Alex Tabarrok.

WashingtonTimes: Residents in rural America are eager to access high-speed internet under a $42.5 billion federal modernization program, but not a single home or business has been connected to new broadband networks nearly three years after President Biden signed the funding into law, and no project will break ground until sometime next year.

A big part of the problem is the piling on to any government program a host of progressive wish-list items including:

• Preference for hiring union workers, who are scarce in some rural areas.

• Requiring providers to prioritize “certain segments of the workforce, such as individuals with past criminal records,” when building broadband networks.

• Requiring eligible entities to “account not only for current [climate-related] risks but also for how the frequency, severity, and nature of these extreme events may plausibly evolve as our climate continues to change over the coming decades.”

Read it.

Oregon voters will likely decide in November whether to establish a historic universal basic income program that would give every state resident roughly $750 annually from increased corporate taxes.

Proponents of the concept say they likely have enough signatures to place it on the ballot this fall, and opponents are taking them seriously.

State business advocacy groups are preparing to launch a campaign against the proposed measure, arguing that it would harm Oregon’s business landscape and economy.

Just to repeat what everyone ought to know: Businesses don’t pay taxes. They merely collect taxes. Taxes are, to a business, just another expense, and are folded into the price that the business charges its customers. It is the customers who pay the taxes. The only effect it has on the business is to make it less competitive with businesses from outside the jurisdiction that is taxing them, be it a city, county, state, or country.

Bloomberg.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and US President Joseph Biden are both promoting the same kind of mistake: giving people money when they should instead be working harder to expand supply. In both cases, the mistake is being made in the housing market, a longstanding venue for counterproductive policy ideas.

Read it.

On Wednesday, three teens were arrested for riding e-scooters over an LGBTQ ‘Pride’ mural painted on a crosswalk in Spokane, Washington. One of the teens was charged with a first degree felony and bail was set at $15,000.

On Saturday, in another Washington thousands of miles away, Hamas supporters rioted near the White House. They threw bottles at a park ranger and vandalized national monuments with graffiti reading “Death to America”. Islamic terrorist supporters waved banners and held up signs in support of Hamas. One man in a Hamas headband brandished a bloody Biden mask.

Two Park Police officers were injured in the pro-Hamas violence, but not one arrest was made.

Power Line.

“You know, 11 million people live in the shadows. I believe they’re already American citizens,” said Vice President Biden in 2014. As he had to know, according to current law they aren’t American citizens, and the number is also wrong. More than 22 million people are illegally present in the United States, according to a 2021 study by scholars at MIT and Yale. Pew Research pegged the figure at 11 million, and for years it stood as the official count. Eleven million is more like the number illegally present in California alone.

Newsbusters.

President Joe Biden sits atop a censorship regime made up of federal agencies that has repeatedly pressured Big Tech social media companies to clamp down on those who express views in opposition to his own.

The U.S. Supreme Court is about to hand down its opinion in Murthy v. Missouri, a case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to prevent the Biden administration from colluding with and coercing Big Tech companies to censor Americans. A lower court found that, along with top White House staffers like former Press Secretary Jen Psaki, high ranking members of our federal agencies used their power to pressure Big Tech firms into censoring Biden’s political opponents. In their briefs, and during oral argument, the Biden administration and the attorneys for Big Tech shockingly argued that the federal government has a First Amendment right to pressure Big Tech platforms to censor the speech of individuals. The purpose of the First Amendment, of course, is the opposite: To establish–without doubt–the inalienable right of individuals to speak against their government.

Read it.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday unsealed an indictment against Dr. Eithan Haim, who last year leaked evidence of cross-sex hormone procedures being performed at a Texas hospital despite the facility claiming to have halted them, with the surgeon facing four felony counts for alleged violations of a medical-records law that could land him in prison for up to 10 years.

No good deed goes unpunished.

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President Joe Biden’s $230 million humanitarian pier on the coast of Gaza has been deemed a failure by aid groups and could be permanently shut down, the New York Times reported Tuesday.

The pier was only functional for 10 days when it had to be shut down for repairs after rough weather. It will now likely be dismantled weeks earlier than expected, per the report. The Biden administration said the pier would be in operation until September, but military officials expect the pier to be dismantled within the next month.

Aid groups have criticized the pier for being largely ineffective and doing little to usher aid into Gaza since Biden ordered the military to construct it in March. The pier required more than 1,000 U.S. service members for its construction and operation and is estimated to cost taxpayers $230 million. While the pier was still in operation, it transported 137 trucks of aid, but much of that aid did not reach Gazan civilians because the trucks were intercepted, according to the Pentagon.

