Read it.

Democrat Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida has been indicted on charges accusing her of stealing $5 million in federal disaster funds and using some of the money to aid her 2021 campaign, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

The Democrat is accused of stealing Federal Emergency Management Agency overpayments that her family healthcare company had received through a federally funded COVID-19 vaccination staffing contract, federal prosecutors said.

A portion of the money was then funneled to support her campaign through candidate contributions, prosecutors allege.

Yet another corrupt black female Democrat politician.

Read it.

Just over 15 years ago, when the Democrat-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate were debating the healthcare proposals offered by the Democrat president, nearly everyone on the political right was unified in opposition. It may well have been the last time the right was united on anything, but it was indeed unified and resolute.

Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann (MN) warned that “This monstrosity of a bill will not only destroy the private healthcare market, it will lead to massive increases in premiums and rationed care.” Congressman (and eventual vice-presidential nominee and Speaker of the House) Paul Ryan (WI) complained that “This bill is a fiscal Frankenstein. It’s a government takeover that will explode costs and kill jobs.” Senator (and Republican Leader) Mitch McConnell (KY) insisted that Americans “want reforms that lower costs, not a trillion-dollar government experiment.”

Right-leaning commentators like George Will and Charles Krauthammer agreed, not only with each other but with Republicans in Congress as well. Krauthammer, in particular, argued that President Obama’s promise to “bend the cost curve” down was pure, unadulterated, and extensively documented fantasy. National Review, much maligned among Trump supporters these days, dedicated most of an issue to exposing and forecasting Obamacare’s fiscal absurdities and the likelihood that it would result in lower quality of care, increased taxes, and exploding insurance premiums. Even the Heritage Foundation—in the news lately for purportedly exacerbating rifts in the conservative coalition—likewise agreed with everyone in the movement, insisting that Obamacare was a disaster waiting to happen and would keep none of the promises that it made, all while destroying what was good and valuable in the private insurance market.

The Foundry.

In a recent interview, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared in unequivocal terms that President Donald Trump was “the worst thing on the face of the Earth.” You heard that right. Not a threat to democracy, not a danger to civility, the worst thing on the face of the Earth.

It was a statement so hyperbolic that it felt less like political commentary and more like a sermon from a zealot who has mistaken politics for theology.

Such rhetoric isn’t harmless. It corrodes the political imagination of a people already steeped in outrage. It plants in the public mind a simple but dangerous idea: that those who disagree with you aren’t just wrong, they’re evil. From that seed grows justification for all manner of destruction.

Read it.

Virginia law enforcement officials are voicing deep concerns that Attorney General–elect Jay Jones could undermine public safety and drive officers out of the profession, citing a string of past statements and actions they say reveal hostility toward police and a disregard for law and order.

Jones, a former Democrat state lawmaker, has faced mounting scrutiny since the surfacing of 2022 text messages in which he told Republican Delegate Carrie Coyner that House GOP Leader Todd Gilbert “gets two bullets to the head” and suggested police might stop shooting people if “a few police died.

He has since scaled back his rhetoric, but many in uniform say the damage has already been done, reports The Washington Free Beacon on Friday.

Read it.

A top housing official in President Donald Trump’s administration has referred California Rep. Eric Swalwell, a frequent critic of the president, to the Justice Department for a potential federal criminal investigation into alleged mortgage and tax fraud tied to a Washington, D.C., home, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, alleged in a letter Wednesday to Attorney General Pam Bondi that Swalwell may have made false or misleading statements in loan documents.

The California Democrat is the fourth member of his party in recent months to face similar allegations, reports NBC News.

I wonder whether he’s still baning Fang Fang, the Chinese spy?

UPDATE: Rep. Eric Swalwell’s $1.2 million DC home target of DOJ mortgage fraud criminal referral (Josh Christenson/New York Post)

Read it.

A judge declined Thursday to throw out the criminal case against U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver, who was charged with assaulting federal agents during a chaotic visit last spring to an immigration detention center in New Jersey.

McIver’s lawyers had argued that the prosecution was selective and vindictive, and that the New Jersey Democrat hadn’t assaulted anyone during her May 9 trip to Delaney Hall detention center in Newark. They also said McIver was performing legislative duties protected by the Constitution when she showed up to inspect the detention center, and was thus immune from prosecution.

