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Time to leave.

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Time to leave.

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Politicians need to have ‘Think It Through: Unintended Consequences’ tattooed on their foreheads.

Not for themselves, because the available evidence suggests that they are functionally illiterate, but as a warning to those with whom they come in contact, sort of a Trigger Warning.

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Whence the story that Robert Mueller’s maleficent miscreants wiped their government phones? Judicial Watch strikes again, as the organization explains in this press release.

The press release announces that Judicial Watch received 87 pages of records from the Department of Justice that show senior members of Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office repeatedly and “accidentally” wiped phones assigned to them. The Department of Justice has posted the documents online here. Politico’s story doesn’t mention Judicial Watch, but let’s give credit where credit is due.

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The average cost of building a single unit of housing for the homeless in Los Angeles has risen to $531,000, according to an audit from the city controller, who recommends that L.A. rehab motels and open dormitory-style buildings to save money and get people off the streets quickly.

Controller Ron Galperin, in a report due Wednesday, also cited two projects whose costs soared to nearly $750,0000 per unit and assailed delays that he said have driven city-funded homeless construction expenses up from initial projections of $350,000 a unit.

Nearly four years after voters approved Proposition HHH, only three projects have opened, construction has not started on three-quarters of the planned units, and many projects may “never come to fruition,” said Galperin, adding that the delays began before the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Because God forbid anything should happen in California without being regulated.

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Like almost all narco submarines this vessel was not actually a true submarine. Instead it is more of a ‘semi-submersible’ or what is called a low profile vessel (LPV). This means that it runs as low in the water as possible which makes it very hard to detect. Just how low can be seen in the Coast Guard video, note how the waves wash over the front of the boat.

These vessels are most active in the Eastern Pacific, coming up from Colombia. This is why San Diego based Coast Guard cutters seem to get the lion’s share of them. They are built in secret ‘artisan’ boat yards hidden in the myriad of jungle estuaries which lead to the sea. Narco submarines can also be found in the Caribbean and, increasingly, in the Atlantic.

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Yeah, that Postal Service is sure a poster child for government efficiency. They ought to have no problem delivering mail-in ballots on time and correctly.

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It’s been a little over a month since former president Barack Obama blessed the increasingly popular notion of doing away with the Senate filibuster. “If all this takes eliminating the filibuster, another Jim Crow relic, in order to secure the God-given rights of every American,” he told the congregants at John Lewis’s funeral, “then that’s what we should do.”

And just as Obama had no compunction about using this alleged relic of Jim Crow — as a senator he took to the floor more than once to defend the practice as a vital tool in preserving constitutional checks and balances and genuine debate — Democrats have no problem using it whenever it suits them.

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It’s their way or the highway.

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Six months into the pandemic, some traditions will still not be upset by a virus. As approximately half of K-12 schools are only offering online instruction, parents will still know little, if anything, of what their children are being taught in school except by accident—or unless they ask.

Recent fallout from such asymmetric information comes from Wylie, Texas, where a cartoon associating police with the KKK went from classroom to living room to the press room and on to the governor.

At Cooper Junior High, eighth-grade students were assigned to write about a political cartoon that depicts slave owners, then KKK members, and then police in corresponding panels. Furious parents, who only learned of the assignment because their children told them, contacted the school and wrote angry statements on social media.

Last week, Gov. Greg Abbott said the teacher responsible for the assignment should be fired.

The solution is to avoid sending your kids to a government school.

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On Tuesday morning, NPR Public Editor (or ombudsman) Kelly McBride admitted the taxpayer-funded network had overreached on two recent pieces I highlighted here at NewsBusters. We asked readers to contact McBride, so hopefully that convinced her to issue a verdicts admitting errors and overreach.

In a column, I noted it was bizarre for NPR to claim Trump stated “without evidence” that Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self-defense when he fell down on a Kenosha street, and a man approached him with a handgun.

