Read it.

U.S. taxpayers will likely be footing the bill for the majority of first lady Jill Biden’s cross-Atlantic travel where she traveled from France to the United States then back to France in less than 48 hours.

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The latest fiasco involves a RICO case against one rapper named Young Thug and co-defendants, in which Mr. Thug (Jeffrey Lamar Williams) and pals have been charged with several gang-related crimes related to the “Young Slime Life” group.

During a Monday court hearing, Mr. Thug’s attorney, Brian Steel, was arrested after alleging that the judge, Ural Glanville, arranged a “secret” meeting with a key witness, Kenneth Copeland (a no-no).

Judge Glanville gave Steel until 5pm to disclose his source regarding the secret meeting, arguing that Steel wasn’t supposed to have any communication with a state witness sworn to testify.

Steel, facing a contempt charge, refused to reveal his source citing attorney-client privilege – after which he can be seen being taken into custody.

Read it.

The University of California, Los Angeles, medical school has gone to extraordinary lengths for over five years to shield its admissions practices from internal scrutiny, stonewalling data requests from concerned professors and refusing to assure admissions officials that they would not face retaliation for cooperating with an internal probe of the school’s admissions office, according to three sources with firsthand knowledge of the situation and documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Since at least 2018, the school has refused to provide members of its faculty oversight board data on the relationship between admitted students’ academic credentials and their performance in medical school, two former members of that board said.

It has also slow-walked, since November of last year, its response to a public records request for similar data, pushing back the estimated date of availability four times over the course of six months, according to emails from UCLA’s public records office.

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The city of Alexandria, Virginia, is drawing fire for painting Pride flags that include transgender symbols over the crosswalks in historic Old Town Alexandria.

The rainbow crosswalks are permanent, City Council member R. Kirk McPike told a local publication, The Zebra.

“Last June, in response to resident requests, I brought a memo before [the] Council, which my colleagues supported, asking staff to put together a proposal for permanent Pride street artwork,” McPike told The Zebra. “Staff brought a proposal to us last fall, which [the] Council approved, leading to these beautiful new crosswalks.”

He also said in a tweet that the unveiling of the rainbow crosswalks was met with “great media fanfare” and an “exciting drag story time” in which men dressed as women in drag read books and danced for children.

In addition to his role on the Alexandria City Council, McPike serves as chief of staff to a California Democratic congressman, Rep. Mark Takano. McPike is married to a man.

Read it.

President Biden’s executive order to curb the illegal alien invasion was nothing more than optically pleasing headlines before the September presidential debates. Just days after the order was signed, US Customs and Border Protection agents in the southern California sector received a memo instructing them to release single adults from all but six countries.

Fox News’ Bill Melugin obtained an internal CBP memo sent to agents in the San Diego sector following Biden’s executive order last Tuesday. The memo instructed them to release single adults from over 100 eastern hemisphere countries, except for six (Uzbekistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Georgia, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan) deemed “mandatory referral” countries. This means despite the president’s promise of stopping the invasion between border checkpoints, the majority, including Chinese, Middle Eastern, and African adults, are still being released into the US.

Read it.

ocial Security faces a potential funding shortfall by 2033-2035, threatening its ability to meet commitments to retirees. A significant issue is the payroll tax cap, which limits taxation to incomes up to $168,000. This cap hasn’t kept pace with the rise in high earners, contributing to the shortfall. Removing the cap could address 70% of the deficit. While raising the retirement age or increasing taxes are other options, the political feasibility of taxing higher incomes makes it a likely solution. Retirees are advised to continue investing in their retirement accounts to supplement Social Security benefits.

Only a fool depends on Social Security for their retirement. (If I had been able to put the money taken from me in Social Security tax and put it into an IRA, I’d be miles ahead.)

The American Mind.

