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When defendants go on trial, the allegations against them are generally clear. Not so with former President Donald Trump and his “hush money” case.

Prosecutors in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office offered new transparency not only to the public, but seemingly also to Trump’s defense attorneys on Tuesday when, one year after indicting the former president, they finally pulled back the curtain to reveal the motivating “crime” in their case: a violation of state election law.

Former federal prosecutors told the Daily Caller News Foundation that Bragg’s lack of clarity is unfair to the defense, which can’t prepare to argue against a charge they don’t know, and unlike what they’ve seen before.

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Case in point: The administration’s new “solar energy plan” for western states, where the vast majority of land is owned by the federal government. The Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, is proposing a new plan for “Utility-Scale Solar Energy Development” that is supposed to expand the development of solar projects across 11 western states. In fact, far from expediting the permitting of solar projects, the new solar plan throws pointless obstacles in their path and could shut down solar energy development in the desert West altogether.

 

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In a 4-3 decision, the court found that the trial judge in the disgraced mogul’s case had made a critical error, allowing prosecutors to call a series of women as witnesses who said that Weinstein had assaulted them, but whose accusations weren’t part of the charges against him, the NYT reports.

New York Justice. Can Trump expect any better?

Newsweek.

The roughly four dozen migrants that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis helped fly from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard about a year and a half ago have been granted legal designations due to the Republican’s crimes against the “victims.”

On September 14, 2022, DeSantis emulated immigration policies enforced by Texas Governor Greg Abbott—who has become known for busing migrants to liberal, sanctuary cities like New York and Chicago—and sent two planes of about 50 migrants, including children, from San Antonio to the small, liberal island south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Critics of DeSantis said that sending the migrants, mostly from Venezuela, to the popular vacationing spot was a political stunt that cost Florida taxpayers about $615,000 in total, or about $12,300 per migrant paid out of a $12 million fund to relocate unauthorized immigrants from Florida. Days after they touched down, the migrants—aided by civil rights attorneys—filed a class action lawsuit demanding financial compensation for “economic, emotional and constitutional harms.”

Those same migrants are now able to temporarily live and work legally in the U.S. while avoiding deportation due to applying to receive special visas, the migrants’ immigration attorney, Rachel Self, told The Miami Herald.

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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) hid how a woman who suffered chest pain and other symptoms following COVID-19 vaccination received a shot because of a mandate at work, newly obtained documents show.

The Foundry.

New York state lawmakers plan to hand out tens of millions in taxpayer dollars to local media outlets to help pay for journalists’ salaries.

The state will dole out $30 million over three years to local media outlets in the form of tax credits, giving publishers the ability to offset up to 50% of the first $50,000 in journalists’ salaries, according to a Tuesday release from New York State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie.

Ah, but will they stay bought?

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Kansas university officials have spent millions of dollars on diversity, equity, and inclusion, in what appears to be just a jobs program for DEI staff.

A state auditor could not determine what DEI means at state universities or what DEI programs produce, and Kansas lawmakers made a proactive decision to reinforce civil rights laws and protect everyone on state college campuses from the discriminatory effects DEI programs have had on campuses around the country.

Kansas legislators last week adopted a law that prohibits state university officials from requiring prospective employees to complete a DEI statement as a condition of employment or requiring students to write a DEI statement when they apply to a university. Faculty also cannot require professors to write a DEI statement as a condition of being promoted.

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The migrant has been in prison for TEN YEARS after attacking a teenage girl in 2014.

GB News reports that an appeal claiming that the migrant wouldn’t be able to access care for PTSD or depression in the East African country has been successful.

The Foundry.

Even as Americans grow increasingly pessimistic and agitated about their personal finances, Congress is about to ask struggling families to cover the cost of more funding for Ukraine.

The $95 billion foreign aid package adopted Saturday by the House and facing near-certain passage in the Senate includes an additional $61 billion for Ukraine. Once added to the money already appropriated for Ukraine since 2022, the United States will have spent approximately $173 billion.

That translates to more than $1,300 per American household, according to Heritage Foundation economist Richard Stern, director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget.

RealClearPolitics.