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A group of parents filed a lawsuit Tuesday alleging that the public school system in Montgomery County, Maryland, discriminates against Asian American students in the admission process for gifted and talented programs.

The group of mostly Asian American parents, organized as the Association for Education Fairness, are asking a federal court in Maryland to find that changes to the admissions process violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause and to prohibit continued enforcement of the changes.

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Progress, of a sort. I would have thought that state police would have the authority to arrest and prosecute rioters and looters, but whatever.

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The federal government has filled the national stockpile with enough ventilators, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The agency told The Hill that it will end some of its remaining contracts for ventilators because it has met its quota for the stockpile.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration awarded $3 billion in emergency contracts to obtain more ventilators as the coronavirus outbreak surged across the country.

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Janice Dean reports on the weather for Fox News. She lost both of her in-laws to the Wuhan coronavirus. Both contracted the disease at long-term care facilities, but her mother in-law died at a hospital.

New York apparently does not include cases like the mother-in-law’s in totaling up the nursing home death count. Thus, New York is under counting the number of deaths that arose at such facilities.

Dean has long wanted to testify about New York state’s disastrous response to the coronavirus in nursing homes. However, she was removed from the witness list for a hearing by the legislature on this subject.

The Antiplanner goes to work.

Writing in the September Trains magazine, which isn’t available on line, transit advocate Malcolm Kenton argues that rail transit agencies can thrive in a pandemic and post-pandemic world by shifting strategies. But he doesn’t mean shifting business strategies to attract more riders; he means shifting propaganda strategies to attract more tax dollars.

The primary customer of rail systems aren’t riders but politicians.

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Paul and his wife Kelley were leaving the White House Thursday night after the president spoke, accepting the Republican nomination to close out the Republican National Convention, when a crowd descended upon them and quickly grew in size.

Paul explained that even as they left the White House for his hotel — which was just across the street — the Secret Service had directed them to take a bus to the Trump hotel in order to avoid protesters who had been chasing people down

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A series of errors by contractors and consultants on the California bullet train venture caused support cables to fail on a massive bridge, triggering an order to stop work that further delayed a project already years behind schedule,the Los Angeles Times has learned.

The bridge is longer than two football fields and is needed to shuttle vehicles over the future bullet train right of way and existing BNSF freight tracks in Madera County.

Authorities have yet to finalize a plan to repair the bridge. Late last year, crews installed temporary steel supports to prevent it from collapsing.

Hundreds of pages of documents obtained by The Times under a public records request show the steel supports snapped as a result of neglect, work damage, miscommunications and possible design problems.

High-speed rail, the Future of America.

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A former State Department official told the Senate Intelligence Committee he destroyed records in January 2017 at the request of former British spy Christopher Steele, according to a report released on Tuesday.

Jonathan Winer, who served as special envoy to Libya through early 2017, was Steele’s contact at the State Department. He arranged a meeting for Steele in October 2016 with another State Department official at Foggy Bottom to share findings from a dossier of research he had compiled on Donald Trump.

“SCORECARDS! GETCHER SCORECARDS HERE! You can’t tell your Deep State operatives without a scorecard!”

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Four cities in Indiana are suing Netflix and other video companies, claiming that online video providers and satellite-TV operators should have to pay the same franchise fees that cable companies pay for using local rights of way.

The lawsuit was filed against Netflix, Disney, Hulu, DirecTV, and Dish Network on August 4 in Indiana Commercial Court in Marion County. The cities of Indianapolis, Evansville, Valparaiso, and Fishers want the companies to pay the cable-franchise fees established in Indiana’s Video Service Franchises (VSF) Act, which requires payments of 5 percent of gross revenue in each city.

The lawsuit is based on an unusual legal argument and doesn’t seem likely to succeed. Essentially, the cities are claiming that Netflix and similar providers use the public rights of way simply by offering video streaming services over the Internet….