For most of my life, June signified the arrival of summer and opened wedding season. In recent years, a small but boisterous group of activists have claimed it as Pride Month, replacing the traditional focus with honoring an ever-changing flag that represents the worship of a postmodern Baal. As society has surrendered to this iteration of humanistic religious practice, the military complex has followed suit.

The American military that could not be defeated by global nuclear powers was conquered by a band of people dedicated to sexual disorder. Since the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) in 2010, the Department of Defense (DOD) capitulated to the revolutionary cause of Pride Month with nearly the speed of Kabul’s fall to the Taliban. In doing so, it usurped the concept of selfless service to others with the celebration of self for the sexually divergent.

The Pentagon, and all branches of the military, publish internal public affairs guidance documents laying out exactly how military leaders from top to bottom are expected to celebrate LGBTQ values in speech and action. This now includes sending honor guards in full military dress to formally kick off pride parades. The American flag and military colors have long shown up in battles throughout American history. Now they wave in cultural battle—on the side of those who want the nation deconstructed.

Gothamist.

The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money — in this case, the taxpayers.

Time to leave.

Forbes.

S Corporation shareholders and partners in a partnership could see their effective federal income tax rate increase by 30% by the end of December 31, 2025, due to the expiration of certain tax laws. With the sunsetting of the 199A deduction and an increase in individual federal income tax rates scheduled to occur as of December 31, 2025, the effective tax rate for pass-through entity owners will jump from 30% to 39.6%. Taxable income could also increase due to the sunsetting Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provisions, including the capitalization of research and experimental expenditures, bonus depreciation dropping to 60% in 2024 and to 40% in 2025, and the application of a more restrictive interest expense limitation calculation.

A dramatic increase to the effective tax rate may catch many pass-through entity businesses by surprise. Doesn’t Congress have to pass a bill to change federal income tax law? Unfortunately, not in this situation. For tax law to be passed, the Senate normally needs a 60-vote majority to overcome a filibuster. However, provided the political party controls the Presidency, House and Senate, laws can be passed under the budget reconciliation process where only a simple majority in the Senate is needed. The budget reconciliation process was utilized to pass the Tax Cut and Jobs Act (“TCJA”) in December of 2017, which bypassed the need for bipartisan support. Under the reconciliation process, the bill cannot increase the deficit beyond a 10-year budget window. Under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, taxes were reduced substantially between 2018 through 2025, resulting in an anticipated $1-$2 trillion increase to the national deficit. Both parties have used the budget reconciliation process when controlling the Presidency and Congress. In 2010, the budget reconciliation process was utilized to amend the Affordable Care Act and modify the federal student loan program. This process was utilized most recently in 2021 to enact additional COVID-19 relief via the American Rescue Plan.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

Read it.

If it weren’t for double standards, we wouldn’t have any standards at all.

Read it.

The new Nancy Pelosi?

Don’t you wish you were a Congresscritter, so you could own a California winery?

NavalNews.

The decommissioning schedule for the U.S. Navy’s remaining 13 Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers has been set. Next to leave service will be the Vicksburg (CG 69) in June 2024, followed by the Cowpens (CG 63) in August, Antietam (CG 54) and Leyte Gulf (CG 55) in September. Overall, the last two cruisers will likely be Chosin (CG 65) and Cape St. George (CG 71), both to be decommissioned in fiscal 2027. The close of their careers will bring an end to the service life of the class, the world’s first to be equipped with the Aegis combat system.

Vicksburg and Cowpens had been two of the seven cruisers inducted in the mid-20-teens into the Navy’s Cruiser Modernization Program, and the cost of their protracted, never-finished modernizations has approached nearly one billion dollars. Although Congress had directed otherwise, the U.S. Navy in early 2024 ordered all further work on the ships to stop and they were placed on the decommissioning list. Of the seven cruisers in the program, only Gettysburgand Chosin have been redelivered, with work continuing on Cape St. George. Two other ships in the program, Hue City (CG 66) and Anzio (CG 68), were decommissioned in 2022 in poor condition and far from completion.

