If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, then you’ve probably run across the occasional Mark Felton video, most likely in a LinkSwarm. He usually covers interesting historical military tidbits, but here he veers into contemporary American territory to ask: What sort of gun does Donald Trump carry?
“Donald Trump was issued with one of the rarest gun licenses available in the United States: An unrestricted concealed carry handgun permit in New York City, well known for its very restrictive gun laws in comparison with many other parts of the US.”
“Trump was issued this very rare permit by the New York City Police Department, and it is usually only granted in New York City to retired police or federal law enforcement, or to a person whose need for such a permit is clearly demonstrated.”
“Very often these licenses also go to very wealthy and politically connected New Yorkers, and Trump has certainly been one of those for a very long time.”
“Did Trump prior to becoming president for the first time in 2016 actually conceal carry in the Big Apple?”
Trump: “The way I view it, if nobody has guns, then only the bad guys have them, and they aren’t giving up their guns.”
“He told an interviewer that he owns two handguns, one a .45 caliber Heckler and Koch semi-automatic, supposedly a USP, a German military service pistol made for the Bundeswehr and very popular worldwide.”
The USP carries 12 rounds and weighs “26.4 oz without the magazine.”
Felton suggests “the weapon is not easily concealed, however, and commentators have suggested that Trump’s USP is a nightstand gun.” Maybe, but if Trump purchased the gun in the 1990s, standard 1911s were considered an acceptable carry choice at the time because carry and ultracarry choices weren’t nearly as widely available as they are today.
“Trump, however, does own a weapon deliberately designed as a conceal carry piece: a Smith & Wesson 642 hammerless Airweight .38 Special, a five round revolver. It has a cylinder, and Trump uses .38 Special +P ammunition.”
“Due to having a fully enclosed hammer to prevent snagging on clothing, the 642 is double action only, with a fairly long trigger pull. It is a snubnose barrel, and can fit a variety of grips. Many off-duty NYPD officers carry the 640 or 642 as a conceal carry weapon, or as a backup gun, and it weighs around 22 1/2 oz, with the alloy version even lighter at just 15.8 oz.”
Felton’s search for evidence Trump actually carried the gun is inconclusive.
Democrats refuse to let rapists be deported, the apple doesn’t fall far from the Democratic assassin’s tree, Israel decapitates Hamas, more illegal alien voting schemes exposed, the boom falls on Eric Adams, Goines goes down, another Russian ammo dump goes boom, a commie sub sinks, Raptor 1 Cylon 0, and 50 Cent throws down some Diddy dirt for your amusement.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Man, Democrats sure love illegal alien rapists. “158 Democrats voted against a bill that would ensure ‘aliens who have been convicted of or who have committed sex offenses or domestic violence are inadmissible and deportable.’ The Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens Act (H.R.7909) bill was introduced by Republican Representative Nancy Mace.”
No, they really, really do. “ICE Detains Illegal Migrant Accused Of Raping Pre-Teen In Nantucket…More Than A Month After He Walked On Bail.” “After being charged with one count of rape of a child with a 10-year age difference and two counts of indecent assault and battery on a child under 14, [Bryan Daniel Aldana-Arevalo] was allowed to ‘walk free on bail’ and immigration authorities were never called, according to a report from the New York Post.”
“Ryan Wesley Routh Wrote of ‘Failed’ Assassination Attempt in Letter to ‘World’ Months Ago; Offered $150,000 Bounty to ‘Complete the Job.’” Plus a refresher to the would-be assassin the media already seems to be trying to memory hole: “While Trump was golfing at his International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida on September 15, a Secret Service agent spotted a rifle barrel with a scope sticking out of the fence and ‘engaged’ with the person, who was later identified as Routh, a Biden-Harris supporter and Democrat donor with an extensive criminal background.”
“Son of would-be Trump assassin arrested for child porn.” “Investigators say they discovered ‘hundreds’ of files with child pornography during a search of Oran Routh’s residence in Guilford County, North Carolina, on Saturday conducted ‘in connection with an investigation unrelated to child exploitation.’ The two charges he faces include receipt of child pornography and possession of child pornography.”
In little more than a year, a once-obscure South American street gang has taken hold in the Big Apple, exploiting the migrant crisis to build a violent criminal enterprise from within the walls of city shelters.
Tren de Aragua, a Venezuela-bred crew of thugs, now terrorize Gotham with gun-toting, moped-riding hoods, sell illegal guns under the very noses of private shelter security guards, and run sleazy prostitution rings in neighborhoods suddenly besieged by the marauding migrants.
The gang, which also peddles a lethal fentanyl mix called Tussi or “pink cocaine,” has grown so fast that it has so far overwhelmed both average New Yorkers and the city’s elite police force.
Given how many FBI arrests have been sprung on NYPD brass over the last few months, I’m not sure how well that “elite” appellation still applies.
“Not every migrant is here to commit crimes, not every migrant is a gang member,” said NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny. “But these TDA guys hide very well in plain sight in the migrant community.
“We aren’t looking to grab the food delivery guy, but these guys go so far as to wear Uber Eats clothing, [use] the delivery bags while they’re out there committing their crimes,” the chief told The Post. “When we do arrest them, they are very eager to talk about the crime they have committed.
“They are unwilling to talk about TDA itself.”
The gang, whose name means “train from Aragua” (a state in north-central Venezuela) in Spanish, now runs citywide theft and robbery crews that have terrorized neighborhoods.
In Jackson Heights, a stretch of Roosevelt Avenue dubbed the “Market of Sweethearts” has become a testament to TDA’s muscle and influence, with vendors peddling stolen items and an open-air red light district that has migrant hookers walking the streets day and night.
Plus a feud between Tren de Aragua and rival illegal alien gang El Carro De Lost Caragijos 666, as well as a guide to gang tattoos. (Hat tip: TPPF.)
Former President Donald Trump has gained ground and is leading Vice President Kamala Harris in key Sun Belt states, according to a New York Times/Siena poll from Monday.
Trump gained in Arizona and is now leading Harris by five points with the two candidates polling at 50% and 45% among likely voters respectively, according to the poll. At the same time, Trump has also held onto his lead over Harris in Georgia by four points and in North Carolina by two points. (RELATED: Experts Say Major Swing State Is Once Again ‘Pivotal’ To Trump’s Chances Of Retaking White House)
While the Republican candidate is leading, a significant portion of likely voters across all three states are independents, according to the poll. On average, 31% of likely voters in the Sun Belt consider themselves Democrats, 33% identify as Republicans and 31% say they are independents.
The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project and the guerilla journalists at Muckraker have teamed up to unearth a little scheme down in Arizona — registering illegal aliens to vote. And shocker, I wonder which political party those new “voters” might be supporting? I’ll give you one guess, and I bet you’ll get it right.
The illegals Muckraker interviewed said they were registered to vote at grocery stores, while others reported activists visiting their apartment complex and encouraging them to register to vote. Why does this matter? In 2020, fewer than 11,000 votes tipped Arizona’s electoral votes to Biden.
Fast forward to today, and recent polling shows former President Donald Trump holding a narrow lead over Vice President Kamala Harris in Arizona, a critical swing state. With the race shaping up to be just as tight in 2024, the integrity of voter registration efforts takes on even greater significance — as does the lack of concern from the left.
It gets worse. The Oversight Project tried to track these individuals on the voter rolls but came up empty-handed — they were nowhere to be found.
This development comes just days after the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously ruled that nearly 98,000 people with unverified citizenship documents are still eligible to vote in state and local elections.
Jena Griswold, Colorado’s rabidly leftist Secretary of State who will forever be known for her anti-democratic drive to knock former President Donald Trump off the ballot, has suffered another election law loss in federal court.
The U.S. District Court for the Colorado District last week issued an order demanding the Democrat secretary of state release Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) reports suspected of containing dead registrants on the state’s voter rolls. The reports, according to a settlement, include individuals who may have died within the past three years.
It’s another significant election integrity victory for the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), and another stunning loss for election transparency-stifling Griswold and ERIC.
“PILF has knocked down ERIC’s wall of secrecy in the voter list maintenance process,” J. Christian Adams, president of the election integrity watchdog organization, said in a press release. “States cannot use third parties to hide election records that the public has a right to see.”
Griswold ultimately signed the stipulation after the court denied her original request to dismiss the case. Judge Philip Brimmer ordered the secretary of state’s office to disclose the requested 2021 ERIC Reports by Nov. 1. Brimmer did allow minimal redactions to the ERIC Report Key. With the agreement reached, the judge dismissed PILF’s claim that Griswold violated the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993.
The long awaited indictments of New York City Democratic Mayor Eric Adams finally comes down.
New York City mayor Eric Adams engaged in a nearly decade-long conspiracy that included accepting bribes and illegal campaign contributions from foreign sources to benefit his political career, according to the federal indictment unsealed Thursday morning.
Adams is accused of accepting free airline flights and staying in luxurious hotels on behalf of Turkish business and government officials who sought to influence him.
He sought foreign money in part to benefit his 2021 mayoral campaign, according to the indictment. But some of the criminal conduct Adams is accused of dates as far back as 2015 when he was the Brooklyn borough president.
Adams had been charged with five counts: conspiracy to commit wire fraud, federal program bribery, and to receive campaign contributions by foreign nationals; wire fraud; solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national in two instances; and bribery.
He is the first sitting New York mayor to face criminal charges.
The 57-page indictment accuses Adams of funneling illegal foreign money through U.S.-based straw donors, including at least two New York construction companies, to reap over $10 million in public-matching funds based on false certifications that his campaign complied with finance regulations. The funds provide “eligible candidates with public funds to match small-dollar contributions from New York City residents,” the charging document says.
Adams also received free or discounted travel benefits on Turkey’s national airline from a Turkish official, who facilitated the funneling of the straw donations to Adams. These overseas trips included flights from New York to Turkey, India, France, Sri Lanka, China and Hungary from 2015 to 2019. These trips are valued at more than $100,000.
Other luxurious benefits included “free rooms at opulent hotels, free meals at high-end restaurants, and free luxurious entertainment while in Turkey,” the indictment states.
In January 2022, when Adams was inaugurated as mayor, Adams agreed to accept foreign contributions intended for his 2025 campaign while meeting with a Turkish entrepreneur whom the indictment dubs the “Promoter.”
The Turkish government sought influence over Adams, in part, to get his help to open a new consulate building in the city before the country’s president visited in 2021, prosecutors say. The 36-story skyscraper would have failed a fire inspection at the time.
Prosecutors say Turkish officials cashed in on their influence with Adams and he pressured the fire officials to open the building, which they did because they “were convinced that they would lose their jobs if they didn’t back down.”
The question, of course, is how the boom fell on Adams, but Bill de Blasio’s wife “mishandled” hundreds of millions in homeless funds and never received an investigation…
“Ukraine Destroys ANOTHER Ammo Dump! In Kammenyi, Krasnodar Krai.” Here’s my quick, handy description of the different between an “oblast” and a “krai’: I have no frigging clue.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee narrowly voted 26–25 to recommend Antony Blinken be held in contempt of Congress following the diplomat’s failure to appear for Tuesday’s hearing.
“Secretary Blinken’s refusal to comply with the Committee’s subpoena — despite months of notice and offers of accommodations — warrants contempt,” the resolution read.
The Republican-led committee has long sought to host the secretary of state as it investigates the botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan over three years ago that left 13 U.S. service members dead.
Israel took out Hezbollah headquarters in Beirut. You would think Hezbollah honchos wouldn’t be hanging around their headquarters in the current conflict, but Israel reportedly took out five senior Hezbollah officials. Not sure if this is the strike or not, but it’s pretty shock-and-awe:
These are JDAMs using either BLU-95 500 lb (230 kg) (FAE-II) BLU-96 2,000 lb (910 kg) thermobaric warheads.
The double slap sounds and the jet plumes of orange tinted smoke out of the impacts signify an underground tunnel network being 'serviced' by thermobaric munitions. https://t.co/sZZQ1ngaXA
The blue is Israel. The lack of counter-activity (which would be in red) suggests Israel may have already crushed Hamas in Gaza.
Here’s a very long range look at Lebanon and northern Israel, showing that while Hezbollah is still launching a few rocket attacks at Israel, Israeli air power is bombing the absolute snot out of Hezbollah, not only with strikes in southern Lebanon, but even all the way up near the northern border in the Bekaa Valley.
Israel is obviously able to hit targets in Lebanon with impunity.
You feel sorry for Lebanese civilians caught in the crossfire, but pity is tempered by the fact that Hezbollah is part of the ruling March 8 coalition.
International law expert covers Operation Grim Beeper. “In the context of distinction, necessity, proportionality these principles of the laws of armed conflict being adhered to in an exemplary fashion.”
Bill to strip the tax-exempt status of terrorist supporting organizations (like the Council on American-Islamic Relations) moves forward in the house.
“Pentagon to Send Additional U.S. Troops to Middle East as Regional Tensions Boil Over.” “The U.S. maintains about 2,500 troops in Iraq and 900 in Syria, primarily tasked with counterterrorism operations. U.S.-controlled military bases also exist in Turkey, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, with a total count of U.S. military personnel in the region numbering around 40,000, up from the 34,000 troops stationed in the Middle East before the October 7 massacre.” But wait! Kamala Harris said we had no troops in a war zone!
A woman from Warrington, Cheshire, has revealed how her attempt to report a sexual attack led to her own arrest while the perpetrator remained free to assault others for nearly two years.
Helen Ingham, 48, recently waived her right to anonymity in order to share her harrowing experience with law enforcement after reporting an assault by Ahmed Fahmy, 45, a hotel manager whose reign of terror against women spanned more than 15 years.
There, as here, the left doesn’t want foreign rapists deported…
Democrats chances to take the senate this year appear to be dim. Good.
The U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill on Monday aimed at streamlining permitting laws to facilitate the domestic construction of semiconductor factories.
The bipartisan legislation passed by a vote of 257 to 125, with 49 members not voting, and now moves to the president’s desk for approval.
The bill passed the Senate last year, and was passed in the House of Representatives this week as the “Kelly-Cruz substitute amendment.”
Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) submitted the amended text of their Senate bill in December 2023.
When a bill passes as a “substitute amendment” in Congress, the original text is entirely replaced with new content. This new version of the bill, offered as an amendment, becomes the text that is voted on and passed.
It aims to accelerate the construction of U.S. semiconductor facilities, as the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act of 2022 has made over $50 billion available to promote domestic production and innovation.
It will also streamline federal permitting by designating the Department of Commerce as the lead agency for National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews, exempting certain projects from NEPA, providing the Secretary of Commerce with greater authority to expedite reviews in coordination with state and local governments, and limiting court challenge timelines.
Snip.
Cruz supported one portion of the CHIPS Act but disagreed with another.
Cruz explained in 2023 that the CHIPS Act consisted of two key parts: the Facilitating American-Built Semiconductors (FABS) Act, offering a tax credit to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing investment, and the CHIPS Act itself, providing billions in direct subsidies to companies. While Cruz co-sponsored the FABS Act, he voted against the CHIPS Act due to his opposition to direct subsidies, favoring the more indirect incentive of the tax credit.
“Many companies have fired Gen Z workers just months after hiring them and several business owners said they are hesitant to bring on recent college graduates due to concerns about their work ethic, communication skills and readiness to do the job, according to a new survey. Six in 10 employers said they have already let go recent college graduates this year, while one in seven said they are inclined to refrain from hiring new graduates next year, according to a survey conducted by Intelligent.com.” Also: “Although they may have some theoretical knowledge from college, they often lack the practical, real-world experience and soft skills required to succeed in the work environment.” Also: “75% of companies reported that some or all of their recent college graduates were unsatisfactory.” There may be a bit of truth to this, but a lot of companies seem to be laying off and firing people of whatever age right now…
Seems like an Air Force F-22 Raptor shot down a UFO over Canada in 2023. This was during the Red Balloon Menace, but it sort of looks like a Cylon Raider from the BattleStar Galactica reboot.
Critical Drinker gives thumbs up on The Penguin. “Just the right balance between grounded realism and industrial gothic. It’s obviously still based on New York, but rundown, neglected, stricken by crime, corruption and decay. So basically just actual New York, then.”