U.S. District Judge Jamel Semper wrote that McIver failed to show the prosecution was vindictive and that her actions were “wholly disconnected” from the oversight she was conducting as a member of Congress.

Read it.

Controversy over the Obama Presidential Center is boiling over again in Chicago, as residents and preservationists question why a former president would build what many view as an oversized monument on protected, historic parkland — concerns detailed extensively by the New York Post.

According to the Post, critics across the city are still stunned that Barack Obama’s $850 million center — derisively dubbed “The Obamalisk” by some locals quoted by the paper — replaced prized sections of Jackson Park, the landmark landscape designed by Frederick Law Olmsted for the 1893 World’s Fair.

Construction began in 2021 and is expected to finish next spring.

The Foundry.

After weeks of noncommittal responses during the nation’s longest federal government shutdown, former Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who is now looking to unseat Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, has proclaimed the deal to end the government shutdown is “a bad deal for Ohioans.”

Brown took to X to express his displeasure with his fellow Democrats: “Half a million Ohioans are facing monthly premiums that are double or triple what they were paying. This is a bad deal for Ohioans. It does nothing to help the out-of-control costs people are facing. We can’t allow health care costs to skyrocket and not be willing to fight.”

Senate Democrats had refused to support measures that would reopen the government for more than 40 days until, on Sunday night, enough Senate Democrat Caucus members struck a deal with Senate Republicans to advance legislation that could reopen the government.

Brown is seeking a comeback bid after losing last November to now Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno.

Read it.

The American Freedom Law Center is asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to grant oral arguments in its First Amendment lawsuit against Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel for the “irreparable harm” of her endorsing the Southern Poverty Law Center’s claim that AFLC is a “hate group.”

“From the very beginning, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has politicized and weaponized her office and abused her government authority to target political opponents,” AFLC co-founder Robert Muise told The Daily Signal in a statement Wednesday.

“Her use of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s ‘hate group’ list as a matter of public policy to identify organizations, mostly conservative Christian and Jewish organizations, for her propaganda attacks and threats of surveillance are detrimental to the rights and freedoms of individuals in our free society,” Muise added. “Indeed, this is right out of the pages of George Orwell’s famous novel, 1984, and it is unconstitutional.”

The case traces back to a 2019 press release Nessel published, along with Michigan Department of Civil Rights then-Director Agustin Arbulu, announcing a “Hate Crimes Unit” that would “fight against hate crimes and the many hate groups … in our state.” The announcement linked to the SPLC’s list of “hate groups,” which puts conservative and Christian organizations on a “hate map” alongside largely defunct chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.

Read it.

Progressives are trumpeting a report that consumers’ financial data may be less secure following Trump administration efforts to shrink the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

But in their eagerness to attack Trump, attention is refocusing on a massive scandal that plagued the “consumer watchdog” agency under Joe Biden– one that left over 250,000 people’s data exposed.

Read it.

For 28 years, the Democrats have controlled both houses of the state legislature, and apart from Schwarzenegger’s interlude from 2004 to 2010, there’s been a Democrat governor since 1999.

Nothing seems likely to change; this month, California’s voters approved a redistricting plan that is expected to reduce the number of Republican U.S. Congressmen to four out of 52. Democratic dominance in California’s cities and counties is equally absolute.

And yet they’re not accountable.

Democrats in California have perfected the art of persuasion with an electorate that for over two generations has been indoctrinated in public schools by teachers who themselves have been indoctrinated to hate capitalism, resent wealth, rebuke “whiteness,” and celebrate hedonism. All Democrat candidates have to say is “protect abortion,” “fight racism,” “climate emergency,” or “stop the Nazis,” and voter reaction is Pavlovian. Peak conditioning was achieved in the special election of 2025, when all they had to say was “stick it to Trump,” who they have turned into the biggest boogeyman since Hitler (someone who, just to be clear, really was a boogeyman).

Read it.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee are facing severe backlash after releasing cherry-picked emails involving Jeffrey Epstein that mention President Donald Trump — despite no evidence of wrongdoing.

The release has been blasted by the White House and Republican lawmakers as a “fake narrative” aimed at smearing the president.

The emails, dated years before Trump’s presidency, show Epstein bragging in private exchanges about Trump allegedly telling Ghislaine Maxwell to stop recruiting young women from Mar-a-Lago’s spa.

Read it.