If the economy is so good, why do small business leaders feel so bad?
The latest Small Business Optimism Index from the National Federation of Independent Business could hardly be more depressing. It finds that the men and women who run our 33 million small businesses and hire more than half of American workers are in a somber mood. The survey finds that small-business confidence has reached its lowest point in 12 years.
Amazingly, small company CEOs are even more fearful of the future today than during the COVID-19 pandemic, when most businesses were shuttered.

The American Mind.

The latest release into the American interior of an FBI terrorist suspect who illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border—a twice-freed Afghan national man free to roam America for 11 months until his capture—demands that the federal government regard this patterned problem as a chronic national security emergency requiring elevation to the highest priority within the intelligence community, federal law enforcement, and Congress.

The case of the 48-year-old Mohammad Kharwin, whom an overwhelmed Border Patrol freed into America on March 10, 2023 before agents could confirm the FBI watch list hit that initially flagged him and whom a swamped Texas immigration court freed a second time in February, is the seventh example of its kind that can establish, just from disparate public records, a mortally dangerous failure pattern.

More cases of accidental Border Patrol releases of illegally crossing terrorism suspects, who did not reach the public record, are highly likely if not certain.

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The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a legal challenge to a Texas law that requires voters under the age of 65 to provide justification to vote by mail, meaning that the Democrat-aligned attempt to sharply expand “no-excuse” mail-in ballots in the Lone Star state has failed, with implications for other states.

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The Catholic Charities of San Antonio allegedly misused tax dollars to fund the travel of illegal migrants to a “destination of their choice.” “These tax dollars were not intended to be used to fly illegal immigrants all over the country,” Rep. Monica De La Cruz, R-Tex., said.

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), appearing alongside President Joe Biden on Monday, praised the anti-Israel campus protests that have sprung up across the United States.

“It is especially important that we remember the power of young people shaping this country today, of all days, as we once again witness the leadership of those peaceful, student-led protests on campuses like Columbia, Yale, Berkeley, and many others,” the New York Democrat said at an event in Virginia with Biden commemorating Earth Day.

After Ocasio-Cortez spoke, Biden urged the audience to “listen to that lady.”

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Senator Jon Tester’s new $14.5 million ad campaign features footage of the southern border wall and boasts that the Montana Democrat “worked with Republicans” to “target fentanyl traffickers and add hundreds of new border patrol agents.”

There’s just one problem: Tester lobbied against a border wall in 2017 and voted against amendments that funded anti-fentanyl programs.

Tester was a vocal critic of former president Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall on the southern border, calling the idea “ineffective and wasteful.” Tester has since said he supports erecting barriers where it “does make sense,” but he has not put forward any legislation that would do so.

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While Congress failed to pass a border security bill over the weekend amid a flurry of billions in international aid to Ukraine and Israel, they did set aside $3.5 billion for “Migration and Refugee Assistance” for the State Department to “address humanitarian needs of vulnerable populations and communities.”

The Antiplanner.

Today is Earth Day, a day in which we are supposed to celebrate environmentally friendly ideas such as public transit, high-density development, and electric vehicles. My report published last week revealed that the transit lobby has hijacked affordable housing funds so that, in many cities, most of those funds are spent on expensive high-density transit-oriented developments rather than on more affordable low-rise housing.

The Antiplanner.

axpayers spend billions of dollars a year subsidizing so-called affordable housing, but much of that money is wasted, says a new report from the Cascade Policy Institute. Affordable housing being built today actually costs much more than market-rate housing, and most of the benefits from building such expensive housing are captured by the developers, not low-income families who need housing.

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The White House is weighing an unprecedented declaration of a national climate emergency to crack down on the oil industry and advance President Joe Biden’s climate policies, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

Declaring a national climate emergency would allow the Biden administration to more easily reduce oil exports, offshore drilling, and greenhouse gas emissions, individuals familiar with the administration’s internal deliberations told Bloomberg on the condition of anonymity.

The administration, however, will likely not make a final decision anytime soon, with the president’s advisers still divided over whether such an unprecedented move to advance the green energy agenda is appropriate, especially as Biden looks to win over voters ahead of his rematch this fall with Republican nominee Donald Trump.