Well, Jimmy Carter will be happy to learn that he has been replaced as the worst President in American history.

Read it.

A vivid metaphor for American global geopolitical incompetence is about to float off into the sunset, as the White House is poised to give up on the $230 million Gaza aid pier it built to alleviate an Israel-imposed humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Disassembly could begin in July, officials told New York Times.

Read it.

The Biden administration’s border policies have led to more than 400,000 unaccompanied illegal immigrant minors to be placed throughout the U.S. without oversight, according to a report from the House Judiciary Committee, PM reported Tuesday.

UK Daily Mail.

DailyMail.com filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Secret Service in March after a video was mentioned as part of an email that detailed a June 15, 2023 biting incident with the since-banished first dog.

The video purportedly showed Commander running at a high rate of speed and jumping toward the agent in the East Wing’s Kennedy Garden, leaving a ‘deep bite’ on the individual’s left arm ‘that reportedly needed stitches,’ the email said.

Read it.

The Biden administration’s State Department worked with left-wing nonprofit environmental organizations before it joined an international anti-coal coalition, The Washington Free Beacon reported.

Read it.

Buy those votes! Buy those votes!

UPDATE: Sen. Tom Cotton: Biden’s Amnesty Plan Illegal

Read it.

This week, Attorney General Merrick Garland took to the pages of the Washington Post to lash out at critics who are spreading what he considers “conspiracy theories crafted and spread for the purpose of undermining public trust in the judicial process itself.” His column, titled “Unfounded attacks on the Justice Department must end,” missed the point.

I thank God every day that this partisan hack didn’t wind up on the Supreme Court.

Read it.

No, because (a) they won’t do any good–people still smoke, despite the fact that labels have been on tobacco products for fifty years; (b) Social Media political donations are more influential in Congress than some diversity-hire in the public health bureaucracy; and (c) politicians are too busy using the existing Social Media situation to harvest votes.

This is just another government employee who wants a line on his resumé that says See I Did Something.

The Foundry.

The Department of Justice is targeting a Texas whistleblower who exposed Texas Children’s Hospital secretly performing attempted gender transition procedures on children.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas announced Monday that it had indicted 34-year-old Eithan Haim for “obtaining protected individual health information for patients that were not under his care and without authorization.”

If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 maximum possible fine.

Texas Children’s had publicly said in March 2022 that it would no longer perform attempted gender transition procedures on kids. In May 2023, Haim provided journalist Christopher Rufo with documents showing that Texas Children’s was “lying to the public about the existence of its transgender-medicine program,” as Haim later revealed in an explosive January 2024 piece.

Associated Press.

Translation: “The IRS is going to try to re-write the tax code so that they can steal more of people’s money; since it’s just “rich people”, stealing from them is okay.’

Just as ‘price gouging’ is charging more than the speaker thinks is proper, ‘loophole’ is using the existing tax code to avoid paying the amount of tax that the speaker thinks is your ‘fair share’.

Read it.

If you’re unbanked and the fees and onerous terms of check cashing and other non-bank services are killing you, you might be able to get some relief from a surprising place: Your local post office. The Postal Service actually offers some limited banking services, and there are a lot of folks who are pushing to expand those services dramatically.

Read it.

A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked the Biden administration’s new Title IX rule expanding protections for LGBTQ+ students in six additional states, dealing another setback for a policy that has been under legal attack by Republican attorneys general.

This is the rule that includes ‘gender identity’ as a protected class, which is of course not in the statute.

Read it.

Brendan Carr, Republican member of the FCC, has been criticizing Joe Biden, alleging that since the passage of the Infrastructure and Jobs Act of 2021, wherein $42 billion was appropriated to connect rural America with high-speed fiber optic cable internet, not a single internet connection has been achieved. A truly stunning record. Three years, no connections.

Read it.

Gee, I wonder why?

Financial Times.

Buy those votes! Buy those votes!

New York Post.

And yet there are people who will vote for this vegetable. Unbelievable.

Read it.

During the pandemic it was common for many Americans to discount or even disparage the Chinese vaccines. In fact, the Chinese vaccines such as Coronavac/Sinovac were made quickly and in large quantities and they were effective. The Chinese vaccines saved millions of lives. The vaccine portfolio model that the AHT team produced, as well as common sense, suggested the value of having a diversified portfolio. That’s why we recommended and I advocated for including a deactivated vaccine in the Operation Warp Speed mix or barring that for making an advance deal on vaccine capacity with China. At the time, I assumed that the disparaging of Chinese vaccines was simply an issue of national pride or bravado during a time of fear. But it turns out that in other countries, the Pentagon ran a disinformation campaign against the Chinese vaccines.