More Trump assassination details emerge, the Israel-Hezbollah front remains spicy, a huge Russian ammo dump blew up real good, more open borders shenanigans from the Biden-Harris junta, more woke Tolkien garbage, and China tries to pass off the most adorable fake pandas.
Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) released a whistleblower report Monday on the law-enforcement failures leading up to the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump two months ago. The report was released one day after a suspect was apprehended in Florida for trying to kill Trump on his golf course in Florida.
The Secret Service’s failures to secure Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13 were extensive and constituted one of the most consequential security debacles in U.S. history. Chief among them was law enforcement’s apparent choice to leave the rooftop of the American Glass Research (AGR) building unguarded, allegedly because of heat, before gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed atop the building to carry out the attack, Hawley’s report states.
The report is based on whistleblower allegations brought to his office in the wake of Crooks’s rampage. Before the report was published, Hawley sent multiple letters to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, questioning him about the most shocking details from the whistleblowers who contacted his office.
Overseeing the Secret Service’s security operations at the rally was an unnamed lead agent who apparently has a history of incompetence and who directed the placement of certain items around the stage of the Trump rally that impaired visibility. The individual is allegedly known to be a low-quality agent and failed an examination on the way to becoming a Secret Service agent.
Secret Service intelligence units were not at the Butler rally. If they had been there, they could have prevented or mitigated the communication breakdown between federal and local law enforcement, Hawley’s report says, a major allegation that he has not previously publicized.
Ahead of the rally, the Secret Service’s counter-surveillance division did not conduct its typical inspection of the site and did not have a presence at the Butler campaign rally. A whistleblower told Hawley’s office that the counter-surveillance division would have arrested Crooks for carrying a rangefinder. The same whistleblower alleges that acting director Ron Rowe personally requested cuts to the counter-surveillance division, a claim Rowe has denied.
At a congressional hearing in July, Rowe admitted to the Secret Service’s mistakes on the day of the Trump rally, including a decision to reject an offer from local law enforcement for drone support after the Secret Service was unable to fly its own. Hours before the shooting, Crooks flew a drone around the perimeter of the Trump rally for roughly 11 minutes, the FBI has determined.
According to the report, a whistleblower with direct knowledge of the Butler planning process said that the rally was not slated to receive any additional security because Trump is not a sitting president or vice president. These additional resources would have included counter-snipers and counter-surveillance personnel.
The Trump rally was considered to be a “loose” security environment, meaning that Department of Homeland Security personnel failed to police the area immediately surrounding the stage and were not placed at intervals around the perimeter, Hawley’s report asserts. Extra DHS personnel without the necessary training to work campaigns were pulled away from the department’s investigative team and reassigned to the Trump rally, a whistleblower told Hawley’s office.
Up to this point, Hawley says, the Secret Service and DHS have not answered questions about the lead agent overseeing the Trump campaign rally, resources allocated to the Trump campaign, and the Secret Service’s lack of counter-sniper coverage on the AGR building.
I think we need to know the name of this unnamed lead agent, and how many ties he has to the Obama regime…
On Sunday, September 15th, 58-year-old Ryan Routh of Hawaii showed up to Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, where former President Donald Trump was golfing.
Routh reportedly shoved the barrel of a scoped polymer SKS-style rifle through the fence with the intent to fire at President Trump, who was several hundred yards away.
Nothing says “accuracy” quite like an old Soviet design they dropped for the AK-47.
Authorities say Routh also had a GoPro camera, as well as two backpacks containing ceramic tile that he had hung on the fence (a type of ballistics armor is made of ceramic tile).
Secret Service agents saw Routh and fired at him. He escaped in a black Nissan before getting arrested by local police on I-95 thanks to a photograph taken by a bystander.
USA Today says Routh has a “complex history,” which is code for “the man was foaming at the mouth for leftist causes.”
A profile for Ryan Routh on X dates to January 2020, where he posted a range of passionate opinions on issues including Black Lives Matter, Taiwanese sovereignty and supporting Ukraine in the war with Russia.
Obviously he supported Palestinians and hated Israel.
According to Fox News, Routh spent the majority of his life in North Carolina, where he owned a company called United Roofing.
You won’t be surprised that Routh was in support of Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) in the 2020 election.
In 2020, during the presidential primary, the X account said: ‘I was not supporting Bernie, but now I am; as sleepy Joe stands for nothing; no plans, no ideas, just as limp as hillary. Bernie…….give them hell…..fight to the death…’
Routh reportedly donated to ActBlue, a major Democratic campaign fund, at least 19 times.
Ukrainian military recruiters appear to have spotted almost immediately that Mr Routh, who had a long criminal record, was not promising material.
According to an interview that he later gave to the Financial Times, he was rejected for service when he first reported to a Legion office on the Polish border at the war’s outset.
“They said: ‘You’re 56, you’re old and you have no experience’,” he told the paper. “So why don’t you recruit and coordinate?”
If that is what they told him, they probably intended him doing so having returned himself safely back to the US. Undeterred, however, Mr Routh continued on to Kyiv, where he became a familiar – if less than welcome – face on the Legion’s fringes.
There were many such cranks in Kyiv at the time, latching on to the war to pose as international men of action and boasting of high-level contacts in the Pentagon or CIA.
Regular Legionnaires did their best to avoid them, referring to them variously as “Call of Duty Warriors”, “Volun-tourists” and “Screamers” – the latter a reference to their reaction if coming under fire.
But there was little to stop them promoting themselves on social media, as Mr Routh did prolifically, claiming to be an active recruiter for the Legion ranks.
“Any gender, any age, any skill level to no skill level,” he claimed to Newsweek in 2022. “Yeah, if you wanna fight, come and see me and I’ll put you in a unit so you can go fight.”
Kamala Harris: “As of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone, in any war zone around the world for the first time this century.” U.S. active duty soldiers in a combat zone: “Say what?”
CBS polls restaurant patrons in Nevada and finds precisely one Harris supporter. Everyone else was for Trump. Presumably illegal aliens don’t eat out much…
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has determined that the two biggest counties in the state do not have to count mail-in ballots that have either the wrong date or no date where indicated on the outer envelope. The ruling was 4 to 3, with those 3 justices writing a dissent in the case.
The order from the court found that the lower court, which had ruled that those ballots must be counted even with the errors, lacked jurisdiction in the case because only Allegheny and Philadelphia Counties were mentioned in the case and not all of the state’s 67 counties.
The order reads: “AND NOW, this 13th day of September, 2024, the order of the Commonwealth Court is VACATED. The Commonwealth Court lacked subject matter jurisdiction to review the matter given the failure to name the county boards of elections of all 67 counties, and because the joinder of Al Schmidt, in his official capacity as Secretary of the Commonwealth, did not suffice to invoke the Commonwealth Court’s original jurisdiction.”
In practice, this means that in the coming presidential election, officials will not count any ballots that are either misdated or undated ballots. The jurisdiction issue could be addressed by the plaintiffs in the case before the election. The plaintiffs are listed as Black Political Empowerment Project, Power Interfaith, Make the Road Pennsylvania, OnePA Activists, New PA Project Education Fund, Casa San Jose, Pittsburgh United, League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania and Common Cause Pennsylvania.
But don’t think for a minute this will keep Pennsylvania Democrats from trying to steal the election just like they did in 2020, as they won’t start “counting” absentee ballots until election day.
And speaking of Pennsylvania voting fraud: “Pennsylvania[‘s Luzerne County] bans drop boxes after woman caught with multiple ballots.”
In a scathing revelation before Congress, former San Diego Sector Border Patrol Chief Aaron Heitke accused the Biden-Harris administration of covering up a sharp rise in encounters with suspected terrorists at the U.S.-Mexico border.
During a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing titled “A Country Without Borders: How Biden-Harris’ Open-Borders Policies Have Undermined Our Safety and Security,” Heitke said he was muzzled from releasing critical information on the number of Special Interest Aliens (SIAs) — individuals with known or suspected ties to terrorism — apprehended in California.
“I was told I could not release any information on this increase in SIAs or mention any of the arrests,” Heitke testified. “The administration was trying to convince the public there was no threat at the border.”
According to Heitke, arrests of individuals with terror ties skyrocketed under President Joe Biden’s watch. The former Border Patrol chief revealed that before 2021, his sector had apprehended between 10 to 15 SIAs annually. By 2022, that number had shot up to over 100, with even more recorded in 2023.
“Once word was out that the border was far easier to cross, San Diego went to over 100 SIAs in 2022, well over that in 2023, and even more than that registered this year. These are only the ones we caught,”
Scott Adams lays down some truth bombs:
Trump is trying to "steal your democracy" by running for office.
Meanwhile, Democrats are. . .
Importing millions of fake asylum seekers to political battleground states to create one-party Democrat rule.
Pack the Supreme Court to remove it as a separate branch of government.…
For years, Beijing has been deepening its hold on America, drawing intelligence from the U.S. government while silencing critics with the help of agents embedded in U.S. society.
The United States is now hitting back—and seeing results, according to experts.
In early September, prosecutors arrested Linda Sun, former aide to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, accusing her of acting on behalf of Beijing in exchange for gifts and payouts valued in millions of dollars to her family.
There has also been a marked increase in the rate of convictions or pleas in recent months. The Justice Department has brought forth dozens of CCP-directed espionage and foreign agent cases in the past four years, resulting in at least 13 convictions or pleas, with more than half of those taking place this year—including three in the past month. an Epoch Times review of the court records show.
On Aug. 6, a Chinese American scholar posing as a pro-democracy activist was convicted by a jury for spying on dissidents for the CCP.
On Aug. 13, a U.S. army intelligence analyst from Texas pleaded guilty to selling military secrets to the CCP.
On Aug. 23, a software engineer who worked two decades at Verizon pleaded guilty to gathering intelligence on countless dissidents and organizations targeted by the CCP since 2012.
Case documents reveal a broad range of criminal actions taken by agents, often different from what most may imagine to be spying. Beyond industrial espionage and covert influence campaigns, the regime has directed hacker rings, including a group that was charged and sanctioned this year for waging a 14-year campaign on the United States.
“I feel that our nation must take every opportunity to stop these threats,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), chair of the cybersecurity subcommittee for the House Armed Services Committee, told The Epoch Times, noting that the U.S. intelligence community has identified Beijing as the number one threat to the United States.
Bacon has experienced Chinese espionage attempts firsthand. Last year, he was hacked by CCP-linked hackers who also broke into email systems of State and Commerce department officials and dozens of other groups.
“Can we ever say that whatever actions we are taking are enough? I don’t believe so as the threats are increasing in frequency, sophistication, and national security impact,” Bacon said.
The CCP has long targeted people of Chinese descent—of whom there are more than 60 million people outside China—as potential assets in its intelligence operations.
Among those charged by the DOJ in the foreign agent cases are officials of the CCP’s top intelligence gathering agency Ministry of State Security (MSS), Chinese citizens traveling to the United States under false pretenses, hackers residing in Asian countries; as well as asylees, permanent residents, and U.S. citizens of Chinese descent.
Some reside in the United States while dozens of others charged are known to reside in China, and will now face arrest if they ever set foot on American soil.
There are also many who are U.S. citizens that aren’t of Chinese descent. They include active military members, former law enforcement, and experts in competitive fields.
An Israeli airstrike in Beirut killed senior Hezbollah military official Ibrahim Akil on Friday, Israeli Defense Forces announced. Although Hezbollah has not confirmed the reports, Lebanese officials said earlier in the day that the strike killed at least eight and wounded 59.
Israeli Defense Forces reportedly targeted two residential buildings in southern Beirut. Akil is the head of Hezbollah’s Radwan Force and Jihad Council, and is sanctioned by the U.S. Department of State for playing a role in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, in which a suicide bomber murdered 63 people, including 52 embassy employees. The State Department designated Akil a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in 2019, and offered a reward of “up to $7 million for information” about the Hezbollah leader.
“Two chiefs with the New York Fire Department have been arrested on bribery charges.” Those are Brian E. Cordasco, 49, and Anthony M. Saccavino, the same ones the FBI raided.
Shark Tank host Kevin O’Leary says that New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and California those states are now “uninvestable.” The taxes are too high and “the regulatory environment is punitive.”
Remember Thierry Breton, the eurocrat who got in a slapfight with Elon Musk over Twitter refusing the censor people and knuckle-under? He just resigned. “France’s European Union commissioner Thierry Breton abruptly resigned on Monday amid an ongoing dispute with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. He was slated to serve a second term after being re-appointed by French President Emmanuel Macron, The Guardian reports.” Evidently von der Leyen wants the Commission to be “gender balanced.” Social justice will oft social justice mar…
“The mayor of Atlantic City, Marty Small Sr., and his wife [La’Quetta Small] (the superintendent of schools) have both been officially indicted.” Despite both being Democrats, they weren’t indicted for fraud, but for brutally beating their own teenage daughter. Bonus: The daughter told principal Constance Days-Chapman of the abuse, and instead of telling the police, she told the abusive parents. She’s being charged, too.
“23andMe’s board quits en masse: A former tech darling is in turmoil after all seven of its independent board members resigned. 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki is now the sole remaining member following a disagreement over taking the company private.”
ESPN’s NBA reporter Adrian Wojnarowski retires. He was at the top of his profession, and reportedly walked away from a $30 million contract. But given Disney’s ongoing debacles, it’s quite possible they asked him to take a haircut or let him retire in advance of a layoff.
Jane says/Can you taste my fist today? Also, the tour’s been cancelled on the basis of chin music. A shame, really, since Jane’s Addition has a fairly unheralded role as the musical bridge between LA’s “hair metal” scene and the harder alt rock edge of acts like Nirvana.
It’s a LinkSwarm tradition to end with an amusing dog clip or story. So here are some pretty Chow Chows…painted up to look like Pandas in a Chinese zoo:
NEW: China zoo forced to admit the truth after one of their “pandas” started panting and barking.
The Shanwei zoo admits they painted dogs white and black to make them look like pandas.
The zoo initially tried claiming that the dogs were a unique breed of pandas called… pic.twitter.com/MMoQLD7zuR
Happy Friday the 13th! Harris continues to slip behind Trump despite (because?) of their debate on the network of her Best Friend Forever, Haitian immigrants in Ohio accused of eating roof rabbit, Texas blasts Biden Administration overreach (again), Conor McGregor steps into a different kind of ring, a worse than usual remake idea, and American cats meet a variety of grisly ends.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
You know that Harris bounce? Nate Silver says not so much. “I’d also note that Harris’s raw polling averages have DECLINED in most swing states since the start of the DNC. This data is NOT subject to the convention bounce adjustment. She’s had a run of pretty mediocre state polling.”
It’s not surprising that the snap polling, including by groups that conservatives trust, like Trafalgar, is showing that Harris “won” the debate. And I think that’s true. She was more polished, more prepared; she had her canned barbs. But there’s something strange going on here. While she won the debate, Democrats always come across in snap polling as winning the debates. I saw people sharing on X the history of snap polling after debates with Donald Trump, first with Hillary and then with Biden. In every one of those debates—six in total—clear majorities said that Trump lost the debate. I’m not sure what to read into that.
So, it was anger at the moderators, frustration that Trump wasn’t making a lot of the points I thought he could have made, but he was being Trump. And I’ve misjudged his appeal to voters and his electoral success so many times, so it is what it is.
But there’s something else I took away from this—and it’s showing on the screen just to the side of me here. One thing I really noticed throughout was the faces that Harris was making—very condescending, very mocking, very childish, actually. I think that’s the one thing I remember more than anything about the debate.
Now, I think Trump did a very good job, even though he didn’t make the points I thought he could have, like showing how she flip-flopped. He hit hard on the border and the economy, and I think that may have a lasting impact.
What’s showing up in the focus groups—ones I’ve seen not by right-wing groups, but CNN, Reuters, NBC—there seems to be a disconnect between who they think won the debate and how they’re reacting substantively.
Trafalgar was consistent with the others, showing a 15-point win for Harris in terms of who won the debate, but no movement in who people were going to vote for. CNN was interesting—they had an even larger, 20-plus-point win for Harris, but found that on the key issue—voters’ most important issue—the economy, Trump actually improved over pre-debate polling. Similar findings came from Reuters and NBC.
Dana Walden, a senior Disney executive whose portfolio includes ABC News, is one of Vice President Kamala Harris’ “extraordinary friends,” according to a report in the New York Times.