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Democratic officials are throwing billions at California high-speed rail projects that have yet to be built, funding thousands of jobs specifically for union members.

Despite funding initially being approved by a referendum in 2008, the California High-Speed Rail project currently has less than a quarter of its expected length under construction and was initially supposed to have connected Los Angeles and San Francisco by 2020, according to The Los Angeles Times.

The Los Angeles/Orange Counties Building and Construction Trades Council, which represents 48 local unions and more than 150,000 members in California, boasted of the creation of 13,000 unionized construction jobs due to continued funding of California’s high-speed rail project.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority, in its community benefits agreement regarding the construction of the rail, lays out that it will exclusively bargain with union representatives for craft labor and that no employee will be required to join a union, but workers who are at the site for more than eight total days will be required to pay union dues.

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In the past, teachers’ unions concentrated on fighting to keep all teachers employed—competent or otherwise—laying off teachers by seniority when necessary and soaking taxpayers every chance they could. While those activities are still part of their mission, they have, over time, increasingly delved into the political/social realm, promoting Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, DEI, class warfare, gender-bending, etc. And their current level of engagement is staggering.

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For much of the past year, we had joked that behind the facade of western Democratic ideals, was a cold hard truth: the price of oil must not be allowed to go up in an election year. This was obvious in Biden’s “kid gloves” treatment of Iran’s regime, it was obvious when the US implemented “sanctions” on Russian oil that were breached within months with zero enforcement, it was also obvious when the US president became best friends with Venezuela’s dictator Nicolas Maduro last October when, in exchange for a few thousands barrels of Venezuela’s oil, the US lifted sanctions on the person that for years was one of western “democracies” biggest enemies.

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Two conservative Colorado counties—Douglas and El Paso—have sued the state of Colorado and its Democrat governor over laws that prevent local law enforcement from working with federal agents to arrest and deport illegal immigrants.

Pretty sad.

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Perhaps because he’s in favor of it.

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If idealistic politicians succeed in removing U.S. LNG from the global market, it will lead to the double whammy of increased coal and dirtier natural gas from emissions-agnostic countries like Russia. Like nuclear, the LNG export sector is highly vulnerable to political disruptions.

Washington Free Beacon.

Michigan public schools used nearly half of their pandemic relief spending on employee compensation, according to a new report from a Michigan policy watchdog. Many of the state’s students, meanwhile, continue to perform below pre-pandemic testing benchmarks.

So far, Michigan public schools have spent 47 percent of their $1.2 billion in COVID relief expenditures on staff salaries and bonuses, according to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The watchdog group says state data show staffing levels did not increase significantly enough for new hires to explain away the heavy spending on teacher salaries and benefits.

“Overall, staffing levels did not increase drastically enough to suggest that the $1.2 billion of Covid aid slated for compensation was primarily devoted to mitigating learning losses incurred by prolonged school closures,” the report states. “Although a portion of the funds may have been used to hire new employees, these findings support the idea that school districts mostly used Covid relief funds to pad existing employees’ compensation levels.” Over half of Michigan’s pandemic relief funding for schools left must be spent by September.

As Jerry Pournelle was fond of saying, the purpose of government is to hire and pay government workers. Like it or not, public school teachers are government workers, and (as history has demonstrated time and time again), the objective of government workers (and of the Unions that now represent them) is to get as much money as possible for as little work as they can get away with.

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Plenty of room at Guantanamo Bay.

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Why bother? It’s not as if they intended to do anything about it.

The Beatles – Taxman (Remastered)

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In a scene reminiscent of the Chuck Norris film Invasion USA, a speedboat loaded with at least a dozen illegal immigrants ripped through the waters just off the coast of Carlsbad, California, nearly slamming into bathers and surfers as they landed and sprinted across the beach.

Some migrants raced to nearby waiting vehicles which sped away, the rest walked off in broad daylight to mix with the surrounding tourists. Locals who filmed the migrants claimed police were called but didn’t show up.

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The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is distributing $300 million to sanctuary cities that provide services like shelter and food to illegal immigrants amid a massive increase in incursions across the southern border.