The Biden-era sanctuary state policies in California foisted on the state and Americans by Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom have once again collided with federal law — this time on America’s highways.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has admitted to illegally issuing 17,000 commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) to foreign nationals who were not legally eligible to hold them, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Tuesday.

“After weeks of claiming they did nothing wrong, Gavin Newsom and California have been caught red-handed,” Duffy wrote in a statement. “Now that we’ve exposed their lies, 17,000 illegally issued trucking licenses are being revoked.

Read it.

Recently Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that New York was joining 14 other states in a “nonpartisan initiative” (though all 15 states have Democratic governors) called the Governors Public Health Alliance, a “coordinating hub for governors and their public health leaders and a unified, cross-state liaison with the global health community. The Alliance also provides a platform for governors to exchange best practices, align policies, and coordinate on issues like vaccine access, emergency response and health security.”

Bear in mind that Hochul is only Governor of New York because Andrew Cuomo stepped on his own dick during the Pandemic Panic.

Despite claiming the GPHA is “nonpartisan,” Hochul’s press release is anything but: “From undermining vaccine access and abortion rights to slashing billions in Medicaid funding from those in need, the federal government is wreaking havoc on public health and the institutions we rely on.” 

Hochul’s announcement also states: “This new Alliance builds on New York’s ongoing work to protect access to public health and scientific information amidst ongoing attacks from the federal government.”

Finally, the press release burnishes GPHA’s credentials by stating: “The Alliance is advised by leading public health experts, including former CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen,” as well as others.

All these platitudes of partisanship and self-promotion are par-for-the-course for a governor seeking reelection. However, for New York in general, and Hochul in particular, they are the height of hypocrisy.

The Foundry.

A watchdog group alleges that Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, filed inconsistent financial disclosure statements regarding investments, which potentially violated House rules and federal law if the unreported assets exceed $1,000 in value.

The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust filed a complaint with the Office of Congressional Conduct seeking an investigation into Crockett for failing to fully disclose financial investments in two dozen companies.

“Generally, a lot of members of Congress are trading and holding assets that could be considered a conflict of interest,” Kendra Arnold, executive director of FACT, told The Daily Signal. “When we see members of Congress not taking financial disclosure seriously, we do see other ethics problems.”

Associated Press, a Voice of the Crust.

This combination photo of eight senators is Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., top row from left, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., and bottom row from left, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H. (AP Photo)

Interesting. Both Senators from New Hampshire, both Senators from Nevada, the “Independent” from Maine, Uncle Fester from PA, and Hillary’s VP pick. Plus old Dem warhorse Dick Durbin.

UPDATE: Chuck Todd Laments Dems ‘Snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory’

UPDATE: Democrats rebel after 8 senators cut a deal to end the shutdown without ACA funds (NBC News)

UPDATE: Buttigieg Rips Senate Dems Who Broke Ranks on Shutdown

UPDATE: Newsom Blasts Senate Dems for ‘Betrayal’ in Shutdown Deal

UPDATE: Scoop: Schumer privately fought to extend government shutdown (Axios)

UPDATE: Why These Vichy Dems and Their Spineless Boss Need to Go Now (David Rothkopf/The Daily Beast)

UPDATE: Angry Democrats call on Schumer to resign after eight vote to end shutdown (Chris Stein/The Guardian)

UPDATE: Senate Ends Filibuster; Democrats Immediately Form Circular Firing Squad (Babylon Bee)

PJ MEdia.

was behind the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the Capitol Complex. Things were too pat. Narratives were set and eagerly parroted by the media within hours. Buses filled with non-MAGA people were reported and verified by congressional reps. And there were “bombs” found at the Democratic National Committee and later at a club near the RNC. Impeachment talk was openly discussed.

Suddenly, questioning the obviously hinky 2020 election was a criminal act against democracy. Trump must go to jail, the left said. And then they went about trying to make that happen. A Hollywood producer soon was under contract to produce Congress’s January 6, The Movie! where no exculpatory information was allowed.

The word “insurrection” became quickly affixed to all news stories, though no one knew what really happened. President Donald Trump’s slow response in urging people to go home was seen as an admission of something nefarious. And his words spoken at the Ellipse were clipped, taken out of context, and all exculpatory words he spoke were mysteriously left out of the discussion.

And the fix is still in. On Sunday, two executives at the BBC resigned in disgrace after the popular British news program Panorama was caught making egregious edits in Trump’s speech to make him sound like he was encouraging a run on the Capitol Building.