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Three propositions on California’s November ballot would violate our constitutional right to private property; a fourth would violate the individual’s right to nondiscrimination.

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It was about about nine years ago when consulting company BCG first suggested that in a time of out of control spending and soaring debt loads, the only fiscally sustainable “solution” was to implement a wealth tax (see “There May Be Only Painful Ways Out Of The Crisis”).

While the idea was well ahead of its time in 2011, and was quickly shut down in the court of public opinion, several years later none other than the IMF resurrected the idea of a wealth tax, which has only gained momentum in recent months, and despite widespread grassroots pushback, the concept of a “wealth tax” has moved front and center and most recently the chairman of Capital Economics, Roger Bootle, said that the world’s wealthiest could be subjected to higher tax rates as governments scramble to fund spending and repair their economies amid the coronavirus crisis.

Fast forward to today when the ultra-liberal state of California is now ready to take this “socialist” idea from concept to the implementation phase, with the SF Chronicle reporting that a group of CA state lawmakers on Thursday proposed a first-in-the-nation state wealth tax that would hit about 30,400 California residents and raise an estimated $7.5 billion for the general fund.

The proposed tax rate would be 0.4% of net worth (most likely ended up far higher), excluding directly held real estate, that exceeds $30 million for single and joint filers and $15 million for married filing separately.

That will clear out the tech companies that California depends on for its budget toute de suite. It’s amazing how reliably statists always shoot themselves in the wallet with such policies.

Ah, well. Couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people.

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But you knew that.

The Other McCain keeps up with this crap so that you don’t have to.

There is no “crisis.” What there is, apparently, is a paranoid delusion that ORANGE MAN BAD is trying to “steal” the election.

Democrat hopes for stealing the election focus on extensive mail-in ballots, which can’t require photo ID, and that can be manipulated in various ways. The Post Office is key (Don’t laugh. I’m serious.) in this scheme.

You will note that there is no ‘UPS crisis’ or ‘FedEx crisis’. Why? Because those companies exist to provide a service for the public, rather than as a featherbedding enterprise for Democrat-voting public sector union employees, and actual have to be effective and efficient, something that the Post Office is notorious for not being.

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As a senator, Sanders voted for many of the policies that granted billions in subsidies and incentives to Musk and his companies.  For example, Sanders voted for passage of the American Recovery and Investment Act of 2009, which boosted the solar energy tax credit from 10 percent to 30 percent of the cost of a solar installation.

Sanders also voted for the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 that provided tax credits of up to $7,500 to purchasers of electric vehicles. Tesla Motors sold 200,000 electric cars to buyers able to claim this credit.

Senator Sanders and presidential candidate Joe Biden support the “Solving the Climate Crisis” report that was issued in June by the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. The report calls for extension of the 30 percent tax credit that provided more than $1 billion to SolarCity. It also proposes a national mandate “to achieve 100% sales of zero-emission cars by 2035.” The report calls for billions of dollars in additional subsidies for green energy that would flow to the companies of Elon Musk and other green billionaires.

It appears that billionaires don’t deserve to grow their wealth except when they build green energy companies.

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Harvey Risch says treatment effective in helping people in early stages of disease, especially those with higher risks.

Amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic Yale School of Public Health epidemiology professor Harvey Risch is asserting that the drug hydroxychloroquine, in conjunction with zinc and appropriate antibiotics, can help high-risk patients recover from COVID-19.

Risch draws a distinction between two stages of the illness, noting that while the treatment will likely work quickly during the first stage, it is not effective in helping people who have advanced to the more serious second stage.

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Yesterday, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who signed an executive order forcing nursing homes in his state to accept patients who tested positive for the coronavirus in March, informed reporters there was no need for an independent inquiry into his deadly mistake because no one can be deemed reliable enough to investigate him.

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Last October, Ibrahim Bouaichi sexually assaulted Karla Dominguez with whom he reportedly had been in a relationship. He was charged with six felony counts and held without bond in an Alexandria, Virginia jail.

