There’s so much Trump news this week that I need to do a separate roundup or the LinkSwarm will end being bigger than Hunter’s coke habit.
A whole lot of things about how would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks came so close to succeeding don’t seem to be adding up. Like cops knowing about Crooks nearly half an hour before he tried to assassinate President Trump.
A team of snipers were inside the building where Donald Trump’s would-be assassin climbed onto the roof and opened fire after being spotted 26 minutes earlier, bombshell new reports claim.
Cops at the scene noticed Crooks, 20, clambering into place in plain sight just 130 yards away from the rally stage and took two photos of him because he was acting suspiciously, sources told WPXI.
Meanwhile a counter-sniper team was inside the building that was being used as a ‘watch post’ during the event when Crooks pulled the trigger, The New York Post reported.
It’s not clear if he had the AR-style rifle on him when he was first seen scaling the AGR International Inc. factory or if he stayed on the roof for the whole time.
The shocking new allegations surfaced as authorities and the U.S. Secret Service face mounting questions over how Crooks was able to shoot the former president and kill a member of the rally crowd.
A horrifying video shows witnesses pointing at the roof and shouting at officers trying to warn them. MAGA fans also say they alerted law enforcement to Crooks as he crawled to his shooting position, but he was still able to shoot.
5:10 p.m. Crooks was first identified as a person of interest
5:30 p.m. Crooks was spotted with a rangefinder
5:52 p.m. Crooks was spotted on the roof by Secret Service
6:02 p.m. Trump takes the stage
6:12 p.m. Crooks fires first shots
From the time Crooks fired his first shot to the gunman being killed was just 26 seconds, according to law enforcement officials. Eleven seconds after the first shot, Secret Service counter snipers acquired their target — and 15 seconds after that, Crooks was shot dead.
So the early summaries were wrong, and the Secret Service response was orders of magnitude worse than we initially believed. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
An officer even alerted people on a blanket tactical channel. Did the Secret Service have access to it? Were they just not listening?
A bold assertion: “Biden’s Team Deliberately Kneecapped Trump’s Security To Allow An Assassination Attempt.”
Nobody wants to hear this because of the implications, but oh well, because it needs to be said: Joe Biden’s security regime deliberately and with malice aforethought created the conditions that led to an attempted assassin shooting Donald Trump in the head. It is by the grace of God that he lived and our nation is not currently in the midst of a violent civil war.
They deliberately starved Trump’s security team of the resources it needed. And they did it repeatedly, over many weeks and months.
With Trump’s security detail understaffed, under-resourced, and stretched to its limits, Biden’s security regime reportedly diverted even more resources to a hastily planned Jill Biden event that just happened to be in the area.
Biden’s security regime then ordered the most obvious assassination perch in the entire area to remain outside the main security perimeter.
Furthermore, Biden’s Secret Service director ordered law enforcement and counter-snipers OFF the roof the assassin used.
If that weren’t enough, Biden’s security regime also refused to block the line of sight from the assassin’s perch to Trump’s location. When law enforcement radioed in a suspicious person using a laser range finder at the building and even took photos of him, nothing was done to detain the assassin.
The assassin was so obviously a threat that bystanders at the event begged law enforcement to stop him, but nothing happened. And even as snipers on the roof near Trump saw a gunman on the other roof, Biden’s security regime refused to have agents immediately surround Trump or remove him from the stage to protect him from being shot.
Given the lies and nonsense from both Biden’s Department of Homeland Security secretary and his Secret Service director, it’s increasingly difficult to believe this was just a series of independent mistakes (Secret Service director Kim Cheatle at one point this week claimed snipers couldn’t be on the roof because it was sloped and they might fall and hurt themselves). In contrast, when you look at the entire picture, what you see better resembles a deliberate plan to make Trump vulnerable but to appear at first glance to be just a couple of innocent mistakes.
And when you add in how little information we’ve been given about the shooter — apparently the only person on Earth not on the internet — you begin to wonder if maybe a group of people at a different three-letter agency might have been working on a parallel track to find and encourage people to take action against Trump at the very same time he was kept vulnerable by Biden’s regime.
