The mayor of Baltimore has been running a grift: She self-published her own stupid children’s books about health, about the unimaginitively named “Healthy Holly.”
She made these books available. To, for example, health care providers looking to sign lucrative contracts with the city of Baltimore.
And you won’t believe this –health care providers looking to sign lucrative contracts with the city of Baltimore bought tens of thousands of copies of this self-published book, putting a great deal of money in the mayor’s pockets, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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A Massachusetts judge was indicted for “conspiracy to obstruct justice” after she allegedly impeded an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer from detaining an illegal alien.
The indictment was handed down by the U.S. Attorney’s office against Judge Shelley Richmond Joseph on Thursday. Richmond and trial court officer Wesley MacGregor, her fellow defendant, allegedly conspired to keep ICE from detaining the illegal alien last year.
The illegal alien had previously been deported twice and was the subject of an ICE detainer after having been arrested in Pennsylvania for narcotics possession.
It’s high time some of these scofflaws went to jail.
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Thanks to its urban-growth boundary, Denver has a housing affordability problem. Apartment rents have increased by 65 percent in the last decade, while the nationwide cost of living in that time rose by just 18 percent and rents nationwide increased by an average of 28 percent.
If you restrict supply, the price goes up. That’s elementary economics, too elementary to appeal to state ideologues legislators.
For hundreds of years, some form of question about citizenship has been included in the United States census form. But now that Donald Trump was president it’s suddenly a problem of epic proportions, that’s according to the liberal media.
TDS makes all things problematical. The census can ask what kind of car you drive but dooooooon’t you dare ask about citizenship.
A US judge gave the cops permission to force people’s fingers onto seized iPhones to see who could unlock them, a newly unsealed search warrant has revealed.
There is a story, don’t know whether it’s true, about a French Foreign Legion officer who was so offended by the prospect of police taking his fingerprints that he put his fingertips on a red-hot stove, guaranteeing that all they would get would be scar tissue.
I imagine that this applies to Apple’s ‘face recognition’ as well.
Which is why I use a complicated passphrase rather than any of the it’s-convenent-to-you-and-even-more-convenient-to-the-state ways of unlocking my phone.
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Discrimination is perfectly okay as long as you discriminate against smart people,
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Under a sweeping surveillance program, the Drug Enforcement Administration secretly spied on Americans who bought money counters, “the vast majority” of whom “were never shown to be connected to illicit drug-related activities.” In an extensive audit, the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Inspector General revealed that between 2008 and 2014, the DEA had collected tens of thousands of records, including the names, addresses, and phone numbers of buyers, though only 131 arrests were made. (The DEA declined to reveal how many convictions were secured following those arrests.) During the same period, however, bulk purchaser data helped the DEA seize $48 million in cash, $4 million in real estate, 88 vehicles, and 179 firearms, as well as nearly 1,500 pounds of cocaine and over 21,300 pounds of marijuana.
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April Perry, Foxx’s chief ethics officer, and Conviction Integrity Director Mark Rotert have both tendered their resignations and will serve their last days on the job in May.
I wonder what they know that we don’t know?
Foxx’s office released a statement announcing that she had recused herself, but the office was forced to clarify that she had recused herself only “in the colloquial sense” after it was reported that she had continued to involve herself in the case.
(SNL voice) Never mind!
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Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on SCOOP: HUD Planning Crackdown on Illegal Immigrants Taking Advantage of Public Housing
Republicans are taking notes for the next time a Democrat is President.
It’s going to get very ugly but Democrats have nobody to blame but themselves.
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“On Monday, the boys were forced to meet with an assistant principal and an anti-bullying specialist, who quickly decided to punish them for clearly constitutionally-protected speech.”
Truly a sign of our times. Two boys go to a shooting range, train with legal firearms. Post some pictures and innocuous comments about their training and are immediately punished by their school because of the complaints of one panicked parent.
This is the true battlefield of the Culture Wars, not our politics. No political victory will fix this and no legal regime of protection will last when under assault from people like this parent and the school officials at these boys’ school.
Yet another reason to keep your children from government schools.
The White House is moving to dissolve the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and reorganize the agency’s responsibilities into three existing departments in order to “drive what is needed to support the mission in all of government.”
…
The agency was formed in 1979 and tasked with managing the government’s civilian workforce, which includes healthcare, insurance and retirement benefits, as well as oversight and human resources policies for federal employees.
Basically, the Federal government’s HR department. Another of Jimmy Carter’s mistakes.
