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A new audit by the New York City Comptroller’s Office found the city overpaid upstate hotels and other subcontractors by millions to shelter illegal immigrants last spring.

The audit also finds sizable undue commission payments to DocGo, a main city contractor responsible for running temporary shelters in the metro area at an annual cost of $432 million.

DocGo was one of a few city contractors tasked with developing upstate hotels-turned-shelters last May, a novel city practice that auditors deem “unusual,” and has met with strong opposition from several upstate counties, including Rockland and Orange.

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We have previously discussed controversial sentences handed down in cases involving rioters on January 6th, including sentencing orders that, in my view, violate First Amendment rights. That included the case of Daniel Goodwyn, who pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor count of entering and remaining in a restricted building. That crime would ordinarily not involve any jail time for a first offender.

However, Judge Reggie B. Walton of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia decided that he would use the case to regulate what Goodwyn was reading and communicating with a chilling probation order. After the case was sent back by the D.C. Circuit, Walton doubled down on his extraordinary order. Now the D.C. Circuit has refused to hear an emergency appeal.

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A federal appeals court in North Dakota has found that a rule issued by the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) that restricts ownership of pistol attachments known as stabilizing braces is “arbitrary and capricious,” ordering a lower court to re-consider a motion that would block enforcement of the brace ban.

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When the Washington Free Beacon asked me to review Over Ruled, I was honored, intrigued, and amused. Honored because this was Justice Neil Gorsuch’s latest work that’s not printed in U.S. Reports, the official publisher of Supreme Court opinions. Intrigued because he, along with his sometime coauthor and former clerk Janie Nitze (an accomplished lawyer in her own right) were arguing that our rule of law was suffering because we had not just too many laws—that ground has been well-trod, not least by my former colleague Walter Olson, who founded and for over 20 years ran the first-ever legal blog, Overlawyered—but too much law.

Wally Olson was a friend of mine at Yale, and I follow his Overlawyered blog with interest.

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office hired a famous photographer on a $200,000 yearly salary six months ago, Politico reported Saturday.

UPDATE: Newsom Hires $200k/Year Celebrity Photographer For Glamor Shots

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Dr. Anthony Fauci often claims a “DNA of caring” yet his actions reveal a stark contrast. Avoiding direct patient care, Dr. Fauci focused on populations—effecting a mindset aligned with abstract compassion for humanity that nonetheless neglects individual rights. His so-called ‘DNA of caring’ has most recently doubly stranded those subjected to it: first, by amplifying fear about Covid-19 while burying mitigating data; second, by pushing a vaccine in a draconian, methodical, and threatening manner, taking away liberty and jobs to an extreme never seen before in the history of mankind.

Additionally, by fast-tracking and strong-arming an mRNA vaccine-platform technology heretofore devoid of Phase II or III safety studies, Dr. Fauci prioritized hypothetical scientific advancement over actual current health, medical knowledge, and personal liberties—effectively double-crossing both the public’s trust and violating his own integrity: contradicting medically foundational principles he had spent his career enunciating—perhaps influenced by pharmaceutical interests.

Is this ‘Shit on Fauci Day’? I’m in.

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For months, governmental officials around the world have appeared to want to forgo discussing the specter of long COVID. As a new review makes clear, that is wishful thinking—and the latest COVID variants may well kick long COVID into overdrive, a scenario that researchers and experts have been warning about for some time.

“I think they (government agencies) are itching to pretend that COVID is over and that long COVID does not exist,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center at Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System and lead author of the review. “It is much more pleasant to pretend as if emergency department visits and hospitalizations haven’t been rising sharply this summer.”

NavyMatters.

Value – The LCS has almost no combat capability.  Hence, the value for the money is near zero.

Opportunity Cost – The opportunity cost = $27.5B.  What could we have done with $27.5B if we had not spent it on the LCS program?  Well, the alternative opportunities are nearly endless:  munitions, mines, a dedicated minesweeper, ASW destroyer/corvette, air wings, dry docks, etc.  At this point, it’s not even debatable that almost any alternative choice would have been a better use of the funds.  In other words, the opportunity cost-value far exceeded the actual cost-value.

Bear in mind that this is not a case of hindsight.  Almost everyone except the Navy pointed out massive problems with the program from day one:  concurrency, lack of CONOPS, a multitude of design issues, insufficient weight and stability margins, a badly flawed manning model, a badly flawed maintenance model, lack of armament, complete absence of modules, etc.  There was no hindsight involved or required.  The problems were painfully obvious and predictable.  In fact, the term ‘predictable’ implies a small degree of uncertainty.  Regarding the LCS problems, there was no uncertainty.  The problems were 100% certain to occur, as was pointed out by … well … everyone.