The New York Times, “All the News That’s Fit for the Crust to See in Print”.

After more than a month of stalemate, the Senate on Sunday took a crucial step toward reopening the government, when a small but critical group of Democrats broke from their party and voted with Republicans to advance legislation that would end the longest government shutdown in history.

The shutdown is not over yet. Sunday’s 60-to-40 vote cleared the way for the Senate to formally debate the spending measure before a final vote. If the Senate approves it, the package still must be passed by the House — which has been on an extended recess and has not yet scheduled a return date — and signed by President Trump.

Still, the deal that senators reached on Sunday night reflected important lessons for both parties from the shutdown fight and is likely to have far-reaching policy and political implications long after the government grinds back to life. Here are six takeaways.

UPDDATE: 16 Thoughts On The Dem Shutdown Cave (Brian Beutler/Off Message)

UPDATE: Dem civil war (Politico)

UPDATE: Democrats Fume Over Deal to End Government Shutdown (Wall Street Journal)

UPDATE: Thoughts on Democrats’ Shutdown Surrender (Dan Pfeiffer/The Message Box)

UPDATE: A Quick Take on Team Cave’s Big Win (Josh Marshall/Talking Points Memo)

UPDATE: Furious Dem Civil War Immediately Erupts Over Bombshell Shutdown Deal (Will Neal/The Daily Beast)

UPDATE: Trump made a huge blunder on the shutdown. So why did Democrats cave anyway? (Nate Silver/Silver Bulletin)  Maybe because they know more about it than Nate Silver does?

UPDATE: “It’s complete BS”: Dems go ballistic over Senate shutdown deal (Andrew Solender/Axios)

UPDATE: What Were Democrats Thinking? — Back in September, when I was reporting an article … (Ezra Klein/New York Times)

New York Post.

Believing they’re “winning” the government shutdown, Democrats are playing a dangerous game of chicken, aiming to keep on exploiting the public’s misdirected ire — without it being turned on them.

Yet what’s already a record-long federal closure could blow up in their faces if their scheming means millions of Americans can’t see grandma at Thanksgiving.

Even though it’s the Dems refusing to let the government reopen, Senate and House Minority Leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries & Co. bet that voters would finger Republicans for gumming up the works.

The gamble seemingly paid off Tuesday, as Democrats outperformed expectations in Virginia and New Jersey; at least some polls also show the public blaming the GOP more.

Most Americans don’t look past who’s in charge of the House, Senate and White House to grasp how the filibuster lets the minority party block the bill to fund federal operations, and of course much of the media is happy to frame Republicans as villains who don’t care if SNAP recipients can’t eat or furloughed federal workers can’t pay their bills.

Read it.

Radical leftist and twice-failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has officially shuttered her dark-money-funded nonprofit network, including the New Georgia Project and its affiliate, the New Georgia Project Action Fund, a pair of organizations used to drive voter registration and turnouts across the state.

Last week, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (MO-08) released a statement that said the move to dissolve Stacey Abrams-founded New Georgia Project comes after the committee launched an investigation into whether the nonprofit illegally funneled millions into Abrams’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign. Smith urged the IRS to revoke its tax-exempt status.

The Foundry.

Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee who serves as chief judge of the D.C. District Court, is facing an ethics complaint for “political bias” against President Donald Trump and his administration.

Boasberg approved nondisclosure orders in 2023 that kept nearly a dozen Republican members of Congress from knowing their cellphone records had been secretly obtained by the Biden Department of Justice (DOJ), documents released by Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley recently revealed.

“Judge Boasberg enabled certain facets of what may be one of the biggest scandals in the history of the country,” the ethics complaint filed by the Center to Advance Security in America (CASA) and exclusively obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation states. “Weaponizing the DOJ to surveil political opposition not only violates the rights of the subjects of the investigation, but also the American people who were unable to know the facts of the investigation due to the secrecy of it.”

Now … where have I heard that name before?

The Foundry.

When Sen. Elizabeth A. Warren recently traveled to the Big Apple to endorse New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, she was asked if overt socialism is really the best model for Democrats to adopt. “You bet,” she replied in her signature folksy style.

