rejects unreservedly that which is antithetical to those values,” the letter continued. “There is no room for anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism or any other form of violence, hatred or bigotry on your campuses, in our workplaces or our communities.”
Snip.
Signatories included: Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, Kirkland & Ellis LLP, Latham & Watkins LLP, McDermott Will & Emery LLP, Milbank LLP, O’Melveny & Myers LLP, Paul Hastings LLP, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, Proskauer Rose LLP, Ropes & Gray LLP, Shearman & Sterling, Simpson Thatcher & Bartlett LLP, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, Watchtell, Lipton, Rosen, and Katz, Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, Norton Rose Fulbright, and Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP.
Jewish homes in Paris marked with Stars of David. It’s good that sort of thing has never led to any negative outcomes in Europe…
Good: Disney is making it’s live-action Snow White remake a more traditional film, including actual dwarfs rather than random guys. Bad: The CGI dwarfs look absolutely horrible. It’s as though Disney wants to punish movie-goers for rejecting their woke vision…
Democrats flee, lettuce wins, a flood of extra executives, and Musk gets out the hatchet. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
People leaving the Democratic Party describe it as cancer:
While Democrat voters have been leaving the party for years, their reasons have become more urgent.
“When people were feeling pushed away years ago, to the point where they were starting to walk away, there was more of a casual tone about it,” former liberal Democrat Brandon Straka, founder of #WalkAway told The Epoch Times.
“People were beginning to feel the effects of leftist, communism, Marxism infiltration into our society, our culture, and our politics.”
Straka founded #WalkAway in 2018 after making his personal decision to leave the party public while inviting others to join him. Since then, thousands of exiting Democrats made social media videos explaining why they were choosing to #WalkAway, giving Straka a window into the minds of these voters.
At that time, people were just noticing changes in the party, he said. They weren’t always identifying what it meant, but they knew they didn’t like how it felt, and quietly left.
“But now, it’s akin to cancer. Cancer doesn’t stop growing and spreading just because people don’t like it. And what’s happening with the left is no different,” Straka said. “Particularly with them getting rid of Trump, installing Biden, and the Democrats taking full control of the government. This is a cancer that’s rapidly growing and spreading now. And it’s becoming not just uncomfortable, but I think intolerable, for a lot of people.”
Drugs dealers openly selling on Broadway. Thinks to mayors Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams, and the feckless actions of Soros-backed DA Alvin Bragg, Democrats have undone not only all the hard-won law-and-order gains of Rudy Giuliani’s broken windows police, but they’ve actually brought NYC back to the nadir of the crime-ridden New York of the 1970s. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke is heading to his third high-profile defeat in five years. But he and Planned Parenthood have an ace of their sleeve: registering dead voters.
A Texas firearms dealer is suing the Biden administration for weaponizing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to shut down law-abiding gun retailers over paperwork errors discovered during audits.
President Joe Biden ordered the Department of Justice in June of 2021 to enforce “zero tolerance for willful violations of the law by federally licensed firearms dealers that put public safety at risk,” but after a 500 percent increase in federal firearm license revocations for retailers over the last year, it’s clear the Biden administration isn’t just going after gun sellers who intentionally violate the law.
Punishing minor slip-ups, the lawsuit argues, draws on a drastically different interpretation of the law than the definition federal courts have held based on the Gun Control Act of 1968.
The lawsuit, to which the federal government has 60 days to respond, also argues that the Biden administration’s new policy sets an unreasonably high standard that is not applied to any other industry.
That’s why Michael Cargill, owner of Central Texas Gun Works in Austin, chose to bring this case.
Those energy-hostile Democratic Party policies just keep paying dividends: “New England facing natural gas shortages, rolling blackouts this winter.”
The reality is that the normal flow of natural gas into the region is limited and has been unable to keep up with increasing demand levels over the past decade. That means that utility operators have to rely on liquid natural gas (LNG) imports to make up the difference during peak demand periods. During such times, LNG accounts for as much as one-third of the total natural gas used for heating and electricity.
But why is that? You won’t need an ace detective to figure that out. Utility companies in New York, Connecticut, and other New England states projected supply shortfalls more than a decade ago. Fortunately, New York and Pennsylvania sit on some of the richest natural gas resources in the country, found in the Marcellus shale deposits. The companies requested new, higher-volume pipelines to carry natural gas to meet the spiraling demands of New York City, particularly at the furthest end of the gas lines in Long Island. They also urged the development of local gas production to feed those lines. Similar situations were noted all across New England.
Instead of doing that, New York refused to approve new gas lines and passed a moratorium on natural gas drilling in the state. This brings us to the current situation where the same amount of natural gas is being used, but increasing amounts of it come in the form of LNG that has to be imported either from other regions of the country or from overseas. The energy crunch in Europe is eating up a lot of the available LNG, so there may not be enough for New England this winter.
A star reporter for ABC News has been missing since an April 27 FBI raid at his Arlington, Virginia apartment.