The $300 million in grants will be provided through the Shelter and Services Program (SSP), according to an April 12 press release. SSP offers funding to non-federal entities like NGOs and local governments that provide support to illegal immigrants released into the United States by the DHS. Out of the $300 million, $275 million will be distributed in the first allocation, with the remaining $25 million to be allocated later this year to meet operational requirements.

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The Biden administration is sending tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to an anti-Israel professor to investigate how “viral memes” can “perpetuate gendered, anti-Muslim racism,” federal spending disclosures show.

The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded San Diego State University professor Amira Jarmakani $60,000 to research and write a project titled, “Weapons of Mass Dissemination: Apprehending Digital Anti-Muslim Racism,” which will address Islamophobic stereotypes in memes and images on the internet.

Jarmakani in the grant description argues such memes have the ability to perpetuate “gendered anti-Muslim racism” which leads to “domestic surveillance that can also lead to the capture and incarceration of innocent people, framed as terrorists or enemy combatants in the War on Terror.”

Explain to me how ‘Muslim’ is a race.

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U.S. employers’ obligation to accommodate workers’ pregnancies also extends to abortions and the use of contraception, the U.S. agency that enforces workplace discrimination laws said Monday.

New York Post.

Customers packed Cory Gautereaux’s small gun store northeast of San Diego on a recent Friday afternoon.

Many of the people buying pistols at Firearms Unlimited California said they were concerned about the massive number of migrants being released onto the local streets after the area became a hub for the crisis at the border — which is just 25 miles from El Cajon, a Southern California suburb of 105,000 people.

“My wife and I have had home defense guns for many years. Recently, though, with all the stuff that’s happening south of the border and all the people coming over, my concerns have broadened,” said Keith Carnevale, one of the shop’s customers, who’s armed his entire family.

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The World Health Organization’s Dr. Hanna Nohynek testified in court that she advised her government that vaccine passports were not needed but was ignored, despite explaining that the COVID vaccines did not stop virus transmission and the passports gave a false sense of security. The stunning revelations came to light in a Helsinki courtroom where Finnish citizen Mika Vauhkala is suing after he was denied entry to a café for not having a vaccine passport.

CBS News.

an Dell is a former chemical engineer who has spent years telling an inconvenient truth about plastics. “So many people, they see the recyclable label, and they put it in the recycle bin,” she said. “But the vast majority of plastics are not recycled.”
About 48 million tons of plastic waste is generated in the U.S. each year; only 5 to 6 percent of it is actually recycled, according to the Department of Energy. The rest ends up in landfills or is burned.
Dell founded a non-profit, The Last Beach Cleanup, to fight plastic pollution. Inside her garage in Southern California is all sorts of plastic with those little arrows on it that make us think they can be recycled. But, she said, “You’re being lied to.”

Imagine my surprise.

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An Afghan man and illegal immigrant who’s on the FBI terror watchlist has been twice apprehended in the United States only to be released by a federal apparatus that continues to make a mockery of the very notion of “border security.”

Mohammad Kharwin, 48, was first arrested in Southern California in March 2023 after he’d illegally entered the United States from Mexico, according to NBC News, which was first to report the story. Border police suspected Kharwin was on the watchlist, because one unspecified attribute matched his entry on the list.

However, for lack of additional corroborating data, he was processed and released, just like hordes of other illegal migrants before and since. He was instructed to periodically call an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, but was free to apply for asylum and permission to work in the United States. He was also free to board domestic flights.

The American Mind.

The U.S. Navy recently released a photograph on social media showing a sailor firing his M-4 aboard a ship. No doubt some public relations officer thought the picture looked great—a fit and ready sailor shooting his rifle, with spent cartridges flying. A perfect picture for a recruitment catalog, except for one crucial detail: the rifle’s scope—which the sailor appears to be looking through—is mounted backwards, and its lens covers appear to be closed. A swift social media uproar arose over the bizarre and glaring error. Someone with actual military experience in the Navy evidently noticed what this photo said without words, because the picture was quickly deleted.

