Read it.

The Department of Justice report on the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Tx was released today. It is about a 600-page report. I’m just starting to read the report, but I will say that the law enforcement response was an epic failure.

Words matter in training and in my opinion the words ‘Hunter Cells’ should be used to reinforce the concept that in an active shooter situation the first officer(s) that arrive at the scene are not perimeter builders and should not wait for a supervisor or incident commander to start hunting for the shooter. The only reactive part of searching for an active shooter is the dispatch call. The proactive action is searching for and neutralizing the shooter.

I will try to write a series of posts involving the DOJ report.

Read it.

Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the liberal ladies of ABC’s The View celebrated by making a mockery of Dr. King’s legacy. In addition to spreading the usual lies about Republicans trying to erase black people from history, white co-host Sara Haines proclaimed that it was “important” for white kids like her own to be made to “feel bad” in history class, particularly about slavery. She demanded this while no one living today was involved in the slavery of the past.

Setting the stage for Haines’s insane demand, staunchly racist and anti-Semitic co-host Sunny Hostin spewed her usual anti-American falsehood about how the country was founded on slavery. “What happens is when you’ve had privilege for so long, equality feels a lot like oppression,” she chided her critics.

Hostin herself had a very warped perspective on what oppression actually was. Despite being a multimillionaire who brags about not needing to shop for groceries in years, Hostin insists she’s “oppressed” and demands her reparations.

Read it.

Desperate for members and knowing the importance of getting in on the ground floor, the Association of Flight Attendants-Communication Workers of America (AFA-CWA) saw an opportunity with startup airline Avelo.

The AFA-CWA recruited flight attendants to its cause almost before the airline got off the ground.

The union filed an application for an election when the company was in its infancy and there were only 14 eligible voters. At the time of the election, there were nearly 100 flight attendants, but through a loophole in the law, only the original 14 were allowed to vote, and of them, eight voted for the union.

Since then, the company has continued to grow. Now, Avelo Airlines’ 200-plus flight attendants are saddled up with a union voted in by eight people. Think of that: More than 200 people have been forced into an affiliation with an entity that only eight of them embraced.

And there’s still no contract. The AFA-CWA may claim to be adept at contract negotiations, but nearly two years have already passed with no end in sight to negotiations.

Look for … the Union label….

Read it.

My local Home Depot now locks up a great many things. I don’t have time to ring a bell and cool my heels – so I walk out and purchase online instead.

The net result is that prices will soar at these stores (just to pay for the staff, and reduced demand from impatient shoppers). And Amazon (and equivalents) will soon be the only ways to purchase the stuff people steal from stores.

A good start to the day consists of taking a nap. After breakfast, of course.

I remember, when I was in the Navy, getting together with my colleagues to discuss what we were going to do for the day. We called it “Quarters for Muster”.

BBC.

It’s a common sight at many retail stores: a queue of people, waiting to use a self-checkout kiosk, doing their best to remain patient as a lone store worker attends to multiple malfunctioning machines. The frustration mounts while a dozen darkened, roped-off and cashier-less tills sit in the background.

For shoppers, self-checkout was supposed to provide convenience and speed. Retailers hoped it would usher in a new age of cost savings. Their thinking: why pay six employees when you could pay one to oversee customers at self-service registers, as they do their own labour of scanning and bagging for free?

While self-checkout technology has its theoretical selling points for both consumers and businesses, it mostly isn’t living up to expectations. Customers are still queueing. They need store employees to help clear kiosk errors or check their identifications for age-restricted items. Stores still need to have workers on-hand to help them, and to service the machines.

The technology is, in some cases, more trouble than it’s worth.

That’s in addition to people such as myself who object to them on principle.

ZMan adds some needed focus.

The basis of all human societies is reciprocal obligations. Social contract theory rests on this assumption. Monarchy rests on a collection of reciprocal vertical relationships that bind the king to the lowest peasant. The social club assumes the members will be loyal to the club and its members. In return, the members get benefits from the club and fellow members exclusive to them. A club that has no duties to the members is not a club, but a random collection of strangers.