Pelosi’s spokesperson went on to say that if undocumented migrants were released in the streets of San Francisco they might catch cholera from all the feces
The National School Lunch Program has changed dramatically since it began in 1946. What started as a grant program to help poor students and those with special needs has morphed into a massive entitlement offering meals to 30 million students every year—equivalent to nearly 55% of all children enrolled in public and private schools.
And the bigger the program got, the more wasteful it became. The Office of Management and Budget now classifies the school lunch program as a “high-error” program due to large losses from incorrect payments each year—nearly $800 million in fiscal year 2018 alone.
In 2010, the Obama administration approved letting school districts offer free meals to all students in schools where 40% of the student body comes from low-income families that qualify for public assistance such as food stamps. This “Community Eligibility Provision” is providing meals—breakfast as well as lunch—to kids from middle- and upper-income families.
Universal welfare via a back door.
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Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Corrupt State’s Attorney Kimm Foxx: I’ve Been Wondering What All the Criticism of My Exoneration of Jussie Smollett Is Really About, and I Think Maybe It’s All About Race
When you’re in the Crust, you get to live like you’re in the Crust.
Vance is the son of Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State and the product of Groton, Yale, and Georgetown Law.
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That is the question that Senator Tom Cotton asked today in a letter to the IRS. The Southern Poverty Law Center is an arm of the Democratic Party whose stock in trade is defamation. What tax-exempt purposes do baseless, politically-motivated smears serve?
Members of Congress are old. Really old. The House Democrats’ top three leaders are all 78 or 79.
Democrat John Dingell was re-elected to the House every two years from 1955 to 2014, even though he represented Detroit during the period in which the city sank from America’s crown jewel of manufacturing to a symbol of urban blight. In 2014 he was replaced — by his wife.
Republican Strom Thurmond was a racial segregationist born in 1902 who served in the upper chamber from 1956 until 2003. The nation changed, but he remained in office. By the end, his aides were dragging him around and propping him up like a marionette. Who did this serve?
Congressmen have used their power to design an institution that’s first order of business is keeping current members as current members for as long as possible.
The Trump administration has cut off all foreign aid to the Central American nations of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras – known as the Northern Triangle countries.
About. Fargin. Time.
“We were paying them tremendous amounts of money. And we’re not paying them anymore. Because they haven’t done a thing for us. They set up these caravans,” Trump reportedly said.
They need to realize that they are no longer allowed to dump their trash on our lawn.
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Republicans are finding their spines. It’s good to see.
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San Antonio’s left-leaning city council, backed by mayor Ron Nirenberg, recently banned Chick-fil-A from becoming a concessionaire at the city-operated international airport. City officials reportedly cited Chick-fil-A’s political positions as justification for its boycott of the company: “With this decision, the City Council reaffirmed the work our city has done to become a champion of equality and inclusion,” said councilman Roberto Treviño. “San Antonio is a city full of compassion, and we do not have room in our public facilities for a business with a legacy of anti-LGBTQ behavior.”
…
The charge that Chick-fil-A is “anti-LGBTQ” is based on its owners’ private contributions (made through the WinShape Foundation) and statements in support of traditional marriage. The city does not claim that the company’s employment practices or business policies are illegal; Chick-fil-A’s personnel policies conform to federal employment law, and the company has issued a statement of respect for all people, regardless of sexual orientation, in an internal document called “Chick-fil-A: Who We Are.” Nonetheless, LGBT activists have targeted Chick-fil-A for years. In 2012, when LGBT groups organized a national campaign to boycott the chain for its owners’ opposition to same-sex marriage, a backlash by the company’s devoted customers—led by former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee—resulted in record-breaking sales. The public has demonstrated that it does not object to the owners’ allegedly objectionable positions. Yet the activists persist.
Since when is it the government’s job (i.e. the taxpayers’ job) to fund programs to make handicapped people feel good about themselves? How much do ‘participation trophies’ cost, anyway?
In fact, Peoples had been arrested for her daughter’s spotty school attendance record under a truancy law that then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris had personally championed in the state legislature. The law, enacted in January 2011, made it a criminal misdemeanor for parents to allow kids in kindergarten through eighth grade to miss more than 10 percent of school days without a valid excuse. Peoples’ 11-year-old daughter, Shayla, had missed 20 days so far that school year.
I’ll bet you didn’t know that ‘truancy’ was still a thing.
Civil forfeiture is the law enforcement tool which allows property or currency to be seized and permanently forfeited, even in situations where the owner is neither charged with, nor convicted of, a crime.