Navy Matters.

Here’s a time line of the pier:

• Mar 7 – Biden announces Gaza pier plan
• Mar 9 – U.S. Army support ship General Frank S. Besson leaves to begin construction
• May 17 –  pier opens
• May 28 – pier ops suspended after piece breaks off
• Jun 8 – operations resume after repairs
• Jun 15 – Pentagon announces pier will be torn down

So, what can we learn from the Gaza pier effort?

Read it.

How many Americans have been assaulted, raped, maimed or murdered by illegals who have streamed into our country at the invitation of Joe Biden’s open border policies? No one knows, but it is safe to say that Rachel Morin is one among many.

Morin, a 37 year old mother of five, went for a run in Harford County, Maryland. She was waylaid by Victor Martinez Hernandez, who raped, viciously beat, and murdered her. Hernandez is an illegal alien. He reportedly is associated with the MS-13 gang and was wanted for murder in El Salvador, so he fled to the U.S.

A sane country would take every reasonable measure to prevent escaping murderers and gang members from crossing its borders, but we are not a sane country. We elected Joe Biden president. It has been reported that Hernandez entered the country in February 2023, but I am not sure how we know that. Did he use Joe Biden’s app to facilitate his illegal entry? Was he given a free cell phone? I don’t know.

Read it.

“An Arkansas prosecutor on Friday said a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent was justified when he fatally shot the Little Rock airport director during a raid in March,” CBS News reports. “Pulaski County Prosecutor Will Jones said in a letter to ATF that no charges in the shooting would be filed after reviewing the Arkansas State Police investigation of the shooting of Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport Executive Director Bryan Malinowski.” On the other hand, a group of Arkansas legislators had some questions.

I imagine that they do.

TIME.

oday, in a runoff election for mayor, Chicago voters will choose either former teacher Brandon Johnson or former schools CEO Paul Vallas. What’s raising eyebrows is the funding of Johnson’s campaign: Over 90 percent has come from teachers unions and other public employee unions. Vallas has the endorsement of the police union, but his funding is more diverse, including business leaders and industrial unions. Just looking at the money, the race comes down to this: Public employees vs everyone else plus cops.

What is wrong with this picture? The new mayor is supposed to manage Chicago for all the citizens, not to benefit public employees. Chicago is not in good shape. In 37 of its schools, not one student is proficient in reading or math. Its transit system is stuck with schedules that serve no one at great expense. The crime rate in Chicago is among the highest in the country. But no recent Chicago mayor has been able to fix these and other endemic problems because the public unions have collective bargaining powers that give them a veto on how the city is run. Frustrated by the inability to get teachers back to the classroom during Covid, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot observed that the teachers union wanted “to take over not only Chicago Public Schools, but take over running the city government.”

This is not just a Chicago problem. Los Angeles teachers walked out of class rooms last month supposedly to support striking service personnel, but Los Angeles lacks the resources to help the service employees because of the indebted inefficiencies in the teachers union contract.

Read it.

Baltimore City and Chicago Public Schools are spending taxpayer monies like there’s no tomorrow, yet math and reading test scores are shockingly low. Radical leftists, who are embedded in these school systems, along with the officials in City Halls in these respective imploding metro areas, have ideals and beliefs not rooted in reality. Their progressive agendas have failed the youth and also unleashed a tidal wave of crime and chaos.

These are not new problems for crime-ridden Baltimore City and Chicago. The school systems in these metro areas have been failing the nation’s future generations for years. Still, it’s only now becoming absolutely insane that woke leftists are continuing to run these education systems into the ground.

Washington Examiner.

“We recently learned that the Democrat mayor of Denver has been sending illegal immigrants to Utah without proper notification or approval. This is completely unacceptable and follows on the failed catch-and-release policy of the Biden administration,” Cox wrote on X. “Every state has received illegal immigrants and Utah’s resources are completely depleted.”

Where is it written that one state has to have ‘notification or approval’ to send illegal immigrants to another state? Texas obviously thinks that there is no such requirement. Certainly the Federal government feels under no obligation for ‘notification or approval’ before shipping illegal immigrants to a state.

If you don’t like it, ship them back. Or sue.

Read it.

It’s been more than three years since Congress directed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to investigate the long-term effects of COVID-19—and there are still no answers for the millions of Americans suffering from long COVID.

The Foundry.

The Environmental Protection Agency plays judge, jury, and executioner—and its newest-issued rule is a death sentence to American energy and energy-producing states.

Meanwhile, states like Pennsylvania, which will be disproportionately harmed by the rule because of our abundant natural gas production, hold the key to America’s increasing energy needs, generating immense economic development and reducing the very emissions targeted by this heavy-handed agency.

The EPA unilaterally issued a final rule establishing draconian emission standards that target existing coal and new natural gas power plants nationwide. It requires 90% carbon capture for power-generating facilities by 2032.

Aside from its questionable legality, the new rule is unfeasible. The EPA proposed impossible standards. Current carbon-capture technology—a water- and energy-intensive process that filters and sequesters emissions—neither meets this standard nor projects to do so in the next decade.

Read it.

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court has found that the federal government cannot use a decades-old ban on machine guns to ban bump stocks.

“Semiautomatic firearms, which require shooters to reengage the trigger for every shot, are not machineguns. This case asks whether a bump stock—an accessory for a semiautomatic rifle that allows the shooter to rapidly reengage the trigger (and therefore achieve a high rate of fire)—converts the rifle into a ‘machinegun.’ We hold that it does not,” wrote Justice Clarence Thomas.

Thomas was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch in deciding the ban was illegal.

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

We don’t see a lot of pride flags flying through most of the US, not even during the unilaterally declared “pride month” that has been foisted on the populace every June. The only pride flags we do see are in corporate marketing campaigns and certain government buildings, not to mention certain city crosswalks.

If you have come to the conclusion that the pride movement is nothing more than astroturf sponsored by corporate interests and far-left politicians then you would be right on target. Without these institutions pushing LGBT propaganda on a regular basis the pride movement simply would not exist beyond a minority of useful idiots.

But what is the point? Why fabricate an activist ideology and why force it on the masses as if it is legitimate? There are a lot of reasons, but the primary goal is to create a vehicle for controlling speech and a shield for collectivist ideologues so that they can pursue political power while hiding behind proclamations of “equal rights.” If you are engaging in a coup from a position of weakness it sure helps if your enemies can’t criticize you for fear of being labeled “monsters and insurrectionists.”

Read it.

The Associated Press reported that unnamed U.S. intelligence officials are recycling a familiar narrative ahead of the 2024 election, claiming without evidence that the upcoming presidential election is a target for foreign disinformation campaigns.

An unnamed official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has been briefing political candidates and government groups an unspecified number of times, alleging that the risks in 2024 are higher because “presidential elections draw more attention from our adversaries,” according to The Associated Press (AP).

They made similar claims in 2020 when 51 intelligence officials falsely asserted that Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” This letter and the leftist media’s refusal to cover the story ultimately led Big Tech to censor anyone who dared to share the New York Post’s bombshell on the laptop.

Read it.

A few months back reports started to emerge of Illegal immigrants taking shelter in Boston’s Logan Airport. Now there are HUNDREDS of them living there, including whole families.

The New York Post reports that there are “throngs of families lining a baggage claim surrounded by suitcases and using sparse blankets for makeshift mattresses.”

“We continue to see migrants at the airport. They come to Logan a number of ways. They also arrive at Logan at all hours,” a representative from MassPort commented.

The rep. also noted that as quickly as the migrants are moved out of the airport to shelters, more arrive.

Read it.

The Department of Education has never educated one person. Not one. Ever.

Roberts, himself a former K-12 and college educator, made the case for abolishing the Cabinet-level department in an interview with podcast co-host Tim Kennedy. Roberts called that policy goal his “life’s work.”

“The Department of Education got it wrong on the first minute of its existence in 1979,” he contended, “because it is such a terrible idea to centralize or attempt to centralize education policy, education funding, [and] curriculum questions.”

The department was created near the end of the Carter administration at the behest of the teachers unions.

Read it.

The House committee with oversight of elections is subpoenaing 15 members of the Biden administration’s Cabinet regarding the implementation of the president’s executive order to use federal agencies to partner with left-leaning groups for get-out-the-vote purposes in 2024.

The House Administration Committee is investigating President Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14919, signed in March 2021, that requires federal agencies to partner with private interests to boost voter participation. The committee previously advanced legislation to block funding of the order.

“Elections are partisan, but our election administration should never be partisan,” House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., said in a public statement. “Allowing federal employees from the Biden administration to flood election administration sites threatens election integrity and reduces Americans’ confidence.”

The Biden administration has been secretive about the implementation of the plan. Critics of the order have called it “Bidenbucks.”