The LCS is the poster child for a program that should never have left the back-of-the-napkin stage.  It produced no value and a staggering $27.5B wasted opportunity cost.

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A chilling letter this week from Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is a reminder that Americans cannot forget about the importance of the judiciary in upholding free speech and our other constitutional freedoms.

On Tuesday – ironically, the day Michiganders went to the primary polls to participate in our constitutional right to vote – Nessel issued a “cease-and-desist letter” against a citizen whom the letter claimed was violating a state law against “misleading or false information” about “polling locations.” The recipient of the letter, Kerry Lynn Elieff, was threatened with “criminal prosecutions” if she did not follow the order.

What raises the biggest red flags is that Nessel’s letter doesn’t ever state what information was false or misleading. Elieff told me after the cease-and-desist letter became public that all she was trying to do was verify that due process was followed in changing polling locations. She actually took down her public posts out of fear of prosecution – and who can blame her? She wasn’t sure what to do after being under surprise threat by a state official.

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The Biden-Harris administration has, for years, vowed to deploy thousands of solar panels to stabilize Puerto Rico’s power grid amid regular blackouts, government mismanagement, and ever-increasing residential electricity rates. But, years after making that promise, a $1 billion program central to that effort yielded only a tiny handful of solar panels, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

“We’re talking about energy and solar. That’s where the power is, right there,” Vice President Kamala Harris said during a speech in Puerto Rico earlier this year.

During her remarks, Harris touted the so-called Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund, a $1 billion fund managed by the Department of Energy and designed by Democrats in 2022 to quickly address Puerto Rico’s electrical grid vulnerabilities via the installation of tens of thousands of rooftop solar and battery storage systems across the island. That fund has taken a central role in the administration’s plans to, as President Biden said in October 2022, “transform the entire” Puerto Rican grid.

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Ahead of Tuesday’s Senate grilling of acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe, local Pennsylvania police released a curious diagram from the July 13 rally in Butler that ended in an assassination attempt of former President Trump, the death of rally-goer Corey Comperatore, and injuries of two others.

The aerial photo of the event site, the Butler Farm Show, contained labels for the locations of Butler County and Beaver County police assets, including two local law enforcement “snipers” assigned to cover the American Glass Research building, where shooter Thomas Crooks perched with his AR-15 rifle about 150 yards from Trump’s onstage performance and fired eight bullets at the former president and the crowd.

The diagram includes a narrow red triangle, clearly labeled “Beaver Sniper Line of Sight.” That line of sight is narrowly conscribed between the location of the snipers inside the AGR building to the stage and pointedly does not cover any area of the rooftop where Crooks ran across and then stopped to open fire.

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The top global agency, part of the United Nations system, for promoting preparedness in advance for health emergencies and crises and coordinating national responses, is the World Health Organisation. Unfortunately, its performance in helping the world manage Covid-19 proved, to be kind, very patchy. This makes it all the more surprising that there should be a concerted effort underway to expand its authority and boost its resources.

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Seattle is infested with so much crime, its jails are running out of space. And, because King County Jail is running out of space, the city is now considering a program that “would pay for jail beds at the SCORE jail facility in Des Moines,” according to KIRO 7.

Its a move that the report says “would cost Seattle millions”. And, unsurprisingly, it isn’t winning any fans in Des Moines, as the SCORE facility would be used for offenders who are locked up only for 24-48 hours, before being released.

The report says that the Seattle City Council Public Safety Committee met Wednesday to discuss a pilot plan, with public comments varying from full support to calling it “theatre.” The proposal would fund at least 20 beds, costing $1.5 to $3 million annually, depending on usage.

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It took them four-and-a-half years, but the IRS has issued final rules governing mandatory distributions from traditional 401k’s, IRAs, and other retirement plans inherited in 2020 or later. To the great disappointment of beneficiaries and their financial planners, the agency embraced the most complex procedure possible as it interpreted a law passed by Congress in 2019.

The new rules apply when the deceased IRA owner was old enough to be making required minimum distributions (RMDs) of their own before they died. Currently, that requirement starts at age 73, but in 2020, it was age 72. It’s scheduled to rise to age 75 in 2033. (Yes, we’re only in the second paragraph and things are already getting knotty. Bear down.)