Read it.

Nuclear plant construction is often characterized as exhibiting “negative learning.” That is, instead of getting better at building plants over time, we’re getting worse. Plants have gotten radically more expensive, even as technology has improved and we understand the underlying science better

…

Most nuclear plant cost increase in the 1970s-80s can be attributed to increased labor costs. An estimate by United Engineers and Constructors found that from 1976-1988, labor costs for plant construction climbed 18.7% annually, while material costs escalated by only 7.7% annually (against an overall inflation rate of 5.5%) Of those labor costs, over half were due to expensive professionals: engineers, supervisors, quality control inspectors, and so on.

…

Why did labor costs increase? According to most observers, increasing regulation made plants increasingly burdensome to build. During the late 60s and early 70s, regulatory requirements steadily increased.

 

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Like every regulator grant of power to the administrative agencies of the executive branch, the agency has grabbed the power and expanded it beyond its original intent. Take the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards imposed by the Department of Transportation/National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — please. The origin of federal fuel economy standards dates to the oil embargo of 1973-1974 imposed by Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and the subsequent tripling in the price of crude oil. Americans could not be trusted to seek cars with better mileage on their own.

Like the old Temporary North of Mines Building at the University of Minnesota, it’s a long way to temporary. The CAFE standards have now become a tool wielded by the Biden administration to club Americans into submission to electric vehicles. We want nothing more than to be left alone, but they want to run our lives. Count the ways.

It’s a long list that includes the displacement of cars powered by internal combustion engines by electric vehicles. We love the former and reject the latter. Thus the latest edition of NHTSA’s CAFE standards, announced yesterday.

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

Read it.

When is a ban not a ban? When it’s a Biden.

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Yeah–electric cars don’t need gas, and gas taxes are what they use to (not) repair their streets.

Read it.

On Wednesday, Senate Republicans blocked the Democrats’ “Right to Contraception” bill. The bill sought to provide more money to places like Planned Parenthood to facilitate more abortions and promote transgender surgeries on kids. Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) proposed the bill called “Right to Contraception.” Critics have more appropriately titled the bill as the “Payouts for Planned Parenthood Act.”

The Foundry.

Arizona’s two largest cities allocated tens of millions of dollars to fight homelessness in the past several years, but little has changed, according to a Goldwater Institute investigative report released Thursday.

“We’ve seen Phoenix and Tucson spend, combined, almost half a billion dollars on this issue with very minimal improvements in the area of homelessness,” Austin VanDerHeyden, municipal affairs liaison for the Goldwater Institute, told The Daily Signal.

The Goldwater Institute, a public policy research and litigation organization based in Arizona, launched an investigation into what Phoenix and Tucson officials are spending to address homelessness, who is receiving the funding, and the results of the investment.

Read it.

Note that these are members of his own party. When did you ever see Democrats criticize a fellow Democrat for wearing a decoration that he (or she) didn’t earn? (That would be Never.)

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The United States is preparing to announce a new $225 million weapons package for Ukraine this week, coming two weeks after the last package, which was at $275 million and featured badly needed artillery rounds. And a few weeks prior to that, in early May, the US administration rolled out with $400 million in defense aid —  thus it appears the White House is planning to apportion new packages about every two or three weeks, drawing from Biden’s $60 billion in recently approved total funding for Ukraine.

Currently, Ukrainian soldiers are resorting to literally trying to find leftover, unexploded artillery shells scattered in the ground at prior battle sites. The Wall Street Journal recently underscored this severe lack of ammo along Ukraine’s front lines in writing that “Kyiv’s ammunition shortage is so acute that a soldier who hunts for Russian shells—and makes his own bombs—has become an important supplier for some units.” 