We know this happens because the FBI did it with Gretchen Whitmer: It recruited and urged disturbed individuals to buy weapons and put together a plan to kidnap her. In that case, the FBI wanted a story it could use to slime right-wingers. So it created the story itself.
What happens when an agency like that, or maybe even another three-letter agency, decides instead that it’s had enough of Trump? Some former FBI employees might even call it an “insurance policy.”
Did the Biden Administration want Trump assassinated? That may be a bridge too far, but I think it’s fair to say that the Biden Administration didn’t go out of their way to ensure Trump’s safety. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Incompetence or malice?
There are basically four competing narratives or theories about what led to the assassination attempt against Donald Trump:
1) Through a combination of incompetence and innocent mistakes and garden-variety bureaucratic ineptitude, a gunman was able to penetrate security and take…
Sometimes the obvious answer is the answer: Evidently the shooter hated Trump.
A former classmate of the man who attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump recounted a heated political discussion with the shooter, according to Fox News.
Vincent Taormina told Fox News Digital in an interview posted Wednesday that the shooter, Thomas Michael Crooks, considered him “stupid” for supporting Trump. Trump was slightly wounded Saturday during the attempted assassination at a Butler County, Pennsylvania, rally, which left former volunteer fire chief Corey Comperatore dead and two other attendees wounded. (RELATED: Liberal Media Outlets Claim Trump Contributed To ‘Violent Rhetoric’ After Assassination Attempt)
“I brought up the fact that I’m Hispanic and, you know, I’m for Trump. And he said, ‘Well, you’re Hispanic, so shouldn’t you hate Trump?,’” Taormina recounted. “No. He’s great. He was a great president. He called me stupid – or insinuated that I was stupid.”
“He said, ‘Well, that’s kind of stupid.’ He was a know-it-all,” Taormina continued. “So, like, once again, if he was passionate about something, he would just talk, talk, talk and acted like he knew everything, especially politics-related. He would say it in a tone that was, like, ‘I’m better than you,’ in a type of way, and meanwhile, it’s like, dude, we’re in the same classes.”
So he was the living embodiment of those WE BELIEVE IN SCIENCE signs…with a gun.
After years and years of uncivilized behavior, celebrating the attempted assassination of a presidential candidate is finally far enough over the line that leftists are finally getting pink slips. More good work by Libs of TikTok.
He “unequivocally” denounced the attempt. “Not funny.”
“Whoever did this has done so much damage to the left.”
“They lost a lot of moral high ground in the ‘You’re the violent people.'” (The left hasn’t had that “high ground” for quite some time, as Steve Scalise and Rand Paul can attest.)
“I’ve got to say this: Trump is the luckiest motherfucker ever to walk the face of the earth.”
“Biden can’t get through a debate and a bullet can’t stop Trump.”
US District Court Judge Aileen Cannon has dismissed Donald Trump’s classified documents case, ruling that the appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutional.
“The Special Counsel’s position effectively usurps that important legislative authority, transferring it to a Head of Department, and in the process threatening the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers,” Cannon wrote in her decision. “He can be appointed and confirmed through the default method prescribed in the Appointments Clause, as Congress has directed for United States Attorneys throughout American history.”
“Dismissal of this action is the only appropriate solution for the Appointments Clause violation.”
The Democratic Media Complex’s push to derail Trump by any means necessary has all but ensured his election.
I’ve barely touched on the Republican National Convention going on now, but this roundup is already pretty lengthy…
A whole lot of Elon Musk news of note has popped up this week, so let’s dig in.
First, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt against Trump, Musk endorsed Trump for President.
Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla, publicly endorsed Donald Trump for the first time in the U.S. presidential race, calling the Republican former president “tough.”
Musk, the world’s richest person, posted the endorsement with a video of Trump with blood on his face pumping his fist after multiple shots rang out at Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday. Trump was safe.
The posts cement Musk’s shift towards right-wing politics and hand Trump a high-profile backer in his quest to return to the White House in the Nov. 5 election.