This is the central defect of conservatism. When the people we call the left claim society has some new moral duty, conservatives never challenge the moral duty, but instead fall into a form of bourgeois anarchism. Terrified of challenging the left on moral grounds, they instead argue that society has no duties at all. In the case of the mega-corp screwing its employees, they say the company has no duties to them. Conservatism is always an answer to a question no one asked.

Read it.

In 1996 in the Tazmanian city of Port Arthur a man by the name of Martin Bryant killed 35 people using semi-automatic rifles in what would later be known as the Port Arthur Massacre. This singular event was quickly used as a rationale for the banning of most firearms for Australian civilians, but the new regulations were not a product of Port Arthur. Rather, anti-gun politicians had been pushing for restrictions and confiscation for many years prior; Port Arthur simply gave them enough public panic to get their legislation passed.

This is the modus operandi of the typical anti-gun lobby – Wait for a tragedy and then exploit it to punish all law abiding citizens for the crimes of a handful of deranged people. It doesn’t make much sense unless you realize that gun control laws are not meant to thwart criminals, they are meant to thwart good people who might object to government trespasses.

Read it.

Superior Court Judge William Clark nullified the results of a Democrat mayoral primary in November 2023 and ordered a new election. The ruling was based on hours of video evidence showing hundreds of illegally harvested absentee ballots being stuffed into drop boxes in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

“The videos are shocking to the court and should be shocking to all the parties,” Judge Clark wrote in his ruling.

A California judge overturned the result in a 2021 Compton City Council run-off race that was initially decided by one vote.

Block Club Chicago.

The city is considering installing bollards in retail sectors across the city as thieves continue to crash cars into luxury and local businesses before ransacking them, two alderpeople said.

The news comes after a smash-and-grab Monday morning at a Prada store on the Gold Coast, 30 E. Oak St., which resulted in a shootout between two police officers and a 33-year-old man now charged with attempted murder and burglary.

Smash-and-grabs have been thrown into the spotlight as videos often circulate online of people breaking into stores and leaving with as many items as they can carry. In the past year, this has included using a stolen car to smash through a window to get inside.

Other stores hit in recent months include a West Loop luxury boutique and several streetwear stores.

Read it.

Imagine being trapped in London rush hour traffic next to a huge 4500F / 2500C fireball, or even worse, being a passenger trapped on the upper deck of a burning EV.

Read it.

A former civil servant, Anna Stanley reports on a counter-terrorism course she attended which she found a deeply, existentially depressing experience. She argues that ‘prestigious’ educational institutions are delivering politically biased, anti-government training, amounting to indoctrination and that extremism and terrorism are misunderstood by civil servants to the point of being a national security risk.

I recently attended a Kings College course called ‘Issues in Countering Terrorism’. Organised by the Centre for Defence Studies, it was designed for civil servants and professionals in Counter Terrorism. Staff from the Foreign Office, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Defence and Home Office attended. Facilitating this relatively new 3 day course were senior lecturers from the Security Studies Department.

The civil servants were given presentations by Kings College lecturers while Visiting Senior Research Fellows and Professors also spoke. These included those formerly holding positions such as Permanent Secretary of the Home Office and Director of GCHQ, Defence Minister and Foreign Office Director.

PJ Media.

These Fani Willis allegations are getting crazier by the day. By now, I’m sure you’ve read Athena Thorne’s intrepid report on the accusations that Willis hired an attorney with whom she is supposedly carrying on an extramarital affair as a special prosecutor in the Trump RICO case, despite his lack of qualifications with that type of litigation. The special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, also allegedly met with White House representatives about the case.

I penned a follow-up piece about another Willis hire, Pallavi Bailey, who serves as the DA’s spokeswoman. She is married to Charlie Bailey, who ran for lieutenant governor and lost in 2022. Willis hired Pallavi Bailey and actively campaigned for Charlie Bailey while using the Trump grand jury to target Burt Jones, his rival in the lieutenant governor’s race. Targeting Jones led a judge to bar Willis from investigating him due to the conflict of interest.