The Boston lawmaker wasn’t just jumping on the sudden trendiness of socialism three-and-a-half decades after its near-extinction. With Senate fellow traveler Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Warren has been a catalyst for moving her party to the left since her first campaign in 2012.

She and Sanders are, in many ways, the godparents of the self-avowed democratic socialists such as Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who are providing the youthful energy for the Democrats in the Trump era.

Read it.

The Blaze has reported that the pipe bombs found at Democratic and Republican offices on the night before the J6 fiasco were planted by a Capitol Police officer. The FBI already knew that the person who planted the bombs took the Metro using a farecard owned by the next-door-neighbor of the suspected cop. At the time, agents were ordered not to pursue this particular lead(!!?)

The same federal law enforcement agencies that could track down every granny who “paraded” on J6, failed to identify the fellow in expensive shoes who (illegally) built the mock gallows on Capitol grounds, could not explain to 200 agents dispatched to the J6 demonstration how the FBI was now doing crowd control but without the slightest attempt to integrate with DC or Capitol cops and most of all, could not identify the pipe bomb suspect.

The story is so very DC—Botched conspiracies? Incompetence? Coverup? All drenched in partisan spin.

A complicating factor is that there is absolutely no reason to rely on the integrity and competence of Director Wray or the investigative followup in the integrity-free zone that was the Biden FBI and DOJ.

At a minimum, the American people deserve straight and complete answers for some very basic questions. It is about time.

Read it.

It’s a challenge when you want to be a major political party and you can’t seem to avoid alienating about 90 percent of 50 percent of the population, but that’s the challenge the Democrats have accepted. People with penises who identify as men, I have some bad news for you. They don’t like you. Not at all. And their solution to this problem – and it’s a serious problem – is to try to convince you, in the least convincing possible way, that they dig you so you’ll shut up and vote as you’re told.

But they do not dig you. Not at all. And they deeply resent that the brutal arithmetic of politics requires that they at least try to appeal to dudes who are not femboys, pinkos, pervs, or eunuchs dominated by their evil faux first wives.

What do they dislike about men and masculinity? Well, the men and masculinity parts. Somebody has to be to blame for the fact that everything they lay their soft, girlish hands on turns to Schiff. Normal men are as good a scapegoat as any; there will never be any introspection about how the common denominator in the disasters that inevitably stem from feminized government (and everything else) is the feminization part. Helen Andrews has called it—check out her viral take on the phenomenon.

Read it.

A conservative watchdog group has accused Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., of being delinquent on up to $50,000 in federal student loans and has asked House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to garnish her congressional wages.

Thomas Jones, founder and president of the American Accountability Foundation, also accused the progressive lawmaker in a Wednesday letter to Johnson of using her position in Congress to “bully” the Department of Education into not collecting past-due payments from her.

Omar has consistently backed policies to forgive student loan debt, including former President Joe Biden’s executive action that was ultimately overturned by the Supreme Court.

Read it.

There’s always a plan.

A group of eight centrist Democrats who want to end the government shutdown – now the longest in US history – have been approaching their colleagues about a deal to reopen the federal government this week or next week, however progressives within the party are pushing back hard, according to The Hill, citing people familiar with the discussions.

To refresh your memory, the crux of the shutdown is that Democrats want to extend pandemic-era Obamacare enhancements, which include coverage for illegals – and they’re unwilling to kick the can down the road with a “clean” (free of new pork) continuing resolution while congress debates a larger package (again).

According to one senator, the centrist Democrats include Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Gary Peters (D-MI) – and apparently have the ‘contours of a deal’ and are “whipping” more of their colleagues to sign on.

Jonathan Turley

In Shakespeare’s Richard III, Queen Elizabeth — whose husband King Edward IV was overthrown and her twins taken to the Tower — asks the older Queen Margaret (widow of the murdered King Henry VI) to “teach me how to curse mine enemies.” The Queen responds that it is easy: “Think that thy babes were sweeter than they were, And he that slew them fouler than he is.”

The lesson: The key to hate is to decouple it entirely from reason and reality. Only then can you hate completely without restraint or regret.

It seems that the left has learned how to hate. Hateful speech is in vogue as Democratic leaders ramp up violent rhetoric and political violence rises. The key is to get voters to hate your opponent so much that they forget how much they dislike you.

The irony is crushing. For years, liberals have sought to criminalize hate speech while expanding the range of viewpoints considered to fall within this category. Democratic leaders, from senators to former presidential candidates, have falsely claimed that hate speech is not protected under the First Amendment.

