Read it.

Considering the paltry amount that Social Security pays (about the same as unemployment), it’s disgusting that any state taxes such benefits.

And you will note that the Federal government will tax your benefits as well.

Power Line.

Minnesota’s Department of Education allowed taxpayers to be defrauded of somewhere between $250 million and $500 million in programs that ostensibly were intended to feed poor children during covid.

Of course, if you did the math, there aren’t that many poor children in Minnesota, and the facilities whose operators got the money couldn’t possibly have fed the many thousands of kids for whom they claimed reimbursement. The fraud was open and obvious.

The real moral of the story is that Democrats are not actually opposed to the government being defrauded. They think that the purpose of government is to take money from some and give it to others–i.e., the ones who vote for them. If hundreds of millions are obtained by fraud, so what? The dollars went to their friends and supporters. In the Democrats’ eyes, there is little difference between legitimate social welfare payments to qualified claimants and outright theft. Which, now that I think of it, should tell you something.

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The latest blotter entry comes to us from the US Government Accounting Office (GAO), via a new report pointedly titled “F-35 Joint Strike Fighter: Program Continues to Encounter Production Issues and Modernization Delays.”According to GAO, Lockheed Martin is running out of parking space for all the completed F-35s that the Pentagon refuses to accept.

These aren’t one-by-one rejects. Last summer, the DOD put a complete freeze on accepting the stealth fighters until Lockheed fixed huge hardware and software problems associated with “Technology Refresh-3” (TR-3), a $1.8 billion package intended to expand the planes’ capabilities.

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In the first – but certainly not last – major shake up at a key US financial regulator under the Biden admin, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Martin Gruenberg bowed to pressure to resign from the bank regulator after an external investigation found widespread sexual harassment at the agency and lawmakers of both parties berated his leadership, capping a nearly two-decade career at the agency.

But he’ll undoubtedly still receive a lush pension.

In a press release, Gruenberg said he would resign once a successor had been confirmed, avoiding an outcome that would leave FDIC Vice Chairman Travis Hill, a Republican, as the agency’s acting chairman. Hill is a former staffer at the agency who has served on the five-member board for about a year.

God forbid that a Republican should ever be in charge of anything at any time, however much qualified.

Read it.

ByteDance may be suing the Department of Justice (DOJ), but the two have now joined forces in an effort to fast-track the company’s legal challenge to a potentially imminent TikTok ban.

‘Opposing parties’? Say rather ‘the two wings of the Establishment UniParty’.

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More than half of U.S. voters support deporting all illegal immigrants in the country according to a new poll from Reuters and Ipsos released on Monday.

Will the government act? Of course not.

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The Sept. 1, 2021, mandate “clearly violates the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause as interpreted by our precedents,” a majority of a U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit said in the May 7 decision.

While the mandate was later updated, the newer version also violates the Constitution, the judges said.

The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in 2021 required COVID-19 vaccination of all students and employees. It initially offered religious exemptions to anyone who checked a box, but later said administrators would “only recognize religious exemptions based on religious beliefs whose teachings are opposed to all immunizations.”

Read it.

Newly released testimony from former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins confirms that Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx did not base the pandemic-era six-foot social distancing rule on science, and instead were making things up as they went along.

But you knew that.

Read it.

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office condemned Sean “Diddy” Combs’ shocking surveillance video, in which the music mogul is seen assaulting ex Cassie Ventura — but is unable to file charges.

The office of district attorney George Gascón explained in a lengthy statement released via Instagram Friday why their hands are tied due to the statute of limitations.

Some minorities are more equal than others.

Power Line.

An Australian man calling himself Sasha Jane Lowerson must be allowed to compete in a California surfing competition, which “cannot discriminate on the basis of gender.” As Sir Bedevere (Terry Jones) might say, who is this who is so wise in the ways of biological science and athletics? Why, it’s the California Coastal Commission (CCC), an unelected body that overrides the elected governments of cities and counties on the California coast. As Steve once noted, the commission combines Stalinist regulation with mafia-style corruption, a reference to coastal commissioner Mark Nathanson, packed off to prison for extorting bribes from Hollywood celebrities.