The dangerous trend can be summarized as follows: the more desperation there is on the ground as Ukraine loses more and more ground along frontline positions, the greater the bellicose posturing on the part of NATO and the West. Western publications are even openly airing contingency plans for US troop movements in Europe in a WW3 scenario involving war with Russia in the heart of Europe. As another alarming and somewhat absurd example of this trend, look what European Commission chief is positively boasting about…

Read it.

In the transparency case over a recording of President Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur, a lower court ruling could reach a verdict in August, one involved lawyer says. But he says that “fevered, emergency appeals” are likely to follow, regardless of the outcome.

Biden invoked executive privilege to shield release of the audio recording, although an edited transcript has been released of interviews in which the president showed “diminished capacities,” according to Hur’s report on Biden’s possession of classified documents.

“They altered their released transcript, which is a very big deal in that the arguments they’ve been making for not releasing the audio is that the transcript is already out there and you don’t need the audio,” Mike Howell, executive director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, said Wednesday in a conference call with reporters.

StrategyPage

What the U.S. Navy has not been able to produce are the cheap, effective UAVs and USVs the Ukrainian used to cripple the Russian Black Sea Fleet. The problem is situational and political. The American situation is peacetime, not wartime. When you are at war things are done quickly, effectively, and inexpensively. Ukraine demonstrated that with its domestic UAV and USV programs. In the United States peacetime defense procurement is a lot more expensive and takes longer than it would in wartime. That means the Ukrainian type UAVs and UUVs will cost the USN far more than the Ukrainian models and take years to reach the U.S. Pacific Fleet. If China goes to war over Taiwan that situation changes in a hurry. Meanwhile, you go to war with what you have when war is declared. Right now the American navy has none of those clever and effective Ukrainian UAVs and USVs. Keep in mind that it took the Ukrainians over a year, after the Russian invasion, to come up with their brilliant and effective UAV and USV tactics that crippled and defeated the mighty Russian Black Sea Fleet.

The United States knows that Ukraine did in the Black Sea but that knowledge does not quickly translate into similar American weapons. The primary problem is so few American naval commanders understand exactly what the Ukrainian did and how to replicate that for the American Pacific Fleet, where such Ukrainian technology is needed.

Read it.

When 75-year-old Paulette Harlow was sentenced to 24 months in prison on Friday for attempting to dissuade women from getting abortions, she felt thankful—despite her chronic health conditions.

“I went to the sentencing, and I felt very confident, and I felt very joyful, and I felt like it was a tremendous privilege to stand in the court on behalf of the unborn, who have no voice,” she told The Daily Signal.

The jury found Harlow guilty in November under the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act and of a civil rights conspiracy. The FACE Act prohibits “violent, threatening, damaging, and obstructive conduct intended to injure, intimidate, or interfere with the right to seek, obtain, or provide reproductive health services.”

Let’s see: How many BLM rioters are in prison? That would be: None. How many AntiFa rioters are in prison. That would be: None.

Read it.

Apparently that’s what Democrats mean by ‘closing the border’.

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During the pandemic, the American people started to feel that Big Government was very cozy with Big Pharma. Now we know just how close they were.

New data from the National Institutes of Health reveals the agency and its scientists collected $710 million in royalties during the pandemic, from late 2021 through 2023. These are payments made by private companies, like pharmaceuticals, to license medical innovations from government scientists.

Almost all that cash — $690 million — went to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), the subagency led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and 260 of its scientists.

The American Mind.

Following Donald Trump’s conviction in New York—for allegedly causing 34 incorrect purpose tags to be entered in the Trump Organization’s private, internal account register with an intent to defraud and unlawfully interfere in the 2016 presidential election—Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg took a victory lap. He calmly explained that the trial was an ordinary example of what his office does every day, without “fear or favor,” and had simply done its job. Bragg lied.