But now the plot thickens for the beleaguered prosecutor, who probably just wants to be left alone so she can take Trump down and profit off that achievement. The estranged wife of Willis’ alleged sneaky link wants her to testify in their divorce proceedings.

The Other McCain.

In Seattle, one of the richest cities in the world, entire blocks of downtown streets have become open-air drug markets, but — BUT! — you can’t get a plastic straw in a restaurant there.

ZMan doesn’t have a lot of respect for the political process.

The entirely authentic and on the level Republican Party primary is about to kick off for real next week with the Iowa Caucus. The totally legitimate and sincere debates came to an end with Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley declared the finalists. They booted Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy from the debates because no one cared about Christie and Ramaswamy was too normal. Despite both having no chance to win next week, the party had DeSantis and Haley debate last night.

Of course, none of this is on the level. The reason there are debates at all is everyone knows the party will remove Trump from the ballot if the court does not go along with the crackpot scheme to use the 14th amendment. Regime media is holding these debates thinking they will get to pick the replacement. They are probably right about that, given the ridiculousness of the Republican Party. Even the candidates admit they are running to be the party’s regime approved booby prize.

Politics has always been theater, but now it is the theater of the absurd where everyone pretends that this is all on the level, while knowing that it is not on the level and that everyone in the country knows it is not on the level. The Solzhenitsyn line captures this farce of a primary campaign perfectly. We know that they are lying and they know they are lying. They know that we know they are lying. We also know that they know we know they are lying, but they keep lying.

Read it.

The University of Michigan continues to exponentially grow the number of staffers dedicated to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion, with at least 241 paid employees now focused on DEI and payroll costs exceeding $30 million annually, according to an analysis conducted for The College Fix.

The payroll costs are $23.24 million for salaries and $7.44 million for benefits, or $30.68 million, an amount that would cover in-state tuition and fees for 1,781 undergraduate students.

Thirteen DEI staff members earn more than $200,000 and 66 earn more than $100,000 when factoring in benefits.

Read it.

Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) published its official figures for 2023 on Monday, January 8th, revealing that asylum requests have increased significantly compared to 2022.

The data shows that there were nearly 352,000 asylum applications submitted in Germany last year, an increase of 51.1% compared to the 218,000 applications in the year before. The figure includes 23,000 ‘subsequent’ applications from migrants who have already been rejected at least once.

The statistics also make it clear that Ukrainian refugees are not included, as they are provided with a separate scheme to apply for asylum in the country. Germany hosts the largest population of Ukrainian refugees in Europe at nearly 1.2 million, or close to 29% of all people who fled Ukraine for the European Union.

The Foundry.

Our nation’s capital is a model of dysfunctional, clueless blue city governance. Nothing highlights that better than the explosion of crime—and especially carjackings—since 2020.

The official 2023 year-end tally of carjackings in Washington, D.C., ended up being a staggering 959, twice the number of the previous year. There were 152 carjackings in 2019. That number more than doubled in 2020, and it has been soaring ever since.

What’s particularly hard to believe is that 65% of the carjackings last year were committed by perpetrators under the age of 18.

Perhaps I need a new Category: Blue State Blues.

The American Mind.

The seeds of this movement were planted long ago, but its blooming flower bears only a superficial resemblance to the seed. Progressivism was once the seed. The term is still in use on the Left; but the flower of progressivism today is identity politics. It needs to be identified as such. Affirmative action, too, was once the seed. The term is still in use on the Left; but the flower of affirmative action is more appropriately named spiritual eugenics, as I have written elsewhere. In this twenty-first century version of eugenics, the impure identity groups—whites, Asians, Jews—must be purged; and the innocent victims must be elevated, whatever their scholarly record, perhaps even to the rank of university president. It is long past time for the spiritual eugenics that is now at the heart of higher education to be identified and repudiated. If left unchecked, it will someday yield real purges, involving bloodshed.