Too late, for this image of bastardized military training is already the allegory for the collapse of the military profession and America’s deployment of military force around the world. The glaring deficiencies in this photo go a long way towards understanding the U.S. military in 2024. Outkick has a hilariously tragic rundown of all that is wrong with the picture, but there is a lesson for those Americans concerned about the institutional integrity of a military on the precipice of war in different regions of the world.

Many veterans will recognize the notion and verbiage of a “box check exercise,” that being a colloquial phrase used to describe drills a military unit undergoes to fulfill a prescribed process. Box-check exercises are frequently unrelated to easier or more functional parts of a unit training calendar. From a veteran Army infantryman, one would think shooting rifles aboard a Navy destroyer epitomizes the notion of a “box-check exercise.”

The Foundry.

Today’s standard-issue body shields leave officers exposed to perpetrators’ increasingly lethal weapons. But groundbreaking innovations like liquid armor and ultra-high-strength composites could revolutionize police protection, creating lightweight, flexible equipment that lets cops operate more securely.

AI-powered sensors and real-time data analysis could enhance authorities’ situational awareness and decision-making. On the horizon: lighter and more comfortable “smart long johns” that officers could slip beneath their uniforms.

Breakthroughs in smart helmets also could prevent deaths. Advanced composites of Kevlar, carbon fiber, and thermoplastics could help craft headgear that are more nimble, easier to wear, and far tougher on hostile fire.

Sorry–all our money is going for ‘reparations’ and into the pockets of politicians and their cronies.

Read it.

on the U.S. Census, support for the measure could be growing in the backdrop of the border crisis and its potential impact on congressional reapportionment.

Heritage Action, a policy advocacy arm of The Heritage Foundation, announced Friday the Equal Representation Act would be scored as a key vote. The bill is S 3659 in the Senate and HR 7109 in the House. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

Under current law, foreign citizens living in the United States are counted in the Census, and thus toward congressional apportionment. Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., publicly admitted, “We have a diaspora that can absorb a significant number of these migrants. … I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes.”

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I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

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Progressives are using legal loopholes and the power of the federal government to maximize Democrat votes in the 2024 election at taxpayers’ expense, RealClearInvestigations has found.

The methods include voter registration and mobilization campaigns by ostensibly nonpartisan charities that target Democrats using demographic data as proxies, and the Biden administration’s unprecedented demand that every federal agency “consider ways to expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process.”

A dizzying array of overwhelmingly “democracy-focused” entities with ties to the Democratic Party operating as charities and funded with hundreds of millions of dollars from major liberal “dark money” vehicles are engaged in a sprawling campaign to register the voters, deliver them the ballots, and figuratively and sometimes literally harvest the votes necessary to defeat Donald Trump.

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An Afghan migrant, who is on the terrorist watchlist, was taken into custody crossing the southern border and released by authorities last year, NBC News reported.

The network, attributing the information to U.S. officials, said Mohammad Kharwin, 48, was taken into custody again in February and released last month by an immigration judge, who was not informed of the security risk.

Kharwin had been ordered free on bond pending a 2025 immigration hearing in Texas. No restrictions were placed on his movements inside the U.S.

The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

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Four years have passed since the onset of COVID-19 and the global mishandling of its spread. Now, the same governments and international organizations that lied about the last pandemic are negotiating a new pandemic agreement and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) at the World Health Organization (WHO).

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Garret O’Boyle and Stephen Friend dedicated years of their lives to serving their country in the FBI. But when they began to question some of the decisions being made within the bureau, they were suspended.

After joining the FBI, O’Boyle says he “immediately saw that other agents [and] supervisors didn’t have a solid grasp of people’s civil rights.”

“Having sworn that oath to the Constitution multiple times—twice in the Army, once as a police officer, once as an FBI agent,” O’Boyle said, “it actually meant something to me—which, I think, it doesn’t to many, maybe even to most at this point. It’s just a job.”

The Foundry.

The Democrat-run city of Denver plans to defund its Police Department to pay for illegal immigrants.

Colorado’s capital, commonly referred to as a “sanctuary city,” announced Wednesday that it will spend $89.9 million on services for incoming illegal migrants, pulling some funding from roughly $45 million in public programs and services. The Denver Police Department will be hit with a reduction of $8.4 million— about 1.9% of its total operating budget, the city confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation.