Archive for October, 2021
28th October 2021
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After five years in the wilderness, Huma Abedin is finally getting Beltway buzz again. Abedin has been Hillary Clinton’s shadow since 1996, controlling access, cleaning up gaffes, and plotting Hillary’s rise to the presidency. Huma was flattered with decades of beat-sweetening puff pieces by reporters desperate for an ally in Hillary’s inner circle. In November 2016, the knives came out. Coverage since has been meager and sordid, often focused on her soap-opera marriage to Anthony Weiner.
That all changed Tuesday with Simon and Schuster’s announcement of her new autobiography. Being clever marketers, they dangled an excerpt sure to tantalize gossips in the DC media.
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | 1 Comment »
27th October 2021
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Pandemic Panic – It’s Titanic
27th October 2021
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
27th October 2021
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
27th October 2021
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on #BidenRemorse: The Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
27th October 2021
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Histyeria
27th October 2021
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Politico is reporting that Congressional Democrats are pondering major cuts to Medicare Advantage, a system of competing private health plans, to help pay for their massive multitrillion dollar spending bill.
This would be a bad policy. Compared to traditional Medicare, Medicare Advantage provides better benefits, lower costs, and higher quality care.
Medicare Advantage is a popular alternative to traditional Medicare. From 2011 to 2020 alone, private plan enrollment grew by 103% compared to overall Medicare growth of 28%. This year, private plans are projected to enroll over 27 million senior and disabled Americans or an estimated 43% of the total Medicare population.
The program’s rapid growth is not hard to explain. It works.
And because it works, Democrats hate it.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | 1 Comment »
27th October 2021
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Andrew Breitbart’s axiom has been repeated so often in right-wing commentary that it has become something of a cliché: politics is downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of religion. But an essential feature is missing from this exercise in hydro-political cartography. Near the source of the river, just across from the church, there is a farm.
It may seem outlandish to claim that the way we farm and the way we pray are comparable in their influence on culture and therefore on politics. But it only seems that way from the vantage point of deracinated modernity. Indeed, agriculture has always preceded and underpinned culture. It takes no intellectual leap of faith to trace our obesity and other health crises back to what we grow, and how we grow it. Likewise, if we are what we eat, then our national (and civilizational) identity crisis should come as no surprise: we no longer know who we are because we no longer know what we are eating, or by what means it has arrived on our plates.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Farmtrad Life’s Lessons
27th October 2021
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Why Teslas Keep Striking Parked Firetrucks and Police Cars
27th October 2021
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Evolution. It’s not just for breakfast any more.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Female African Elephants Are Evolving Without Tusks Due to Ivory Poaching
27th October 2021
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A federal jury in Charlotte awarded a former top executive with Novant Health Inc. $10 million on Tuesday after he claimed in a lawsuit that he was fired from his job because he is a white male, court records show.
David Duvall, who lives in Michigan, said in his 2019 lawsuit that he lost his job as senior vice president of marketing and communication in July 2018 at Novant Health because of the company’s efforts to diversify many of its top leadership positions.
The jury said that Duvall proved that his race and gender were motivating factors in Novant Health’s decision to terminate him, according to the jury’s verdict form. The jury also indicated that Novant Health failed to prove that it would have dismissed Duvall regardless of his race.
Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on White Man Who Claimed Novant Discriminated Against Him Wins $10 Million Jury Verdict
27th October 2021
ZMan takes a broad view.
One way to measure the health of a society is to look at how the ruling elite of that society protects the things that are important to the society. Just as the management of a company cannot micromanage every aspect of the firm, the ruling class cannot make sure every rule and custom is strictly enforced. It has to focus its energy on the big items that make the society possible. From there this attitude will flow down to the lower levels who will enforce the smaller rules.
What the ruling elite of a society does by enforcing the big rules, especially those that manage the affairs of the ruling class, is set the tone. A disciplined ruling class reinforces the idea that the rules matter, and they must be respected. This attitude becomes a habit of mind for the people. On the other hand, a ruling class that has no respect for its own rules helps foster a culture of cheating. If it is okay for the bosses to cheat, then only a sucker follows the rules.
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The elephant in the room on this topic is Covid. The idea of science has been so corrupted that it is now warping the language. Because the vaccines do not actually work as promised, the language is being changed to fit the crime. It used to be that vaccines provided immunity from infection by a specific virus. Now immunity means a sense of happiness that comes from compliance. You may still die from Covid, or you could become immortal. Who can tell anymore?
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Corruption of the Soul
27th October 2021
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A former Weather Underground militant has been granted parole 40 years after taking part in the infamous Brink’s armored car robbery that left two policemen and a security guard dead, it was announced Tuesday.
David Gilbert, 77, will be released by Nov. 30, the New York Department of Corrections said. He had been convicted of taking part in the ambush, which was planned by the Black Liberation Army.
Gilbert was granted a parole hearing after former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y., commuted his 75-years-to-life sentence, The New York Times reported.
The disgraced Cuomo did so in one of his final acts as governor before leaving office amid numerous sexual harassment allegations. Gilbert otherwise would not have been eligible for parole until 2056.
Posted in Democrats: Party of Plundering and Blundering | Comments Off on Militant Granted Parole 40 Years After Deadly Brinks Heist
27th October 2021
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Lithium is prized because it is lightweight and can store lots of energy, making it an important component in batteries for electric vehicles and as reservoirs for excess energy generated by wind turbines and solar panels. Demand for lithium-ion batteries is expected to grow between five- and 10-fold by the end of the decade, and the world must ramp up production quickly to move away from fossil fuels.
This find could contribute to that. But under Maine’s recently enacted mining laws, it’s unclear whether it will ever be extracted.
As always, government is the problem, not the solution.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Staggering $1.5 Billion Lithium Deposit Discovered Near Newry; Excavating It Poses a Challenge
27th October 2021
Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on It’s the Day
27th October 2021
Black Actress Cut Out From Chinese Version of ‘Dune’ Poster Since she was replacing a white male in the book, perhaps the Chinese are just being literary purists.
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
27th October 2021
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
26th October 2021
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The controversy stems from the News Tab. Facebook’s News Tab aggregates news articles from various outlets and presents them to users within the app and on desktop. Internal chats indicate that Facebook employees worked to control the narrative on controversial political issues like the Jan. 6 riot.
Some employees targeted Breibart, a right-wing media platform. “Get Breitbart out of News Tab,” one message read.
“My argument is that allowing Breibart to monetize through us is, in fact, a political statement,” another message added. “It is an acceptance of extreme, hateful and often false news used to propagate fear, racism and bigotry. On a daily basis, it publishes articles that I believe insult our values as a company.”
“The fact that we have a partner manager program for misinformation escalations at all is disheartening to me,” yet another message continued.
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Internal Facebook Chats Show Politics Trumps All
26th October 2021
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on #BidenRemorse: The Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
26th October 2021
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
26th October 2021
John Hinderaker at Power Line.
I am proud of the friends we at Power Line have made over the years, but I am also proud that we have made enemies of some truly hateful individuals and organizations. For me, Exhibit A is Education Minnesota, the National Education Association’s affiliate in my state.
Education Minnesota is by far the number one political force in Minnesota. The teachers’ union dominates our state legislature and gets pretty much whatever it wants. Its influence is malign: for decades, it has opposed every effort to reform and improve Minnesota’s public schools, almost always successfully.
UPDATE: Defund the Education “Deep State”
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Enemies We Make
26th October 2021
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“When your father dies, your accounting degree is not going to help you at all to process that experience. Homer will help you.”
Homer’s poems, the Illiad and the Odyssey, were the Bible of Greek civilization: Everybody knew them, everybody quoted them, everybody internalized them as the foundation of their culture.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Daniel Mendelsohn on the Odyssey
26th October 2021
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A former Bernie Sanders adviser indicted for embezzling money from a labor union is now leading the progressive push to unseat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.).
Chuck Rocha, the founder of Nuestro PAC, launched the “Run Ruben Run” campaign to encourage Rep. Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.) to primary Sinema in 2024. Rocha’s criminal past surfaced during the 2016 presidential campaign after he joined the Sanders campaign. The longtime labor activist was sentenced to 24 months probation and fined $2,000 after he was convicted of embezzling funds from the United Steelworkers International Union, where he served as political director. Rocha admitted to misusing a union credit card in 2008 and 2009 to pay for golf outings and Stanley Cup tickets.
Nuestro PAC is one of several groups working to unseat Sinema because of her opposition to President Joe Biden’s massive $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” initiative. Way to Win, a group funded by liberal donor George Soros, formed the Primary Sinema PAC, though it has not endorsed a specific candidate. The primary efforts highlight growing disunity within the Democratic Party over the Biden spending plan.
Posted in Democrats: Party of Plundering and Blundering | Comments Off on Meet the Bernie Bro Embezzler Behind the Progressive Push to Primary Sinema
26th October 2021
ZMan looks at the proposed wealth tax.
Legend has it that the Persian King Xerxes was confident in his ability to crush the Greeks because he saw them as dishonest men. They lied to one another in their marketplace and in their debates over politics and law. From the perspective of the Persians, a people who allegedly viewed lying as the worst crime possible, this defect would undermine their efforts to resist the Persians. Men who cannot trust one another cannot defend one another when under attack.
We know Xerxes was wrong, if he indeed thought these things. Much of our history of the time comes from Herodotus, who was not afraid to gild the lily when rerecording the history of the Greeks and her enemies. It is a useful insight, however, as the market-based society is, when you think about it, a system where the rewards go to those who are best at deceiving their fellow citizens. More accurately, status comes from deceiving people into thinking you are being honest with them.
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Democratic politics is just taking the marketplace idea and applying it to the governance of the society. The sellers are the people with ideas for how to solve problems in society and the buyers are the majority who vote on it. The game is to convince the mob there is a problem and that you have the solution. Being right about the problem or the solution is unimportant. What gets rewarded is convincing fifty percent plus one to go along with your scheme, which makes you the winner.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Strength in Lying
26th October 2021
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The Times reports that “Under the proposal, people with $1 billion in assets or $100 million in income for three consecutive years would be brought into a new tax system. Initially, they would have to assess the current value of their tradable assets — like cash, stocks and bonds — and their value when they were purchased, then pay a one-time tax on them.”
The Washington Post reports that “The plan would also set up a system for taxing assets that are not easily tradable, such as real estate,” and also that “Billionaires would also be able to take deductions for any annual loss in value of those assets.”
The constitutional challenges that such a plan would face are considerable.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Biden-Wyden Wealth Tax Would Break Campaign Pledge, Run Afoul of Constitution
26th October 2021
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Trent Colbert is the self-possessed second-year student behind the exposure of the diversity regime at Yale Law School/Yale University. They owe Colbert for what they have done to him, including lying about what they have done to him. Yet the authorities are keeping their heads down and waiting for the controversy to blow over.
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Getting Minds Right at Yale: Trent Colbert Speaks
26th October 2021
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Science is a process. It’s a good process, the best we have for ferreting out objective truths about nature. It’s a good process, but scientists are people, and people, even good people who want to do what’s right, are imperfect. So science, as good as it is, isn’t perfect. Even when the people are careful and the science is good, science is never the only consideration. (That’s why letting one thing — say, health care policy — dictate a nation’s response to a crisis is generally a bad idea.)
But it seems that the loudest accusations of “science denier!” are made when the science is sketchy and, frankly, probably in need of some serious denial. That’s when the technocrats really up their game, censoring competing views, exaggerating their claims of certainty, and encouraging panic and the immediate action that comes with it. We’re seeing that today with the Wuhan coronavirus, where ambiguous and conflicting information and a lack of accountability leave petty authoritarians free to craft arbitrary and capricious public policy.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Trust the Seance
26th October 2021
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day: Taxpayers in the Hands of an Angry Establishment
26th October 2021
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Foreign intervention has been a major problem for Libya because not all the foreign supporters agree on what a united Libya should be like and are unwilling to withdraw unless their local faction prevails. Russia and several Arab nations have been involved in the Libyan civil war since 2015. Russia joined Egypt and some other Arab states in backing the LNA (Libyan National Army) that had the support of most Libyans because of LNA efforts to suppress Islamic terrorism and restore order to the country. Neighboring Egypt was the first to witness the effectiveness of the LNA approach as Islamic terrorist activity and weapons smuggling declined as the LNA operations increased in eastern Libya. Egypt already had contacts with some Libyan tribes there and there were also a lot of Egyptians who still had jobs in Libya, mainly to support oil production. The news was enough to get other Arab nations as well as Russia and some Western nations willing to quietly support the LNA, which meant these nations could send some of their special operations troops in to get a better look from a ground level up-front-and-personal look at the situation.
That worked until Turkey intervened in 2019 to support the unpopular, but UN-backed, GNA (Government of National Accord) opposition. Now the major obstacles to peace in Libya are the continued presence of Turkish and Russian forces.
Posted in Living with Islam: The world's most intolerant—and intolerable—religion | Comments Off on Libya: The Walking Dead
26th October 2021
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Since 1932, Congress has passed dozens of laws aimed at making rental housing and homeownership more affordable. Many of these laws created new programs while few of the older programs were abolished. As a result, more than two dozen programs remain active today, including programs targeted for specific groups such as seniors, people with disabilities, Native Americans, veterans, and people with HIV.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on The Affordable-Housing Industrial Complex
26th October 2021
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Think of it as evolution in action.
Posted in Full Frontal Stupidity | Comments Off on Hiker Lost on US Mountain Ignored Calls From Rescuers Because He Didn’t Recognise the Number
25th October 2021
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
25th October 2021
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
25th October 2021
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
25th October 2021
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
25th October 2021
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on #BidenRemorse: The Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
25th October 2021
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These nine items are just a sampling of the “green” insanity in the bill.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on 8 Ridiculous ‘Green New Deal’ Programs in Democrats’ Bloated Spending Bill
25th October 2021
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ale Law School’s Office of Student Affairs has removed all administrator profiles from its website “to protect staff members” in the wake of widespread outrage about the school’s treatment of Trent Colbert, the second-year law student who invited classmates to his “trap house,” according to a university spokeswoman.
Two of those administrators, Yale Law diversity director Yaseen Eldik and Associate Dean Ellen Cosgrove, suggested that Colbert could have trouble with the bar if he didn’t apologize for his invitation. That wasn’t an empty threat: According to a now-deleted version of the student affairs website, Cosgrove’s remit involves the bar exam’s “character and fitness” investigations, which review aspiring lawyers’ disciplinary records in considerable detail.
Eldik’s profile is no longer viewable on any Yale Law website, though he remains listed as a “discrimination and harassment resource coordinator” with the university. An entry for Cosgrove—which contains no mention of her “character and fitness” duties—is still viewable on the law school’s main website. Archived web pages indicate that the profiles were scrubbed between Oct. 13 and Oct. 18.
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Damage Control: Yale Law School Scrubs Administrator Profiles from Website
25th October 2021
ZMan lays it out.
The paradox of modern liberal democracy is that despite its constant exhortations in favor of inclusion, it systematically excludes most options. It is a tails the rich people win or heads the rest of the people lose. There is no option for the guy making $250K per year to get more of what he wants from government at a better rate. The people not paying income tax do not have an option that promises to do some of things they want at a reasonable cost in taxes to them.
The fact is, most of the people who vote Republican want the government to defend cultural norms so they can live their lives in peace. They don’t mind paying taxes and they do not resent rich people for being rich. The people voting Democrat want the government to do a better job looking after the poor and to provide useful services to the middle-class. The people running both parties hate all of that and spend their time pitting the two sides against one another.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Madhouse of Democracy
25th October 2021
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Why are congressional Democrats breaking welfare again?
In March, they transformed the child tax credit into a monthly child allowance — no work conditions attached. If made permanent, as they are now trying to do, it would be the second-largest expansion of the welfare state in U.S. history.
The credit used to increase as low-income parents worked more. The allowance, however, goes to non-working families. Proponents insist that this giveaway won’t substantially affect low-income parents’ interest in working, but a new study has made it clear: Fewer low-income families will work.
Earlier reports have underestimated the effect of eliminating the Child Tax Credit’s pro-work incentives. But researchers at the University of Chicago have found that 1.5 million workers — 2.6% of all working parents — would exit the labor force if the child allowance is made permanent.
Those who are dependent on government are faithful voters for the Party of Free Stuff.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Work Matters, Despite What Congressional Democrats Think
25th October 2021
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The left claims that their most urgent battle is to save democracy, but when it comes to any questioning of the LGBT lobby, they are the ones who sound like authoritarians. The overtones are unmistakable in the “news” coverage promoting “dozens” of employees walking out of Netflix in Los Angeles on Oct. 20 in protest. The target? A popular Dave Chappelle comedy special, “The Closer.”
Tens of thousands of anti-abortion advocates can assemble and be ignored, but assemble two dozen transgender lobbyists and NBC and PBS will treat it as momentous.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on ‘Free Speech’ Media Allies With Transgender Tyranny
25th October 2021
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A team of engineers working on Twitter’s own ML Ethics, Transparency and Accountability (META) unit scraped millions of tweets of thousands of elected officials from seven different countries: US, Japan, UK, Canada, Germany, Spain, and France. They tracked how likely these posts made between 1 April 2020 and 15 August 2020 were to be placed in a higher rank in users’ personal Twitter feeds using Twitter’s algorithms.
Tweets posted by politicians from right-wing parties were amplified more than those from left-wing parties in all countries except Germany. The effect was strongest for Canadian and British politics. For example, content from UK Labour MPs was amplified 112 per cent as opposed to the 176 per cent amplification of Conservative MPs’ content; and Canada’s Liberal party politicos were amplified 43 per cent versus 167 per cent for the Canadian Conservative party.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Twitter’s Machine Learning Algorithms Amplify Tweets From Right-Wing Politicians Over Those on the Left
25th October 2021
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In Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, Batya Ungar-Sargon, the deputy opinion editor of Newsweek (where, full disclosure, she has published two of my essays), argues that elite left-wing journalists have embraced a race-based view of American inequality and abandoned any sort of class-based analysis. They’ve done this, she explains, because it largely absolves them of having to apologize for their own elite lifestyles. “The fact is,” she writes, “journalism has become a profession of astonishing privilege over the past century, metamorphosing from a blue-collar trade into one of the occupations with the most highly educated workforces in the United States. And along with this status revolution has come the radicalization of the profession on questions of identity, leaving in the dust anything commensurate to a similar concern with economic inequality…”
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Bad News—A Review
24th October 2021
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
24th October 2021
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
24th October 2021
Child Sacrifice in the US
Rural Canadian pastor spends extra night in jail after refusing condition keeping him from church
Austria Makes Life Difficult for the Unvaccinated
Physicians & The Vaccine Tyranny
EcoHealth Throws NIH Under The Bus Over Wuhan Gain-Of-Function Report; Researcher Claims ‘Massive Cover-Up’
Majority Of Maryland Parents Oppose Vaccine Mandates For Students, Teachers, Survey Says
Nunes, Grenell Call on DOJ to Prosecute Dr. Fauci for Wuhan Testimony He belongs to the Crust. The motto of the Crust is: Nobody gets fired, nobody goes to jail.
“Welcome To The Hunger Games”: More Chicago Officers ‘Summoned’ As City Council Mulls Vax Mandate Reversal
Anti-Vax Mandate Demonstrators Attempt to Storm Doors at Brooklyn NBA Arena
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Pandemic Panic – It’s Titanic
24th October 2021
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
24th October 2021
Biden widely mocked on social media for bizarre hand gestures
Organized migrant caravan moves toward US, surging past Mexican forces
Biden: Walls for Me But Not for Thee
White House Moving 55K Refugees to US Homes
Trump Slams Response as 2,000 Migrants Continue Walk Through Southern Mexico There really ought to be some pushback on Mexico for allowing this to go on.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on #BidenRemorse: Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
24th October 2021
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Oddly enough, despite my captivating, detailed earlier reports, none of you Ricochetti has asked for regular updates on the status of the construction of Black Lives Matter Plaza in DC. So in the true federal government spirit, I will now provide what you apparently don’t want or need and did not request.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on DC Priorities