Emmy award winner James Gordon Meek – a deep-dive journalist who was also a former senior counterterrorism adviser and investigator for the House Homeland Security Committee, abruptly quit his job of 9 years and “fell off the face of the earth,” after the raid, one of his colleagues told Rolling Stone.
A recent proliferation of phony executive profiles on LinkedIn is creating something of an identity crisis for the business networking site, and for companies that rely on it to hire and screen prospective employees. The fabricated LinkedIn identities — which pair AI-generated profile photos with text lifted from legitimate accounts — are creating major headaches for corporate HR departments and for those managing invite-only LinkedIn groups.
Last week, KrebsOnSecurity examined a flood of inauthentic LinkedIn profiles all claiming Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) roles at various Fortune 500 companies, including Biogen, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Hewlett Packard.
Since then, the response from LinkedIn users and readers has made clear that these phony profiles are showing up en masse for virtually all executive roles — but particularly for jobs and industries that are adjacent to recent global events and news trends.
Does the Federal Reserve swapping some $6 billion worth of dollars for Swiss Francs with the Swiss National Bank mean a global financial crisis is coming? Boiling down his argument: A.) The Swiss National bank has a weekly dollar auction every Wednesday. 99%+ of the time, no one shows up for them. B.) Last Wednesday, 15 parties (meaning banks) showed up for them to the tune of some $6 billion. C.) The only reason they would do that is if they don’t trust their current repo counterparties, and D.) This is what happened when Flu Manchu hit and before the Subprime Meltdown in 2008. If it’s any consolation, they first started showing up for the latter in December of 2007, so you might have nine months to buy gold, ammunition and canned goods…
“According to the latest campaign finance reports, Republican Alexandra del Moral Mealer has raised a record-setting $4.9 million dollars in support of her campaign for Harris County Judge, outraising Democratic incumbent Lina Hidalgo 4 to 1.”
Related: “Hidalgo Booed Exiting Meeting Where GOP Commissioners Continue Boycott of Tax Increase.”
Woke reporter: Are you just super excited to coach against another black coach? Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Todd Bowles: “We don’t see color…the minute you guys stop making a big deal about it, everyone else will as well.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul will drop New York’s stringent indoor mask mandate on Wednesday, ending a requirement that businesses ask customers for proof of full vaccination or require mask wearing at all times, and marking a turning point in the state’s coronavirus response, according to three people briefed on her decision.
The decision will eliminate a rule that prompted legal and interpersonal clashes over mask wearing, especially in conservative parts of New York. It was set to expire on Thursday and would have required renewing.
Ms. Hochul’s decision will let the mask mandate lapse just as a crushing winter surge in coronavirus cases is finally receding. But it was not yet clear whether the governor would renew or drop a separate mask mandate in New York schools that is set to expire in two weeks.
Are Democrats crazy enough to drop restrictions for adults but keep the ones harming children despite children at extremely low risk? Maybe. How else can they punish parents for daring to reject Critical Race Theory?
The same piece notes that New Jersey’s democratic governor also got religion on the issue.
It was Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey who began the effort last fall, weeks after he was stunned by the energy of right-wing voters in his blue state, who nearly ousted him from office in what was widely expected to be an easy re-election campaign. Arranging a series of focus groups across the state to see what they had missed, Mr. Murphy’s advisers were struck by the findings: Across the board, voters shared frustrations over public health measures, a sense of pessimism about the future and a deep desire to return to some sense of normalcy.
See, Democrats are listening to the science! The science of focus groups.
Another data point: CNN’s resident “doctor” Leana Wen says it’s time.
Despite nothing changing at all, CNN’s resident ‘doctor’ Leana Wen claimed this week that “the science has changed” and so COVID restrictions including mask mandates should now be rescinded.
Wen failed to cite any studies or data that shows the science has changed.
Wen, who started to admit some weeks ago that masks don’t work in stopping the spread of COVID, stated that “the decision to wear a mask should shift from a government mandate to an individual choice.”
She added that kids in schools should not be forced to wear masks because it can be harmful and makes it harder for them to learn.
Welcome back to 2020, “Doctor” Wen, when everyone who didn’t have a (D) after their name already figured this out. I’m just going to leave these here:
Just wait, Leana Wen, who was born in Shanghai, China, is only 39 years old, managed to be interviewed on CNN regarding the Boston Marathon bombing, became the head of Planned Parenthood, and is CNN's Covid expert? Do I have this right? https://t.co/NyXiSMIZrM
Dr. Leans Wen, who was calling for your children to be forced to wear nothing short of a “medical-grade, 3-ply surgical mask” in schools a month and a half ago, would now like to move beyond “divisiveness” pic.twitter.com/pXHf3Y3sTP
Two Republican governors were way, way, waaaaay ahead of the curve of their Democratic counterparts in eliminating lockdowns, masking and vaccine mandates. Both were ruthlessly smeared as dangerous extremists who wanted to kill grandma. One was Florida governor Ron DeSantis:
Where does DeSantis go to get his apology from the liberal media?