The CCC’s prime mover was Peter Douglas, a regulatory zealot of considerable ferocity. Douglas authored Proposition 20, the 1972 ballot initiative that created a temporary 15-member commission aimed at preventing disasters like the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. Douglas also wrote the California Coastal Act of 1976, signed by governor Jerry Brown, which made the Commission permanent. The next year, Douglas became deputy director and in 1985 executive director, a post he held until 2011.

While running roughshod over property rights, the CCC prevents Californians from tapping their greatest asset, the vast Pacific Ocean. In 2022 the Commission voted unanimously to reject the Poseidon Water desalination plant in Orange County. As the California Globe noted, the plant was “decades in the works during a time when California needs more freshwater to combat a drought in the state.” The plant would have provided 50 million gallons of freshwater a day but the Commission wasn’t having it.

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A federal appeals court ruled that the largest school district in Maryland does not have to afford parents the opportunity to opt-out their elementary school-age children from LGBTQ lessons.

Time to leave.

Eventually public schools will contain only the children of the poor and proglodyte. This will not end well.

Read it.

Republicans on two House committees voted to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress on Thursday night despite President Joe Biden’s intervention to block them from obtaining his recorded interviews with special counsel Robert Hur.

After a spirited debate, members of the House Judiciary Committee voted 18–15 on May 16 to approve a resolution to hold Mr. Garland in contempt for refusing to provide impeachment investigators with the recordings in defiance of congressional subpoenas.

The House Oversight Committee followed suit hours later, voting 24-20 to approve their own resolution.

As Eric Holder demonstrated, being held in contempt of Congress don’t mean shit.

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Electric vehicles (EVs) may be the most subsidized product in America. Federal taxpayers shell out $7,500 every time a new eligible electric vehicle is purchased (usually by wealthy buyers). State and local taxpayers chip in an additional $1,500 for each EV purchase. Then, there’s the tens of billions of dollars “invested” by policymakers into building EV plants. Even these bank-breaking concessions aren’t enough to please the Biden administration. Recently finalized EV tax credit rules expand eligibility for the subsidy while maintaining bizarre trade sourcing rules likely to lead to further tariffs from China. It’s time for President Biden and lawmakers to ditch protectionism and finally end EV subsidies.

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With the threat of a conflict in the Pacific looming, a congressional subcommittee says the Navy is not moving fast enough to figure out how to better push munitions to its ships at sea and wants to know what is being done to fix the problem.

This is hardly a new issue, but it has come into sharp focus in the Red Sea as Arleigh Burke class destroyers had fired more than 100 Standard family surface-to-air missiles alone as of mid-February at Houthi missiles and drones. The need to rapidly replenish warships would be far more pronounced in a large-scale fight with China that would occur over a vast, contested battlespace

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President Joe Biden’s retelling of economic history could win a fiction award.

He recently claimed in an interview that inflation “was 9% when I came into office,” even though it was 1.4% at that time. Not only is Biden lying about the historical record, but it was his policies that fueled the inflation fire.

The facts are clear: Biden was handed an economy that was recovering at an unprecedented pace. Gross domestic product was rising at an annualized rate of $1.5 trillion. Annual inflation as measured by the consumer price index was 1.4%. A monthly average of 1.5 million people were returning to work as lockdowns were lifted.

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And rightly so.

“Diversity, equity, inclusion? Yeah, of course, they [military colleagues] think it’s a waste of time. Except my boss, I mean, Lisa, the admiral, she doesn’t think it is. She likes it. But secretly, everybody else is like eh,” said Riggs. “You know what’s going to happen when the first missile hits the first side of the first DEG [Guided Missile Escort Ship]? What’s it going to matter? It won’t. Diversity, equity, inclusion. It’ll just be out the window.”

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With Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filing the “climate” lawsuit that campaign supporter Michigan LCV had lobbied her to file against energy companies, and the UM law school faculty putting the shoulder to the wheel as well, GAO recalls the recently unearthed record of just how occupied Michigan’s government is with donor-financed “climate staff”.

Read it.

Good news for Gordon Liddy … Oh, wait, he’s dead.

The Ninth Circuit is famous for being the most reversed-by-the-Supreme-Court Circuit in the country. Just sayin’.

Read it.

U.S. officials have cut off funding to a nonprofit that funneled government money to a laboratory in China located in the same city where the first COVID-19 cases appeared.

