SupremeCourt

ModeratePolitics

This is the greatest piece of neolib pearl clutching:

As I have stated publicly, I had noting whatsoever to do with the flying of that flag. I was not even aware of the upside-down flag until it was called to my attention. As soon as I saw it, I asked my wife to take it down, but for severals days, she refused.

My wife and I own our Virginia home jointly. She therefore has the legal right to use the property as she sees fit, and there were no additional steps that I could have taken to have the flag taken down more promptly.

Let's take this at face value. People make sacrifices for their spouses every day. Whether it's picking up the kids from school when it's not your day, moving to a new state because your spouse got a new job, or moving across the country because your spouse got new orders.

I'm sorry, when you're the wife of a Supreme Court justice, you can't spit at your neighbor and desecrate the American flag. Too bad.

My wife's reasons for flying the flag are not relevant for present purposes, but I note that she was greatly distressed at the time...

This is a Supreme Court justice saying "women, am I right?"

I am confident that a reasonable person who is not motivated by political or ideological considerations or a desire to affect the outcome of Supreme Court cases would conclude that the events recounted above to not meet the applicable standard for recusal. I am therefore required to reject your request.

This is a Supreme Court justice saying "If you don't agree with me, you're crazy". This is a Supreme Court justice calling us buttholes.

As I said in reference to the other flag event, my wife is an independently minded private citizen. She makes her own decisions, and I honor her right to do so.

Alito wrote the Dobbs decision.

By the way, here's Donald Trump encouraging this behavior:

Congratulations to United States Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito for showing the INTELLIGENCE, COURAGE, and “GUTS” to refuse stepping aside from making a decision on anything January 6th related. All U.S. Judges, Justices, and Leaders should have such GRIT - Our Country would be far more advanced than its current status as A BADLY FAILING NATION, headed by the Worst President in American History, Crooked Joe Biden! [Truth Social]

Desecrate the flag? Lmao

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From the libertarian national convention

The act of naming is always a form of propaganda. When you name something, you are never perfectly describing what it is, but are instead influencing how it is perceived.

Marketers know this better than anyone. Prior to 1977, there was no such thing as the Chilean sea bass; the fish was called, instead, the Pata­gonian toothfish. The Chilean sea bass isn't a type of bass at all, and most of them do not come from Chile. It was purely a marketing invention: an entrepreneur named Lee Lantz intuited that the American market might enjoy the taste of the Patagonian toothfish, but would never buy it under its given name. First, he chose to falsely call it a “bass” because Americans were comfortable with that type of fish. He then rejected the names “Pacific sea bass” and “South American sea bass,” on the grounds that they were too generic, and eventually settled on “Chilean sea bass” as a more exotic alternative.

The name of one of the most popular fish in the world therefore has nothing to do with what the fish really is. A type of cod that is primarily farmed near Antarctica became the Chilean sea bass as a Goldilocks branding compromise. The familiarity of the bass was married to the perceived exoticism of Chile so that an American entrepreneur could sell a fish nobody had ever heard of to high-end restaurants in the United States. This ploy worked so well that today nobody has ever heard of the Patagonian toothfish, while the Chilean sea bass has a secure and inalienable position on restaurant menus from sea to shining sea.

So its name is propaganda, but nobody cares. A lie that makes money will always be preferable to a truth that does not. Once you realize that every name is propaganda, it becomes readily apparent how much misconduct, greed, and corruption can be concealed behind an innocuously disingenuous name, especially a name that successfully evokes positive emotions in the general public.

Consider the word “nonprofit.” Whoever came up with the idea of calling these organizations “nonprofits” was a marketing genius on the level of Steve Jobs. When someone hears the word nonprofit, they assume that such an organization is working for the public good; that it serves the homeless, protects the weak, exists for the benefit and the betterment of society at large. Hearing that something is a “nonprofit” immediately gives a sense that the organization is trustworthy and the people running it are driven by a charitable agenda. It's a word that shuts down the critical faculties and grants an instantaneous moral stature to any organization to which it is applied. Consequently, non­profits receive a benefit of the doubt that would not be granted to any other form of private corporation.

Yet nonprofit organizations are frequently the exact opposite of what they appear to be. As a consequence of the benefit of the doubt provided to nonprofits, there is rarely enough oversight to guarantee that they are doing what we pay them to do. In some cities, upwards of a billion dollars of public funds are paid to nonprofit organizations every year with glaringly insufficient safeguards to ensure that the money is used in a manner likely to serve the public interest.

This money is then spent in ways that would shock the taxpayers whose hard-earned dollars are being effectively stolen from them. Non­profits that self-righteously declare themselves providers of homeless services actively lobby to make homelessness worse in order to increase their own funding; nonprofit organizations hire convicted felons—including murderers, gang leaders, sex offenders, and rapists—who go on to commit more felonies while receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in government contracts; and the executives of nonprofits, the very people in charge of institutions whose stated purpose is not to make money, earn millions of dollars while catastrophically failing to deliver the public services we are paying them to provide.

And as all of that is going on, the nonprofits in question receive tax breaks from the IRS, ensuring that the incompetent organizations wors­ening your city's homelessness crisis exert their corrupting influence all the way to the halls of power in Washington, D.C.

Money for Nothing

There is a notorious nonprofit in San Francisco called the Tenants and Owners Development Corporation, or TODCO for short. The Tenants and Owners Development Corporation, despite containing the word “development” in its name, has not developed a single property in approximately twenty years. More and more, TODCO isn't spending its money to help its current tenants, either. The San Francisco Standard found that TODCO's spending on resident services declined from 62 percent of revenue in 2012 to only 45 percent eight years later. The Standard interviewed tenants in one of TODCO's buildings and was deluged with complaints about decaying accommodations and rodent infestations. A woman told them bluntly that there were rats in the walls and complaints to management went nowhere; the tap water tasted foul and she sometimes found roaches in her food. One man felt a bite on his neck and assumed at first that he'd been bitten by one of the multitude of vermin that crawled through the building's light fixtures; in fact, he'd been accidentally shot and the bullet hole was still visible in his wall when reporters interviewed him several months after the fact.

It turned out that instead of spending money on housing development and tenant support, TODCO boosted executive pay and funneled millions into lobbying. As TODCO's spending on its tenants declined by 17 percentage points, executive pay quadrupled. Meanwhile, TODCO's president, John Elberling, launched the Yerba Buena Neighborhood Consortium, a political lobbying organization. Between 2012 and 2020, TODCO's direct lobbying of legislative bodies increased 95 times, from $5,000 to $470,000. The Yerba Buena Neighborhood Consortium spent another $1.35 million on ballot referenda between 2016 and 2021, and within the small pond of municipal politics, that much money, if strategically deployed, can buy a shocking amount of influence.

Here's where the story gets strange. Although TODCO's nonprofit status is predicated on helping poor people afford housing, TODCO lobbies incessantly to prevent the construction of affordable units in some of San Francisco's most expensive neighborhoods. In 2018, TODCO sued to prevent the construction of a mixed-use building on the grounds that it would cast “new shadows” on a community garden; TODCO then agreed to drop this lawsuit after the building's developer paid them $98,000, raising questions as to whether TODCO was merely using San Francisco's byzantine permitting process to extract a bribe from another developer. In another case, TODCO lobbied to block a 495-unit housing development that would have included over a hundred affordable units. In other words, an affordable housing nonprofit has repeatedly sued other developers to prevent the construction of the same affordable units that it is supposed to be working to provide.

And then, in July of 2020, the strangest of TODCO's fiascos took place. That year, TODCO prevented the construction of over one thousand new apartments, including 350 affordable units, so it could run a “racial equity study,” which it then never bothered to conduct. San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston—a TODCO political ally—convinced the land use committee to put off the development for six months, during which time TODCO would supposedly analyze the development's impact on minority residents in the neighborhood.

By August 2022, TODCO had not even begun the study that was supposed to have been completed eighteen months earlier. When asked by reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle why the study had never been done, TODCO's president told the Chronicle that Covid interfered with their plans and a consulting group they'd been relying on had dropped out. Both of these excuses are highly dubious. When TODCO lobbied to delay the housing development so it could run its mythic study, Covid had already been rampaging through the United States for six months, meaning that TODCO was not blindsided by Covid and cannot use it as an excuse for failure. Furthermore, one consulting group dropping out should not indefinitely delay a study when the organization running it has millions of dollars in annual revenue, tens of millions of dollars in total assets, and a bevy of political connections. If TODCO wanted to run the study they could have done so, but they have exhibited no sense of urgency despite the fact that their failure to conduct the promised study has indefinitely prevented the existence of 350 units of affordable housing.

TODCO is a nonprofit whose mandate is to provide affordable housing. Over the last twenty years, however, TODCO has produced no additional units of affordable housing, has allowed the units it already owns to decay, and has spent millions of dollars preventing other developers from building thousands of apartments and hundreds of affordable units. Paradoxically, a nonprofit meant to provide affordable housing is spending taxpayer money to prevent affordable housing from being built; an organization that exists with the explicit mandate to help alleviate San Francisco's housing crisis is instead working tirelessly to make that crisis worse. How can this be explained?

To understand TODCO's behavior, you need to know something about the business model of affordable housing nonprofits. An afford­able housing NGO makes more money as rents rise in the area where its buildings are located. Government subsidies make up the difference between what the NGO's tenants are paying and what they could be paying if the building charged them the market rate. This means that a nonprofit, despite its name, has the same profit incentive as any other landlord, in that a lack of housing construction increases its profit margins by driving up rents. The only difference is that a nonprofit benefits from high rents through government subsidies instead of from directly charging its tenants.

And that is an obvious conflict of interest. Nonprofit housing providers benefit financially if less housing gets built because high rents increase their subsidies. Affordable housing nonprofits are therefore incentivized to work against housing affordability if they want to increase the amount their executives get paid. Everything TODCO is doing is a natural consequence of the nonprofit industrial complex. TODCO's subsidies rise in concert with rents; it then funnels the money it receives from the government back into lobbying the same politicians responsible for funding it; those politicians prevent the construction of housing on TODCO's behalf, thereby ensuring that rents remain high and TODCO rakes in millions of additional dollars in government subsidies; and TODCO's executives receive enormous boosts to personal compensation and buy million-dollar houses in the suburbs. It is a kickback scheme so ingenious it would make Al Capone green with envy.

This propensity for nonprofits to privilege their own finances over the needs of the poor is not unique to San Francisco. Last year, an initiative to establish a public social housing developer in Seattle was opposed by the Housing Development Consortium, a lobbying organ­ization for affordable housing nonprofits. The Seattle Times' reporting on this initiative is revealing:

The Housing Development Consortium, a lobbying group whose members include King County's major low-income housing de­velopers, financial institutions and governmental development agencies, doesn't want to compete with a new organization for funding.

The Housing Development Consortium argues that Seattle should focus its resources on the existing system . . . which in­volves a collaboration between the largely federally funded Seattle Housing Authority, local public development agencies and other nonprofit organizations [emphasis added].

In other words, a lobbying organization for affordable housing nonprofits advocated against a social housing initiative on the grounds that it would direct funds away from its members. Many of the people involved in these affordable housing nonprofits would describe them­selves as socialists, and yet they argued against a more socialist form of public housing development and in favor of the privatized, complex, and inefficient system that just so happens to financially benefit themselves.

In the event that America tried to dramatically increase the amount of public housing, a policy advocated by many progressives, it is likely that some of the fiercest opponents would be nonprofit landlords who would be outraged at the prospect of direct competition from government-owned housing. This is normal behavior for a private organization that relies on the government as its primary revenue source, but it is directly contrary to what the term “nonprofit” would seem to imply. Despite their trustworthy name, nonprofits are not now—nor have they ever been—the uncorrupted agents of the public good that their defend­ers would have us believe.

Crime Inc.