In April, a judge, Nolan Dawkins, ordered the release of Bouaichi due to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. Bouaichi was 33 years old. The virus probably posed about the same threat to his health as the flu. Moreover, there had been no cases of the virus at the Alexandria jail.

Bouaichi’s lawyers argued that visits to the jail had been curtailed and that they needed to meet with their client. But all trials had been postponed.

The lawyers apparently did not seek relief from the curb on their ability to visit Bouaichi. Instead, they insisted on his release.

Judge Dawkins ordered Bouaichi to stay at home, to leave only to met with his lawyers, and to have no contact with Dominguez, his victim. But the judge did not order electronic monitoring of Bouaichi.

Less than a month after his release, police officers spotted Bouaichi in his car at a Wendy’s drive-through. He rammed his car into one of their cruisers.

For this, he was charged with multiple assault counts and drunk driving. But after spending one night in a Maryland jail, Bouaichi was released on bond.

You can probably guess the rest of the story. In late July, Dominguez was shot to death in Alexandria. The police issued a warrant for the arrest of Bouaichi on the charge of murder. He fled. When the police finally spotted him and moved in for the arrest, he killed himself.

Given the guy’s name, I could as easily put this under Living With Islam.

One of the fundamental tasks of government is to keep its citizens safe. Makes you wonder what we’re paying all of this money for.

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Suspend the price mechanism, put the government in charge, and, sure enough, lo and behold, shortages and quality problems result.

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Mail in ballots belonging to more than 84,000 Democrats in New York City who were seeking to vote in the presidential primary were disqualified according to newly released data from the Board of Elections.

According to the NY Post, the city received 403,103 mail in ballots for the June 23 Democratic primary and the certified results on Wednesday confirmed that only 318,995 of these ballots were counted.

The 84,108 ballots that were not counted represented 21% of the total mail-in ballots.

And this is just among Democrats, so the classic Democrat machine techniques of stealing elections by ballot fraud were presumably not in operation.

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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pandemic planning documents state non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing are ineffective once a disease infects 1% of a region’s population. Literature on this subject is unanimous worldwide.

…

Nature always finds a way. No respiratory virus ever needed a “lockdown” to dissipate. What it needs is herd immunity, preferably sooner than later, preferably developed by the young and healthy to minimize mortality. Politicians know the disease will eventually leave, yet they strive to convince a critical mass that their actions — modern-day versions of the rain dance — brought about that result. They count on us behaving like renowned psychologist B.F. Skinner’s superstitious pigeons.

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Fifty years after the Public Broadcasting Service launched, we’re still seeing our taxpayer subsidies transformed into Democratic donations in election years. On August 4, the PBS NewsHour hatched a love-in with Jill Biden.

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I suppose any excuse will do.

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The owner of a Virginia smoke shop is outraged that a juvenile who allegedly plotted to burglarize his store “is walking free.” He said Monday that his employee is on house arrest with an ankle GPS for defending himself and the store.

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For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked. And many teachers and parents don’t know there’s anything wrong with it.

The Other McCain has the scoop.

Yesterday, while I was working on an American Spectator column, my office TV was tuned to the House Judiciary Committee hearing where Attorney General William Barr was testifying and the performance by the committee’s Democrats of a loathsome kabuki theatre. Every Democrat unloaded a sort of sermon accusing Barr of various malfeasances — treason, conspiracy, murder, etc. — and then, when Barr would begin to answer, his interrogator would interrupt: “Reclaiming my time!”
Barr remained calm during this abusive treatment. At one point, interrupted by California Democrat Lou Correa, Barr responded: “This is a hearing. I thought I was the one who was supposed to be heard?”

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The coronavirus has made it essential that every transit supporter use the word “essential” in their discussions, as in how essential it is that transit carry essential workers to their essential jobs. Ridership may be down by more than 80 percent, but the remaining 19 percent of riders are really essential, so that makes it essential that we keep giving more subsidies to essential transit agencies.