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Historically, many people have had less to eat than they’ve needed to thrive, or simply survive. Hence, many have hailed the Green Revolution: a late 20th-century agricultural project encompassing plant genetic modification, modern irrigation systems, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides that increased food production, especially of wheat, rice, corn, and soybeans.

But the Green Revolution hasn’t been a cost-free, magic bullet. Neither mass nor energy is created nor destroyed; everything physical derives from something else physical. Newer crop varieties yield more because they use more water, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, expensive farm equipment, and fuel.

Green Revolution practices have caused serious environmental harm. Aquifers are being depleted as irrigation water is pumped from the ground faster than rain recharges it. Unimaginable amounts of fertile soil have been washed or blown away. Fertilizers and pesticides pollute soil, air, and water beyond the agricultural lands themselves, including rivers and oceans. Converting forests, grasslands, and wetlands into farmland has destroyed much wildlife/game habitat and lessened atmospheric carbon uptake. Consequently, the natural resources needed to produce food have been degraded, portending eventual, widespread crop failure and food shortages.

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The Department of Homeland Security is abruptly stopping a program that has allowed close to half a million immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela into the United States following allegations of widespread fraud, reported the New York Post.

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A Texas rancher has filed a lawsuit against President Joe Biden and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) accusing them of adopting policies that have resulted in “the biggest influx of illegal aliens into America in our history.”

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An investigation into a Maryland school system’s electric bus initiative found that it resulted in millions of dollars in “wasteful spending” due to issues with the vehicles, according to a report from the county’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released in late July.

In February 2021, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) in Maryland announced it was replacing 326 diesel school buses with electric buses as part of its sustainability initiative, the county OIG concluded in the report.

Due to delayed deliveries and frequent mechanical issues with the electric buses, the county has had to partially resort back to diesel buses despite the roughly $170 million it paid for the new fleet.

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Undercover footage reported by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project from Muckracker.com reveals that 14% of illegal immigrants in a single apartment complex in Georgia admitted to being registered to vote. The video, taken by journalist Carlos Arellano, has over 21 million views as of this writing.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

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President Joe Biden’s administration’s rewrite of Title IX went into effect on Thursday, an effort that seeks to allow men in women’s private spaces, athletics, and educational opportunities.

The White House did not appear to issue a statement or weigh in on the rule going into effect, nor had Vice President Kamala Harris or Biden issue statements or social media posts on the matter.

“Today, the Biden-Harris administration‘s harmful Title IX rewrite goes into effect,” said Riley Gaines, a former collegiate swimmer forced to compete against a man. “This rule says sex = gender identity. 52 years of progress & sex-based protections have been erased with the stroke of a pen.”

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Thank you, Joe Biden.

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God forbid that teachers be held accountable for their performance.

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A school that injected a minor with a COVID-19 vaccine despite the boy’s parents telling school officials they did not want him to receive a COVID-19 vaccine is immune under federal law, the Vermont Supreme Court has ruled.

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Federal regulatory costs tax the average American household more than $15,000 per year under the Biden administration, according to a Competitive Enterprise Institute annual report released Tuesday.

Households pay an average of $15,788 in hidden regulatory costs, according to the annual report, written by Clyde Wayne Crews and titled “Ten Thousand Commandments.” That’s more than what they pay for food, clothing, education, or any other household expense other than housing, consuming 17% of income and representing 22% of household expenses.

Federal regulations’ total compliance costs and economic effects add up to at least $2.117 trillion, rivaling individual income-tax costs estimated at $2.328 trillion. Regulatory costs are nearly four times the corporate income tax of $546 billion.

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For millions of Americans, Social Security is an essential lifeline during retirement. The annual cost-of-living (COLA) is designed to help beneficiaries escape the effects of inflation by providing an annual increase that matches inflation. However, this theory doesn’t always work out well in practice.

The prospects of the 2025 COLA have cast a long shadow and become a matter of debate. Soaring inflation has caused the downsides of the COLA system to be felt more dramatically. As inflation soars, more and more seniors are finding that COLA isn’t enough.

Social Security’s projected 2025 cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) falls short of addressing the escalating financial burdens faced by retirees, potentially exacerbating economic hardship for millions of Americans.

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A Roman Catholic diocese is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court a New York appeals court ruling that requires religious charities to provide abortion coverage in their employee health insurance packages.

ObamaCare: “If you like your plan you can keep your plan … so long as it covers everything WE want it to cover (not YOU) and of course you’ll have to pay through the nose for that extra coverage.”