Bragg ran for office on the promise he would get Trump. To do so, Bragg charged him with a low-level misdemeanor, for which the statute of limitations had already run, alleging that the Trump Organization “falsely” recorded $430,000 of payments to Trump attorney Michael Cohen in its accounts as “legal fees” or “legal expenses” rather than as “hush payments” or “repayment of hush payments.” Then he added 33 counts by separately charging each entry. Finally, he revived the statute of limitations and upped the potential crime to a Class E felony (the lowest of New York’s five felony classes) by alleging that Trump had “falsified” these business records with the intent to “commit another crime.” The indictment did not disclose that crime.

Read it.

It will take some time before the Biden administration’s highly touted pier in Gaza is usable again after breaking apart in heavy seas. Humanitarian aid deliveries via the sea have subsequently ground to a halt and criticisms are growing about how the technically ‘no-boots-on-the-ground’ mission has proceeded to date. Yet the U.S. has a robust capability to conduct outsized deliveries from ship to shore without any of this infrastructure. So, if this is such a high-priority humanitarian mission, where are the U.S. Navy’s Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC) hovercraft?

The Other McCain.

You can watch the video of the incident in which Trooper Londregan shot Ricky Cobb and see that any reasonable person would determine that the shooting was justified, even if they didn’t know that Rick Cobb was a lifelong menace to the community. But this happened in Minneapolis, where St. George of the Blessed Fentanyl is considered a civil rights martyr, and the usual suspects demanded “justice.”

…

In January, Mary Moriarty charged Trooper Londregan with three felonies — second-degree unintentional murder, first-degree assault, and second-degree manslaughter: “Our hearts are with Ricky Cobb’s family today, who are grieving an unimaginable loss. I know that they are devastated and will continue to feel this loss for the rest of their lives.”

Read it.

One day after Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in his ‘hush money’ trial, a court-appointed officer overseeing the Infowars bankruptcy apparently went rogue on Friday and tried to seize and shut down Alex Jones’ studio without a court order, despite having a reported “path with the [bankruptcy] judge to continue on for years.”

Navy Matters.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a report on the Constellation class frigate construction program delays and it’s an eye opener even for ComNavOps who predicted exactly these kinds of problems long ago.

To review, the contract delivery date is April 2026. Current estimates by the Navy put delivery sometime in 2029, three years late and seven years after the Aug 2022 start of construction (seven years to build a frigate?!), and you know that date is going to continue to be pushed further out with more delays.

As with all sizable ships, the Constellation is being built in sections, called blocks (although the Navy now calls them ‘Grand Modules’ in their typically PowerPoint-ish, pointless churn style; someone undoubtedly got a promotion for coming up with the phrase, ‘Grand Module’) and, according to a diagram in the report, the Constellation has 31 blocks. Of the 31 blocks, 11 are currently being manufactured despite not having completed design documents

Read it.

If the devil is in the details, bureaucracy is hell on earth. Though terrain familiar to the Biden administration, Republicans must prepare to navigate it.

Witness the debacle over liquefied natural gas exports, wherein the White House, by “pausing” most new approvals, has catapulted the energy security of key U.S. allies straight into the buzzsaw of its climate ambitions. (The category of exports that will continue to be authorized is tiny.) The Department of Energy claims that a multifactor impact study due in early 2025 is required to determine whether and how the moratorium will be lifted.

Under a certain conception of executive power, it should be simple enough for a second-term Trump administration to end this national embarrassment by pressing “resume” on the authorization process. But as analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies have suggested, merely setting aside the study could provide a basis, however tenuous, for future litigation. In the modern administrative state, it is easier to open than shut the procedural door to delays.

Read it.

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office provided free consultations and legal assistance to illegal aliens charged with violent felonies in 2023, documents reveal.

The taxpayer-funded consultations were provided to migrants charged with various heinous crimes—including rape, robbery, strangulation, aggravated assault, and homicide by vehicle—in an ostensible effort to help them avoid convictions that would lead to their deportation, documents obtained by the Immigration Reform Law Institute reveal.

Daily Signal.