Let us be clear-headed about what our colleges and universities have always been. Almost every institution of higher education in America founded prior to the twentieth century was religious from the outset. Their seed was Christianity. Harvard, Yale, Princeton—all of them were self-consciously Christian. And from that seed grew the flowers, from which other seeds sprang: the social gospel movement of the late nineteenth century; Progressivism in the early twentieth century, which as I indicated above provided the germ from which identity politics grew. All of these movements would have been inconceivable had our colleges and universities not provided the soil for their growth. Not by accident has Harvard been ground zero for the growth of all the quasi-religious “social movements” that have transformed America. From the seed of its Calvinism has come the flower of identity politics. And it is not good.

OffGuardian.

Will 2024 be the year the Deep State’s exercise in controlled chaos finally gives way to an apocalyptic dismantling of our constitutional republic, or what’s left of it?

All the signs seem to point in this direction.

Read it.

As a child of the ’80s, I recall with great fondness the Christmases of my youth: full of stinging cold winters and reassuring fireside warmings up; snowball fights and tobogganing; turkey dinners and endless festivities. They provided the perfect segue into the new year, with its accompaniment of bonfires, piping hot jacket potatoes, and mesmerising firework displays. I don’t think it’s naïve to say I cannot recall a single violent episode, save for a very British exhibition of tutting one year, over the lack of queuing etiquette witnessed at the hotdog stand.

I must be mistaken, however, because the festive season no longer looks anything like that. Christmas markets are increasingly facing cancellation, on the pretext of ‘public safety.’ Those that remain are becoming ‘winter’ markets. Choirs and Santas have been replaced with armed guards; presents with metal detectors and concrete bollards, because you never know when those self-driving cars are going to get uppity again, do you?

Meanwhile, New Year’s Eve has become less celebration, more conflagration. Last year’s Europe-wide festivities were particularly un-Christian in this regard. In Germany alone, there was widespread rioting across Berlin, Hamburg, and North Rhine-Westphalia, where several hundred people were arrested. With 41 emergency service personnel injured, clearly it was essential to identify where the aggression was coming from. “Apparently predominantly young men in groups, often with a migration background,” was the furthest the authorities were willing to go.

San Francisco Standard.

A group representing drug users in San Francisco has posted signs promoting drug use and criticizing law enforcement across the Tenderloin neighborhood, the center of the city’s open-air drug scene.

Created by an entity called the Drug User Liberation Collective, the signs, measuring approximately 8 inches by 11 inches, aim to counter a recent initiative under Mayor London Breed to arrest people who use drugs in public, according to Nova Schultz, the creator of the campaign.

The signs blame Breed’s recent drug-enforcement measures for last year’s record-breaking number of overdose deaths. They argue the negative stigma of drug use is responsible for problems in the Tenderloin—rather than drug use itself.

OffGuardian.

So, what’s with all the fake crying?

Rachel Maddow pretended to cry about “kids in cages”. Matt Hancock pretended to cry about Covid vaccines. Sarah Sidner pretended to cry over covid. Anderson Cooper pretended to cry about Israel, so did John Kirby. Van Jones pretended to cry after Biden “won” the 2020 “election”. Adam Schiff and Adam Kinzinger both pretended to cry about January 6th.

Don Lemon pretends to cry about pretty much everything.

They all do it, and they’re all so bad at it.

Read it.

The Turd World invasion of Europe continues unabated.

N. Y. Post.

A mob of over 100 looters purposefully crashed a Kia into a small bakery in Compton, Calif., before they flooded in and ransacked the store during a night of rampage on the streets earlier this week.

The thieves had gathered in the area for an illegal street takeover around 3 a.m. Tuesday before making the mile-long trek to Ruben’s Bakery & Mexican Food.

When they got to the locked store, a white Kia backed into the front doors, clearing an entryway for the crowd of pillagers to get to their loot.

Straight outa Compton … time to leave.

Read it.

Despite promises to reduce illegal migration and attempts at negotiating deals with countries outside of the European Union to curb migration flows, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s first full year as the head of the Italian government has been marked by failure.