The second Republican governor who scared Democrats into doing the right thing was Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin.
Very, very rarely do you see the leadership of a major state political party so badly miscalculate where it stands, both in overall public opinion and amongst its own rank-and-file legislators. Three weeks ago, Virginia Democratic Party chair Susan Swecker declared that, “Masks are essential to keeping students safe and schools open, but Glenn [Youngkin] would rather use our children as political cover to appease the extreme, far-right fringes of his own party.”
Got that? Wanting parents to decide whether or not their kids wear masks to school is a position of the “extreme, far-right fringes.” So Virginia Democrats prepared themselves for an epic showdown over masking in schools.
And then they lost, badly. On Tuesday, almost half the Democrats in the Virginia State Senate said, “Nah, we’re fine with having parents decide”:
The Virginia Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved a bill that would prevent local school boards from levying mask mandates and from punishing students whose parents opt to send their child to school without a mask.
Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax City, filed the provision Tuesday as an amendment to a bill about in-person learning introduced by Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant, R-Henrico. Democrats have 21 votes in the Senate to Republicans’ 19. Ten Democrats voted for the amendment, nine voted against it, and two abstained.
The bill is expected to clear the GOP-controlled House.
Youngkin hailed the Senate vote as a “victory for parents and children.” His administration plans to fast-track the bill to becoming law once it reaches his desk, meaning that it could be the law in less than two weeks.
Never forget that just five days ago, the national press had a meltdown over Glenn Youngkin not wearing a mask in a grocery store that didn't require masks. Five days ago. Now, they are praising Democrats for lifting mask mandates.
It means they were chumped for 2 years and wasted a portion of their lives for NOTHING. I feel for these people as they were victims of a cruel psyop. They're going to have to deal with it eventually though.
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! It’s seems less that I “finish” these than I abandon them…
Flu Manchu deaths hit zero in Sweden. Seems like “protect the elderly and go for herd immunity” was a much better strategy than “lock everything down, throw the economy into a steep recession, throw millions out of work, practice ineffective masking theater and let antifa/#BlackLivesMatter burn everything down so the Democratic Media Complex can drag Biden’s ambulatory corpse across the finish line in November.” Who’d of thunk it?
Did Republicans surrender on pork-laden infrastructure bill? Sure seems that way. You can brag about how small the shit sandwich you’re eating is compared to the much larger one they wanted to shove down your throat, but it’s still a shit sandwich. Write your senators to express opposition to any infrastructure bill.
The brother of one of President Joe Biden’s closest advisors lobbied members of the National Security Council for General Motors in the second quarter, according to a new disclosure report reviewed by CNBC.
The report shows that Jeff Ricchetti, brother of White House counselor Steve Ricchetti, engaged with the NSC for the car-making giant on “issues related to China.” The company paid Ricchetti $60,000 last quarter for his lobbying services.
Gavin Newsom just might lose the California recall. How bad do you have to suck to lose a recall election in a one-party state? The answer is “Gavin Newsom bad.”
By an overwhelming 9-1, they would feel safer with more cops on the street, not fewer. Though one-third complain that Detroit police use force when it isn’t necessary – and Black men report high rates of racial profiling – those surveyed reject by 3-1 the slogan of some progressives to “defund the police.”
“It’s scary sitting in the house, and when you go outside to the gas station or the store, it’s possible someone will be shooting right next to you,” said Charlita Bell, 41, a lifelong Detroit resident who was among those called in the poll. Last year, when her car was hit by stray bullets during a shopping trip, she hurried home rather than wait for the police for fear the shooter might return.
Things that make you go “Hmmmm“: “Why Are Soros And Gates Buying UK COVID Testing Company?”
In 2015, French intelligence officials warned the U.S. State Department and their own foreign ministry that China was cutting back on agreed collaboration at the lab, former State Department official David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
By 2017, the French “were kicked out” of the lab and cooperation ceased, leading French officials to warn the State Department that they had grave concerns as to Chinese motivations, according to Asher.
90% of the illegal aliens let in by the Biden Administration don’t report to ICE as required by law. This is my shocked face. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Bridgeport Councilman Michael DeFilippo has been indicted by a federal grand jury on multiple election fraud charges.
DeFilippo, 35, a Democrat who represents Bridgeport’s 133rd District and has been a city councilman since 2018, is accused of conspiring to “interfere with and obstruct Bridgeport citizens’ right to vote by falsifying his tenants’ voter registration applications and absentee ballots applications, then stealing tenants’ absentee ballots and forging their signatures in order to fraudulently vote for him,” according to Acting U.S. Attorney Leonard C. Boyle.
Billionaire financier George Soros directed $1 million to a left-wing group that seeks to cut funding to police departments around the country, according to federal records.