If you’re one of the millions of Americans struggling to save for retirement today, get ready for more struggle, at least if President Joe Biden gets his way. He’s proposing a tax hike on savings that would mean a negative rate of return for many people after adjusting for inflation.

As part of his trillions of dollars in tax hikes, Biden has proposed a 45% tax on capital gains, painting it as a tax on the boogeyman of “greedy” billionaires. In reality, 12.5 million Americans—mostly middle class—pay this tax on their retirement savings.

That’s why every American should be horrified that Biden wants to raise this tax to the highest rate in 111 years. Such a move would severely hamper people’s ability to save for retirement, and it would cripple economic growth.

Zman takes a look at our foreign policy, if you can call it that.

Most men can remember back to a time on the schoolyard when two kids got into a confrontation and one of them kept promising to do something bad to the other if the other did not stop whatever it was he was doing. The threat of consequences was supposed to deter the other, but the other kid was undeterred, and the result was a fight, with the kid making the threats getting the worst of it. Bullies often come to a bad end like this as their bullying is based on threats.

If you are a member of the managerial elite, it is unlikely that you have such a memory as you were raised by women, so no school yard fights. As a result, the logic of the bully, issuing escalatory threats, makes perfect sense. After all, if you can conjure something worse than the other guy is conjuring, then you win! Therefore, success is determined by who has the greatest mastery of escalatory dominance, the alleged ability to escalate a conflict beyond that of an opponent.

Read it.

The State Department is funding an array of LGBTQ pride events across the globe ahead of June, some of which include events focused on children, federal grant records show.

President Joe Biden’s State Department is bankrolling a gay film festival, an LGBTQ community conference, and other pride events in Australia, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria in the lead-up to June, according to grant records.

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In June 2023, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management proposed a rule that would require stricter financial assurance standards for oil companies operating in the Outer Continental Shelf. This costly rule became final on April 15, 2024, but in the 10 months since its initial proposal, BOEM did nothing to alleviate concerns for smaller companies that comprise of 76 percent of oil and gas operators in the Gulf. As a result, many of these companies could be forced out of business by extreme and unnecessary costs from this rule. The situation threatens an estimated 36,000 jobs, more than $570 million in federal government royalties, and $9.9 billion from our GDP.

 

Read it.

There are three layers to the U.S. state that lord it over the American people and the world: deep, middle, and shallow. It’s a typology of how technocracy works in practice. Let’s talk about how it works and how the layers interact.

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The House Oversight and Accountability Committee has launched an investigation into potential vulnerabilities in the Secret Service’s ability to protect President Biden, Vice President Harris, and former President Donald Trump and their families after an incident last month raised new concerns about the agency’s diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring decisions and vetting process.

Power Line.

A footnote to John’s post awaiting the verdict: Alvin Bragg’s case against President Trump is a Stalinist joke. It is fundamentally lacking in due process. One glaring element of this is the failure to identify the second crime that revives the otherwise time-barred misdemeanor charges and turns them into a viable felony.

Read it.

New details about weight growth, design instability, and other issues with theConstellation class frigate came in a report the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), a Congressional watchdog, published yesterday. Just last week, the Navy awarded a new contract to Fincantieri Marinette Marine, valued at just over $1.04 billion, for another two of the frigates. The service now has six Constellations on order, the first of which is currently under construction.

Read it.

Washington and London have, since January, been waging a brutal campaign of airstrikes against Yemen in response to the pro-Palestine naval operations that Ansarallah and the Yemeni army began in November last year.

The start of the US-led war against Yemen prompted Yemeni forces to begin targeting US and British vessels alongside those linked to or bound for Israel.

The western campaign has done nothing to deter the Yemenis. US and EU maritime task forces have failed to progress in preventing attacks on ships in the Red Sea, Arab Sea, Indian Ocean, and elsewhere, which have resulted in a strain on both the Israeli economy and international shipping as a whole.