Read it.

Leaders should seek to unify people. Instead, California governor and likely 2028 presidential candidate Gavin Newsom is mired in identity politics, dividing his constituents into those entitled to privileges and subventions by reason of their melanin, sex, or sexual orientation – and those who are required to fund the largesse.

He opposed race neutral admissions to the California state university system (overruled by the people of California – twice), imposed gender and racial requirements on corporate boards (held unconstitutional – twice), required ethnic studies and ethnically dumbed-down math in K-12 curricula, and is carefully advancing a potentially multi-trillion dollar reparations plan for California’s black residents.

Newsom’s unconstitutional quest to curry favor with, undermine the confidence of, and potentially spend trillions of dollars on, California’s 2.5 million black residents began in 2020 when he signed AB3121 into law. That act required the state to study and develop reparation proposals for black Californians, with “special consideration” for descendants of slaves.

Jonathan Turley.

This week, I ran a column on how many on the left have discovered the joy and release of unmitigated hate speech. Democratic Helena City Commissioner candidate Haley McKnight is under fire for messages left on the phone of freshman Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., in which she hopes for him to get cancer and die. It comes on the day that voters are going to the polls in Virginia, where the Democratic candidate for Attorney General, Jay Jones, admitted that he previously expressed a desire to kill a political opponent and his children.

Read it.

During a speech on the Senate floor, Schumer blamed Republicans for refusing to maintain pandemic-era Obamacare enhancements that were always meant to be temporary. Remember this next time a Democrat says something is temporary…

“The only plan Republicans have for healthcare seems to be to eliminate it, and then to tell working people to go figure it out on their own,” said Schumer. “That’s not a healthcare plan. That’s cruel.”

That said, some Senate Democrats – 6 or so according to Fox News, are meeting behind closed doors to find a way out, with Sen. Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) optimistic that they can get something done by the end of the week.

Read it.

Illinois has now joined California and Connecticut in barring federal immigration agents from conducting “civil arrests” of illegal aliens in or around state courthouses. The sanctuary law appears largely performative since it also appears unconstitutional. It is difficult to see how a state can bar the exercise of federal jurisdiction, at least after the Civil War.

What is this ‘civil arrest’ nonsense? Illegal immigration is a felony. That is a criminal charge.

Gov. JB Pritzker has been ratcheting up the rhetoric against ICE and the Trump Administration for months, including analogies to the Nazis and claims that democracy is dying. The new law, however, crosses the constitutional Rubicon by not only limiting the operation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) but also establishing a 1,000-foot “buffer zone” outside of buildings.

‘Safe zones’ for criminals. Unbelievable.

The Foundry.

bloodcurdling endorsement of political violence I have seen from an elected official—and none other than Barack Obama spent the weekend sidling up to him.

Brief recap: Jones has not denied reports that he sent text messages fantasizing about shooting Todd Gilbert, the Republican former speaker of the House of Delegates. He said he would rather shoot Gilbert twice than kill Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot. He later said he wished Gilbert’s young children would die in their mother’s arms. He sent these messages to a Republican and, when she asked him to stop, he sought to justify these violent thoughts with one sentence:

“Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”

That’s the key justification for political violence: our agenda is more important than your life, or in this case, than your children’s lives.

New York magazine, a Voice of the Crust.

Last year’s election debacle, rooted in the rapid decline of the then-81-year-old Joe Biden, took a heavy toll on New Hampshire congresswoman Annie Kuster. “It was the most painful thing I’ve been through since my own parents aging,” she said of her up-close experiences with the former president. “Nobody wants to face incapacity.” It forced Kuster to look hard at her party. Months before the fateful presidential debate that exposed Biden’s frailty, Kuster, at a mere 68 years old, announced her retirement, having served in Congress for 12 years after turning a red seat reliably blue. Though fit and healthy, she was feeling her age on some issues. “We were dealing with AI, cryptocurrency,” she said of her work on the Energy and Commerce Committee. “I am not the person best situated to be dealing with these issues. I did my best to learn, but it’s just time for us to move over.”

Now, as debate rages among Democrats over how to improve their party’s abysmal reputation with voters, Kuster worries that the crucial lesson of 2024 has been forgotten, particularly by ancient officials clinging to their seats and seemingly doing everything in their power to prevent a younger generation of politicians from emerging. “People keep asking, ‘What’s wrong with the Democratic Party? What’s the right message?’” Kuster said. “They act like there are magic words. And it’s like, ‘It’s not a question of just getting the right words. It’s that we are too freaking old.’”