Soros sent the funds to the Color of Change PAC on May 14, the Washington Free Beacon reported on July 22, citing Federal Election Commission (FEC) records. The contribution was the largest political contribution made by Soros during the 2021 election cycle.
Color of Change, which describes itself as a racial justice group, has frequently called for the defunding of police departments across the United States, including leading an online campaign to slash funding following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
MyPillow employee beheaded in Shakopee, Minnesota. Suspect is in custody. “They say Alexis Saborit is also facing previous charges of property damage, arson, and obstruction. The presiding judge, Richard C. Perkins, allegedly ignored claims of mental illness brought forward to the court and [Saborit] was somehow released back into the public.”
The State Department revealed in a letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) that it had identified “multiple security incidents” committed by current or former employees who handled Hillary Clinton’s emails, according to Fox News.
So far 23 “violations” and seven “infractions” have been issued as a part of the department’s ongoing investigation – a number that will likely rise according to State Department Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Legislative Affairs, Mary Elizabeth Taylor.
“To this point, the Department has assessed culpability to 15 individuals, some of whom were culpable in multiple security incidents,” said Taylor in the letter to Grassley, adding “DS has issued 23 violations and 7 infractions incidents. … This number will likely change as the review progresses.”
The Democratic National Committee has a money problem. And that could hurt its nominee’s chances of beating President Donald Trump in 2020.
In the first four months of 2019, the party spent more than it raised and added $3 million in new debt. In the same period, its Republican counterpart was stockpiling cash.
Snip.
Whoever wins the party’s nomination will rely heavily on the DNC in the general election for organizing, identifying voters and getting them to the polls. That will ultimately cost hundreds of millions of dollars by Election Day, but the party needs to spend early to prepare, which is why it’s been borrowing money. It’s also sending out fundraising appeals under the presidential candidates’ names, something it’s never done before.
“It’s trouble, it’s going to affect us,” said Allan Berliant, a Cincinnati-based Democratic bundler, who says the party needs to open offices and get boots on the ground around the country. “All of that starts with fundraising,” he said.
Party officials and fundraisers blamed the deficiency on several factors, and chief among them is competition from the 23 Democrats who are running for president and vacuuming up contributors’ cash. Giving to the party isn’t as compelling as supporting the presidential hopefuls, said John Morgan, an Orlando-based trial attorney and Democratic fundraiser.
“Do you want to fix up the barn or do you want to bet on the horses?” he said.
But major donors also pointed to the perception of some contributors that the national party is disorganized – a hangover from the 2016 election. The growing schism between the old-guard establishment and the younger, activist wing could be discouraging donors, too, they said.
By the end of April, the DNC had collected contributions of more than $24.4 million, but had spent $28.4 million, according to the latest disclosures. It had $7.6 million cash on hand, $1 million less than in January. It posted $6.2 million in debt, including bank loans and unpaid invoices to vendors, Federal Election Commission records show.
It seems like I link some variation of this story every year.
The Democratic ex-staffer who doxxed several Republican senators after disapproving of their handling of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation will be going to jail for four years.
Jackson Cosko, a 27-year-old former staffer for Sen. Maggie Hassan (D., N.H.), was arrested last October for leaking the phone numbers and home addresses of Republican senators Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Orrin Hatch (Utah), and Mike Lee (Utah). The information was briefly posted on the senators’ Wikipedia pages before being taken down.
Cosko was working for Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D., Texas) at the time of his arrest, and was immediately fired.
Jackson Cosko was sentenced Wednesday to four years in prison. Prosecutors called his offense an “extraordinary” and “vicious” crime where the ex-Democratic aide stole a senator’s data, mined it for blackmail material and then published the home addresses and phone numbers of Republican senators during the 2018 hearings for now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Even after the computer administrator was caught in the act and arrested for spying on a senator’s office using his advanced technical skills, Capitol Police didn’t check the USB ports of nearby computers. Six different computers within steps of where he was arrested in the Senate had keylogger devices in them that continued to capture and beam private information over WiFi. They were only exposed through a confession.
Police then got a search warrant on his home, but missed critical evidence because they didn’t check the oven.
I worry that our desire to fix the past compromises our ability to fix the present. Think about what we’re doing today. We’re spending our time debating a bill that mentions slavery 25 times but incarceration only once, in an era with zero black slaves but nearly a million black prisoners—a bill that doesn’t mention homicide once, at a time when the Center for Disease Control reports homicide as the number one cause of death for young black men. I’m not saying that acknowledging history doesn’t matter. It does. I’m saying there’s a difference between acknowledging history and allowing history to distract us from the problems we face today.
In 2008, the House of Representatives formally apologized for slavery and Jim Crow. In 2009, the Senate did the same. Black people don’t need another apology. We need safer neighborhoods and better schools. We need a less punitive criminal justice system. We need affordable health care. And none of these things can be achieved through reparations for slavery.