The Italian interior ministry announced that in 2023 a total of 155,754 illegal migrants had arrived in Italy, up from 103,846 in 2022, an increase of nearly 50%, according to a report from the European Union-funded website InfoMigrants.

For Meloni, the numbers are representative of the biggest failure of her government so far. She had campaigned hard on reducing illegal immigration prior to the 2022 election that saw her party, the national-conservative Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), shock the world and place first, ensuring her premiership in a right-wing coalition government.

Read it.

Real America’s Voice host Ben Bergquam published a video on social media platform X that exposes what is described as a ‘guerrilla camp’ on the southern border, operated by radical leftist groups, which are aiding in the illegal migrant invasion by cartels.

“OK, here is the whole video. You have to watch it all – it just gets worse and worse! Leftists caught directly aiding and abetting the invasion of our country the wall in Sasabe, Arizona,” Bergquam wrote on X.

He continued: ” These are some of the same people that we previously exposed harboring illegals at their camp in Arivaca. How do we save our country when we allow enemies within to do this? When we take power back, these organizations must be defunded and prosecuted.”

Read it.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspectors uncovered problems at a Moderna plant used to manufacture a substance that is part of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine, according to a newly released document.

Moderna failed to meet multiple requirements, including rules aimed at minimizing the potential for contamination, according to the document.

FDA inspectors performed inspections at the plant in Norwood, Massachusetts from, Sept. 11 to Sept. 21, visiting nine times in total.

Politico.

Before we blame the individuals on center stage, however, we should look at the structural causes that brought us to this moment. A big reason for our disenchantment is that the job of a university president no longer prioritizes being a pioneering thought leader, but instead requires the skills of a savvy lobbyist. For most large universities, administrators’ attention has increasingly focused on outside funding and large revenue generators and away from student instruction and traditional scholarship.

One significant reason — one that has been wholly unappreciated but is growing in importance — is the role many universities play in our nation’s health sector. Universities with health systems are better understood as health systems with universities. As such, they are highly dependent on the graces and whims of policymakers, and their leaders are structurally restrained from asserting independence against, or challenging the wrongheaded politics of, elected leaders. In the end, academic freedom is the big loser.

National Geographic.

On the fourth floor of the Museum of the Bible, a sweeping permanent exhibit tells the story of how the ancient scripture became the world’s most popular book. A warmly lit sanctum at the exhibit’s heart reveals some of the museum’s most prized possessions: fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient texts that include the oldest known surviving copies of the Hebrew Bible.

But now, the Washington, D.C. museum has confirmed a bitter truth about the fragments’ authenticity. On Friday, independent researchers funded by the Museum of the Bible announced that all 16 of the museum’s Dead Sea Scroll fragments are modern forgeries that duped outside collectors, the museum’s founder, and some of the world’s leading biblical scholars. Officials unveiled the findings at an academic conference hosted by the museum.

“The Museum of the Bible is trying to be as transparent as possible,” says CEO Harry Hargrave. “We’re victims—we’re victims of misrepresentation, we’re victims of fraud.”

Read it.

At least four police officers were hurt Saturday in what has been dubbed a ‘diversity riot’ in London.

The incident in Camberwell, South London saw a violent mob of stick-wielding hoodlums, some reportedly of Ethiopian descent and some Eritreans, attempting to stop a meeting inside a nearby theatre that was being attended by representatives of the government of the East African nation.

The footage shows that as police attempted to control the situation, they quickly found themselves under attack.

A major problem with letting large numbers of foreigners into your country is that they often bring their quarrels with them from The Old Country.

Strategy Page.

This is our annual summary of current war zones and an overview of where it is all heading. After this overview there is the alphabetical list of the war zones and a quick summary of how the local mayhem has been proceeding. Since we have been covering this sort of thing for over twenty years now, there are many war zones that have gone quiet. We left most of those in summary, with a note that those wars had gone dormant, and maybe extinct. History shows that dormant is more common than extinct. Forever wars, or at least multi-century ones, are an ancient tradition.