Read it.

The White House on Wednesday unveiled nearly $900 million in awards to 530 school districts to replace thousands of aging, gas-fueled school buses with cleaner, mainly electric models.

Buy those votes! Buy those votes!

Read it.

As President Joe Biden considers adopting a global health agreement that would turn the power of the federal government over to leaders of a world government, dozens of governors have put him on notice that they “stand united in opposition” to handing over America’s national sovereignty.

Nearly every Republican governor in the country has signed a letter asking Biden to reconsider adopting a forthcoming accord enhancing the power of the World Health Organization before, during, and after global health crises.

Negotiators are working around the clock to hammer out a final version of the WHO Pandemic Agreement before the World Health Assembly meets on Monday. The current text of the accord would require nations to agree with WHO regulations on “routine immunization,” “social measures” such as lockdowns and mask mandates, and a massive global redistribution of U.S. wealth and technical information based on “equity.”

The Biden administration has signaled it will accept the agreement without congressional approval.

And they claim Trump wants to be a dictator….

Read it.

Migrants being stored in fancy New York City hotels didn’t seem to make much sense, did it? Why would these hotels willingly surrender business from their high class patrons to take in migrants?

Now we have our answer, and it’s the same answer it always is: money.

A former hotel worker told Fox News on Monday that the hotels involved in the resettlement of illegal immigrants “are making lots of money through New York City’s shelter program for illegal immigrants”, the Daily Caller reported.

The worker, Carlos Arellano, said that “everybody’s loving this because the money is just going around and around.”

Everybody line up for the gravy train! Taxpayers, get out your wallets!

Politico.

Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans have spent years aggressively turning the state into a haven for school choice. They have been wildly successful, with tens of thousands more children enrolling in private or charter schools or homeschooling.

Now as those programs balloon, some of Florida’s largest school districts are facing staggering enrollment declines — and grappling with the possibility of campus closures — as dollars follow the increasing number of parents opting out of traditional public schools.

How about that? Give people a choice, and they’ll make it.

Education officials in some of the state’s largest counties are looking to scale back costs by repurposing or outright closing campuses — including in Broward, Duval and Miami-Dade counties. Even as some communities rally to try to save their local public schools, traditional public schools are left with empty seats and budget crunches.

The taxpayer-funded trough is running dry, and the pigs are squealing.

Read it.

The average daily rate of hotel rooms in New York City jumped 8.5% from 2022 to 2023 and remained high through the first few months of 2024 during the conversion of roughly 135 hotels to housing illegals.

Read it.

Four U.S. Army vessels supporting the temporary pier in the Mediterranean Sea used to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip ran aground because of heavy seas.

Read it.

Early in the interview CBS’s Margaret Brennan called out Mayor Pete on something we wrote about just days ago: after spending more than $7 billion since 2021 on EV infrastructure, the nation has less than 10 EV chargers to show for it.

Joe Biden sure can pick ’em.

YOU are paying this guy.

Read it.

California Senate Bill 961 (SB 961) was passed by a 22-13 vote this week requiring that 50 percent of new vehicles manufactured or sold in California must have passive speed limiters installed by 2029. By 2032, that percentage increases to 100 percent.

A passive speed limiter is a system that warns drivers with audible and visual signals when their speed exceeds the posted speed limit by more than 10 miles per hour. SB 961 applies to all trucks, buses and passenger vehicles manufactured or sold in the state. Emergency vehicles are exempt from the passive speed limiter requirement.

“California, like the nation as a whole, is seeing a horrifying spike in traffic deaths, with thousands of drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians dying each year on our roads,” said Senator Scott Wiener who put forth the bill. According to the California Office of Traffic Safety’s (OTS) 2023 Traffic Safety Report, one third of all traffic fatalities in the state between 2017 and 2021 were speeding-related.

Time to leave.

Read it.

God help us if we ever again get into an actual war.