“This is his worst treason since his last worst treason!” they thundered. “This is even more treasonous than when The Bad Orange Man called us ‘traitors’ for our treachery after we called him ‘traitor’ for two years!”
They got really, really upset. Fake upset, of course, but they committed to the bit and kept straight faces. And you know that Trump pulled the pin on that hand grenade of truth on purpose in order to make the dummies explode just like they did.
You have to wonder if the garbage elite really thinks their brand of blatant hypocrisy disguised as moral outrage works, or if this is just a reflexive response to a president who not only sees them for the useless slugs they are, but says so.
My apologies to slugs. I am not slugist.
Still, do any of them truly think that we Normals will listen to them sounding off about the perfidy of perhaps considering the possibility of maybe accepting dirt on their freak show candidates from outsiders and not recall that Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit famously did just that with the pee-pee dossier, or that Adam Schiff got punked by a couple of Russian Howard Stern wannabeskis offering him pics of the POTUS au natural?
When Staggers O’Cankles does it, it’s cool? When Congressman Leaky does it, it’s fine? Yet when Trump says he might do exactly what they did, it’s the greatest betrayal of our Values, our Constitution and our Democracy since his last greatest betrayal of our Values, our Constitution and our Democracy, which happened last week?
Snip.
To the extent our modern elite had retained any residual credibility from back in the distant past when our elite wasn’t totally corrupt and incompetent, that goodwill has been squandered in the wake of its war to crush Trump, which is actually a war to crush us and restore the elite’s unchallenged power.
We watch them do X as they tell us to do Y, and they expect us to accept it. Maybe that’s not a completely unreasonable expectation. A lot of goofy, submissive alleged conservatives from Conservative, Inc., have accepted that 2 + 2 =5. The whole cruise-shilling set loves Big Gender-Neutral Sibling and eagerly joins in the phony festivals of fake fury. Last week, social media was packed with these bitter pills fulminating about TRUMP TRAITOR TREASON. And, probably, the geebos at The Bulwark ran with it too, not that anyone would know except the donors Bill Kristol somehow suckered into funding that cesspool floater of a blog.
Everything they tell us reeks of hypocrisy, like the ever-changing rules about our Glorious Public Servants. When some bureaucrat parrots the party line, we’re supposed to defer. When one fails to parrot correctly, we’re supposed to scream that he’s in contempt of Congress.
How Republicans can retake the House in 2020. “The Republicans need to flip only 18 seats in 2020 to regain control of that body — and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) has already identified nearly twice that number of vulnerable Democrats in districts won by President Trump during the last presidential election.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Will Oberlin Learn Its Lesson? Short answer: No, they won’t.”
David French brings the requisite amount of wood in stating how the Oberlin College judgment provides a blueprint to fight back. Maybe because Trump isn’t involved. But one wonders why neither the phrase “Social Justice Warriors” nor the word “woke” appears in the piece.
….proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone. I am in no hurry, our Military is rebuilt, new, and ready to go, by far the best in the world. Sanctions are biting & more added last night. Iran can NEVER have Nuclear Weapons, not against the USA, and not against the WORLD!
Both Iran and Trump are playing the long game.” “Iran’s recent attacks signal weakness and desperation, not strength and assurance…Most of the oil passing through Hormuz (about 11/17ths) is bound for the Straits of Malacca en route to China, Japan and Korea. If Tehran actually closed the Straits, by mining it for example, they would essentially be blockading China.”
The United States then ramped up sanctions on the Iranian theocracy to try to ensure that it stopped nuclear enrichment. The Trump administration also hoped a strapped Iran would become less capable of funding terrorist operations in the Middle East and beyond, proxy wars in the Persian Gulf, and the opportune harassment of ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz.
The sanctions are clearly destroying an already weak Iranian economy. Iran is now suffering from negative economic growth, massive unemployment and record inflation.
A desperate Iranian government is using surrogates to send missiles into Saudi Arabia while its forces attack ships in the Gulf of Oman.
Snip.
Time, then, is on the Americans’ side. But it is certainly not on the side of a bankrupt and impoverished Iran that either must escalate or face ruin.
If Iran starts sinking ships or attacking U.S. assets, Trump can simply replay the ISIS strategy of selective off-and-on bombing. The United States did not lose a single pilot to enemy action.
Translated, that would mean disproportionately replying to each Iranian attack on a U.S. asset with a far more punishing air response against an Iranian base or port. The key would be to avoid the use of ground troops and yet not unleash a full-fledged air war. Rather, the United States would demonstrate to the world that Iranian aggression determines the degree to which Iran suffers blows from us.
It’s unfortunate that social media not only makes informed debate more difficult on their platforms, but also, it seems, rewires people’s brains in such a fashion as to make such debate more difficult everywhere else. This is made worse by the fact that Twitter in particular seems to be most heavily used by the very people – pundits, political journalists, the intelligentsia – most vital to the sort of debate that Emerson saw as essential.
In fact, the corruption of the political/intellectual class by social media is particularly serious, since their descent into thoughtless polarization can then spread to the rest of the population, even that large part that doesn’t use social media itself, through traditional channels. Writing on why Twitter is worse than it seems, David French observes that even though its user base is smaller than most other social media, those users are particularly influential:
But in public influence Twitter punches far above its weight. Why? Because it’s where cultural kingmakers congregate, and thus where conventional wisdom is formed and shaped — often instantly and thoughtlessly.
In other words, Twitter is where the people who care the most spend their time. The disproportionate influence of microbursts of instant public comments from a curated set of people these influencers follow shapes their writing and thinking and conduct way beyond the platform.
Hong Kong stages huge demonstration against new communist Chinese extradition laws:
This time lapse gives an idea of the size of the Hong-Kong demonstration on Sunday. 2 million demonstrated (for a population of 7 million). pic.twitter.com/4thz4QBsX7
Texas Governor Greg Abbott didn’t use a single line-item veto on any item in the Texas budget. There’s been a lot of grumbling that the recently completed legislative session didn’t hold the line on spending and failed to enact several conservative priorities.
Banning plastic bags won’t save the planet. “Research from 2015 shows that less than 5 per cent of land-based plastic waste going into the ocean comes from OECD countries, with half coming from just four countries: China, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam.” Also: “You must reuse an organic cotton shopping bag 20,000 times before it will have less environmental damage than a plastic bag.” (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
“Down here, voter fraud is not all that unusual,” says Monte, a city planning consultant in a brown suit jacket, sitting with other activists at a table in Coffee Zone on McColl Road. “It’s unusual when they get prosecuted.”
Now, for this south Texas town, that unusual moment has arrived. A November 2017 mayoral election has been under scrutiny from local and state officials, and 19 arrests have been made over alleged voter fraud. The mayor—and winner of the 2017 election—was indicted earlier this month, along with his wife.
Only 8,400 votes were cast in the mayoral election, and Mayor Richard Molina’s final vote count was more than 1,200 votes ahead of the No. 2 candidate, 14-year incumbent Richard Garcia. From what’s known now, the election result couldn’t have been changed by the number of suspicious votes identified.
But Molina reportedly is the first elected official in Texas to face a felony charge under a 2017 statute against vote harvesting, casting the midsize city into the national debate over election integrity.
In case you were worried that Democrats had a monopoly on all the bad ideas, the Tampa Bay Rays are considering spending half their time in Montreal. Because nothing says “well thought-out idea” like 1,500 miles between home games…
“Florida man says he had sex with stolen pool toys instead of raping women.” Uh…you can buy pool toys, dude…
The Edge wanted to live where the streets have no name, but thanks to the California Supreme Court’s ruling, he still hasn’t found what he’s looking for.
Pamela Harris, a Democratic Brooklyn assemblywoman, was indicted on “four counts of making false statements, two counts of wire fraud, two counts of bankruptcy fraud, and a single count each of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, witness tampering and conspiracy to obstruct justice.”
Important Florida Man safety tip: Do not pick up frozen iguanas and put them in your car intending to sell them for meat, because they will thaw out, revive, and bite you, causing your car to crash.
Welcome to October! Enjoy your complimentary LinkSwarm:
Imran Awan’s lawyer said the House Democrats he worked for asked him to falsify spending reports:
House Democrats ordered the systematic falsification of records showing how they spend their taxpayer-provided office budgets, according to lawyers for two former House information technology (IT) aides.
It’s a remarkable accusation that pits sitting lawmakers against the former aides, Imran Awan, his brothers Abid and Jamal, and his wife Hina Alvi. Imran was arrested in July while trying to board a flight to Pakistan, and then indicted on four counts of bank fraud involving moving money to that country. Imran and Hina, who was also indicted, face a court date Friday.
One of Imran’s lawyers, Aaron Page, acknowledged the invoicing discrepancy Aug. 21, telling The Daily Caller News Foundation, “This is just how things have been done for forever. This is what experienced members of Congress expect: to expedite things, they adjust the pricing.”
If members or senior staff instructed IT aides to misrepresent how budgets were spent, that could potentially explain why officials have not charged the Awans with crimes related to procurement, even a full year after House authorities gathered documentation showing invoices that claimed expensive technological items cost $499 instead of their true price: potentially an open-and-shut violation.
Garden-variety Democratic graft is probably the least worrisome lawbreaking the Awan ring could have been up to…
now believe that the left will re-elect Trump. The ruction over NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem illustrates the point.
The left has talked itself into believing that Trump’s alleged appeals to white racism were what put him over the top.
More astute psephologists have pointed out that the actual difference was made by people in industrial states who previously had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, but switched to Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016. Hard to attribute those decisions to white racism.
Nevertheless, the left now interprets all of Trump’s actions through the prism of perceived appeals to white racism. If Trump were to tweet, “It’s a lovely day in Washington,” the left would denounce it as a dog whistle to white supremacists.
Which brings us to the NFL ruction. Players began kneeling during the national anthem reportedly to protest what they regard as racial injustice in the United States. Trump denounced them in Trumpian fashion.
According to the left, since the players were protesting racial injustice, Trump was endorsing racial injustice by criticizing them. There goes that dog whistle!
o most Americans, that’s nuts.
I’m not much of a flag waver. And I’ve never really understood why sporting events begin with the playing of the national anthem. Doesn’t seem a particularly apposite occasion for a display of patriotic fidelity.
But it is part of American tradition. And traditions matter.
You don’t have to be a racist to find galling the spectacle of pampered athletics, making millions of dollars playing a game, hosted in taxpayer-subsidized stadiums, benefiting from an antitrust exemption, ostentatiously exempting themselves from the traditional display of fidelity to our country.
The argument by some that the protest isn’t really about the flag and national anthem rings hollow. If you do it during the national anthem, it is about the flag and the national anthem.
Snip.
Generally speaking, white Middle Americans aren’t racists. They don’t long for a return to Jim Crow. They’re just sick of having identity and grievance politics thrown in their faces all the time.
If the left continues to tell Middle Americans they are racists, Trump will be re-elected.
“Senior law enforcement officials from the United States, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras announced here today criminal charges against more than 3,800 MS-13 and 18th Street gang members in the United States and Central America in a coordinated law enforcement action known as Operation Regional Shield.”
The forces that brought Trump to power are alien to the experience of the men and women who populate newsrooms, his supporters unlike their colleagues, friends, and neighbors, his agenda anathema to the catechism of social liberalism, his career and business empire complex and murky and sensational. Little surprise that journalists reacted to his election with a combination of panic, fear, disgust, fascination, exhilaration, and the self-affirming belief that they remain the last line of defense against an emerging American autocracy. Who has time for dispassionate analysis, for methodical research and reporting, when the president’s very being is an assault on one’s conception of self, when nothing less than the future of the country is at stake? Especially when the depletion of veteran editors, the relative youth and inexperience of political and congressional reporters, and the proliferation of social media, with its hot takes and quips, its groupthink and instant gratification, makes the transition from inquiry to indignation all too easy.
North Korean ship carrying 30,000 rocket launchers seized in Egypt. Biggest surprise? They had been purchased by the Egyptian military in defiance of UN sanctions…
Houstonian’s rich neighbors aren’t wild about the the working Sherman tank in front of his house. I say good for him. I also wonder why Fox declined to call it a Sherman rather than the more generic “World War II” tank.
Since I just topped up my Strategic Dog Reserve, blogging may get light at some point. But in the meantime, enjoy another Friday LinkSwarm:
This may be what’s driving some Democrats’ idee fixe on Russia: a guilty conscience:
Radical left-wing icon former California Democratic Rep. Ron Dellums was a hired lobbyist for Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. June 9, 2016, the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has learned.
Dellums, who represented liberal San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., is a long-time darling of left-wing political activists. He served 13 terms in Congress as an African-American firebrand and proudly called himself a socialist. He retired in 1996.
The former congressman is one of several high-profile Democratic partisans who was on Veselnitskaya’s payroll, working to defeat a law that is the hated object of a personal vendetta waged by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
A national outcry has erupted in the establishment media about Trump Jr.’s meeting with Veselnitskaya. But there has been little focus on the Democrats who willingly served for years on her payroll helping to wage a Russian-led lobby campaign against the law. Congress passed the legislation, the Magnitsky Act, in response to the murder of Sergei Magnistky, a Russian lawyer who alleged corruption and human rights violations against numerous Russian officials.
According to a complaint filed to the Department of Justice Foreign Agents Registration Act division last July, Dellums failed to register as a foreign agent representing a Russian-driven effort led by Veselnitskaya to repeal the Magnitsky Act.
Add Dellums to a list that includes Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Podesta brothers of high profile Democrats who have documented financial and lobbying ties to Putin’s government.
Russian journalist on how American journalists cover Russia, especially the Russian hacking story. “The way the American press writes about the topic, it’s like they’ve lost their heads.” Also: “Putin seem to look much smarter than he is, as if he operates from some master plan.” He’s actually a bumbler…
You know the Obama Veterans Administration that was only too happy to look the other way while veterans were dying on the waiting list? President Trump’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin has helped implement a number of reforms:
In Shulkin’s five months on the job, the VA has been a whirlwind of activity:
The department announced last week that between President Trump’s inauguration and July 3, it had fired 526 employees, demoted another 27, and temporarily suspended another 194 for longer than two weeks.
In April, the department launched a new website that lets veterans compare the wait times at its facilities and view Yelp-style reviews of each facility written by previous patients.