“I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” Musk posted.
“The martyr lived,” he wrote, citing a reported debate between conservative venture capitalist Peter Thiel and LinkedIn co-founder and Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman.
Musk later posted a photograph of Trump at the event, followed by: “Last time America had a candidate this tough was Theodore Roosevelt.”
It IS true that Twitter’s current version violates the Digital Services Act, arguably, because the Digital Services Act is nothing but a censorship regime intended to shut down any speech that doesn’t parrot exactly what the Davos Elites want out there. That isn’t even an exaggeration; that is what it is intended to do.
If George Orwell wanted to write a law to make 2024 look like 1984, the DSA would be a great first start. It is, I say unironically, evil.
Elon clearly wants this fight, and he took his first shot back at the E.U. by revealing that they offered him and the other social media platforms a deal: comply with our censorship demands and we will help you deceive your users. He accuses the other social media platforms of taking the deal, and I believe him. Nobody is taking any shots at them because they have knuckled under.
The European Union isn’t just doing it for their own Elites–they are collaborating with US policymakers, the intelligence “community,” the MSM, and the censorship industrial complex to do their dirty work because there are limits placed on what government can do due to the First Amendment.
Billionaire Elon Musk said he is moving the headquarters of X and SpaceX out of California after governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill barring school districts from requiring teachers to notify parents if a child changes their gender identity.
“This is the final straw,” Musk said in a social-media post Tuesday afternoon. “Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas.”
Musk said he previously told the California governor a new law like this one would “force families and companies to leave California to protect their children.” Tesla moved its headquarters out of California to Austin, Texas in 2021.
California is the first state to pass such a law, and conservative groups have said they plan to challenge it in court. Ongoing litigation may complicate those efforts. A San Bernardino County judge already blocked one school district’s parental notification policy after the state’s attorney general sued last year.
The California Policy Center, a conservative think tank in the Golden State, said the new law “opens the door to child exploitation.”
“Gov. Newsom has okayed a bill that was based on the flawed logic that parents are dangerous and not to be trusted, and that the state or strangers are better positioned to deal with the difficulties of adolescence than parents,” said Lance Christensen, vice president of education policy and government affairs. “Hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements with victims of sex assault by public school employees is evidence that the opposite is too often true.”
Musk is reportedly moving Twitter/X headquarters to Austin. If so, I happen to know a Senior Technical Writer who is currently between jobs…
The giant Borganism that is the federal government has a built-in bias to stick its tentacles into every orifice of the body politic, gathering more money, power and influence to itself in stark defiance of the Founder’s blueprints for a weak federal government checked by strong state and citizen sovereignty. In addition to money and power, it also wants to gobble up land, and now it wants to eat 700,000 acres of private land on Texas-New Mexico border.
Under the guise of “land protection,” the federal government aims to acquire 700,000 acres of private land in the Southern High Plains region—which sits along the Texas-New Mexico border.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently finalized its Land Protection Plan. The plan aims to acquire 700,000 acres of privately owned land and put it under federal control for “protection” in “perpetuity.” This is part of the federal government’s efforts to expand the Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge—which feeds into the broader aim of the Biden administration: fulfilling the “30×30” initiative.
Through the “30×30” initiative, the Biden administration decided that 30 percent of the nation’s land and waters must be under federal control and management by 2030. President Biden launched the agenda via Executive Order 14008 on January 27, 2021.
However, American Stewards of Liberty explains that the initiative was rebranded as “America the Beautiful” after facing public backlash.
As the American Stewards highlight, the Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge is attempting to expand the “acquisition boundary” from 6,440 acres in Texas and New Mexico to 7,000,000 acres—all without congressional authority. After they acquire more land, they plan to federalize 700,000 acres through buying the land or obtaining permanent conservation easements.
“Federally acquiring nearly three-quarter million acres from this region is a direct attack on the oil, gas, and mineral industries, agriculture production, and local economies,” the American Stewards write.
They also claim counties were not notified of the expansion.