The Foundry.

New York Attorney General Letitia James is fighting a federal criminal probe over alleged “selective enforcement” in cases she brought against President Donald Trump’s business and the National Rifle Association, court documents unsealed Friday reveal.

James’ effort to block subpoenas issued by the Department of Justice touches “on matters of national concern, with implications that stretch well beyond this action,” Judge Lorna Schofield, an Obama appointee, wrote in her order making the filings public Friday.

“Unsealing this action is not only permissible but compelled,” the judge wrote. “One simple fact drives this conclusion: the information at issue is not secret.”

Read it.

The Democrat Party is “an elitist institution” that’s “way out of touch” with the country’s working class, according to liberal Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

In a wide-ranging interview for The New York Times Opinion series, Sanders said he learned “there is no Democratic Party” when he ran for the 2016 presidential nomination.

“One of the things that I learned is there isn’t much of a Democratic Party. There are people on the top,” Sanders told Times Opinion editorial director David Leonhardt.

Gee, there’s an echo in here….

Well, he ought to know.

Read it.

Almost 800,000 New Yorkers are planning to flee the city if Democrat candidate Zohran Mamdani wins Tuesday’s mayoral election, according to a poll carried out by J.L. Partners for the Daily Mail.

The survey found that 9% of New Yorkers would “definitely” leave the city, which currently has a population of some 8.5 million.

If those numbers were to depart, it would be equivalent to the entire population of Washington, D.C., Las Vegas, or Seattle fleeing the city.

Read it.

The epicenter of America’s power bill inflation crisis stretches across the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, where far-left state and city leaders have swallowed the globalist “climate crisis” pill, which even Bill Gates admitted last week that the climate crisis narrative was fake news.

The result of these leftist extremist “green” policies has been the systematic degradation of regional power grids in Mid-Atlantic and Northeast states, as reliable fossil-fuel generation was prematurely retired in favor of unreliable, intermittent solar and wind. These nation-destroying green policies have gutted spare grid capacity (read here) just as demand surges from data centers, onshoring, and the broader electrification push (read here), culminating in today’s power bill crisis.

A recent Goldman Sachs report by analyst Carly Davenport found that “higher power bill inflation has been the most pronounced in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and California in the past three years.”

Read it.

Whenever you delve into the modern history of internal national conflict you’re bound to come across post-crisis accounts from people who said “We never saw it coming…” or “The violence hit us from nowhere…” Generally speaking, these were the people who weren’t paying attention and they just happened to survive by sheer luck.

I think of this dynamic a lot these days. I see a large contingent of American society (perhaps 25% of the population) which has been radicalized or brainwashed beyond all reason or repair. These people (leftists) operate deep within a protective bubble of propaganda and zealotry; they function within a hive mind that does not deviate from the demands of their gatekeepers. They cannot be reasoned with, nor can they be satiated. They lust for power and the suffering of anyone who opposes them.

One can see an immediate difference between the sides. Conservatives are so independent we in-fight constantly. We might agree on basic values (even in this we sometimes argue), but in terms of policy and action we rarely shake hands.

For the political left, any disagreement with the majority leads to immediate ostracism. The hive mind does not tolerate individual rebellion. Only the gatekeepers can change the mindset or the mission of the mob.

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Los Angeles Fire Department crews were ordered to abandon a smoldering hillside blaze that later reignited into the catastrophic Palisades Fire — a move firefighters on the ground warned was a “bad idea,” The Los Angeles Times reported.

According to text messages reviewed by the Times, crews at the site of the Lachman Fire — an 8-acre blaze that broke out on New Year’s Day and was declared contained the next day — told their battalion chief that “the ground was still smoldering and rocks remained hot to the touch.”

Despite those warnings, the chief ordered firefighters to roll up their hoses and leave the area on Jan. 2, rather than remain to check for lingering embers that could reignite, according to the Times’ report Thursday.

“Yeah! Burn out all those rich fucks so we can buy it up for affordable housing on the cheap! That’s the ticket!”

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Organized labor is growing frustrated with the Democrats’ refusal to end the government shutdown.

The Southwest Airlines Pilot Association (SWAPA), Allied Pilots Association, and National Air Traffic Controllers Association appeared in a video released by the White House endorsing the Republicans stopgap government funding bill that Democrats refuse to help pass.

“The biggest way to ensure the safety, security, and reliability of our national air traffic control system is to pass a clean continuing resolution [CR],” said Jody Reven, president of the SWAPA.

Despite their name, Democrats really have no use for democracy.

UPDATE: Democrats’ rift with unions erupts as shutdown pain worsens (Axios)

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Democratic strategist James Carville said he has heard enough from former Vice President Kamala Harris as she promotes “107 Days,” her book about her failed 2024 presidential campaign.

“Let me be very clear here. No one that had anything to do with 2024, no Democrat wants to hear from you. We all voted for you,” Carville said on his “Politics War Room” podcast.

“OK, not [former first son] Hunter Biden, not Harris, not [Minnesota Gov.] Tim Walz, not the consultants, not anything. 2024 has left such a lingering bad taste in Democrats.

Well, when you pick somebody on the basis of skin color and ‘gender’, this is what you wind up with.

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Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is promoting her new book, “Independent,” but the effort has drawn ridicule from both journalists and some of her former colleagues, who say they can’t stop watching her awkward interviews.

Many former Biden staffers expressed astonishment at Jean-Pierre’s inability to answer basic questions and her tendency to ramble while defending former President Joe Biden’s fitness for office following his disastrous 2024 debate against now-President Donald Trump, Politico reported.

In interviews with The New Yorker, “CBS This Morning,” and “Late Night With Stephen Colbert,” Jean-Pierre has left journalists and hosts stunned as she continues to defend Biden, saying she never saw any cognitive decline in him.

Why do black women do their best to look as little as possible like black women?

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he last federal government shutdown, like the current one, was caused by Democrats’ support of illegal immigrants. That time, they won – until President Trump took an extraordinary measure to thwart their agenda.

On January 25, 2019 during his first term, Pres. Trump ended a record-long, 34-day federal government shutdown by signing a continuing resolution (CR) providing funding through February 15 of that year.

The shutdown was triggered because Democrats objected to funding the construction of a U.S.-Mexico border wall to stem the tide of illegal immigrants flooding into the country. By filibustering the Trump Administration’s government funding plan because it included $5.7 billion for the border wall, Senate Democrats kept the government closed until Trump relented and agreed to a CR funding the government at current levels without money for the border wall.

Democrats had promised to engage in good faith negotiations regarding border security – if Trump would cave and sign the CR devoid of border wall funding. But, the continuing resolution funded the government for only an additional three weeks.

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Tim Pool does what he does best.

An interesting illustration of what happens when the bread & circuses get cut off. “They cain’t catch everybody.”

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A new round of Obamacare enrollment begins on Nov. 1 against the backdrop of an ongoing partial government shutdown that revolves around a debate over Democrats’ demands to expand the controversial 2010 law.

Then-President Barack Obama and other Democrats made numerous promises about the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.

The following are four broken promises from the Obamacare law.

More accurately, four LIES told by Obama to get his semi-socilaized-medicine program passed.

Power Line.

So far, I wouldn’t have noticed Chuck Schumer’s government “shutdown” if it hadn’t been in the newspapers. The government is still withholding money from my paychecks, so the shutdown is obviously less than complete. I don’t depend on SNAP or other government programs, although I sympathize with those who do:

But I do travel a lot, and the Schumer Shutdown is starting to affect air travel and, perhaps, air safety.

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Zohran Mamdani, the Democrat nominee for New York City mayor, reportedly faces two criminal referrals accusing his campaign of accepting illegal contributions from foreign donors.

The referrals were filed by the Coolidge Reagan Foundation, claiming Mamdani might have violated the Federal Election Campaign Act and New York Election Code.

The foundation filed the referrals with the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office Tuesday.

Mandami is really getting the hang of being a Democrat.

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When President Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on Chinese goods, the Chinese Communist Party didn’t just retaliate with trade measures. It launched an information war, using American insiders to spread its narrative that tariffs were reckless and self-defeating.

One of the most prominent voices in that campaign is Rick Waters, a former senior U.S. diplomat who once directed the State Department’s China House.

positions, appearing with CCP-linked influence groups and using Western media outlets to promote pro-China talking points that undermine Trump’s trade strategy.