Veterans Health Administration’s Veterans Crisis Line — designed for those struggling with PTSD, thoughts of suicide, and other forms of mental stress — is now answering “more than 90 percent of calls within 8 seconds, and only about one percent of calls are being rerouted to a backup call center.” A year ago, an inspector general report noted that “more than a third of calls were being shunted to backup call centers, some calls were taking more than a half hour to be answered and other callers were being given only an option to leave messages on voicemail.”
At the end of June, Shulkin unveiled the world’s most advanced commercial prosthetic limb — the Life Under Kinetic Evolution (LUKE) arm — during a visit to a VA facility in New York. Veteran amputees demonstrated the technology, a collaboration among the VA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the private sector. (The name alludes to the lifelike robotic hand that Luke Skywalker is fitted with in The Empire Strikes Back.)
In May, Shulkin said the department had identified more than 430 vacant buildings and 735 underutilized ones that cost the federal government $25 million a year. He said that most of the buildings are not treatment facilities and could profitably be closed or consolidated. Of course, if he actually attempted to close or consolidate some of the buildings, he might face a controversy along the lines of those touched off by military-base-closing announcements in recent decades.
Shulkin has also gotten some help from Congress during his short time on the job. At a time when Republican legislators have had enormous difficulty passing big pieces of legislation, they’ve made great progress on VA reform.
One particular law designed to make the VA more accountable is arguably the most consequential legislation President Trump has signed so far. It establishes speedier procedures for firing employees, gives the department the authority to recoup bonuses and pensions from employees convicted of crimes, adds greater protections for whistleblowers who report errors and scandals, and expands employee training.
The One Sentence That Explains Washington Dysfunction: “I didn’t expect Donald Trump to win.” So no one was ready to do anything policy-wise once he did. “Among those consequences: The expectation that Republicans might actually try to keep the promises they’ve made to voters over the last eight years.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
No matter which party is in charge of Washington, rain or shine, summer or winter, the deficit keeps growing. “Real monthly federal spending topped $400 billion for the first time in June.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
An appeals court vacated the conviction of former New York Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, just the latest in a long line of appeal reversals for former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara. How much of Bharara’s once-sterling reputation was real, how much was showboating, and how much was good press from working at MSM-saturated New York City? (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
What we are actually witnessing — in Hungary, in the United States and in many other countries in recent years — is a populist reaction against the elite “progressive” consensus of which Soros is a prominent symbol. There is an international clique of influential people and organizations who share certain ideas about the future direction of political, social and economic policies, and who don’t want to be bothered with debating the merits of these policies. The ordinary people whose lives would be affected by the agenda of the elite aren’t being asked for their approval, and popular opposition to the elite agenda (e.g., the Brexit vote, Trump’s election, Hungary’s anti-“refugee” referendum) is treated by the elite media as evidence of incipient fascism. Never does it seem to have occurred to George Soros, or to anyone else in the international elite, that perhaps their policy ideas are wrong, that they have gone too far in their utopian “social justice” schemes. Unable to admit error, the progressive elite therefore resort to cheap insults and sloppy accusations of “fascism” to stigmatize opposition to the Left’s agenda.
For ABC, religious liberty organization = hate group.
Seattle decides that they want to drive the affluent out of the city. I’m sure many cities in Texas would be happy to welcome them with open arms…
And just in case you thought that was going to be the craziest story out of Seattle this week: “Seattle Councilman Objects to Hosing Excrement-Covered Sidewalks Because It’s Racist.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Kid Rock is running in the 2018 Michigan Senate race. And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer. And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see.
On the same subject. “Rock is arguably much better positioned than Trump for a successful political run.”
“The man running Sweden’s biggest security firm was declared bankrupt this week after his identity was hacked.”
Flaccid NFL ratings lead to Viagra and Cialis pulling out as sponsors. Maybe if they stopped focusing on politics, the NFL’s ratings wouldn’t be as soft….
Austin attorney “Omar Weaver Rosales, who filed hundreds of lawsuits against local small businesses alleging technical violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act, has been suspended from practicing law in the Federal Western District for three years.”
Clint Eastwood, when looking to cast American Paris train heroes Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone for a movie he’s directing, decided to cast Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone.
Was Shia LaBeouf always this big an asshole, or did he get worse after Trump and 4Chan broke him? “I got more millionaire lawyers than you know what to do with, you stupid bitch!” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Alyssa Milano is too busy as a member of “the Resistance” to take care of trivia like paying her taxes. Or her share of her employee’s taxes.
Woman climbs Mt. Everest to prove that vegans can do anything, dies. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
AMC releases emails from fired Walking Dead producer Frank Darabont in which he states how he’s boiling with rage over subpar efforts by various production team members. It’s not a good look, but if you directed The Shawshank Redemption, I’m inclined to cut you more than the usual amount of slack over your film-making methods…
Marvel is actually doing a live Squirrel Girl TV show. Sure, it’s called New Warriors, but we all know what the real attraction is there…
(@AMAZlNGNATURE) March 14, 2025
(@BaconMore1) 
(@ginacarano) 
(@AMAZlNGNATURE) 