“No direct notice was given to the counties or local governing authorities. The USFWS [U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] failed to coordinate this plan with the local governments as required by law.”
The expanded area grabs land in 15 Texas counties including Bailey, Castro, Cochran, Crosby, Dawson, Gaines, Garza, Hale, Hockley, Lamb, Lubbock, Lynn, Parmer, Terry, and Yoakum. The expansion into five counties in New Mexico includes land from Chaves, Curry, De Baca, Lea, and Roosevelt counties.
If you look at a map of the proposed takings, you can see federal environmentalists want to “conserve” (i.e. control) land rightup to the edge of Lubbock:
Both this plan and the 30×30 plan in general smack of the sort of unauthorized, self-directed bureaucratic empire-building that the Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo decision struck down. Both private land owners and the State of Texas should resist this blatant land grab with all the tools at their disposal.
Demolition Ranch’s Matt Carriker offers up a short, heart-felt video on the fact that would-be Trump assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks was wearing a Demo Ranch shirt when he committed his crime.
Takeaways:
“It sucks.”
Carriker stays away from politics on his channel.
Says something like this shouldn’t happen to anyone, on any political side, and offers condolences to survivors.
Says, just like wearing Nikes, anyone can buy a Demo Ranch t-shirt.
“It’s unfortunate, but it’s not what we stand for, and it will never be what we stand for. We’re going to keep keep trucking.”
“When you’re watching a a CNN article and it says three names, the shooter’s, Trump’s, and mine, that was not on my 2024 bingo card.”
It was succinct, heartfelt, effective, and hit all the necessary notes. It’s as good as I’ve seen the Difficult But Necessary Speech done this side of David Letterman.
After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the Great State of Ohio,” Trump said. The former president highlighted Mr. Vance’s record as a Marine, a graduate of Yale Law School, and a bestselling author.
Mr. Vance, at just 39 years old, will be the youngest vice presidential nominee of a major political party since President Nixon ran with President Eisenhower in 1952. The Ohio senator was elected in just 2022, making him a candidate with some of the least experience in modern history.
He has made his mark as an “anti-woke” warrior in the upper chamber, and has made it clear that American foreign policy must be geared much more toward the interests of the American middle class rather than the more obscure goals of protecting democracy and upholding international defense obligations.
Mr. Vance’s stances on foreign policy issues — including saying that America should play a small, if not nonexistent, role in helping Ukraine in their war with Russia — does not frighten some of the more establishment members of his party.
Senator Cornyn, the number two Republican in the upper chamber, tells the Sun that the GOP has been having thoughtful foreign policy debates within the party for more than 100 years.
“These discussions on how active the United States ought to be around the world have been long-standing disputes, going back to at least World War I,” Mr. Cornyn said, adding that he was happy to see “a new generation of people” taking the helm of the Republican Party.
A senior advisor to Trump who was granted anonymity to speak freely tells the Sun that choosing Mr. Vance as the veep candidate is a sign that the GOP is playing offense between now and November.
“J.D. [Vance] is going to do well with veterans. Huge veteran population in New Hampshire … Hug veteran population in Virginia,” the source says. “It’s gonna be a battle to the end. Why was Vance the best pick for that? Because he’s young, because he’s a Marine. … There are alot of people who said: ‘Leave him in the U.S. Senate’, and there are a lot of people who said that because he may have been the president’s best advocate in the Senate.”
Speaker McCarthy, who spoke briefly to the Sun after the announcement, says Mr. Vance will held the party do well in the typical “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Of the various possibilities floated as a possible Trump VP pick, Vance is a better choice than Nikki Haley (duh), Marco Rubio (a lightweight I never understood the appeal of), better than Doug Burgum for age-balancing the ticket (though not on executive governance experience), and possibly not as electorally savvy as Tim Scott. Maybe the blue collar Hillbilly Elegy author will help Trump further crack the “blue wall,” though I think Trump scooped all the votes in rural white demographics he’s going to, especially with the Biden Recession still raging. Trump leads in Ohio by 10+ points, so winning Vance’s home state (a traditional VP pick criteria) isn’t a concern. Also, Vance himself only won the state by six points in his 2022 Senate race.