Transit Is Essential is, in fact, the name of a new paper from the California Transit Association. The paper skips over the whole messy part about why transit is so essential and instead goes immediately to demanding more subsidies. “Another round of emergency funding is critical to preventing significant and permanent reductions in transit services.” In other words, subsidies aren’t just essential, they are critical.

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Democratic New York Rep. Jerry Nadler scolded three Republican congressmen for not wearing masks during a portion of the House Judiciary Committee’s questioning of Attorney General Bill Barr.

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Buy those votes! Buy those votes!

Where were these guys when I had student loans to pay?

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And serves him damned right.

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Transit agencies are stepping up their campaigns for more subsidies to make up for their lack of riders during the coronavirus pandemic. The New York Times reports that, unless Congress forks over billions more than it has already given the agencies, transit systems could experience a death spiral.

Technically, a death spiral takes place if cuts in service cause a loss of customers leading to more cuts in service. But if they don’t have any customers, they can’t spiral much further downward.

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With a hefty severance package and a generous pension, no doubt.

Once they’re gone, perhaps we can recruit some people who value teaching children,

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We have the technology.

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That will flush the rest of them to Florida and points west. Manhattan will be a ghost town.

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Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is keeping the city’s mask mandate in place, despite an order from the governor that prohibits cities from issuing mask requirements, Newsweek reports.

Let’s have the would-be despot governor fight the would-be despot mayor.

I predict that ordinary citizens will be the losers.

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Judge James Boasberg of the District of Columbia District Court issued a short opinion last week in Standing Rock Sioux Tribe v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In it, he instructed Energy Transfer Partners, the pipeline builder, to temporarily cease using its 1,172-mile-long Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), which ships up to 570,000 barrels a day of crude oil from the Bakken and Three Forks fields of North Dakota to terminals and refineries in Patoka, IL.

The dispute was about a short-stretch of pipeline (1,094 feet) that ran approximately 100-feet below a lake, about one-half mile from tribal lands. From the moment that DAPL was announced, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe mounted a full-scale attack on the venture. The pipeline was seen as yet another affront to its tribal way of life—the latest in a long string of historical injustices undertaken by, or with the blessing of, the United States government. At a more concrete level, the Tribe argued that the pipeline would run through its sacred lands and damage its water supply.

In fact, the pipeline does not cross into the Tribe’s land. Nonetheless, the Tribe sought to exercise its statutory rights to be consulted about the pipeline under both the National Historic Protection Act (NHPA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). In 2015, the Tribe sued the Corps to reroute DAPL away from its lands, and raised multiple objections about the design and site of the pipeline. The objections to the pipeline continued even after it was put into operation in June 2017 without serious incident.

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The Ford was envisioned as a revolutionary leap forward with technological advancements undreamed of when its Nimitz-class predecessors were launched decades ago.

But the ship, the first in the Ford class of supercarriers, has been plagued with a series of mechanical problems that have pushed its price tag into the stratospheric $13 billion range. The Gerald R. Ford has been in the fleet for almost three years but has yet to deploy on a single mission.

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The Caution Against Racially Exploitative Non-Emergencies (CAREN) Act would make it “illegal for people to contact law enforcement solely to discriminate on the basis of a person’s race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity,” according to USA Today. Individuals who are victimized by the calls would reportedly be allowed to sue the caller for damages up to $1,000 dollars.

I wonder whether it would apply to ‘noose’ and other race hoaxes.

Veronique de Rugy has some news.

I give you the CARES Act news headline equivalent of “dog bites man” or “water still wet”: “Small Business Loans Helped the Well-Heeled and Connected, Too.”

Seriously, is there anyone who has studied government programs, any government programs, for at least five minutes that is surprised by this news? It reminds me of its cousin headline: “big firms gets small business loans, too.”