Walden and Harris have known each other since 1994, while their husbands, Matt Walden and Doug Emhoff, have known each other since the 1980s.
Dana Walden has donated to dozens of Democrats and contributed to Harris’ political campaigns since at least 2003, when she ran for district attorney in San Francisco.
While the legacy media has yet to find any evidence of pet consumption that it’s willing to accept, there are some much larger issues regarding the crisis that has been created in Springfield through the importation of nearly 20,000 Haitian illegals.
Former Ohio State Representative Kyle Koehler has sounded a warning regarding the consequences that have followed the Biden administration’s policy that gave temporary protected status to more than 100,000 Haitian migrants, including those relocated to Springfield.
🚨🚨 BREAKING:
Former Ohio State Rep. Kyle Koehler (@repkoehler) has made SHOCKING revelations about the illegal Haitian crisis in Springfield, Ohio during a recent speech.
1.) The Haitian illegals in Ohio are given $600-$1600 per month on Debit Cards through the Refugee Cash… pic.twitter.com/aWDyVcx7b3
Among the concerns raised by Koehler are the strain on the local school system with more than 1,600 non-English speaking students now enrolled and Haitian refugees who are 20 years old being placed Freshman High School classrooms with 13 year old kids.
Koehler also voiced concern over an individual who is renting his 63 homes to the relocated Haitians for as little as $250 per month, with 20-25 individuals living in each home.
Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) has also weighed in on the controversy, saying that he too has heard from Springfield residents complaining that pets and wildlife were being abducted and that health services are being severely strained by an influx of individuals with communicable diseases like TB and HIV.
The community of 60,000 residents is clearly facing serious issues related to the open border policies of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
When tales of Haitian immigrants eating cats emerged on social media this week, it suddenly focused attention on the city of Springfield, Ohio, but now we are learning there’s more to the story:
“Those 20,000 Haitians did not show up overnight or uninvited. Though flown in by the federal government, they were not forced on the city by the federal government. Elections have consequences. Springfield voted for this. They signaled their virtue, their signal was seen, and virtue arrived. This is what they wanted. This is what they got. They’ll have to deal with the consequences.”
(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Much commentary has focused on whether it’s true that pets are being killed and eaten by the Haitians, but that’s not really the point. The point is why Springfield became the destination for thousands of Haitians (who may or may not eat cats).
It’s a long story. First of all, you’ll find liberals insisting that these Haitians are not illegal immigrants. Research further, however, and you learn that most of them entered the country illegally, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border after making their way through Central America. After Haiti descended into its latest crisis, the Biden administration granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to all Haitians in the U.S., so you may say that they have been retroactively (but temporarily) “legalized.”
Now let’s talk about Springfield, which is a “blue” island of liberalism in a sea of Republican “red.” Ohio was once a battleground state, closely contested in every presidential election, and then Trump came along and the Buckeye State has now become a GOP stronghold. Springfield was a city of 58,662 residents before the Haitian influx, and the city sits in Clark County (population 136,000) which voted 61% for Trump in 2020.
You see that, if the Democrats can turn these Haitians into voters, they can make Clark County “blue,” and a similar calculus is being applied nationwide by the Biden administration’s immigration policy. Democrats insist that the “Great Replacement” is a right-wing conspiracy theory, but we can see them doing it — blatantly, deliberately, in front of our eyes — in places like Springfield. And this brings us to the late Warren Copeland.
For most of the past three decades, Copeland was the mayor of Springfield. He was a professor at Wittenberg University, a local institution affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Anyone who knows anything about the ELCA will tell you it is the pluperfect example of degenerate liberal Protestantism. “The ELCA has drifted so far into pagan goddess worship that to call it ‘Lutheranism’ is an insult to Luther; to call it ‘Christian’ is blasphemy,” as I wrote in 2016. Copeland was a radical obsessed with “social justice,” and the fact that Springfield repeatedly elected him as their mayor tells you something about the politics of the city. Indeed, Springfield eagerly welcomed the influx of Haitians. Read this article from December 2022:
A surge in the number of Springfield residents from Haiti has resulted in an outpouring of language assistance and additional forms of help from the Springfield City School District and others who are trying to meet their needs.
Social Justice destroys everything it touches.
Citizens have questions to City Council about vetting of Haitian refugees in Sylacauga, Alabama. City Council: “Meeting adjourned.”
For the first time in EU history, Germany is at the forefront of immigration suspension. Other EU countries will follow.
The Schengen Area…is an area encompassing 29 European countries that have officially abolished border controls at their mutual borders.
Reuters reports Germany Tightens Controls at All Borders in Immigration Crackdown.
Germany’s government announced plans to impose tighter controls at all of the country’s land borders in what it called an attempt to tackle irregular migration and protect the public from threats such as Islamist extremism.
The controls within what is normally a wide area of free movement – the European Schengen zone – will start on Sept. 16 and initially last for six months, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said on Monday.
The government has also designed a scheme enabling authorities to reject more migrants directly at German borders, Faeser said, without adding details on the controversial and legally fraught move.
The restrictions are part of a series of measures Germany has taken to toughen its stance on irregular migration in recent years following a surge in arrivals, in particular people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East.
Recent deadly knife attacks in which the suspects were asylum seekers have stoked concerns over immigration. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for a knife attack in the western city of Solingen that killed three people in August.
Polls show it is also voters’ top concern in the state of Brandenburg, which is set to hold elections in two weeks.
Scholz and Faeser’s centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) are fighting to retain control of the government there, in a vote billed as a test of strength of the SPD ahead of next year’s federal election.
“The intention of the government seems to be to show symbolically to Germans and potential migrants that the latter are no longer wanted here,” said Marcus Engler at the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research.
Seems like Germans are getting tired of all that vibrant raping and stabbing diversity…
On Wednesday, a federal court ruled in favor of Elon Musk’s X Corp in its case challenging California’s content moderation laws, citing free speech violations. X Corp filed a lawsuit to block the controversial law, which took effect on January 1, 2024.
The legislation requires social media companies to disclose details of their content moderation policies to the state or face civil penalties.
The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco overturned a previous lower court’s decision that ruled against pausing enforcement of the state law. The panel of three judges decided the law facially violated the First Amendment, Reuters reported.
“X Corp. is likely to succeed in showing that the Content Category Report provisions facially violate the First Amendment,” Judge Milan D. Smith, Jr. wrote in his case opinion.
In the complaint filed in Sept. 2023, X Corporation argued that Assembly Bill 587 violates the company’s First Amendment rights because it pressures “companies such as X Corp. to remove, demonetize, or deprioritize constitutionally-protected speech that the State deems undesirable or harmful” which “interferes with the constitutionally-protected editorial judgments” of the company.
For free speech advocates, we often feel that other citizens have become passive observers as an anti-free speech movement grows around us, threatening our “indispensable right.”
One of the most infamous figures in this movement has been former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has long been the smiling face of censorship. As the head of the Labour Party, Blair pushed through some of the early crackdowns on free speech in the United Kingdom. He is now calling for global censorship to expand these efforts.
In an interview on LBC Radio, Blair declared:
“The world is going to have to come together and agree on some rules around social media platforms. It’s not just how people can provoke hostility and hatred but I think… the impact on young people particularly when they’ve got access to mobile phones very young and they are reading a whole lot of stuff and receiving a whole lot of stuff that I think is really messing with their minds in a big way.”
Remember, when the want to crackdown on “misinformation,” the sort of things they want to ban are opinions contrary to their social justice agenda. Such as “the Chinese coronavirus came from a lab” or “there are only two biological sexes.”
More of that voting fraud Democrats swear doesn’t exist. “Illegal Alien Charged With Stealing U.S. Citizen’s Identity to Vote in Elections. She voted in the 2016 and 2020 primaries and general elections.”
The Biden Administration wants Texas to cede Fronton Island to federal control. Texas Governor Greg Abbott told them to get stuffed.
I am in receipt of a letter from the U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) to the Texas General Land Office (GLO) … given that it concerns actions taken under Operation Lone Star to secure Texas’ southern border around Fronton Island against the ongoing invasion of Texas by transnational criminal cartels — a crisis created and incentivized by your Administration,” Abbott wrote.
Abbott added that the letter “alleges that GLO has altered the flow of the Rio Grande by engaging in activities on Fronton Island without USIBWC’s approval.”
“It also alleges that [the] GLO trespassed on federal land in the process of facilitating cleanup and security efforts on the Island … That agency responded in a letter … detailing that GLO has not engaged in construction activities at all, and, in any event, Fronton Island is state-owned land.”
Abbott then responded to the United States Section of the International Boundary and Water Commissioner Maria-Elena Giner’s request that Fronton Island be returned to its pre-construction conditions: “You are either unaware of, or indifferent to, what those ‘pre-construction conditions’ were.”
Before Texas secured Fronton Island, Abbott wrote, “[T]ransnational criminal cartels had assumed practical control of the densely vegetated Island and used it to terrorize Texas communities.”
He recounted occasions when authorities found the criminal cartels to be using the “thick vegetation” to “stash weapons, plant explosives, evade apprehension, and engage in open warfare against rival cartels and against state and federal officers.”
“Are you aware that your appointee is asking Texas to return grenades and rocket launchers along with IEDs to the Island?” he asked the Biden administration.
Abbott continued, “Your open-border policies have allowed an invasion at the southern border and incentivized criminal activity that threatens the lives of Texas law enforcement, soldiers, and citizens.”
“Yet … the federal government has refused to enforce federal laws — even in dangerous areas like Fronton Island.”
“I determined that Texas could not ignore an ongoing invasion of its sovereign territory,” Abbott said of his decision on October 5, 2023 to move a “heavily armed invasion force” onto Fronton Island.
He then addressed USIBWC’s complaint that Texas had built “two sediment bridges.”
“Your Administration’s letter betrays a basic misunderstanding of facts on the ground, and its claims are unsupported by either science or common sense.”
Dwight has been sending me tidbits on the ongoing meltdown among government officials in New York City following FBI raids. Like this: “Paranoid police officials meeting in parking lots as fed raids leave NYPD, City Hall in shock.” “Law enforcement sources telling The Post that they’re afraid NYPD headquarters is bugged and their words are being recorded.” Plus New York City Mayor Eric Adams evidently has several burner phones, which is both highly suspicious and probably justified. And since Adams is reportedly using the messaging app Signal, presumably they’re modern Android or iPhones, which are: A.) More expensive than classic burner phones, and B.) Probably not conducive to quick SIM card swaps, ala Stringer Bell on The Wire.
Anyway, NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban just resigned.
Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori dead at 86. Fujimori revived Peru’s economy and destroyed the Maoist Shining Path guerillas, but in the end he too fell prey to Peru’s long history of government abuse of power and corruption. In the end, he too was corrupt and committed human rights abuses…and was still arguably the most successful (and important) President in Peru’s troubled history.
“The head of the UN wants to create a fake bank that will circumvent EU and US sanctions against Russian banks.”
Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham pushed back against a Biden-Harris administration proposal to “lease nearly 150,000 offshore acres to an energy company (Hecate Energy) with no experience in wind projects.” But it’s easy to understand why the Biden Administration wants to hand the assignment to Hecate: They donate lots of money to Democrats.
Alan Dershowitz announces he’s leaving the Democratic Party over its “anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist convention.” One wonders what took him so long.
Remember Taral Patel the Ft. Bend democrat who faked hate crimes against himself? Now he’s facing even more felony charges. “Last week a grand jury indicted him on four felony counts of Online Impersonation and four misdemeanor charges including Online Impersonation and Misrepresentation of Identity with intent to ‘harm.'”
Self-cleaning litter box has the unfortunate downside of killing your cat.
Rick Beato interviews bassist Tony Levin of Peter Gabriel and King Crimson fame. It’s an interesting interview, especially the part about how he sold all his stuff to go on tour with Buddy Rich, only to find out that Rich’s old bassist had agreed to come back, so he was out of a job…
“Optronic Technologies, Inc., better known to backyard astronomers as the parent company of both Orion Telescopes & Binoculars and Meade Instruments, has shut its offices and storefront in Watsonville, California.” Actual manufacturing was done in Tijuana, so I’m not sure how much California’s new minimum wage law had an effect.
There are rumors that Barbie director Greta Gerwig wants to make an all female Fight Club remake. That’s about as good an idea as an all-male reboot of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
Comedian Kevin Hart’s chain of vegetarian restaurants in LA closed down. 1. How’s that minimum wage working out for you, California? 2. Vegetarian restaurants aren’t even profitable in LA. 3. Stick to comedy. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
The fake Kamala bubble evaporates, another would-be Trump assassin is arrested, more Chinese spies on the staff of high profile Democrats, more NYC corruption raids, Ukrainian drones heat things up around Moscow, Intel and Stellantis layoff thousands each, another Harris County Democrat double-dips, a bit about Idaho, and some really stupid sailor shenanigans.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Evidently jailing Trump right before an election was a kangaroo too far even for this kangaroo court, so Trump’s sentencing has been pushed to after the election. “Judge Juan Merchan ruled Friday that Trump’s sentencing will take place on November 26, three weeks after election day, ensuring that Trump will not be sentenced in any of his criminal cases leading up to the election.”
In the friendliest possible format — a joint interview with VP nominee and emotional-support midwesterner Tim Walz, conducted by Dana Bash with the delicacy of an ornithologist gently hand-feeding hatchling chicks — Harris has revealed that her gaseously mindless word-cloud of a campaign is in fact an accurate reflection of her own personal vacuousness.
To be sure, Harris did not memorably self-destruct tonight. Whatever her failings, they are not those of Joe Biden, who couldn’t even articulate his words without slurring by the end. Her inarticulateness tonight was of the sort already known to be a Harris trademark, the endless jumble of nonsensical, comically vapid stock language. When she could fall back on a memorized list of talking points, she presented somewhat normally; the second she was required to respond directly to a question, then she began to spin out otiose nonsense like a pasta chef catering a Sicilian banquet. You could practically see the gears turning inside her head as she cast her eyes downward, stared laser-beams into the floor, and groped for cliches. She was more muted tonight than usual — her aides clearly ordered her never to display mirth under any circumstances, for fear the Kamala Kackle might emerge — and as a result, while she simulated sobriety for the most part, her body language was pronouncedly downbeat.
And all throughout she offered no answers to any policy questions whatsoever, nor any explanation for her various changes of position between 2020 and now. In theory, Bash asked most of the “right questions”; in practice, the way she solicitously asked them — sometimes even helpfully offering in advance a multiple-choice list of acceptable answers for Harris to choose from — turned them into cream puffs that Harris immediately used to serve up word salad.
Bash’s most pointed moment was when she pushed Harris about why she changed her position on a national fracking ban between 2020 and the present campaign. Harris’s answer was little more than, “Well, because I changed my mind when I became Joe Biden’s VP.” In the real world, anyone familiar with politics well understood that her “position” changed because Joe Biden — the presidential nominee — demanded it, and no other reason. Which of course is why it’s impossible to believe her when she says this is now her sincerely held view, as opposed to something to later be discarded once she can set her own priorities.
Eric Weinstein told Chris Williamson on the “Modern Wisdom” podcast that Donald Trump’s presidency has disrupted the old “rules-based international order,” which many view as an attempt to control global stability and wondered if the Republican nominee will “be allowed” to reenter the White House if elected in 2024. Weinstein argued that Trump’s unorthodox approach challenged the status quo, exposing flaws in the system and revealing that the impact of populist leaders on democracy and international agreements is more complex and significant than previously understood.
CHRIS WILLIAMSON: When we spoke at the start of the year, I said it was way too close to November to switch anybody out. Turns out that I was wrong.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Beginner’s luck.
CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You said what are the odds that Joe Biden has a debilitating event between now and November including death, so he runs a one in 20 chance of dying in any given year or above that. I don’t think you know whether he’s even going to make it to November debilitating event could have been a debilitating public event
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I purposefully left it vague. I didn’t say the other part of it, which I now feel comfortable saying, which is…
CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do you mean by that?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I think there’s a remarkable story, and we’re in a funny game, which is: are we allowed to say what that story is? Because to say it, to analyze it, to name it, is to bring it into view. I think we don’t understand why the censorship is behaving the way it is. We don’t understand why it’s in the shadows or why our news is acting in a bizarre fashion. So let’s just set the stage, given that that was in February.