I’m enthusiastically behind Vance’s anti-woke crusade, though Trump should already have all the anti-woke votes locked up.
Once of the biggest drivers behind the Vance pick may simply be loyalty, an area Trump obviously felt previous Vice President Mike Pence was lacking in.
Trump seems to have a deeper innate understanding of the American electorate than anyone in my lifetime save Ronald Reagan, and frequently decisions that seem puzzling at first (even to me) have a way of working out. There’s an extremely high chance the Vance VP pick will work out as well.
So much for my plans to post light video content today.
Given the flood of news stories, blog posts and videos, I wasn’t sure I had a good angle on the assassination attempt against Donald Trump by (according to police reports) 20 year old Thomas Matthew Crooks, one that would do anything to enlighten my readers that hadn’t already been done before.
But Russo-Ukrainian War YouTuber Suchomimus put up a video that I think admirably elucidates spatial awareness of the attempted assassination:
Takeaways:
Initial reports made me think the would-be assassin was in front of Trump, but he was actually off to Trump’s right side. The Secret Service counter-sniper was behind Trump.
Analyzing footage, Suchomimus comes to the conclusion that the Secret Service spotted the would-be assassin a split second before he opened fire on Trump, adjusted their sights, and shot him just as the first bullet was fired and grazed Trump’s ear.
“As for Donald Trump’s reaction, he handled it amazingly well.”
Sky News has an overview and footage of the shooting at about 2:30 in:
Like every other dramatic shooting event, a lot of the initial information (including the shooter’s name) was wrong.
Beyond this, there’s a lot of noise (a registered Republican who donated to Act Blue and wore a Demolition Ranch t-shirt?) that I don’t want to try untangling at this late hour.
This video is almost genius in its simplicity: Joe Biden as Joe Rogan, interviewing Joe Biden, all populated exclusively with actual Biden audio.
I’m not going to do a blow-by-blow recap, since the video is short and you’ll probably recognize most or all of the snippets. And who doesn’t love the loopy Corn-Pop/rusty razors in rain barrels story?
The creators missed an opportunity to spoof the theme music, though. “The Joe Biden Experience! 10-4 all day! None at night!”
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.
A whole lot of Democrats still seem hot for dumping Slow Joe after his disasterous debate showed his obvious cognitive decline. There’s just one tiny problem: Every polled Democrat loses to Trump by even more.
A series of prominent Democrats were tested in a head-to-head ballot against Donald Trump:
Vice President Kamala Harris: 49% Trump, 43% Harris, 8% undecided
Senator Bernie Sanders: 48% Trump, 42% Sanders, 10% undecided
California Governor Gavin Newsom: 48% Trump, 40% Newsom, 12% undecided
Former Vice President Al Gore: 47% Trump, 42% Gore, 11% undecided
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: 48% Trump, 41% Clinton, 11% undecided
Senator Elizabeth Warren: 49% Trump, 39% Warren, 13% undecided
Secretary of State* Pete Buttigieg: 49% Trump, 39% Buttigieg, 12% undecided
The usual poll caveats apply, and the sample size of 1,370 is a bit low for a nationwide poll. But the crosstabs do show more Democrats than Republicans sampled, which makes things look even worse for Biden’s chances.
The other caveat: The Sacred Spouse of Lightbringer McLegTingle wasn’t polled. She’s denied she’s interested in running, though swathes of media types are slavering over a potential candidacy, so I’ll have both of the the Bill Burr rants cued up.
Finally, the DNC would never, ever, ever let Bernie Sanders get nominated, because that would mean an entirely new set of grifters kicking the current snouts out of the trough and inserting their own.
If this poll is to be believed, then Democrats might as well roll with Biden, despite his brain being mush, because he still has the best chance to beat Trump.
And that’s all that matters to them.
*Yes, that was still up today. Last time I checked, Buttigieg was Secretary of Transportation (and doing a lousy job).