Read it.

Republicans like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott have effectively led sanctuary cities to regret their policies as southern border migrants flood their cities to the “breaking point.”

“New York City has begun to see another surge of migrants arriving, and we expect this to intensify over the coming days as a result of Texas Gov. Abbott’s cruel and inhumane politics,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said this week.

“For many months, we were able to keep the visualization of this crisis from hitting our streets, but we have reached a breaking point and can no longer do that.”

Read it.

It always comes as a surprise to some people when Communists actually act like Communists.

OffGuardian.

I think many people believe that our society has gotten so complex, with so many people, and so much need for consumption of natural resources in order to be comfortable, that what the government is forcing on us now is required to survive.

This includes all the control, restrictions, forced vaccines, lockdowns, censorship of free speech, 15-minute cities, and a myriad of other restrictions and mandates. This belief is inanely stupid, but stupid is as stupid does. What can ‘ya say?

Hey, I’m really tired of pussy footing around all this garbage. I’m now calling a spade a spade and forgetting about being polite or politically correct. These people who believe this charade are destroying our lives, as well as destroying humanity itself.

Read it.

A shop owner in Germany was denounced as a racist for complaining about migrants mass looting his store, while a left-wing politician sided with the criminals, saying they were “entitled” to steal.

ZMan shakes his head.

The remarkable thing thus far about the 2024 presidential election is that the so-called conservatives, and therefore the Republican Party, have gone into this process without having prepared for it. They have experienced two presidential cycles that went entirely against their interests, yet they have not done anything over the last eight years to prepare for this cycle. Their plan, if you want to call it a plan, is to pray the other party eliminates Trump for them via lawfare.

We know with a fair bit of certainty that the party told the collection of munchkins showing up at debates that they expected Trump to be disqualified. In the first debate, the zombie-like Asa Hutchinson blurted this out during the questioning. In the last debate, Ron DeSantis said something along the lines that the option for voters is what was onstage due to Trump’s legal troubles. It was long rumored that he decided to run based on the assurance that Trump would be eliminated.

Now, that is a plan, of sorts, but only if you think the only problem you have as a party is this one man wrecking your fun. Get rid of the bad man and the party, along with the so-called conservative movement, can go back to the old times. They are even bringing back the neocon nutters to promote a dingbat. It is as if they think they are just one more court ruling from going back to 2000 when they could pass off a simpleton to their voters as the updated version of The Gipper.

Read it.

minor but significant spark of direct action occurred in New York on 15 December. A group of people entered a Whole Foods store (owned by Amazon), took groceries without paying and exited wearing Jeff Bezos masks.

Independent reporter Talia Jane posted the following on Twitter/X:

“The action was in protest against corporate wealth alongside increased food insecurity & to call attention to Amazon’s contracts with Israel.”

She also posted a video of the event with people throwing around flyers and shouting, “Feed the people, eat the rich!” Jane stated the food was later redistributed and given to food ‘distros’ and community care spaces feeding migrants and the unhoused.

Read it.

Once upon a time, different institutions believed in different things.

Take universities. We had Royalist Oxford and Parliamentarian Cambridge; later came UCL, the “Godless college of Gower Street”; King’s College London was the Tory response. As 2023 began, our graduates received their new-year alumni magazines, featuring refreshingly identical opinions on sustainability, migration, decolonisation.

Like in early East Germany, private companies still exist, but they increasingly understand that their role is to support the state and its ideology. The chief executive of KLM airlines asks people to take fewer flights for the sake of Net Zero; a new label on Nescafé jars reminds instant-coffee drinkers to celebrate “gender diversity”.

Read it.

A network of NGOs, or non-governmental organizations, seems to be playing a powerful role in coordinating the large-scale invasion of illegals at the US southern border.

The new website Muckraker revealed a treasure trove of “mass migration blueprints,” handed out by NGOs across South and Central America to illegals with details about their route to the US.

Read it.