There is something that I think Mike Benz has just referred to as the rules-based international order. It’s an interlocking series of agreements, tacit understandings, explicit understandings, and clandestine understandings about how the most important structures keep the world free of war and keep markets open. There has been a system in place, whether understood explicitly or behind the scenes or implicitly, that says the purpose of the two American parties is to prune the field of populist candidates so that whatever two candidates exist in a faceoff are both acceptable to that world order.
From the point of view of, say, the State Department, the intelligence community, the defense department, and major corporations involved in international issues—from arms trade to, oh, I don’t know, food—they have a series of agreements that are fragile and could be overturned if a president entered the Oval Office who didn’t agree with them. And if the mood of the country was, “Why do we pay taxes into these structures? Why are we hamstrung? Why aren’t we a free people?” So what the two parties would do is run primaries with populist candidates and pre-commit the populist candidates to support the candidates who won the primaries. As long as that took place and you had two candidates that were both acceptable to the international order—that is, they aren’t going to rethink NAFTA or NATO or what have you—we called that democracy. And so democracy was the illusion of choice, what’s called magician’s choice, where the choice is not actually, you know, “pick a card, any card,” but somehow the magician makes sure that the card that you pick is the one that he knows.
In that situation, you have magician’s choice in the primaries, and then you’d have the duopoly field: two candidates, either of which was acceptable, and you could actually afford to hold an election. That way, the international order wasn’t put at risk every four years because you can’t have alliances that are subject to the whim of the people in plebiscites.
Under that structure, everything was going fine until 2016, when the first candidate ever to not hold any position in the military nor any position in government in the history of the Republic, Donald Trump, broke through the primary structure. Then there was a full court press: “Okay, we only have one candidate that’s acceptable to the international order. Donald Trump will be under constant pressure—he’s a loser, he’s a wild man, he’s an idiot, and he’s under control of the Russians.” And then he was going to be, you know, a 20-to-1 underdog, and then he wins. There was no precedent for this. They learned their lesson: you cannot afford to have candidates who are not acceptable to the international order and continue to have these alliances. This is an unsolved problem.
A Missouri man is facing federal charges following a series of alleged violent threats made via social media against former President Donald Trump, Republicans at large, and law enforcement officers, according to a criminal complaint filed in the Western District of Missouri on Aug. 30.
Justin Lee White, 36, is accused of using interstate communication to spread a slew of online threats to injure Trump, Republicans, and law enforcement in violation of federal law, culminating in a multi-agency investigation led by the FBI, according to the complaint.
Speaking of Trump assassination attempts, DHS personnel assigned to the protective detail for Trump’s Butler rally were given rigorous training. And by “rigorous training” I mean “they sat through a two hour webinar.”
Remember that “Harris Surge” in polls? Yet again, it was a case of oversampling.
As we’ve been highlighting since 2016, polls are not to be trusted thanks to various ‘tricks of the trade’ – most commonly, oversampling.
Last month we noted how the founder of the main outside spending group backing Kamala Harris for president says their own internal opinion polling is “much less rosy” than public polls.
“Our numbers are much less rosy than what you’re seeing in the public,” said Future Forward super PAC president Chauncey McLean said during a Monday event hosted by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.
Now, the Washington Times reports that some pollsters are even sounding the alarm over Vice President Kamala Harris’ so-called ‘surge’ in the polls – which Harris pulled ahead in after replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee on July 21.
Since the switch, Harris is leading Trump nationally by nearly 2 percentage points and is either leading or tied with him in all seven battleground states. However, Republican analysts argue that these polling numbers may not accurately reflect voter sentiment due to biased polling methodology…
Critics point out that many polls have been sampling a disproportionately smaller share of Republican voters compared to exit poll data from the 2020 presidential election. The result, they say, is a misleading “phantom advantage” for Ms. Harris. According to them, this skewed sampling could be a strategic move to boost enthusiasm and fundraising for Ms. Harris’ campaign.
Trump campaign strategist Jim McLaughlin echoed this sentiment, stating, “They undersample Republicans” intentionally “to tamp down support and donations for Trump.” He added that the polls are part of a larger effort to create a narrative that favors Harris.
Trump has openly criticized the poll results. “It’s fake news,” Trump declared during a rally in Michigan. “They can make those polls sing.”
“Billionaire Mark Cuban Asked His Followers If They’d Prefer Their Kids Be Like Trump or Harris.” Turns out they preferred Trump by more than 2-1. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Another week, another high profile Democrat’s aide turns out to be a Chinese spy.
Linda Sun, a former aide to New York governor Kathy Hochul, acted at the direction of Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party officials while serving in state government, federal prosecutors alleged in an indictment Tuesday.
In a statement, the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York said that Sun was arrested Tuesday morning with her husband, Christopher Hu. They were expected to be arraigned later in the day.
Sun is a former deputy chief of staff to Kathy Hochul and has served in numerous roles throughout New York State government since her first post under the administration of former governor Andrew Cuomo in 2012. Before that, she served as Representative Grace Meng’s chief of staff, when the Queens Democrat served in the New York State assembly.
“As alleged, while appearing to serve the people of New York as deputy chief of staff within the New York State Executive Chamber, the defendant and her husband actually worked to further the interests of the Chinese government and the CCP,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said.
The federal government is alleging that Sun was an unregistered agent of the Chinese government and that her husband engaged in money-laundering while they benefited from millions of dollars in bribes from Chinese officials.
The indictment details a shocking pattern of collaboration with China’s consulate general in New York, with Sun at one point in 2020 letting a Chinese diplomat listen in on a private conference call for New York officials regarding the state government’s response to the Covid pandemic.
Chinese-government and CCP officials directed her to block Taiwanese officials from engaging with officials from New York. Beijing views the current government of Taiwan as a traitorous separatist movement and wants to annex the country.
According to court documents, Taiwan’s de facto consulate in New York City invited an unnamed politician, a description that matches the profile of then-governor Andrew Cuomo, to attend a banquet honoring then-Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen during her stopover in the city in 2019. Sun forwarded information about the invite to a Chinese official, telling that individual, “I sent you an email / Just an FYI / I already blocked it.” She then declined the invitation without consulting other New York executive chamber officials.
When Sun later asked a colleague to check if the politician was registered for the banquet, that staff member said that it was not on the schedule. Sun replied: “Perfect!”
She also manipulated messaging from the New York governor’s office, while consulting Chinese diplomats, the indictment stated.
Federal agents on Wednesday zeroed in on the highest ranks of Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, searching a home and seizing the phones of the New York City police commissioner, the first deputy mayor, the schools chancellor and others, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The police commissioner. They seized the police commissioner’s phones. Wow.
Among the other officials the federal investigators sought information from were the deputy mayor for public safety and a senior adviser to the mayor who is one of his closest confidants, the people said. Both men have had other legal challenges.
The agents also searched the home and seized the phone of a consultant who is the brother of both the schools chancellor and one of the deputy mayors, the people said.
The nature of the investigations is unclear, but it appears that one is focused on the senior City Hall officials and the other touches on the police commissioner, the people said.
…
Representatives of the City Hall officials — the first deputy mayor, Sheena Wright; her partner, Schools Chancellor David C. Banks; the deputy mayor for public safety, Philip Banks III; and a senior adviser to the mayor, Timothy Pearson — could not be reached or declined to comment.
The consultant, Terence Banks, a brother of Philip Banks and David Banks, recently opened a government and community relations firm aimed at closing a gap “between New York’s intricate infrastructure and political landscape.” He, too, could not be reached for comment.
Several of the officials had their phones seized or records of their communications subpoenaed.
…
In addition to the police commissioner, Edward A. Caban, several other department officials, including Mr. Caban’s chief of staff and two Queens precinct commanders, also had their phones taken by federal agents, two of the people said.
Says Dwight: “It sounds like the whole Adams administration is so packed with corruption, they can’t even keep the lid screwed on.”
Behind the statistics: “August: 635K Foreign-Born Workers Gained Jobs as 1.3 Million Americans Lost Jobs.”
Germany’s conservative, populist, pro-border security Alternative for Germany won big in this week’s elections. Of course, the media, in unison, denounces anyone who objects to the mass importation of unassimilated Muslims into any European country as “far right.” And in Germany, this means they invariable compare Alternative for Germany to a certain mustachioed National Socialist.
President Trump endorses marijuana decriminalization vote. “Florida’s Amendment 3, titled Recreational Marijuana, would allow adults who are at least 21 years of age have up to 3 ounces of marijuana (a ‘small amount’?) and up to 5 grams of marijuana concentrate. At present, the state only allows medical patients with qualifying conditions to legally buy and possess cannabis.” Marijuana prohibition hasn’t worked. Full-bore marijuana legalization seems to have brought a whole host of problems, especially in blue states. Florida will provide another statewide laboratory of democracy to calibrate an approach.
Lowes may be getting out of the culture wars, but Home Depot is still in, having “partnered with LGBTQ mafia organization Human Rights Campaign on a school program that taught radical gender theory to elementary school kids.”
That budget deficit might also cause the Labour government to pull out of the F-35 procurement program. “Despite previous plans to acquire 138 F-35s, only 48 have been ordered.”
The head of Harris County’s Public Health Department, who was fired last week, has also been working for a California county since last January. Questions are swirling about her work in Texas, including her role in awarding a contract for sending mental health workers instead of police on some 911 calls.
Sources also say there is a pending criminal investigation into the county’s health department and related contracts.
County officials announced last Friday that Executive Director of Harris County Public Health Barbie Robinson had been dismissed, just days after the Houston Chronicle reported on communications surrounding a $6 million contract awarded to DEMA, a California-based company, to run the county’s Holistic Assistance Response Teams (HART).
The Texan has learned that in January 2024, Robinson also contracted with Yuba County, California to provide services for a three-year period. Robinson’s work for Yuba County’s public health department provides her with nearly $200,000 in compensation for hundreds of hours of work, all while managing Harris County’s public health department.
Sources familiar with the matter say that Robinson claimed to have obtained approval from former County Administrator David Berry and the County Attorney’s Office to engage in the additional work, but that current County Administrator Diana Ramirez was unable to confirm Robinson’s claims.
Other sources indicate that the Harris County District Attorney’s Office (HCDAO) has been investigating Robinson and nearly a dozen other individuals with the county, HART, and DEMA for several months.
This week, the McLennan County District Attorney’s Office dismissed murder charges against two Houston men involved in the self-defense incident at a party near the Baylor University campus, finally determining it was a justifiable homicide. While that was good news to Calvin Nichols Jr., it hardly makes up for the 635 days the man spent locked up in jail while the DA’s office slowly dragged its feet over the case.
According to police reports, on the night in question Nichols and his cousin, Jaytron Damon Scott, were invited to a party attended by a number of Baylor students, including football players. According to partygoers, Joseph Craig Thomas Jr. showed up uninvited and began threatening others with a gun, including a female student who asked him to move his car.
He later stuck a gun under the chin of a Baylor football player. And when Scott and Nichols were leaving the party, Thomas began to pistol whip Nichols.
That’s when Scott, acting in defense of his cousin, fired his pistol at Thomas, striking him multiple times and killing him. Murder charges were then filed against Scott and Nichols, a fact that Scott’s attorney, Bryan Cantrell, found unbelievable.
“I don’t know how this case got indicted,” Cantrell told KWTX.com. “This was the clearest self-defense case I have ever seen. And I think the problem is a lot of attorneys and, certainly the people of the community, don’t understand the law of self-defense.”
You would hope that the end of Abel Reyna’s term as McLennan County DA put a stop to this sort of thing, but evidently not.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is preparing to implement the Biden-Harris administration’s Sustains Act which aims to regulate who will own environmental services.
According to private property rights advocates, American Stewards of Liberty (ASL), examples of environmental services include “the air we breathe, photosynthesis, pollination, and even the health benefits of open space.”
Specifically, the new law allows private funds to be used for conservation efforts on private land. The USDA will oversee the program, and the Secretary, preparing its implementation, will also decide who owns the environmental service.
Although the public may still provide the USDA with comments about the plan until September 16, 2024, ASL refers to the new law as “critical for proponents of the United Nations’ sustainable development agenda to achieve.”
The private property rights advocates see the program as a means to “provide the path to transfer America’s real assets from private citizens to federal and international interests.”
Screw both the Biden Administration and the UN.
The latest Stolen Valor Democrat is Maryland governor Wes Moore, who didn’t earn the Bronze Star he claimed he did.
Speaking of Idaho, how Micron defied the odds to become one of the biggest DRAM manufacturers in the world.
Intel just cancelled their 20A (2nm) node and will be fabbing their Arrow Lake processor at TSMC. “Intel projects it will save half a billion dollars by skipping the 20A node. The announcement comes as Intel embarks on a vast restructuring in the wake of troubling financial results last quarter. The company continues to lay off 15,000 workers, among the largest workforce reductions in its 56-year history.” It’s supposedly going full speed ahead with its 18A node, theoretically due in 2025. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Intel and Japan are teaming up to work on EUV. Hard to see them making much progress given how large a lead ASML has…
Rael Enteen, Vice President of the Washington Commanders football team (AKA The Artist Formerly known As The Washington Redskins) has been fired.
He told…that, “over 50% of our roster is white religious, and God says, ‘F— the gays.’ Their interpretation. I don’t buy any of that. Another big chunk is low-income African Americans that comes from a community that is inherently very homophobic.”
…Enteen also said some players are “dumb as hell” and said some who were smart don’t stay that way after getting hit in the head too many times. He also said those who “get their heads knocked around a few times” are more susceptible to conspiracy theories.
Enteen also said, “I don’t think the commissioner of the NFL hates gay people, hates black people. Jerry Jones, who really runs the NFL, I think he hates gay people, black people.”
And James O’Keefe claims another scalp…
Legal Insurrection’s William A. Jacobson just got dis-invited from speaking on antisemitism at a synagogue in Tampa. “How could any Jew look around at the current geopolitical landscape and conclude that it’s safe to ignore all the various threats to their existence — not just Hamas terrorists in Gaza, but also the various murderous entities backed by the Islamic radical regime in Iran, to say nothing of Democratic primary voters in Dearborn, Michigan — because Trump is the real danger? What kind of cocoon are these people living in?”
There’s too damn much going on in the world right now! Compiling the LinkSwarm used to be more like hunting and gathering, but the last few weeks have been like drinking from the firehose.
The real unemployment rate is crushing ordinary Americans, another Trump assassin thwarted, Maricopa cues up illegal alien voter fraud again, Tim Walz’s own National Guard unit accuses him of stolen valor, Ukraine captures a chunk of Russia, Google is declared a monopoly, a global censorship organization immediately folds at the first sign of scrutiny, the leader of Bangladesh flees, and California fines a business for daring to fly Old Glory.
There are lies, damned lies, and government statistics — and maybe none is more damnable than the official unemployment rate which is half the actual rate, according to Rasmussen. Worse, the number of Americans who are neither retired nor employed is more than four times higher than July’s official rate of 4.3%.
I’ve been writing for months now in quick-hit Instapundit items that this country has been in a jobs recession since the COVID lockdowns and, thanks to Bidenomics, never recovered from. Well, the latest Rasmussen unemployment survey has the numbers.
The report is paywalled, but I pay the subscription fee (and take the tax write-off) so you don’t have to if you ever wondered where some of your VIP membership dollars wind up.
Rasmussen surveyed nearly 9,000 American adults and found that in July the percentage of Americans who are unemployed and looking for work — this is the number that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) should report each month — was 8.4%. The BLS reported a rosy 4.3% unemployment rate last month, up from June’s equally imaginary 4.1%.
From there, things only get worse. Because under Bidenomics, of course, they do.
One in four adult Americans is retired, which is nice for them. Fifteen percent say they’re entrepreneurs (that can be anything from driving an Uber to launching a Silicon Valley startup), and just under 30% are employed by a private company.
Nearly one in 10 work for the government at one level or another. Those workers are supported entirely by tax dollars without producing any material wealth. Every government employee involved in regulation makes it harder for the rest of us to do so.
If you’ve been keeping track of these numbers in your head, you might notice they don’t add up to anything close to 100%. About three percent of adults surveyed answered “not sure” about their employment situation, the kind of answer that I assume involves smoking weed. The remaining 9.7% said they were unemployed but not looking — i.e., “Not in Workforce.”