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House Republicans voted to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt — they don’t like him either, but the vote was official business. They voted to hold him in contempt of Congress for failing to turn over the subpoenaed recording of President Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur. Hur found President Biden to be incompetent to stand trial and thus found charges based on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents to be inappropriate. Not unreasonably, House Republicans want to go to the tape.

What does it matter? Ask Eric Holder what happens to an Attorney General held in contempt of Congress. (Hint: Nothing.)

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The price tag for a ‘first-class’ high-rise for the homeless and drug addicts in the utopian progressive hellhole neighborhood of Skid Row, located in downtown Los Angeles, has topped nearly $600k per unit. The building comprises 228 studios and 50 one-bedroom apartments, with the total project costing taxpayers $165 million. This project was financed by state housing funds and $56 million in state tax credits.

Read it.

Republican House lawmakers joined Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) on Wednesday in releasing the 32nd annual edition of the “Congressional Pig Book,” a compilation of “pork-barrel” projects in the federal budget.

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As they do.

The U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which oversees American-funded news outlets across the globe, attempted to stonewall a congressional investigation into corruption at the agency and privately pleaded with a lawmaker to end the probe as investigators began to uncover widespread misconduct at the organization’s highest levels, according to a report obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee, led by Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas), determined that senior USAGM employees spent years trying to shield agency executive Setareh Sieg from discipline over allegations she “used taxpayer funds for personal travel, falsified her educational credentials to obtain high-level employment, and engaged in a pattern of favoritism that materially benefitted some employees at the expense of the public.”

The report on the committee’s investigation, released Tuesday and reviewed in advance by the Free Beacon, shows that the allegations against Sieg, the onetime director of Voice of America’s Persian News Network, “have merit and are supported by substantial evidence.” The conclusion was reached even as USAGM officials tried to protect Sieg from scrutiny and pleaded with McCaul’s team to drop the years-long probe.

Read it.

A U.S. appeals court on June 9 upheld a ban preventing a Massachusetts middle school student from wearing a shirt reading “There are only two genders.”

Another prohibition by school administrators, this time blocking the same student from wearing the shirt with “only two” covered by tape, on which was written “censored,” is also allowed under court precedent, according to the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Time to leave.

“The question here is not whether the t-shirts should have been barred. The question is who should decide whether to bar them—educators or federal judges. Based on Tinker, the cases applying it, and the specific record here, we cannot say that in this instance the Constitution assigns the sensitive (and potentially consequential) judgment about what would make ‘an environment conducive to learning’ at NMS to us rather than to the educators closest to the scene,” U.S. Circuit Judge David Barron wrote for a unanimous panel of the court.

The question is not whether to have censorship – that is obviously yes – but who is to do the censoring. Time to leave.

“[The school] permissibly concluded that the shirt invades the rights of others,” Judge Talwani said before quoting Tinker. “Schools can prohibit speech that is in ‘collision with the rights of others to be secure and be let alone.’”

Orwell, you were SO right….

Read it.

They made a mess of the area, desecrated monuments to heroes of the American Revolution, burned American flags, harassed officers of the law—the very few who even arrived to do anything at all—and despite many wearing face masks, revealed the true face of their movement.

I don’t say “pro-Hamas” lightly here. Many were wearing Hamas headbands.

Read it.

The White House took the unprecedented step of intervening in an international labor dispute last year after a push from powerful U.S. labor unions. Then, months later, a multi-nation tribunal threw the case out, handing a defeat to the administration and its labor allies.

Last year, the AFL-CIO and United Steelworkers—which collectively represent more than 13 million American workers and regularly funnel millions of dollars to Democratic campaigns, according to Federal Election Commission data—made their formal appeal to the White House’s Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), according to legal filings reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

In the appeal, the unions called on the administration to invoke a little-known clause in the 2020 North American trade agreement in support of Los Mineros, a Mexican miners’ union locked in a years-long labor dispute with the massive San Martin mine in Zacatecas, Mexico. The White House, which regularly claims to be the most pro-union White House in U.S. history, soon obliged and assembled a panel to review the case.

Washington Poop.

The draft rules, arriving less than five months before Election Day, are part of President Biden’s argument that he is addressing pocketbook problems.

Yeah, by picking the pocket of people who loan money to make things easier for deadbeat Democrats (but I repeat myself). No wonder the economy is in the toilet, with the government changing the rules every time you turn around.

Buy those votes! Buy those votes!

Read it.

In the midst of the infamous “Pride Month,” with rainbow flags seemingly in every store window and on every company logo, we got an inside look at how two federal agencies celebrate Pride Month—especially their inclusion of the criminals they supervise by providing them resource guides for LGBTQ-friendly housing, employment, mental health groups, and more.