Australia is the latest country to reject a request from the United States to send warships to the Red Sea under the command of the Pentagon’s Operation Prosperity Guardian to protect commercial vessels along the critical maritime trade route from Iran-backed Houthi.

Defense Minister Richard Marles told Sky News that Australia’s military would not send a “ship or a plane” to the Red Sea but would triple the number of troops for the US-led maritime force.

Jonathan Turley.

As the House of Representatives goes into high gear in its impeachment proceedings (and possible contempt resolution against Hunter Biden), the Biden family legal problems continue to mount. In one week, it was revealed that President Biden’s brother James was caught on an FBI audiotape in a corruption investigation, while Ashley Biden, the president’s daughter, is now also facing demands for unpaid taxes.

James Biden is expected to appear before the House for questioning in the coming weeks.

The appearance may solidify a new line of defense for the Bidens: that they are harmless grifters.

Read it.

Governor Katie Hobbs has had a change of heart over the immigration crisis on Arizona’s southern border. She recently reversed an earlier decision against deploying the National Guard, now sending over 200 Tucson sector troops and committing up to $5 million in Arizona taxpayer money to send troops to the Lukeville Port of Entry.

Hobbs also demanded the federal government reimburse Arizona $512.5 million for “migrant transportation, drug interdiction and law enforcement” expenses incurred under the Biden administration. She also promised to seek reimbursement “regularly” from the feds for Arizona’s border crisis mitigation.

What sparked the flurry of activity from our heretofore passive chief? Finally, the direct expenses to Arizona could no longer be ignored. They’re affecting Arizona’s budget and future financial viability.

For Hobbs and scores of other Democrat mayors and governors, compassionate sympathy with the plight of illegal immigrants was a good image so long as the expense was borne elsewhere. Hundreds of sanctuary cities were formed. Mayors from New York Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities basked in assuring that theirs was an open, caring place. Like Biden himself, they welcomed illegal immigrants to our shores. Sure, they heard the reports of complaints from border communities suffering from growing hordes of needy illegal immigrants, but those were mostly just red state conservatives anyway.

However, when the influx of visitors became so overwhelming that they had to be exported around the country, perspectives changed. Too late Hobbs and the others realized the growth was out of control and the fiscal demands truly unsustainable. Their pleas for help from the feds were ignored.

Read it.

For the 10th consecutive year, Illinois lost population. Only West Virginia was worse.

Read it.

A United Nations official said in an interview last week that Palestinians who kill Israeli soldiers are not guilty of crimes because such killings are in line with their “right to resist,” in the latest controversial comments by the anti-Israel official.

“If the Palestinians target civilian objects, they commit war crimes,” said Francesca Albanese, U.N. special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, in an interview on the podcast Makdisi Street. “If they target military objects, they do not commit war crimes—they are in line with acts of resistance.”

Albanese went on to criticize “Western media” outlets that have condemned “every Palestinian action,” including attacks on soldiers.

“The killing of soldiers—it’s, I mean, frankly, it’s a tragedy, but it’s not a crime,” Albanese said. “Instead, very often, when Palestinians manage to attack soldiers, they are portrayed as terrorists. And this is a misunderstanding that needs to be addressed.”

Read it.

Mayor Muriel Bowser’s leadership in Washington, DC, has become a spectacular disaster. The nation’s capital is grappling with a massive surge in carjackings and murders – no thanks to her failed social justice reforms (such as defunding the police).

Read it.

At least three teachers have lost their day jobs after using OnlyFans for a side hustle.

Two high school teachers from Missouri were placed on leave after word got out that they had personal OnlyFans accounts, Fox News Digital reported. The move received both praise and ridicule.

Megan Gaither and Brianna Coppage, both now-former teachers at St. Clair High School, apparently started “selling racy content to pay off student loans.” Gaither had $125,000 in student loans to pay off and turned to the digital prostitution site to supplement her income. Coppage, who makes only $42,000 annually as a teacher, is now “among the platform’s top creators, raking in nearly $1 million since she began the account over the summer,” Fox News Digital added.