That means the percentage of Americans who could be working and perhaps would really like to be working but either can’t find work or have given up finding work is 18.1%. That’s more than four times the official unemployment rate.
An alleged Iranian agent plotted to hire hitmen to assassinate US government officials — including possibly former President Donald Trump, according to sources and a federal criminal complaint.
Pakistani national Asif Merchant, 46, is accused of planning political assassinations in New York City in August or early September, and paid $5,000 in advances to men he believed to be contract killers, according to US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace.
“The Iranian indicted in Eastern District today is 100% an agent of the Iranian government,” a law enforcement source told The Post.
The plot was allegedly in retaliation to the 2020 Trump-ordered killing of prominent Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani, US Attorney General Merrick Garland confirmed Tuesday.
Trump has been a known target of previous Iranian-backed assassination plots, and the feds believe he may have been one of Merchant’s targets, law enforcement sources told The Post. But, the accused terrorist never divulged the name of who he planned to kill during his meetings with undercover agents — instead cryptically saying only that the target would have “a lot of security.”
Last week’s plea bargain deal to let 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and accomplices Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi avoid the death penalty broke a little late to include in the last LinkSwarm, but defense secretary Lloyd Austin has nixed the deal.
Although the last few weeks have had their alarming aspects – chief among which was the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13, the odds-on favorite candidate for president – they have also had their amusing moments.
In the latter category, I place the sudden queen-for-a-day-like coronation of Kamala Harris.
True, that coronation was in the nature of an anti-democratic semi-soft-coup (or anti-democratic “inversion of a coup”). Biden and his handlers, right up until the morning of July 21, were insisting that he was not dropping out, that he was “in it to win,” etc. But someone made him an offer he couldn’t refuse and out he went.
Here’s the amusing bit. Until the moment Biden was chased out of the race, Kamala Harris functioned primarily as political life insurance. “You might not like me,” Biden communicated, “but if I go, you’re stuck with her.”
Biden’s polls were in the toilet and, following his catastrophic debate with Donald Trump, were circling the drain, poised for oblivion. But Kamala’s polls were even worse. She was cordially disliked by—well, by everyone. Her staff, her colleagues, but above all, by voters. In the 2020 race, she got no delegates: none, zero, zip. She dropped out of the race for president but was then tapped to be VP only because this half Indian, half Jamaican woman was swarthy enough to pass as black and Biden had promised to select a black female as a running mate. Kamala truly is, as Biden himself acknowledged recently, a DEI vice president.
And sure enough, Kamala was every bit the disaster people predicted she would be. As a matter of clinical interest, she proved that senility is not the only cause of supreme rhetorical incoherence. Some people, and she is one, come by it naturally. Her tenure as vice president is littered with examples, and she provided another doozy just a couple of days ago when she attempted to comment on the prisoner exchange with Russia.
It’s painful, as are all the many video clips of Harris angrily denouncing people who say “Merry Christmas,” of her presiding as “border czar” over the disaster of our non-existent southern border, of her outlining how she wants to give Medicare, as well as the franchise, to all illegal immigrants, and how she wants to develop a national data base of gun owners so that she can confiscate firearms by force.
Can such a person win the presidency? No.
Then, how can we explain the sudden efflorescence of Harrismania? Democrats are wetting themselves with glee over their sudden fundraising windfalls ($200 million in a week, it is said) and sudden surge in the polls. New York magazine just beclowned itself with a cover showing Kamala sitting on top of the world with Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and even Joe Biden dancing and whooping it up below. “Welcome to Kamalot,” we read: “In a matter of days, the Democratic Party discovered its future was actually in the White House all along.”
Was it? Again, the answer is no. It is a temporary sugar high caused partly by the feeling of liberation following the sudden release from Joe Biden, partly by the slobbering media jumping all over the reinvention of Kamala like dogs vibrating over a bitch in estrus. The feeling of intoxication may linger through the Democratic convention, but there are already signs that it is fading. I think James Piereson is correct. Kamala’s position now is akin to that of Michael Dukakis (remember him?) in 1988.
Dukakis was way ahead of George Bush in the summer of 1988. Then it all unraveled.
The puppeteers have stopped pretending. “Obamaites Take Over Team Kamala.”
Ho hum, nothing to see here, just another cycle in which Barack Obama runs for president. What is this, five in a row now?
In this case, though, we may have to give Kamala Harris a pass. It’s not as if she developed a team of campaign experts on her own. Or that they’d stick around for long if she did (via Memeorandum):
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris hired a battery of new senior advisers to her campaign this week, moving swiftly to replace lifetime loyalists of President Biden with Democratic campaign veterans, including multiple leaders of Barack Obama’s presidential bids, according to people briefed on the campaign shifts.
David Plouffe, a top strategist on both of Obama’s presidential campaigns, joins Harris as senior adviser for strategy and the states focused on winning the electoral college. Stephanie Cutter, the deputy campaign manager for Obama’s reelection who has been working in recent months with Harris, is the new senior adviser for strategy messaging. Mitch Stewart, a grass-roots organizing strategist behind both Obama wins, will become the senior adviser for battleground states. David Binder, who led Obama’s public opinion research operation and previously worked for Harris, will expand his role on the Harris campaign to lead the opinion research operation.
All of the new hires will report to campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, another veteran of Obama’s two campaigns. She managed Biden’s 2020 campaign and built his 2024 operation from the White House before moving to Wilmington, Del., this year. Harris took control of Biden’s campaign as soon as Biden announced he would not seek reelection, an operation consisting of more than 1,300 employees and more than 130 offices. She asked O’Malley Dillon to remain in charge.
O’Malley Dillon tried gaslighting this right off the bat, although the Washington Post doesn’t put it that way. “This team is a reflection of the vice president,” she declared, but the Post’s reporting makes it abundantly clear that it reflects Obama rather than Harris. Harris’ existing staffers will remain in place, but the reporting strongly suggests that they will be eclipsed by people who [checks notes] know how to get to Iowa in a primary cycle.
On one hand, this is smart politics, especially given Harris’ record of abysmal performance on the campaign trail. Until now, Harris has only faced one significant competitive election against a Republican, the AG race in California, which she almost lost while other Democrats won statewide races by double digits. Thanks to California’s jungle-primary system, she won her Senate seat against a fellow Democrat in the general election. She then failed to get to a single primary contest in 2020 after entering that primary cycle as one of the favorites, melting down in two debate exchanges with Tulsi Gabbard and utterly failing to inspire Democrat primary voters.
If anyone needs an Obama rescue, it’s Kamala.
Still. During most of Biden’s presidency, Obama’s team largely drove policy, especially in foreign affairs, and Biden’s clear cognitive decline made it appear that someone pulled the strings behind the scene — and Obama was the most likely suspect. Then Biden got humiliated in a debate he demanded and suddenly Obama became even more of a public puppeteer in forcing Biden to withdraw. And now practically his entire political team has taken over Team Kamala even more than they had with Team Biden.
And not to be too conspiratorial about it, but how did we find out about this? In the oh-so-traditional Friday afternoon news dump.
It seems like the Democrats’ rule of thumb is: if you can’t win, cheat.
On Thursday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed itself and will now allow Arizonans to register to vote in federal races without having to prove citizenship.
“It’s another dizzying swerve in the legal battle over a 2022 law that aims ultimately to reverse a portion of the National Voter Registration Act and require all Arizona voters to show proof of citizenship to register to vote,” reports USA Today. “The order reopens a path for potential voters who just two weeks ago were barred from using the state voter registration form to sign up to vote unless they could produce proof of U.S. citizenship. It comes with two months left before the Oct. 7 registration deadline for the high-stakes presidential election.”
The order means people can again use the state-issued voter registration form even if they don’t produce proof of citizenship. Instead, they attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens, and are limited to voting in federal races only.
In the first 10 days after the July 18 ruling that required the documentary proof, the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office said it had rejected 200 voter applications.
On Thursday, the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office clarified the impact of the ruling.
“Election officials may not reject voter registration applications submitted without DPOC, regardless of which form is used,” communications director Aaron Thacker said. DPOC is shorthand for documentary proof of citizenship.
There is only one reason to allow Arizonans the ability to register to vote without proving citizenship: to let illegals vote. That’s why Joe Biden opened up the border, and that’s why the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed itself.
America First Legal (AFL) has filed a lawsuit against Maricopa County, Arizona recorder Stephen Richer for failing to remove non-citizens from county voter rolls.
On Monday the legal organization founded by former senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller sued Richer and Maricopa County on behalf of the Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona and a registered voter and naturalized citizen, for allegedly refusing to verify the citizenship of voters registered in the county, Just the News reports.
On July 16, AFL sent letters to all 15 Arizona counties demanding that election officials follow state and federal law by ensuring that non-citizens were unable to vote, and warned of legal action if they didn’t by the following week.
America First Legal (AFL) has filed a lawsuit against Maricopa County, Arizona recorder Stephen Richer for failing to remove non-citizens from county voter rolls.
On Monday the legal organization founded by former senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller sued Richer and Maricopa County on behalf of the Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona and a registered voter and naturalized citizen, for allegedly refusing to verify the citizenship of voters registered in the county, Just the News reports.
On July 16, AFL sent letters to all 15 Arizona counties demanding that election officials follow state and federal law by ensuring that non-citizens were unable to vote, and warned of legal action if they didn’t by the following week.
Richer replied via his legal counsel, claiming that he’s following the law by verifying the citizenship of voters – however AFL says he’s lying, as voter rolls have had an increase in the number of registered voters without confirmed citizenship under his watch, and that databases have not been accessed which would verify voters’ citizenship.
CNN: “Do you think Kamala Harris is black?” Actual black people in a barbershop: “Nope.” CNN: “You black people have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Tim Walz’s first executive order as the Democratic governor of Minnesota governor was establishing a diversity, equity and inclusion council for all of the state government’s actions and designated himself as the chair. On Tuesday, Waltz was selected to be Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate in the 2024 presidential election.
The Democratic Vice Presidential nominee told The Associated Press in 2019 that the “One Minnesota Council on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity” would ensure the “lens of equity” for all state government businesses, including “recruiting; retaining and promoting state employees; state government contracting; and civic engagement.”
“Walz told reporters Wednesday he’ll chair the council,” the AP said at the time, “patterned on a similar council formed by former Gov. Mark Dayton, but expand its scope to include geographic diversity and other considerations.” Walz said that the point of the council, per AP, was to “work to ensure that all Minnesotans have the opportunity to fully participate in the development of state policy. He says it will ensure that the ‘lens of equity’ is focused on everything the state does, whether it’s transportation projects or hiring.”
He has spoken many times about the “privilege” he’s been given as a “white man.” “I understand the privilege I’ve been given as a white man,” he said during his leadership, saying that he was in office “not just to talk about the problem” of racial disparity “but the solve the problem.”
It was late in the spring of 2005 when Tom Behrends, a farmer in his mid 40s with three kids, got the call from his superiors: The Minnesota National Guard’s 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery was being sent to Iraq. Tim Walz, the unit’s command sergeant major, had just resigned to run for Congress. Behrends was in line to take his place.
He’d need to talk with his family, Behrends told his bosses. He had a farm to run and his youngest child was still in elementary school. Because he wasn’t in the unit when it was activated, technically Behrends had to volunteer to go.
But Behrends told National Review it was clear what he needed to do.
“My first reaction was, I’m not going to let my soldiers down,” he said.
Behrends ended up spending 17 difficult months in Iraq with the unit. Among the unit’s tasks was maintaining a key supply route, keeping it clear of explosives. Three of his soldiers were killed and dozens more were injured during the tour, he said.
Although they were both first sergeants in the Minnesota Guard, Behrends said he didn’t really know much about Walz. They were in meetings together. “The only thing I knew about him is he talked too much, and he liked to hear himself talk,” Behrends said.
When Democrats decide they need a veteran to help disguise their radical nature, they inevitable seem to pick a “blue falcon,” dating back at least as far as tapping John Kerry in 2004.
The Tim Walz Stolen Valor story goes back to the very beginning of his political career. From the onset of his foray into national politics, Walz sold himself to the public and the media as a combat veteran of the Global War on Terror, masking the reality that he quit the military to run for office and avoid being deployed to Iraq.
Thanks to some quality reporting, we know that the Minnesota governor — who yesterday officially joined the Kamala Harris campaign for President as its VP on the ticket — quit the military in 2005, after learning that his battalion was about to be sent to Iraq. Walz spent his entire career in the Army National Guard learning to lead people into battle, with training and his lone six month overseas deployment to Italy provided at U.S. taxpayer expense. He then retired when he learned he was going to be leading people into battle in Iraq, leaving Minnesota’s 125th Field Artillery Regiment high and dry for a career in politics.
But that’s not what Tim Walz told the public when he decided to run for public office upon abruptly leaving the military.
Just months after leaving his battalion to go to Iraq without him, he announced a run for Congress, and the dissembling about his service record began immediately.
Instead of being honest about his early departure from the military, Walz told the media a much more heroic tale, one that was entirely fictitious.
To this day there are Democrats who believe that Walz served in Iraq, when he never got closer than Italy.
When the US Marine Corps asked me to go to Iraq to serve my country, I did it.
When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, he dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him. I think that's shameful. pic.twitter.com/Dq9xjn4R51
Minnesota National Guard spox Army Lieutenant Colonel Kristen Augé told Just the News that Walz, Kamala Harris’ vice presidential running mate, was demoted and did not retire as a command sergeant major as he has claimed for years – including on his official gubernatorial biography – as he failed to complete a 750-hour course in the Army’s Sergeants Major Academy, a mandatory course for E-9s, the Army’s highest enlisted rank.
While Walz temporarily held the title of command sergeant major he “retired as a master sergeant in 2005 for benefit purposes because he did not complete additional coursework at the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy,” Army Lt. Col. Kristen Augé, the Minnesota National Guard’s State Public Affairs Officer, told Just the News.
The statement reignited a controversy that began during his 2018 election for governor in which National Guardsman claimed on social media and in a paid ad that Walz declined to deploy to Iraq for combat duty in 2005 and forfeited his title of command sergeant major. Walz chose to run for Congress that year. -Just the News
The governor’s biography, however, says that “Command Sergeant Major Walz” retired from the Minnesota National Guard in 2005. At the time he was serving as one of the highest ranking members of the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion.
How is it that stolen valor and career embellishment are so endemic among Democratic office holders? Is it status anxiety, or the arrogance of the entitled? “It’s OK to lie about my record, because I deserve this!”
Ex-UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter’s home in upstate New York was raided by the FBI as part of a federal investigation, Wednesday, officials said.
An FBI spokeswoman confirmed to The Post that agents conducted a raid on the Delmar home as part of a federal investigation. She declined to comment further, citing the ongoing probe.
Ritter, a convicted sex offender, told reporters outside his Delmar home after the raid that the warrant focused on potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the Times Union reported.
He recently had his passport seized by the US Department of State as he tried to fly to Russia for a conference – a brouhaha he contended in the Russian propaganda site RT was a spiteful move against his pro-Russia stances.
The raid came a day after Ritter, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, palled around with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was in an Albany courtroom for a hearing over whether the independent presidential candidate should be on New York’s November ballot, the Times Union reported.
Ritter is indeed a Russian tool, but the timing from our increasingly politicized FBI does seem a tad suspicious…
Google has engaged in illegal activity by using its search-engine dominance to thwart competition, a federal judge ruled on Monday in a landmark decision that could have major implications for the way Americans consume information.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled against Google this week, after the Department of Justice and a coalition of state attorneys general challenged the tech company’s market dominance in 2020. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said in the decision that Google is a “monopolist” that has “acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” Google paid $26.3 billion in 2021, for example, to promote its search engine as the default option on smartphones and browsers.
“The default is extremely valuable real estate,” Mehta wrote. “Even if a new entrant were positioned from a quality standpoint to bid for the default when an agreement expires, such a firm could compete only if it were prepared to pay partners upwards of billions of dollars in revenue share and make them whole for any revenue shortfalls resulting from the change.”
“Google, of course, recognizes that losing defaults would dramatically impact its bottom line. For instance, Google has projected that losing the Safari default would result in a significant drop in queries and billions of dollars in lost revenues,” he added.