You’ve got to hand one thing to the gun-grabbers: Their shameless, brazen tactics to disarm law-abiding American citizens know no bounds. There’s no strategy so dirty, underhanded or silly that they won’t try it. Today’s case in point: To disarm people visiting the French Quarter, they just declared that a police station is actually a vocational school.
After New Orleans city officials were unsuccessful in their attempts to get state lawmakers to designate vast swathes of their city’s popular tourist area as a gun-free zone before Louisiana’s new permitless carry law went live July 4, they came up with their own solution, which is probably unconstitutional, definitely whacky and certain to be contested in court.
The New Orleans Police Department has designated their Eighth District police station – which is located in the middle of the French Quarter – as a vocational technical school. In other words, they turned a working police station into a vo-tech. Now, everything within a 1,000-foot radius of the “school” is a gun-free zone, including more than five blocks of Bourbon Street, an international tourist destination.
It is a felony in Louisiana to violate a gun-free zone, which is punishable by up to five years in a state prison at hard labor.
Who will actually attend classes at the new “school” is not known. New Orleans Police recruits are trained at the police academy, which is located at a different facility. However, city and police officials now claim some of the recruits may take at least one class in a small room at the new “vo-tech.” There are no classes planned for civilian students.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill balked at the city’s move, warning officials they could face civil rights lawsuits because of their “made-up designation.”
“I’m working hard to help keep New Orleans safe, but the City cannot avoid state law by unilaterally designating police stations ‘vo-tech locations.’ You cannot just ‘designate’ yourself a vo-tech school. Among other implications, if it was one (it’s not) the police department would be under the jurisdiction of a board of supervisors for higher education, and it would be subject to other oversight requirements. I have no specific plans yet, but would caution the NOPD that it will likely be subject to civil rights lawsuits under Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act if it arrests people pursuant to its made-up designation, which is clearly not legal or effective. I certainly hope the NOPD isn’t violating people’s rights by making up their own rules, which is why the Department is under a federal consent decree,” Murrill said in a statement posted on social media.
“Schools have classrooms, not booking rooms,” Murrill said in another post.
Snip.
Dan Zelenka is an attorney, a board member of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, and president of the Louisiana Shooting Association, a nonprofit founded in 1966 with thousands of members, which is affiliated with the Civilian Marksmanship Program and the National Rifle Association.
“The Louisiana Shooting Association of course opposes this redesignation, and the reason is that it’s not a school. You can’t wave a magic wand and create a school just because you teach a class there,” Zelenka told the Second Amendment Foundation Monday.
Louisiana state law is very specific, Zelenka said, regarding what constitutes a vo-tech which, as the Attorney General pointed out in her statement, are subject to the supervision of a board of supervisors for higher education.
“They’re claiming their new school is an adjunct of their police academy, but their police academy is not supervised or managed by this board of supervisors, so they can’t be a vo-tech,” Zelenka said.
City officials, he said, have already changed their gun-free zone maps to include the 1,000-foot circle around the Eighth District station.
“Personally, I think our laws are clear,” Zelenka said. “A police station is not a school.”
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell essentially slapped a Burger King crown on her head and demanded that people bow to her because she’s the Queen of Romania. A police station is not a vocational school, no matter how loudly the Democrats running New Orleans proclaim it nor how many signs they put up to that effect.
But this is part and parcel of the Democratic Party’s insistence that they can ignore both law and reality at will if it furthers their political goals. A man wearing a dress magically becomes a woman simply by declaring it so, a widespread spree of looting and arson becomes “a mostly peaceful,” and state and federal statues can be mixed willy-nilly to charge and convict political enemies.
Fortunately for law-abiding gun owners visiting New Orleans, the Governor, Lt. Governor, and Attorney General are all Republicans, and Republicans run both houses of the legislature. The chances they let these blatantly unlawful shenanigans stand is very slim indeed.
Perhaps the legislature should respond by simply scrapping ineffective, counterproductive “gun free zones” entirely.