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Iran reported raking in nearly $16 billion in profits from its illicit oil trade over the past several months, highlighting the Biden-Harris administration’s perennially lax enforcement of sanctions meant to stymie Tehran’s cash flow.

Tehran exported a total of “$15.7 billion worth of oil in the first four months in the Iranian calendar” year, which lasted from March 21 to July 22, Mohammad Rezvanifar, the head of Iran’s Customs Administration, said on Monday. Most of this crude oil was offloaded in China, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, and India, according to the country’s state-controlled press.

Iran’s illicit oil trade, which is heavily sanctioned by the United States and other Western nations, has hit a boom period under the Biden-Harris administration, topping around $90 billion as of March. This cash has helped to keep the hardline regime afloat amid economic uncertainty and helps Tehran fund its network of terror proxies, including Hamas and Hezbollah.

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President Biden called House Speaker Mike Johnson “dead on arrival” during a strange interaction with a reporter on Monday.

The exchange came shortly after Biden called on Congress to impose term limits and a code of conduct on the Supreme Court. In a statement released earlier on Monday, Johnson condemned Biden’s proposal to “radically overhaul the U.S. Supreme Court,” and argued that doing so would “tilt the balance of power” and erode the rule of law.

“This proposal is the logical conclusion to the Biden-Harris Administration and Congressional Democrats’ ongoing efforts to delegitimize the Supreme Court,” the Louisiana Republican argued. “Their calls to expand and pack the Court will soon resume.”

“It is telling that Democrats want to change the system that has guided our nation since its founding simply because they disagree with some of the Court’s recent decisions,” he added. “This dangerous gambit of the Biden-Harris Administration is dead on arrival in the House.”

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The United States’ national debt has reached another milestone. According to the House Budget Committee, the national debt is set to surpass $35 trillion.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

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This woman was in charge of the Federal Reserve, which may explain why inflation is eating our lunch.

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Parents in Palo Alto are fuming about the school district’s plans for an upcoming ethnic studies class, saying they’re worried the curriculum is too political and will push left-leaning political activism on impressionable high school students. The district denies the charge and says it’s working on an inclusive model for the class.

The battle in Palo Alto reflects fights that have played out elsewhere in the Bay Area and are expected to escalate when the state mandate to teach ethnic studies is rolled out at all schools starting in the 2025-26 school year.

Time to leave.

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The medical establishment is teeing up for the launch of another “pandemic,” this one centering around H5N8 Influenza, also known as avian influenza or bird flu.

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The Biden-Harris administration is facing pressure from a top Republican lawmaker and the head of a federal law enforcement union, who accused it of looking the other way in response to a pro-Hamas protest on federal property in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.

Rep. Bruce Westerman (R., Ark.), the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, fired off a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland late Wednesday saying that Park Police requested additional manpower prior to the protest, but that the Interior Department denied those requests. In his letter to Haaland, he said the brazen attacks on federal property are correlated to the failure of Interior’s leadership to provide support.

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We previously discussed the free speech lawsuit of Portland State University Professor Bruce Gilley who was blocked from the Twitter account of the University of Oregon’s Division of Equity and Inclusion after tweeting “All men are created equal.”

The court just granted a preliminary injunction holding that there was a substantial likelihood that he would prevail on the merits against the University of Oregon.

Time to leave.

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Recently, a number of peer-reviewed papers have come to light, exposing just how pervasive and damaging the use of nudges was during COVID-19. They also reveal how nudging, including fear nudging, is being used to control individuals and populations on matters such as health, climate change, meat-eating, tobacco use, alcohol use, weight control, electoral candidates, political campaigns, and more.

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Environmental groups represented on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s own environmental justice council are among the largest beneficiaries of the president’s environmental programs, collectively receiving hundreds of millions of dollars, according to a database of federal grants reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

In total, four leading environmental justice organizations—WE ACT for Environmental Justice, the Bullard Center for Environmental & Climate Justice at Texas Southern University, the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, and Kean University’s Center for the Urban Environment—have been awarded a staggering $229 million in Environmental Protection Agency grants and have been named as partners to grantees awarded another $200 million.

Leaders of those groups serve on the White House’s so-called Environmental Justice Advisory Council, which is formally housed at EPA, the same agency doling out the grants. The council provides the administration with “independent advice and recommendations on how to address current and historic environmental injustice,” the White House description notes.

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Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., introduced articles of impeachment against Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday for high crimes and misdemeanors over her refusal to “uphold Federal immigration laws” and misleading the public about Biden’s “physical and cognitive well-being.”