Once again, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took a leading role in bringing the lawsuit. “The legal battle began in October 2020 when Paxton announced that Texas had sued Google for utilizing business strategies to squelch competition for search advertising and internet searches.”
We have been discussing media rating systems being used to target advertisers and revenue sources for certain cites and companies. NewsGuard and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) have been criticized as the most sophisticated components of a modern blacklisting system targeting conservative or dissenting voices. I recently had a series of exchanges with NewsGuard after a critical column. Now, the House Judiciary Committee under Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) is moving forward in demanding documents and records from leading companies utilizing the GARM system, a company that I have previously criticized. It is a welcomed effort for anyone who is concerned over the use of these blacklisting systems to curtail free speech. However, time is of the essence.
The demand to preserve evidence went to various companies, including Adidas, American Express, Bayer, BP, Carhartt, Chanel, CVS and General Motors.
In my new book, I discuss the rating systems as a new and insidious form of blacklisting.
It is an effort to strangle the financial life out of sites by targeting their donors and advertisers. This is where the left has excelled beyond anything that has come before in speech crackdowns.
Years ago, I wrote about the Biden administration supporting efforts like the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) to discourage advertisers from supporting certain sites. All of the 10 riskiest sites targeted by the index were popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents. That included Reason.org and a group of libertarian and conservative law professors who simply write about cases and legal controversies. GDI warned advertisers against “financially supporting disinformation online.” At the same time, HuffPost, a far-left media outlet, was included among the 10 sites at lowest risk of spreading disinformation.
Once GDI’s work and bias was disclosed, government officials quickly disavowed the funding. It was a familiar pattern. Within a few years, we found that the work had been shifted instead to groups like the GARM, which is the same thing on steroids. It is the creation of a powerful and largely unknown group called the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which has huge sway over the advertising industry and was quickly used by liberal activists to silence opposing views and sites by cutting off their revenue streams.
Notably, Rob Rakowitz, head of GARM, pushed GDI and embraced its work. In an email to GARM members obtained by the committee last month, Rakowitz wrote that he wanted to “ensure you’re working with an inclusion and exclusion list that is informed by trusted partners such as NewsGuard and GDI — both partners to GARM and many of our members.”
GARM is being used by WFA to achieve what GDI failed to accomplish. The WFA sites refers to Rakowitz as “a career change agent” who will “remove harmful content from ad-supported digital media.”
Rakowitz’s views on free speech are chilling and his work shows how these systems can be used to conceal bias in targeting the revenue of sites with opposing views.
Rakowitz has denounced the “extreme global interpretation of the US Constitution” and how civil libertarians cite “‘principles for governance’ and applying them as literal law from 230 years ago (made by white men exclusively).”
He appears to be referring to free speech.
Know who else isn’t wild about GARM? Elon Musk, who’s suing them for coordinated boycott of Twitter/X.
Elon Musk’s X sued a coalition of advertisers leading a boycott against the social platform, accusing the group of conspiring to “collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue.”
The suit takes aim at the World Federation of Advertisers and its initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), which led a boycott against the platform formerly known as Twitter after it was acquired by Musk in 2022.
“The boycott and its effects continue to this day, despite X applying brand safety standards comparable to those of its competitors and which meet or exceed those specified by GARM,” reads the lawsuit, which was filed Tuesday in Texas federal court.
X accused the coalition and several specific advertisers, namely Unilever, Mars and CVS, of violating antitrust law and circumventing the competitive process with their boycott.
“The brand safety standards set by GARM should succeed or fail in the marketplace on their own merits and not through the coercive exercise of market power by advertisers acting collectively to promote their own economic interests through commercial restraints at the expense of social media platforms and their users,” the platform argued.
Since Musk’s takeover of the platform, X has struggled to retain advertisers, which were wary of the tech billionaire’s early decisions to roll back content moderation policies and reinstate previously banned users, like former President Trump.
An advertising industry initiative targeted by an Elon Musk lawsuit is “discontinuing” its activities and has deleted the member list from its website.
On Tuesday, Musk’s X Corp. sued the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) over what X claims is an illegal boycott spearheaded by a WFA initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM). The WFA isn’t disbanding but is halting GARM’s activities, and the GARM member page now produces a 404 error. An archived version of the page from yesterday shows the initiative members, including X.
X’s antitrust lawsuit has drawn skeptical responses from law professors, who say it will be difficult to prove that companies violated antitrust laws by stopping advertisements. But while X may never obtain financial damages from the advertising group or corporations like CVS and Unilever that it also named as defendants, fighting the lawsuit could be costly.
Business Insider reported on the GARM shutdown today:
The advertising trade group The World Federation of Advertisers told its members on Thursday that it was “discontinuing” activities for its Global Alliance for Responsible Media initiative following an antitrust lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s X against the company earlier this week.
Stephan Loerke, the CEO of the WFA, wrote in an email to members, seen by Business Insider, that the decision was “not made lightly” but that GARM is a not-for-profit organization with limited resources. Loerke said that the WFA and GARM intended to contest the allegations in X’s suit in court and were confident the outcome of the case would “demonstrate our full adherence to competition rules in all our activities.”
If that’s not an open admission of guilt, it will do until one comes along. In the meantime, expect this censorship hydra to put up again under another same.
What has all that investment in “green” energy gotten California? “Since January 2014, residential average rates for the PG&E service area have jumped by 110%, those of SCE have surged by 90%, and SDG&E rates have soared by 82%….A total of 18.4% of the customers of the three investor-owned utilities are in arrears in their energy bills.”
“Bangladesh Leader Flees Country In Helicopter As Protesters Storm Parliament.” “Bangladesh’s long-serving Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, resigned and fled the country on Monday, after protesters defied a military curfew and stormed her official residence. Hasina, who had been in power for 15 years, fled the capital Dhaka along with her sister by a helicopter to India, the daily newspaper Prothom Alo reported, after weeks of violent crack downs on protesters left nearly 300 people dead.”
“Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus took charge of Bangladesh’s caretaker government on Thursday, hoping to help heal the country that was convulsed by weeks of violence, forcing Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to quit and flee to neighbouring India. Known as the ‘banker to the poor’, Yunus is the pioneer of the global microcredit movement. The Grameen Bank he founded won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for helping lift millions from poverty by providing tiny loans to the rural poor who are too impoverished to gain attention from traditional banks.” I’d be more enthused about Yunus if their bank hadn’t been a contributor to the Clinton Global Initiative.
Just a normal everyday traffic stop: pulling over a couple of Chinese nationals, driving through Texas, with $250,000 worth of gold bars on their person.
That was the scene last week in Van Zandt County, according to KETK NBC.
Sgt. Charlie Hughes of the Wills Point Police Department was monitoring traffic on I-20 near the 533-mile marker when he saw a White Chevy Malibu with Michigan plates committing a traffic violation.
He then stopped the vehicle and identified the driver as 25-year-old Weijian Chen.
KETK writes that due to a language barrier, Hughes asked Chen to use a translator app in his patrol vehicle to communicate.
The officer said that during the interview he “observed multiple factors that lead [him] to believe there was criminal activity afoot.”
The driver said that he was heading to Dallas and had also been in Florida to “play”.
The vehicle was rented under the name of the passenger, 46-year-old Wenqiang Lin, who consented to a search but appeared uncertain. A K9 unit alerted to the front passenger door.
Inside, officials found a Spirit Airlines boarding pass indicating that Weijian Chen had flown from Los Angeles to Atlanta on July 30-31 without any bags. The rental agreement showed the car was rented in College Park, Georgia, on July 31 and was due in Los Angeles by August 3, the report continued.
A bag behind the driver’s seat contained gold bullion bars worth an estimated $200,000 to $250,000, including:
Seven 1-ounce 999.9 gold bars
Three 5-gram 999.9 gold bars
One 1-gram 999.9 gold bar marked with 20 squares
Eight 10-ounce 999.9 gold bars
After arresting Chen and Lin, Sgt. Hughes contacted U.S. Homeland Security, which revealed both men had entered the country illegally. Lin entered on September 15, 2023, and was awaiting immigration processing in Los Angeles. Chen entered on December 17, 2023, and is also pending immigration judicial action.
“Austin ISD Chief Financial Officer Arrested on Insurance Fraud Charges. Austin Independent School District (ISD) Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Eduardo Ramos has been placed on paid leave following his arrest on charges of insurance fraud unrelated to district activities.” Maybe. But I’d still say a forensic audit is in order…
The New York State Supreme Court has denied New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s request for a preliminary injunction against busing illegal immigrants from Texas to the city.
Adams, who faces challenges from New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and others in his reelection bid next year, filed a lawsuit against 17 charter bus companies in January.
His goal was to stop the companies from busing migrants, many of them undocumented, from communities in Texas to New York. The mayor cited Social Services Law 149, which stipulates that any person “who knowingly brings, or causes to be brought, a needy person from out of state into this state for the purpose of making him a public charge” has an obligation “to convey such person out of state or support him at his own expense.”
But in her nine-page July 29 ruling, Judge Mary V. Rosado found that the lawsuit was “unconstitutional.”
Maybe if NYC hadn’t gone out of its way to declare itself a “sanctuary city” I might feel a tiny more smidge of sympathy. Who am I kidding, no I wouldn’t. This is all on Adams’ Democratic Party. Choke on it.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has provided an update to an investigation related to allegations that the Democratic fundraising operation ActBlue is involved in illicit activities.
“ActBlue has cooperated with our ongoing investigation. They have changed their requirements to now include ‘CVV’ codes for donations on their platform,” Paxton said in the press release.
“This is a critical change that can help prevent fraudulent donations.”
Paxton added that “suspicious activity on fundraising platforms must be fully investigated to determine if any laws have been broken.”
This alleged “suspicious activity” by ActBlue in Texas has been an ongoing point of contention.
Current Revolt first reported on the investigation into ActBlue and the allegedly illegitimate donations last week.
Journalist James O’Keefe recently produced a series of videos where he purported to show alleged money laundering by ActBlue in Texas.
According to O’Keefe, some individuals in Texas are being reported by ActBlue to have made thousands of individual donations, but said individuals deny them when asked if they made those contributions.
O’Keefe received a statement from the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office regarding some of these incidents.
“It appears that both donors made voluntary contributions through ActBlue. One donor was reimbursed after contesting some of the charges, while the other cannot recall whether all or only some of the donations were authorized,” the sheriff’s office told O’Keefe.
I suspect ActBlue will drop any reforms just as soon as they need to launder more money.
“Federal Court Orders California College To Drop Censorship Policy. A federal judge ordered a California community college on Aug. 2 not to enforce a poster policy that was used against three students whose anti-communist posters were taken down. U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston found that the poster policy of Fresno-based Clovis Community College violated the students’ First Amendment and 14th Amendment rights.”
Warner Brothers Discovery took $9.1 billion write-down on it’s network TV assets. As many have observed, this means that not only is CNN worthless from the standpoints of truth, philosophy and morals, but that it’s quite literally worthless as an economic asset as well. It may actually be worth less than your grandmother’s closet full of Beanie Babies…
Actually, it could be worth considerably less than nothing. “CNN Could Be Forced to Pay Upwards of $1 Billion from Defamation Suit from Tapper Show.”
The case may not be as well known (yet), but CNN could be facing a defamation liability rivaling or exceeding the $787 million Fox News paid out to Dominion Voting Systems. NewsBusters recently reported on Florida’s First District Court of Appeals affirming that plaintiff Zachary Young could seek punitive damages, in addition to economic and emotional damages, from the Cable News Network in a civil trial after they allegedly defamed him regarding his work in getting people out of Afghanistan. The total could near or exceed $1 billion.
For that outcome to be remotely in the cards, Young needed to prove malice and according to the ruling, he’s done exactly that. “Young sufficiently proffered evidence of actual malice, express malice, and a level of conduct outrageous enough to open the door for him to seek punitive damages,” Judge L. Clayton Roberts wrote in the court’s ruling.
The court felt the high bars for actual and expressed malice were met because of internal CNN messages that were extremely vicious toward Young. Correspondent Alex Marquardt, the “primary reporter” expressed in a message to a colleague that he wanted to “nail this Zachary Young mfucker” and thought the story would be Young’s “funeral.” On that declaration of wanting to “nail” Young, CNN editor Matthew Philips responded: “gonna hold you to that cowboy!”
Alongside Marquardt, CNN senior editor Fuzz Hogan, who’s a member of CNN’s internally lauded “Triad” of editorial, legal, and standards/practices oversight personnel, described Young as “a shit.”
In an interview with NewsBusters, Vel Freedman, the lawyer representing Young, said that “everyone makes mistakes” but what CNN’s messages showed was a “systemic problem” inside the network. He added that their internal mechanism for accountability had “clearly failed” and opened themselves to “massive, massive liability.”
Freedman told NewsBusters that his client had lost between $40-60 million in economic opportunity over the course of his now-damaged career as a security contractor since people in the field no longer wanted to work with him. If a jury awarded his client for emotional damages, the upper end could be as high as $600 million. The court recognizing the malice and outrageous conduct by CNN, effectively removed the cap on punitive damages in the State of Florida.
All of that meant CNN could be facing upwards of $1 billion in total damages.
Dell lays off 12,500 employees. The Biden Recession is bad for everyone, but especially tech workers.
“Tim Walz Vows To Make America As Great As Minneapolis.” “As the governor who presided over the looting and burning of Minneapolis during the summer of 2020, I have full confidence that I will be able to apply my experience stirring up race riots on the national scale as well as I have in my home state.”
I think these LinkSwarms have gotten too long. Since I’m I’m still between jobs, I have more time to waste on read the Internet. “Oh, there’s a link I should include!” Wash, rinse, repeat. I’m either going to have to start cutting these down in size or start doing multiple LinkSwarms a week.
More signs of the Biden Recession, the DOJ wants to put its thumb on the scale against Trump again, more Secret Service incompetence comes to light, more Kamala cringe, a bunch of lawsuit news, and a metric ton of Babylon Bee links. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
I keep thinking I’ll keep the LinkSwarms to shorter lengths, and the world continues not to cooperate.
The start of the third quarter saw a deterioration in business conditions at US manufacturers as new orders declined for the first time in three months, according to S&P Global.
This makes sense as we have seen ‘hard’ US macro data serially disappoint for three months.
S&P Global US Manufacturing PMI falls to 49.6 in July, dropping into contraction for the first time since Dec 2023.
ISM Manufacturing PMI plunged to 46.8 (48.8 exp) – weakest since Nov 2023 (near post-COVID lockdown lows)
The FBI is going to resume its coordination with social-media companies on content moderation ahead of the 2024 election, after the Supreme Court dealt a blow to free-speech advocates who argue the federal government’s close cooperation with Big Tech firms violates the First Amendment.
According to a Department of Justice memo drafted earlier this month, the FBI “will resume regular meetings in the coming weeks with social media companies to brief and discuss potential [Foreign Malign Influence] threats involving the companies’ platforms.”
By “Foreign Malign Influence,” what they mean, of course, is “the possibility of a Trump victory.”
The memo is featured in a report from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz on the effectiveness of the department’s information-sharing system for monitoring foreign threats to U.S. elections. National Review has reached out to the FBI for comment on the memo.
Horowitz recommended the DOJ increase its transparency around the policies it put in place to ensure information sharing does not trample on the First Amendment, and to ensure the coordination strategy evolves to keep up with ever-changing foreign threats. The report’s appendix says both of the recommendations have been taken up by the DOJ, and requests documentation of the FBI’s outreach to social-media companies over the coming months.
The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and local offices will be tasked with building relationships with social-media companies in areas under the purview of various FBI field offices. As part of this outreach strategy, FBI officials are being instructed to make companies aware of the new standard operating procedure for monitoring suspected foreign influence operations online.
I’m so old that I remember when the primary duty of the FBi was to solve crimes, not to aid the Democratic Party…
Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe was directly involved in denying additional security resources and personnel, including counter snipers, to former President Trump’s rallies and events – despite repeated requests by the agents assigned to Trump’s detail in the two years leading up to his July 13 attempted assassination, according to several sources familiar with the decision-making.
Rowe succeeded former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned last week after bipartisan calls following her widely panned testimony before the House Oversight Committee. But both Rowe and Cheatle were directly involved in decisions denying requests for more magnetometers, additional agents, and other resources to help screen rallygoers at large, outdoor Trump campaign gatherings.
It was Rowe’s decision alone to deny counter sniper teams to any Trump event outside of driving distance from D.C., these sources asserted.
Criminal negligence all the way down:
🚨🚨🚨 EXCLUSIVE: A Secret Service counter sniper sent an email Monday night to the entire Uniformed Division (not agents) saying he will not stop speaking out until "5 high-level supervisors (1 down) are either fired or removed from their current positions." The counter sniper… pic.twitter.com/0dg99EESQk
The Democratic Party ruling class’s bloodless coup of their own democratically elected presidential nominee, who also happens to be the nominal sitting president of the United States, is one of the most astonishing political developments of my lifetime. Joe Biden, though clearly physically and mentally impaired, has sought the presidency for quite literally longer than I have been alive. Biden had been defiant ever since the June 27 presidential debate debacle that he was not going anywhere, despite overwhelming pressure from party elites and sycophantic media lapdogs demanding he do precisely that. He has a Lady Macbeth-like wife who craves power, and he has a felonious son in desperate need of a presidential pardon.
Yet the coup succeeded. Biden became the first incumbent president to not seek reelection after his first term since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. Biden made the much-anticipated announcement—not with a solemn Oval Office address—three days later, and he didn’t even explain his decision. Rather, he issued a bedridden tweet from a personal, not even official, account. It’s the equivalent of divorcing your wife over text message. As if that weren’t crazy enough, the announcement came smack in the middle of a five-day period in which Biden was not publicly seen and during which he apparently experienced an unspecified medical emergency. Suspicious much?
The Democrats’ decision to coup their own president is a curious one, on the political merits.
Hold aside the galling hypocrisy of the purported party of “democracy” trying to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot under an outlandish constitutional theory while simultaneously attempting to bankrupt, prosecute and incarcerate him on equally spurious grounds. Hold aside the self-proclaimed party of “democracy,” feigning ignorance over how its overheated rhetoric laid the seeds for their political opponent’s recent near-assassination and its continuing to depict that opponent as an existential threat to the American constitutional order. And hold aside that purportedly “democratic” party deposing its own presumptive elected nominee—a stark reversal from its presidential primary, when party poobahs worked hard to shut out all viable competition. Somewhere in Minnesota, Dean Phillips would like a word.
Hold all that aside. Because even on its own terms, the coup of Biden for cackler-in-chief Kamala Harris is going to spectacularly backfire on the Democrats.
Already, Democrats and the corporate media have been working hard to “define” Harris for the American people. At times, this has included some rather dubious retconning, such as magically pretending she wasn’t the Biden administration’s appointed “border czar.” (She was.) But the even bigger problem for Democrats is that Harris is not an unknown commodity. On the contrary, she is a very well-known commodity—one who just happens to be about as popular with the American public as venereal disease.
Harris’ current average approval rating is under 38%, and an NBC News poll last June found her to be the single least popular vice president in American history—only 32% of Americans had a positive view of her, putting her 17 points underwater. Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign was an absolute dud, self-imploding well before the first primary votes were cast. And as recently as a month or two ago, Democratic elites were openly discussing whether she could still be dropped as Biden’s 2024 running mate. Funny how quickly one can go from the weakest link to the great savior of “Our Democracy.”
Practically, the path to winning 270 Electoral College votes still runs through the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. It is frankly bizarre for Democrats to swap out the man who talks ceaselessly about his hardscrabble Scranton upbringing for a Californian who boasts the most left-wing voting record of any presidential nominee in modern history. Do Democrats really think Harris’ support for the Green New Deal and a national fracking ban will play well in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania or in the auto factories of Detroit? Will white working- and middle-class voters concerned about skyrocketing crime look favorably upon Harris’ enthusiastic support for the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, which racked up $2 billion worth of property damage?
Tucson-based World View, cofounded by now-U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly in 2012, received venture capital from Tencent — among the largest tech companies in China — both in 2013 and 2016. Tencent, like most Chinese tech giants, has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party….
Spy balloons partially funded by ChiComm ties? Like, how is this considered a totally normal business for a Senator to be in?
Not sure how much you can trust Seymour Hersh, but he says that Obama is the one who finally pushed Slow Joe out, threatening to invoke the 25th Amendment on him. He also says Obama is pulling Kamala’s strings. So there’s that.
Early in the morning, the FBI raided the home of Linda Sun, a former official for Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration. Sun served as Hochul’s deputy chief of staff for a year. Before that, she was the deputy superintendent for intergovernmental affairs and chief diversity officer under disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo. The federal officers searched the $3.5 million home, which resides in the exclusive neighborhood of North Shore.
That’s on top of a raid aimed at Winnie Greco, a top aide to New York Mayor Eric Adams.
While the left is trying it’s hardest to recast Kamala Harris as a moderate Democrat – quietly scrubbing her public record over the past 5 years – her actual positions have always been radical.
For starters, she’s on record wanting to abolish ICE (which she compared to the KKK), letting criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber and rapists vote, ban fracking and offshore drilling, defund the police, provide US taxpayer subsidized healthcare to illegals, and ban private health insurance.
Meanwhile, during 2020 Democratic primary debate Harris said that if elected president, she would “ban by executive order the importation of assault weapons.”
She also said she would reinstate Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status and DACA protection for illegal immigrants, and end other Trump-era immigration policies.
And in multiple speeches and interviews, Harris insisted America needed racial ‘equity’ as well as ‘equality.’ In other words, she endorses ‘equality of outcomes’ over ‘equality of opportunity.’
As The Federalist pointed out on Tuesday:
She Supported Bailing Out 2020 Rioters
Accused rapists, repeat offenders, and rioters alike benefitted in June 2020 when Harris encouraged her social media followers to donate to a bail fund dedicated to those arrested for their months-long, $2 billion siege of cities like Minneapolis. The vice president later lied about her involvement in the money-raising scheme.
She Put Other Countries’ Borders Before Her Own
Harris traveled thousands of miles away from the U.S. border invasion she was tasked with handling to deliver “peace and security” to the borders of Ukraine, which “is a country.”
She Proudly Enabled the Jussie Smollett Race Hoax
Harris called the staged hate crime an “attempted modern-day lynching.” She did not apologize even after Smollett was found guilty of felony disorderly conduct and making false police reports.
She Sponsored Legislation That Would Codify Abortion Through All Nine Months
As a senator, Harris was a proud co-sponsor of the original version of the “Women’s Health Protection Act,” which sought to codify abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.
She’s Openly Anti-Catholic
As a senator in 2018, Harris smeared Brian Buescher, a nominee for the U.S. District Court in Nebraska, for his affiliation with the famous Catholic fraternal organization Knights of Columbus and its historically pro-life views.
Flip, meet flop, as Kamala Harris tries to walk back all her radical positions.
In 2019, Kamala Harris was rated the ‘most liberal’ Senator in a now-scrubbed rating from GovTrack. She’s on record wanting to abolish ICE (which she compared to the KKK), letting criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber and rapists vote, banning fracking and offshore drilling, defunding the police, providing US taxpayer subsidized healthcare to illegals, and banning private health insurance.
According to the NY Times, “video clips of her old statements and interviews are being weaponized as Republicans aim to define her as a left-wing radical who is out of step with swing voters.”
“The archive is deep,” said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and ad maker who is working with David McCormick, the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, among other campaigns. “We will run out of time before we run out of video clips of Kamala Harris saying wacky California liberal things. I’m just not sure that the rest of this campaign includes much besides that.”
To that end, McCormick’s campaign has produced one of the first TV ads to attack Harris on her longstanding positions.
Yet, according to the Times, nevermind all that- Harris is now a reformed moderate – and has suddenly reversed course on virtually all of her most radical views.
On Friday, the Harris campaign announced that she no longer wants to ban fracking – a ‘significant shift’ from where she stood four years ago. She’s also reversed course on funding for border enforcement, no longer supports a single-payer health insurance program, and has walked back liberal fever dreams of a mandatory gun buyback.
She is no longer pushing for a single-payer health care system, and on Friday her campaign said she would maintain Mr. Biden’s pledge not to raise income taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. -NYT
Packing the Court? Nah…
On Monday, as Mr. Biden prepared a speech in Texas calling for term limits and ethics guidelines for Supreme Court justices, the Trump campaign resurfaced statements Ms. Harris made in 2019 saying she was “open to this conversation” about expanding the Supreme Court. Ms. Harris, in a statement released by her campaign, endorsed Mr. Biden’s proposal, which does not call for adding additional justices to the court.
According to Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank, Harris has ‘evolved’ into a Biden style centrist (if centrism is defined as letting 20+ million illegals into the country and cooking Americans with inflation).
“There’s a tremendous difference in changing one’s policy ideas and changing one’s principles,” said Bennett. “She has not changed her principles. She still thinks climate change is an existential threat — she just doesn’t think the Green New Deal is the way to address it.”
Sure Matt.
The Times also hints that Harris is essentially an idiot who didn’t really understand her own positions while running for president in 2020.
…during that race, Ms. Harris also often appeared as if she were not sure what she believed. In a CNN town-hall event the day after what was widely viewed as a successful campaign rollout in Oakland, Calif., she appeared tentative while discussing health care policy, eventually saying she would eliminate private health insurance and institute a single-payer health care program.
She would go on to propose an array of policies popular with progressives. She sought to increase pay for public-school teachers by an average of $13,500 through a bump in the estate tax.
She also called for an assault weapons ban and said she would sign an executive order mandating background checks for customers of any dealer who sold more than five guns in a year.
Minnesota governor Tim Walz is on the short list to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate. This is almost laughable when you look at Walz’s record running the state government, which somehow manages to combine the honesty of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, the competence of former Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco, and the sharp-eyed ethical-watchdog instincts of soon-to-be-former New Jersey senator Bob Menendez. A whole lot of shady and unethical people in Minnesota see the state government as a giant pile of money just waiting to be taken, with a sleepy guard in the form of the governor.
“J. D. Vance is weird.” Yeah, the modern Democratic Party is the last set of people who should be accusing others of weirdness…
“Did the Israelis just take out two key leaders in Iran’s proxy armies? Just hours after announcing that a strike in Beirut killed Hezbollah’s top military commander, the Iranian state media announced that Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh had been “martyred” in Tehran. Haniyeh had just arrived there to meet the newly elected president.” Reports say he stayed in the same room in the same complex every time he visited, so Israel managed to sneak a bomb under his bed several months ago…
“Canada’s standard of living is on track for its worst decline in 40 years, according to a new study by Canada’s Fraser Institute. The study compared the three worst periods of decline in Canada in the last 40 years – the 1989 recession, the 2008 global financial crisis, and this post-pandemic era. They found that, unlike the previous recessions, Canada is not recovering this time. Something broke. In fact, according to the Financial Post, since 2019 Canada’s had the worst growth out of 50 developed economies. Inflation-adjusted Canadian wages have been flat since 2016.” That’s what happens when you elect socialist asshats like Justin Trudeau.
Like the electoral blowout feared by national Democrats with Biden at the top of the ticket, Phelan’s abysmal record of the Texas House under his mismanagement resulted in a political disaster; more incumbent Republicans lost their primary re-election campaigns than any time in modern history.
Phelan himself is damaged goods, politically. He outspent his primary opponent by a 5-to-1 margin yet garnered a “win” of less than 700 votes in a race that saw a couple of thousand Democrats flip primaries, clearly to “help” him.
Everyone in the House knows that their defeated colleagues earned challengers because Phelan made them vulnerable… and then left them to go down in defeat.
But he is, for now, still the speaker… in name, anyway.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was publicly done with Phelan more than a year ago after the speaker and his cronies sent a deeply flawed, legally problematic, and factually vacuous “impeachment” of Attorney General Ken Paxton to be sorted out by the Senate.
The Democratic Party’s social justice agenda in action: “At least eleven transgender-identifying male felons are currently housed at a formerly women-only prison in Washington State. Many of them committed violent crimes against women and children before they entered the Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW), colloquially known as ‘Purdy.'”
Speaking of which, the NFL’s $4.7 billion antitrust judgement was just overturned. “The jury’s damages verdict was otherwise unsupported by the evidence.”
“A Bakersfield College professor who was investigated and disciplined after he questioned the use of grant money to fund social justice initiatives at his school has agreed to a $2.4 million settlement to resolve his lawsuit.” Keep hitting them in the pocketbook…
Bungie games, of Destiny and Halo fame, just laid off a bunch of staff. Official line says 17% of the company, but elsewhere I’m hearing the true total is closer to 40%. Microsoft bought then spun out Bungie, and Sony bought them in 2022.
Slow Joe continues sliding down the slope of senility, Democrats continue freaking out over same, the media continues to be shocked that the media hid Biden’s decline, Democrats gear up to commit more voting fraud in November, tractors join the culture wars, Skydance eats Paramount, and postal rates are going up again. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
President Joe Biden struck a defiant tone during what was perhaps the most consequential press conference of his political career, insisting that he is the best candidate to take on Donald Trump in November, even as he stumbled through several answers.
Biden read prepared remarks off a teleprompter and answered questions from a pre-selected list of reporters Thursday night at NATO’s 75th anniversary summit, addressing a range of subjects including the history of NATO, Russia’s war against Ukraine, inflation, and Israel’s war against Hamas. The embattled president showed signs of his age throughout the event, as he coughed, whispered, stumbled over his words, and at time lost his stream of thought, at one point even referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump.”
“Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president did I think she was not qualified to be vice president,” Biden said, defending his choice of Harris as his running mate. At the end of the press conference, Biden told reporters to “listen to him,” in response to a question about the gaffe.
Parkinson’s disease specialist from Walter Reed Medical Center visited the White House at least nine times in the past year, according to journalist Alex Berenson of Unreported Truths, while the NY Post has reported that a cardiologist was present during one of the visits.
Dr. Kevin R Cannard traveled to the White House’s medical clinic each time, meeting with either President Joe Biden’s personal physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor, or a naval nurse who coordinates care for the president and other senior officials. O’Connor notably gave Biden a clean bill of health after his February annual physical.
The visits spanned July 28, 2023 with the latest being March 28 of this year. That said, Berenson notes that the most recent logs are from April 1, so it’s unknown if Cannard has visited more recently.
The question isn’t whether Joe Biden is suffering from cognitive declines, the questions is how many kinds of cognitive decline is Joe Biden suffering from?
“Biden’s Cognitive Collapse: Greatest Media Scandal We’ve Ever Seen. With Russia collusion, they were inventing things we couldn’t see and trying to convince us that they happened. With the Biden cognitive failures, they were trying to convince us that something we all saw didn’t happen and wasn’t happening.”
You saw the debate and the interview.
Joe is not well. He should not be president, it’s a national security risk. This is what the 25th Amendment is made for.
There have been many media scandals. Rathergate comes to mind. But most immediately, Russia collusion was the most aggressive and sustained media misinformation campaign lasting years. It operated on the level of using bits and pieces of information and disinformation to try to convince us that something we could not see (collusion) did in fact happen.
The media conduct towards Biden’s cognitive decline operated on a different level.
We saw it. We wrote about it. But for years, at least since the 2020 election cycle, the media did its best to convince you that you didn’t see what you saw. The media didn’t try to convince you that something that didn’t exist existed, it tried to convince you that something that existed didn’t exist.
If we accept the actions and outcomes that are visible from Democrats right now, their definition of “democracy” is apparently to dismiss the will of tens-of-millions of Democrat party voters, and instead install a candidate the DC insiders select.
Democrats and even Biden administration officials are being very open about their intent. They are dismissing Joe Biden and debating the installation of their chosen alternative; all while trying to jail their political opponent.
Can democrats see their version of “democracy” is identical to horrible Vladimir Putin?…
Additionally, having just returned from an extended visit to Russia, where I literally spent exhaustive time researching how the government views their role within the social compact – and its consequence upon the average population, the “we know better” outlook currently on display by Democrat influence operations in DC is stunningly similar.
Democrats are defending “The Motherland,” where “mother” is their retention of omnipotent power. Yes, Democrats are Putin.