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A school district in Riverside County will pay $360,000 to settle a suit by a former high school teacher who was fired after refusing, for what she described as religious reasons, to promise to call transgender students by their chosen pronouns or to keep their gender identity secret from their parents.

The Jurupa Valley Unified School District agreed Tuesday to pay $285,000 to former high school gym teacher Jessica Tapia and $75,000 to her lawyers at Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative religious nonprofit. The settlement said it was not an admission of wrongdoing by district officials, but Tapia’s lawyers proclaimed a victory for religious rights.

Read it.

Two legal challenges were filed over the new emissions rules, Nebraska Attorney General Hilgers said in a statement on May 13.

They include a petition for review filed by a coalition of 24 states in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit which challenges the Biden administration’s new regulation setting stronger greenhouse gas emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles.

That petition lists the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its administrator Michael Regan as defendants.

Read it.

Six migrants charged with attacking New York City police officers in January were offered plea deals on Tuesday, the New York Post reported.

During a court appearance, it was also revealed that one of the migrants had been arrested again while out on bail.

Six young adults identified as asylum-seekers were arrested following the alleged assault of two police officers near Times Square, ABC News reported on Jan. 31.

“We need a blanket!” “How about this fig leaf?”

Read it.

What comes after repealing parking mandates? Lots of newly legal homes. Studies from two cities observed that in the years following reform, 60 to 70 percent of new homes would previously have been illegal to build.

The new data add to the heap of evidence that parking mandates—local rules that ban new homes and businesses unless they have a pre-determined number of off-street parking spaces—are a binding constraint on housing construction. While only a few buildings opted out of providing parking entirely, most new homes in the studies ultimately benefited from the increased flexibility.

“It isn’t surprising,” said researcher C. J. Gabbe, who authored one of the studies. According to Gabbe, homebuilders have been saying for a long time that demand for off-street parking was lower than what zoning rules required.

Enter the Texas Doughnut.

Read it.

Hint: Yes.

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Head of the Mezha Anti-Corruption Center, Martyna Bohuslavets, has written a report in Pravda asking “Where are the fortifications?” She reports that millions of dollars that were intended for the construction of fortifications in Ukraine were instead “transferred to Kharkiv OVA to front companies of avatars.”

Read it.

The Littoral Combat Ship was designed with the current crisis in mind, instead it turned into a boondoggle. Here’s why.

Read it.

The programs are taking place in at least four states, a Washington Free Beacon review of online offerings found.

In Battle Creek, Mich., for example, the VA offers a “BIPOC Support Group,” an “8-week curriculum designed to provide support for Veterans that identify as people of color/BIPOC, or as multiracial or biracial,” according to a program description. The Battle Creek VA also offers a “Race-Based Stress/Trauma and Empowerment” program, a “weekly group, tailored to our Veterans of color, to address race-based stress and trauma in a safe and validating environment.”

In Long Beach, Calif., the VA also offers a “Race-Based Stress/Trauma Empowerment Group,” which it says is for “Veterans who identify as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and who are interested in addressing issues of race-based stress, trauma, resilience, and empowerment.” A similar program in Palo Alto, Calif., invites “Women Veterans of color” to join a “10-week group to explore [the] impact of racism on your well-being.”

Read it.

It’s about time.

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The Education Department’s ongoing meltdown due to its failed implementation of its new website for its Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) should, on the merits, be an ongoing major national story. But the Regime Media have chosen only to cover the story in a very sparing manner, shielding those responsible for the FAFSA meltdown from any scrutiny or accountability.

Read it.

Taxpayer millions allocated to border crisis charities are being diverted to unconventional expenses like music therapy and “people-plant interactions” for migrants, alongside hefty salaries for staff, a recent report reveals, the N.Y. Post reported.

Power Line.

Vice President Kamala Harris is apparently at last unburdened by what has been, and has reached what can be, speaking today before the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Relations, and it apparently involves kicking and breaking a lot of things, followed by cackling.

Read it.

As North Carolina’s public university system considers a vote on changing its diversity policy, the system’s flagship university board voted Monday to cut funding for diversity programs in next year’s budget.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees approved a change that would divert $2.3 million of diversity spending from state funds to go toward public safety and policing at a special meeting to address the university’s budget. The board’s vote would only impact UNC-Chapel Hill’s diversity funding, which could result in the loss of its diversity office.

UNC will join the ranks of other notable public universities that have stripped diversity spending, such as the University of Florida in Gainesville, which announced in a March memo it was reallocating funds to faculty recruitment. But unlike UF, which implemented its funding rollback after the state Legislature passed a bill banning diversity program spending at state universities, UNC “set the tone” on funding cuts before the North Carolina Legislature stepped in, budget chair Dave Boliek said.

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Looking at what the kids are up to these days–I’m good with that.

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Biden’s tax proposals would effectively increase the top federal marginal tax rate on long-term capital gains to 44.6%, a record high since the tax was enacted in the 1920s. As a result, taxes paid on long-term capital gains would reach levels above 50% in some states after accounting for state capital gains taxes. Biden also proposed increasing the corporate income tax rate from 21% to 28% and presented a 25% tax on unrealized capital gains for individuals whose net worth exceeds $100 million.

These proposals present two problems. First, they showcase a disregard for the personal property, earnings, and lives of the individuals and organizations subject to the taxes. Second, these taxes would have dire consequences for economic growth and, thus, would negatively impact the living standards of everyday Americans.

Read it.

1 in 10 college students answered that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez had created the New Deal. And only 1 in 10 knew James Madison’s role in shaping the Constitution.

That survey from the ‘American Council of Trustees and Alumni’ was one of several warnings about the catastrophic illiteracy of college students and graduates.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute did its own survey of over 28,000 undergraduates from 80 colleges and the average score on the civic literacy exam was an F. At top schools, including Yale, seniors actually knew less than freshmen. A Collegiate Learning Assessment found that after two years almost half of students showed “no significant gains in learning”.

Watch it.

Between governments and activists, our best prospect for clean energy is being strangled in its cradle.

The only country that has actually built a couple of small modular reactors is (wait for it) Red China. (My, what a surprise.)

Read it.

The White House and its Office of Management and Budget instructed federal agencies to use a “template” for determining the cost of implementing President Joe Biden’s executive order to encourage voter participation, according to government emails obtained by The Daily Signal.

Critics use the term “Bidenbucks” to refer to the president’s controversial order from 2021, which directs federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture to get involved in elections.

Several members of Congress contend that Biden’s order on turning out the vote for elections could violate the Antideficiency Act, a law that has three parts. It prohibits federal employees from obligating tax dollars not authorized by Congress, prohibits officials from not spending money as appropriated by Congress, and prohibits agencies from accepting voluntary service from individuals.

Read it.

One of Chevy’s longest running vehicle models has now fallen at the hands of the company’s transition to EVs. The Chevy Malibu will be no longer, according to a new report from Car and Driver.

The Chevy Malibu, one of the longest-running and most successful vehicles in history, is being discontinued again. Chevrolet informed Car and Driver that production will end in November 2024 as the automaker invests $390 million in its Fairfax Assembly Plant in Kansas.

Car and Driver reports that GM will also pause production of the Cadillac XT4 in January to retool for the Ultium-based Bolt EV. Production will resume in late 2025, with the XT4 and Bolt EV sharing an assembly line.

Read it.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials in the El Paso region seized more than 124 pounds of fentanyl and cocaine last week in four separate incidents, amid criticism of lax border policies.

On April 30, officers working at the Bridge of the Americas seized cocaine totaling 42.5 pounds, according to a May 3 press release from the CBP. The drugs were found to be concealed inside a Hyundai Elantra vehicle allegedly driven by a 48-year-old American citizen. “The seizure was made when CBP officers monitoring the Low Energy Portal inspection system spotted anomalies in the appearance of the vehicle and advised primary CBP officers,” the release noted.

ZMan rips off the bandage.

called Human Bio-Diversity. We tend to live around people who look like us and think like us. It is why after more than half a century of trying, the United States is as segregated as it was before civil rights. Humans naturally self-segregate and that is both natural and based in natural properties.

The term Human Bio-Diversity is credited to Steve Sailer, who years ago hosted an email list using that label to discuss advances in the human sciences. For a time, the HBD subculture functioned as a sort of counterculture, reacting to the dominant blank slate culture, while refuting their claims about the human condition. It has remained a gateway drug for many who end up in the dissident camp.

Thirty years ago when The Bell Curve was released, what would become the HBD world was primarily focused on intelligence. After close to a century of systematically measuring human intelligence and comparing the results to various social outcomes, science seemed to prove what people have always suspected. Intelligence is heritable and genetically determined.

The Foundry.

Apart from the taxpayer-funded lawfare being waged against former President Donald Trump by leftist prosecutors in New York, Atlanta, and Washington, there is no clearer proof that the Left has embraced “by any means necessary” as its credo than the politicization of Secret Service protection of President Joe Biden’s presidential rivals.

Not only has Biden’s Department of Homeland Security denied five requests for Secret Service protection from independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the flimsiest of grounds, but now the Democratic congressman from Mississippi who chaired the kangaroo court Jan. 6 committee is proposing to strip Trump of his Secret Service detail if he were convicted in any of the politically motivated trials he’s facing.

Never mind that this brazen legislation, championed by Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., has no chance of being enacted by Congress or that the courts would surely enjoin it as unconstitutional if it were. Its sheer cold-bloodedness is appalling.

New York Post.

A daunting list, set forth in black and white.

Read it.

Public confidence in the military has slipped. One major reason is the politicization of senior military officers, who show an increasing propensity to compromise their integrity to gain influence and achieve both budgetary and policy goals. Their willingness to spin carefully parsed and knowingly misleading testimony and advice compromises civilian control of the military. Simply stated, these generals and admirals are not providing full and complete representations of plans, concepts, and assessments to senior civilians in the executive and legislative branches, thereby depriving them of the unbiased information they require to make decisions required by the Constitution.

Generals are required by their positions to be political, since a lot of their job is dealing with civilian politicians both at home and abroad.  Some, like Norman Schwarzkopf, rise above it. Some, like Wesley Clark, don’t.

Read it.

The Biden administration is stealthily preparing to surrender our sovereign, constitutional republic and the freedoms it guarantees to the World Health Organization’s unaccountable, Marxist director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Ph.D.

Power Line.

I still argue that the only good thing that happened during the Obama years was all-day breakfast at McDonalds, and COVID took that away from us. Which is when I started saying that COVID won’t be truly over until we get all-day breakfast at McDonalds back again. And it looks like that isn’t going to happen.

One reason might be that consumers can’t afford it.

Read it.

The United States government is not appropriately addressing the threat posed by growing Chinese ownership of American land, according to a report released by The Heritage Foundation Thursday.

The federal government is woefully ill-equipped to track Chinese-owned real estate in the country, despite the serious threat these Chinese Communist Party-affiliated entities can pose to critical U.S. infrastructure, according to the report. The report calls on federal and state leaders to take action, such as increasing transparency and conducting more critical reviews of land purchases.

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Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner (D-VA) broke the news during a press briefing at the tech-tied RSA Conference, according to tech outlet Nextgov/FCW. At the event, the senator reportedly conceded that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are back to their old work of coordinating censorship of free speech ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

An FBI representative admitted the resumed Big Tech communications to The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood. CISA would not confirm the report, however.

“The FBI remains committed to combating foreign malign influence operations, including in connection with our elections,” the bureau’s representative claimed, as reported by The Federalist. “That effort includes sharing specific foreign threat information with state and local election officials and private sector companies when appropriate and rigorously consistent with the law.”

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Illegal immigrants at a Denver, Colorado encampment that is set to be removed are refusing to leave until the city meets a list of 13 demands, which include access to “fresh, culturally appropriate ingredients” for food, unlimited showers, “the same housing support that has been offered to others,” legal services, and fair warning before kicking them out.

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If you are like most Americans, the cost of living has been going up much faster than your income has been. Right now, millions of Americans that were once prospering are now deeply struggling. When I was growing up, most of the population could afford to live “the American Dream”, but now that is no longer true. At this point, the basics of a middle class lifestyle are out of reach for most Americans. Poverty and homelessness are steadily rising, and the economy has become the number one issue during this election cycle. Most of us just want things to go back to the way that they once were, but thanks to the very foolish decisions of our leaders that simply is not possible.

Read it.

A bill being considered in the House this week would add a citizenship question to future census counts could have big implications.

Basic Congressional districts on the number of people rather than the number of citizens has never made sense except to those who benefit by it politically. The southern states tried the same trick with their slaves during the crafting of the Constitution, which is the origin of the notorious ‘three-fifths’ rule.