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A recent graduate of St. Cloud State University in Minnesota is suing the university administration, alleging that she was forced to pay a fee that went to a liberal student activist group.

Tayah Lackie filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota in May, with assistance from the Liberty Justice Center and the Upper Midwest Law Center.

My, what a surprise.

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more outrageous the entire thing becomes. Anthony Fauci had the utter audacity to sit in Congress and admit they had no data, so they just creatively improvised things like social distancing measures. They fooled a lot of folks once, so shame on them. It looks like they’re about to try and fool us twice with the Bird Flu. If we fall for it again, then shame on us.

They did everything from withholding effective medications to depriving people of employment to shaming people publicly, discriminating against them, and wishing them dead.

Then as if 2020 and 2021 weren’t brutal enough, we find out from Congressional investigations and Anthony Fauci’s recent testimony it was all a bunch of baloney to make Big Pharma rich and Big Government powerful. People died who didn’t need to die, the elderly became isolated from their loved ones, medical personnel became burned out and traumatized, and children lost an entire year of educational experiences. Others were vaccinated, some eagerly and some grudgingly, and are suffering longterm disability and even death from the hastily created mRNA vaccine.

Washington Examiner.

Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) introduced impeachment articles against Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle on Monday after a fruitless House Oversight Committee hearing in which she provided little to no information on the assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump.

Steube announced his intention to file impeachment articles after Cheatle testified before the committee on what she described as the most “significant operational failure” in decades.

“In light of Kimberly Cheatle’s unacceptable handling of the Trump assassination attempt, her disastrous appearance before the House Oversight Committee today, and her refusal to resign, we have no choice but to impeach,” Steube said in a statement to X.

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The secret service fumbled badly.

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No doubt. She’s got more mileage than an F1 McLaren.

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Hundreds of migrants from around a dozen countries left from Mexico’s southern border on foot Sunday, as they attempt to make it to the U.S. border.Some of the members of the group said they hoped to make it to the U.S. border before elections are held in November.

Note that none of them doubt that they’ll be able to get across and vanish into the interior.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

Navy Matters.

‘Defeat in detail’ is a military tactic of destroying an enemy force by engaging its small, isolated units one by one with a larger force.

This is a great military theory – and proven successful – but it requires that the enemy present his forces in small, dispersed packets ready to be defeated. This generally only happens if one is fighting an utterly inept foe or if the enemy’s units are forced to disperse due to unrecoverable circumstances such as the rout of a main force or the end of a conflict when the enemy lacks the forces to mass and fight.

In other words, no sane military is going to willingly present its forces to the enemy in small, isolated units. Unfortunately, this is exactly what the Navy and Marines seem determined to do. They seem committed to a war doctrine of small, isolated, individually weak units that will, in some unexplained and unfathomable manner, not only survive and avoid defeat in detail but will go on to exert an effect greater than the woefully weak sum of its parts.

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The bizarre resignation of President Joe Biden plunged the United States into a crisis unlike any it has known. This is what Biden and his party, those stalwart Defenders Of Democracy against the Trumpian menace, have done to the country, out of their arrogant self-righteousness.

The June 27 Atlanta debate with Donald Trump destroyed the lie told by the White House, the Democrats, and their lackeys in the news media: that aging, enfeebled Joe Biden was fit for office. The post-debate network interviews and the campaign speeches at worst reinforced the declinist narrative, and at best failed to reassure anybody not already blinded by ideology. That number includes donors, whose idealistic political zeal is tempered by the hard fact that they have to pay for it.

Donations dried up. More and more Democratic members of Congress began to say Joe must go. Over the past few days, the Democratic leadership played an extraordinary game of psychological pressure, leaking to the media stories that the president was on the verge of withdrawing from the race, forcing the White House to issue denials. Was this an attempt at some kind of soft coup, an attempt to gaslight Biden into quitting?

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“The strength of our organization,” Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle argued in the 2023 report, lay in, among other things, “seeking out the boundless benefits of diversity.”

The Secret Service offers “leadership training on how best to support LGBTQ+ employees” and “training on unconscious bias” which is the idea that all white people are innately racist, and tries to guide more “more inclusive decisions” while “increasing empathy” for minorities.

Special Agents in Charge are tasked with DEI which distracts from their core duties, but diversity and its boundless benefits was not why the Secret Service existed. The Left was.

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Pandemic social distancing is linked to higher rates of preterm births and newborn deaths within one to two months, according to a new study.