Prior to the 1980s, civil forfeiture was a niche law enforcement tool relegated chiefly to admiralty and customs law. But Congress, followed later by nearly every state, ramped up the practice to target the assets and ill-gotten gains of drug kingpins, criminal organizations, and money launderers.
And to encourage law enforcement agencies to use this powerful new tool, Congress empowered federal agencies to retain the proceeds of successful forfeitures, and authorized them to share the funds with state and local agencies that participate in forfeiture cases through what is known as the “equitable sharing” program.
In other words, lawmakers empowered agencies to seize their way to bigger budgets. It should come as no surprise that forfeiture exploded in the United States.
‘Civil asset forfeiture’ is the biggest end-run around the Constitution in the country today. This legislation is badly needed.
I should like to point out that this problem is the direct result of the bogus government-mandated monopoly on certain information under the guise of ‘intellectual property’. Once you decide that people providing you with information can dictate what you can do with it, they’re going to make sure they charge you out the wazoo to do ANYTHING with it.
This started with the oh-no-you-don’t-own-that-software-you-just-bought-you-just-have-a-license-to-use-it trick in the early days of consumer computation and, when that worked, they pushed the envelope for all that it was worth, to the point that people can now patent human genes merely because they happened to be the first to figure out how they work.
The Chinese realized early on that this was a scam and they’ve been ignoring it (to their profit) ever since. Smuggling (the fashionable tar-term is ‘piracy’, the historical tar-term is ‘black market’) exists profitably when I can provide you with something illegally for less than the government will allow you to purchase it legally. The end-game here is Prohibition and the ‘war on drugs’. This is why Columbian narcos had warehouses of dollar bills being eaten by rats because they didn’t have anywhere else to put them.
The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office issued the following statement: “After reviewing all of the facts and circumstances of the case, including Mr. Smollet’s volunteer service in the community and agreement to forfeit his bond to the City of Chicago, we believe this outcome is a just disposition & appropriate resolution.”
Apparently they did this without checking with the Chicago PD. Smooth move.
It isn’t all that meaningful to debate whether the inverted yield curve in the U.S. that occurred Friday will lead to a recession a year from now. Nothing is written in stone. Whether one comes to pass or not doesn’t validate nor negate the signal one way or the other.
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Look, prior to his capture by the North Vietnamese he was the military equivalent of Beto O’Rourke. If his father and grandfather hadn’t been Admirals he would have been passed over for promotion before he made Commander and had to go to work for a living. His main claim to fame as a Navy officer was how hard he could party and what sort of Black Sheep Squadron hijinks he could get up to.
While ie was a POW he behaved heroically, no one questions that. Sometimes people, when you step on them, prove that there’s a hard center to all that softness. But that doesn’t give you a pass for the rest of your life. And it’s the rest of his life that we’re talking about.
Once he got back, he resumed being a consummate jerk. He divorced his crippled first wife, who had kept the faith with him through his captivity, to marry a rich blonde. He ran as a solid conservative Republican in order to get elected to the Senate and then turned around and sold out his party whenever he got the notion. He was famous for being one of the chief RINOs in Washington, and for saying shit about people he didn’t like that Trump would never dream of.
Trump never said anything about McCain until after McCain had spent time bad-mouthing Trump. McCain was the source of the ‘dossier’ that sparked the Mueller investigation that has gone on for two years and cost the taxpayers millions of dollars for absolutely nothing except sending a bunch of small fry to jail for ‘process crimes’ that would never have occurred had it not been for the investigation.
Worst of all, John McCain, AFTER HAVING CAMPAIGNED ON GETTING RID OF OBAMACARE, cast the single vote that blocked Obamacare repeal BECAUSE HE WAS IN A SNIT ABOUT TRUMP. That failure has caused thousands of people millions of dollars in health care expense just because of personal pique. Whatever bad thing you can say about Trump, John McCain was just as bad, if not worse.
Sure, I’ll criticize John McCain. Call on me any time.
We have far too many colleges in this country, and far too many college students. The current crisis is caused by taxpayers being made to guarantee student debt on the part of people who don’t have the brainpower to succeed in college.
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Democrats being Democrats. Light-colored Democrats who can pretend to be ‘black’ typically spend their time in ‘public service’ enriching themselves and their cronies, while destroying the areas over which they rule; thus Detroit.
It’s official: whether it wanted to or not, the Fed’s doubling-down on dovishness this Wednesday is now seen by the market as a major policy error, perhaps the biggest in Fed history.