“Biden Officials Gave Radio Stations Questions They Could Ask Biden During Interviews; They Complied.” Of course they did. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Evidently donors aren’t interested backing a senile loser, as Biden campaign contributions have fallen off dramatically. “Contributions from large donors alone could be down by more than half this month and are lower across the spectrum, according to NBC News. ‘It’s already disastrous,’ a source close to the re-election effort told the outlet about the state of fundraising for the Biden campaign. ‘The money has absolutely shut off,’ another person close to the campaign said.” Now we get to see if Democrats will follow the will of actual voters who cast their ballots for Biden, or a donor class insisting he be kicked to the curb.
Democrats oppose a bill requiring American citizenship to vote. because of course they do. Getting illegal alien ballots in the system is one of the fraud vectors they need to stay in power. It’s amazing Republicans even need to specify that in a law.
Ditto Michigan, where Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer signing bills eliminating the board of canvasser’s investigative powers, instead requiring the board to refer allegations of fraud to county prosecutors. So they can make sure Soros-backed prosecutors can bury any fraud.
This is potentially huge: “Court Holds Federal Ban on Home-Distilling Exceeds Congress’ Enumerated Powers.”
Yesterday, in Hobby Distillers Association v. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, a federal district court in Texas held that federal laws banning distilled spirits plants (aka “stills”) in homes or dwellings exceed the scope of Congress’ enumerated powers. Specifically, the court concluded that the prohibitions exceed the scope of the federal taxing power and the Interstate Commerce Clause, even as supplemented by the Necessary and Proper Clause. The court further entered a permanent injunction barring enforcement of these provisions against those plaintiffs found to have standing (one individual and members of the Hobby Distillers Association.) The plaintiffs were represented by attorneys at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and background on the case (and the various filings) can be found on CEI’s website here.
Hobby Distillers Association has the potential to be a significant post-NFIB challenge to the expansive of use of federal power.
All sorts of federal regulatory shenanigans that depend on the Commerce Clause may be headed for the scrapheap of history… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Annals of evil: Porsche executive convicted for of throwing her newborn daughter out of a window to further her career. “Katarina Jovanovic, a Porsche executive in Germany, chose her career over family by throwing her newborn daughter out a 12-foot window to her death, and is now headed to jail for seven and a half years.” I wonder if German women’s prisons have shankings…
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has launched an investigation into whether the Biden administration used the “obscure Intergovernmental Personnel Act program” to fund the salaries of Big Tech employees as part of an executive order.
“To complete every action, agencies would have had to . . . bring on AI fellows by recruiting temporary — but influential — AI staff from external organizations through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) program. Critics, however, have raised reasonable concerns that these influential AI fellows are shaping federal policy to benefit their organizations’ funders and not the American people,” explained Cruz.
“Moreover, as federal agencies request increased funding for AI hiring, it is important Congress understand the extent to which, and how, agencies have already acquired AI staff in response to the expansive and demanding AI Executive Order.”
In October 2023, Biden issued an executive order to establish “new standards for AI safety and security.” The order also aims to address “best practices” for authenticating content and calls on Congress to pass “bipartisan data privacy legislation.”
Six months after the issuance, the White House stated they had completed all the actions in the order.
In Cruz’s investigation announcement, he casts doubt on whether hiring “only 150 people into AI roles” was enough to be able to complete the required work. Cruz also highlighted a number of reported incidents where, through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) program, Big Tech CEOs funded salaries of employees working in government agencies.
“In effect, large AI technology companies are influencing the Biden administration’s AI policy from the inside and advancing their own anti-competitive agenda to shape the future of the AI industry,” Cruz said.
Elon Musk announced on Thursday that social media platform X will sue ‘perpetrators and collaborators’ who have colluded to control online speech, as revealed on Wednesday by an interim staff report released by the House Judiciary Committee.
“Having seen the evidence unearthed today by Congress, 𝕏 has no choice but to file suit against the perpetrators and collaborators in the advertising boycott racket,” Musk wrote on his platform, adding “Hopefully, some states will consider criminal prosecution.”
The House report details a coordinated effort by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative to demonetize and suppress disfavored content across the internet.
As we noted on Wednesday, the WFA is a global association representing over 150 of the world’s biggest brands and over 60 national advertiser associations which created GARM in 2019.
This alliance quickly amassed significant market power, representing roughly 90% of global advertising spend, which amounts to nearly one trillion dollars annually.
GARM’s Steer Team reads like a who’s who of corporate America, including heavyweights such as Unilever, Mars, Diageo, Procter & Gamble (P&G), GroupM, AB InBev, L’Oréal, Nestlé, IBM, Mastercard, and PepsiCo. These corporations not only wield immense economic influence but are now revealed to be leveraging this power to control online discourse under the guise of “brand safety.”
“In New York City, hotels that have converted into shelters for hordes of illegal aliens have been given over $1 billion in taxpayer money to keep them in business. As reported by Fox News, the average hotel room for an illegal costs $156 per night, with some costing over $300 per night. As such, the city government has already spent at least $1.98 billion on housing for illegals, with 80% of that amount going to hotels or inns that have been converted into shelters, rather than to shelters operated by the city. Overall, the city has spent at least $4.88 billion on the mass migration crisis.” (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
Another loss for Biden’s tranny school mandate. “Carroll Independent School District (ISD) won a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the revised Title IX regulations issued by the Biden administration in April. The rules were set to go into effect on August 1. Federal Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas issued the preliminary injunction on Thursday, July 11, the same day the Amarillo federal court issued an injunction in the case brought by the State of Texas regarding Title IX.”
Bad news on the tractor front: John Deere is going full woke, with DEI idiocy out the wazoo and pushing tranny ideology on children. Plus they’re closing an American plant to move the jobs to Mexico.
Chicken Soup for the Soul, the company that owned Redbox and Crackle, is shutting down. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
It’s not just U.S. companies that have problems with unions: Samsung’s is threatening a general strike in their high speed memory fab at Pyeongtaek. Any machine that goes down on a fab line needs to re-qualified, which is a gigantic, time-consuming pain in the ass. A car factory can resume production in last than a day, but fab can take several weeks to months to get production.
Return of the zombie mortgage. People who thought their second mortgages were written off after the 2008 crisis but didn’t get it in writing are now suffering a rude awakening.
More Biden corruption unearthed, the Biden Recession has canaries dying left and right, yet another Katy ISD teacher involved in child sex crimes, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge is being given another tomb raider to destroy. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on Thursday as part of a probe into whether the Biden DOJ coordinated with Trump prosecutors.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on Thursday as part of a probe into whether the Biden DOJ coordinated with Trump prosecutors.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer dropped a bombshell on Thursday, revealing that his panel had unearthed new financial accounts tied to the Biden family investigation. Adding to the drama, Comer announced a fresh subpoena aimed at an undisclosed bank, ramping up the pressure in this ongoing probe.
“This morning, I issued a subpoena for targeted financial information from a certain financial institution related to Jim Biden, Sarah Biden and Hunter Biden. This is a result of many of the documents that Devon Archer turned over,” Comer told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business.
The Oversight Committee began investigating the Biden family’s alleged shady business dealings over two years ago. In March, they called for Biden to testify before Congress, stating that “the committee has accounted for over $24 million that has flowed from foreign sources to you, your family, and their business associates.”
“It is unbelievable,” Comer continued. “I don’t think you would find very many people that have a billion-dollar net worth that have as many different bank accounts as this Biden family had. Many of these were shell companies.”
Those were “companies [whose] sole purpose was to launder the money that the Bidens were receiving from China, from Romania, from Russia,” Comer added. “And never one time through the course of this entire investigation, even during the depositions with Hunter Biden and the transcribed interview with Jim Biden, were they able to answer exactly what the family did to receive this money.”
Gov. Greg Abbott has pardoned U.S. Army Sergeant Daniel Perry following a recommendation of pardon and restoration of his firearm rights by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.
The board voted unanimously on the recommendation.
Shortly after the recommendation was made, Abbott officially pardoned Perry.
“The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles conducted an exhaustive review of U.S. Army Sergeant Daniel Perry’s personal history and the facts surrounding the July 2020 incident and recommended a Full Pardon and Restoration of Full Civil Rights of Citizenship,” Abbott wrote in a press release.
“Among the voluminous files reviewed by the Board, they considered information provided by the Travis County District Attorney, the full investigative report on Daniel Perry, plus a review of all the testimony provided at trial. Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws on self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney. I thank the Board for its thorough investigation, and I approve their pardon recommendation.”
Perry was convicted of murdering Air Force veteran and Black Lives Matter protester Garrett Foster in 2023. A Travis County jury deliberated for 17 hours before finding Perry guilty of murder but not aggravated assault of Foster at the intersection of 4th Street and Congress Avenue in downtown Austin, as well as threatening a crowd with his car during the 2020 protest.
Perry, who was working as an Uber driver, shot and killed Foster with a .357 Magnum revolver after Foster approached the driver door of his Hyundai Ioniq.
This dispassionate description hides the fact that Perry’s car was surrounded by a crowd of rioters, including the one who aimed a gun at Perry. This was a clear case of self defense that never would have gone to trial if Travis County’s far left Soros backed DA Jose Garza weren’t so in favor of radical left wing rioters and hostile the right of self defense.
The Department of Justice recently argued that a whistleblower lawsuit against Pfizer, filed by Brook Jackson, should be dismissed.
Jackson, a 20-year veteran in clinical trial administration employed by a third-party vendor (Ventavia Research Group), worked on Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine trials in 2020. Alarmed by what she witnessed, Jackson raised concerns to her superiors, Pfizer, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in September 2020.
She claimed the trial was being run, documented, and reported in a manner that violated Federal law and was potentially dangerous.
Hours after contacting the FDA on September 25, 2020, Jackson was fired. Her sealed whistleblower complaint seemed to stall, with the FDA not investigating her claims. Faced with inaction, Jackson filed a lawsuit.
As the case progressed towards discovery, the DOJ intervened, asking the judge to dismiss the case. Jackson argues that the government failed to articulate a legitimate reason for dismissal and did not demonstrate why the burdens of continued litigation outweigh its benefits.
Disturbingly, a former FDA lawyer who worked at the agency when Jackson’s complaint was filed has moved to the DOJ and is now representing the government in its attempt to shut down the suit, raising concerns about regulatory capture and the use of government to shield companies from accountability.
In 2021, the British Medical Journal published an article investigating Jackson’s claims and found them credible. The journal’s investigation concluded that Jackson’s account was supported by documentation and raised serious questions about the integrity of Pfizer’s vaccine trials and the FDA’s oversight.
Other former Ventavia employees vouched for Jackson’s complaint, describing a “helter-skelter” work environment and lack of oversight.
Despite evidence and corroboration, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia after Jackson’s complaint, and Pfizer did not mention any problems at Ventavia in its FDA submission for emergency use authorization.
BMJ’s findings lend significant credibility to Jackson’s claims and raise serious questions about the integrity of Pfizer’s vaccine trial data, the adequacy of regulatory oversight, and, ultimately, the approved emergency use authorization.
Follow the money…
Court throws DEI amendment to NY constitution, off November’s ballot. “The NY State Supreme Court (trial court) in Livingston County (near Rochester), granted summary judgment throwing the ERA off the November ballot, on the ground that the proponents of the legislation did not follow the constitutionally required procedure for advancing a ballot initiative for a constitutional amendment.”
A Tompkins High School teacher has been arrested on nine counts of possession of child pornography.
James Paul Stone was booked into the Fort Bend County Jail Monday.
According to the Montgomery County Precinct 3 Constable’s office, thousands of images of child pornography were recovered from Stone’s residence, including several images that Stone admitted to producing himself.
Ah, not this crap again. “Venezuela Moves ‘Substantial Quantities’ Of Troops To Guyana Border.”
Israel’s Iran strike is shrouded in mystery, California is shockingly “permissive” on sex trafficking children, Warhammer goes woke, and a new Doom speed-running record. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Senior US military sources:The target of the Israeli strike was an Iranian military base in Isfahan near Natanz, not the nuclear facilities themselves. “The Israelis hit what they intended to strike,” The targets within this strike included Iranian air defense systems at the air base including those used to protect their nearby nuclear facilities. It was a message to the Iranians, “We can reach out and touch you.” The Russian made air defense systems were shown to be ineffective. There was one target but multiple strikes within that target. The Israelis used missiles and unmanned aircraft – in other words no manned aircraft (F35’s or others) were used as part of this strike
Both Israeli and Iranian sources are being cagey about what actually was hit. Right now it’s looking like it was a very limited strike, almost just a “See? We can hit them if we want to” strike to satisfy the Biden Administration’s endless calls for “restraint” while they continue to pound Hamas into a fine red paste. But it does offer a certain amount of support for the Kayfabe theory of Middle East politics…
The penalty for the equivalent of child trafficking in “progressive,” “forward-thinking,” “compassionate” California is a maximum penalty of a year in jail, and a minimum of two days in jail, plus a $10,000 fine which may or may not be paid depending on sentencing details.
Plenty has been said in recent years about soft-on-crime policies in states led by Democrats, and with good reason. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that political movements that believe the execution of preborn children is morally and legally permissible would also enforce such loose penalties for child endangerment and exploitation. But this seems, even for liberals, unconscionable.
Thankfully, it’s not that way everywhere. Other states with right-leaning leadership handle child predation, shall we say, “differently.”
But California especially loves setting sex offenders free if they’re illegal aliens.
It turns out that Katherine Maher is no ordinary ascendant progressive media executive. No, this woman’s social-media history reveals her to be the Kwisatz Haderach of white wokeness, presumably bred through generations of careful genetic selection to be the supernaturally perfect embodiment of Affluent White Female Liberalism. (As many have noted, she not only acts but looks like Titania McGrath.) It’s vaguely unreal: If there was a trendy progressive take floating around on Twitter and popular within media circles, then you can reliably bet she was there to voice it in the most preeningly insulting way possible.
(Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, who also offers lots of choice Chris Rufo commentary on tweets from Maher.)
“Texas Congresswoman Beth Van Duyne (R-TX-24) has taken out a full-page advertisement in the New York Post in an effort to recruit law enforcement from New York City, encouraging them to ‘escape New York and move to Texas. Sadly, the corrupt and crumbling Empire State is so purposefully anti-law and order, that you should no longer put your careers and lives in the hands of politicians who couldn’t care less about you or your families,’ the advertisement states.”
I’ll take “Headlines You Don’t Want To Read At Breakfast” for $400: “New York Suffers Record Rise in Potentially Deadly Disease Caused by Rat Urine. New York City has seen a record jump in the number of human leptospirosis, a disease caused by rat urine that can cause kidney damage, liver failure, and even death.”
“A far-left extremist that firebombed a pro-life office in Wisconsin in 2022 has been sentenced to 7.5 years in federal prison, along with three years of supervised release and a $32,000 fine.”
Republicans aim to use ballot initiatives to overturn unpopular Democratic Party policies. “Republicans in Washington are moving to get three major ballot initiatives passed. These measures will repeal Democrat-passed policies that are becoming unpopular among locals. The three changes would repeal the state’s sanctuary status for illegal immigrants, end an attempt to ban natural gas, and a change to the laws to strip squatters of their rights.”
You’ll need to click Show More for this one:
i remember in feb and march of 2020 being astonished by this lockdown idea and loudly yowling "do you have any idea what shutting down the world for 2 weeks would do to global supply chains and economic function?"
Has Warhammer gone woke? “I can’t help thinking that you finally started to bow to pressure from ‘Modern Audiences,’ and you were almost certainly encouraged to do this by a sudden infusion of investment money from BlackRock.”
The moment you make any concession, no matter how tiny, you’ve already given the game away. You’ve made it known that you’re prepared to bow down to their demands if they put enough pressure on you. And so, inevitably, their demands are never going to end. They’ll literally never be happy because there’s always going to be some other thing, some other piece of problematic lore, some other rule or exclusionary detail that has to be altered to comply with their constantly evolving demands, and all in the name of inclusion and diversity.
Because these people don’t care about your hobby, they don’t care about integrating into a community of like-minded individuals. All they care about is that the community bends and reshapes itself to suit them, until eventually they bend it so much that it breaks. People like that are complete and utter poison for any hobby, any fandom, any franchise. All they ever manage to do is stir up conflict, resentment and division, driving people away and turning fans against the very company that tries to pander to them, because their very reason for existing is to undermine and destroy the thing they claim that they’re trying to save.
And if you’ve got any common sense whatsoever or any love for the fandom that you’re so passionate about, you’ll think very carefully before bending the knee to them.