Exacerbating the profound conflicts of interest created by outsourcing government services to private nonprofits is the near total lack of oversight of these nonprofits, particularly with respect to how their money is spent and whom they hire to provide their services. It is a regular occurrence that money given to nonprofits is misdirected in a way ruinously contrary to the public interest. In especially egregious cases, money given to nonprofits finds its way into the pockets of people who never would have been hired by a government agency due to either a lack of competence or a disqualifying criminal history.

For instance, San Francisco gave tens of millions of dollars to a nonprofit called the United Council of Human Services over the course of two decades; their CEO proceeded to spend large sums of money in a totally illegal manner, buying at least five vehicles for herself and family members and driving around with a trunk full of expensive jewelry. She also allowed twenty of her friends, family, and employees to occupy government-subsidized apartments which were meant to be used as housing for low-income San Franciscans.

There is always going to be some level of malfeasance when large sums of money are involved, but what makes the United Council's criminality inexcusable is that Gwendolyn Westbrook, the CEO who stole taxpayer dollars and spent them on herself, pleaded guilty in 1997 to stealing thousands of dollars in parking lot collections while working for the Port of San Francisco. A nonprofit run by a woman with a proven history of stealing from government agencies was given tens of millions of dollars to provide affordable housing services, and San Francisco's political class was somehow surprised when, true to her previous track record, she stole that money, too.

Following Westbrook's fall from grace, a San Francisco Standard investigation discovered that the city had paid tens of millions of dollars to nonprofits that were ineligible for government funding: $25 million went to charities that were either delinquent or suspended and another $65 million went to nonprofits that were later declared ineligible. At the time of the Standard's investigation, San Francisco had another $300 million of future contractual obligations to NGOs it was not legally allowed to fund.

Although San Francisco is one of the worst cities when it comes to nonprofits behaving badly, these same problems exist in every city that makes excessive use of the nonprofit sector. Seattle, in particular, has a rather distressing tendency to give exorbitant sums of taxpayer money to convicted felons, up to and including violent criminals and registered sex offenders. In 2001, a man named Khalid Adams was convicted of first degree theft in an incident in which he allegedly groped his victim while shouting racial slurs; two years later Adams was convicted again, this time of first degree robbery and unlawful possession of a firearm. Adams's third—but not final—conviction came in 2021 when he pled guilty to unlawful possession of a firearm by a previously convicted felon.

Only a year after Adams's third conviction, however, he was hired to work as a “violence interrupter” by a government-funded Seattle-area nonprofit called Community Passageways. In November 2022, while receiving a salary from King County taxpayers to prevent gun violence, Adams broke into his ex-girlfriend's apartment, held her new boyfriend at gunpoint, and was subsequently shot by the ex's eighteen-year-old cousin. Adding a surreal element to this already incredible story, Savior Wheeler, the young cousin who shot Khalid Adams, was a client of Community Passageways, one of the same at-risk young people that Adams was supposed to keep away from gun violence. A Seattle nonprofit therefore hired a three-time convicted felon who was fresh out of prison to work as a mentor for at-risk youths, and he was subsequently shot by one of those very at-risk youths while threatening an ex-girlfriend at gunpoint.

This is a surprisingly common occurrence in Seattle. In 2022, the city gave $260,000 dollars to a registered sex offender who was operating under a fake name and credentials to mentor at-risk young people. In 2020, they gave a $3 million no-bid contract—one of the largest grants in city history—to a nonprofit called Freedom Project to run a “racial equity study.” Freedom Project's executive director at the time was David Heppard who was convicted as a teenager for taking part in the gang rape of a pregnant seventeen-year-old. Freedom Project's finance director, Quddafi Howell, once shot up a man's house as an intimidation tactic to prevent him from snitching on Howell's drug dealing.

Believe it or not, the $3 million Seattle handed over to a bunch of convicted felons was somehow mismanaged. A local political blog called Seattle City Council Insight looked into the paperwork behind this contract and discovered that hundreds of thousands of dollars were handed out to subcontractors for minimal work and the project's lead was paid $300 per hour while publicly claiming to be a volunteer.

In another case, a homelessness nonprofit called share (the Seattle Housing and Resource Effort) turned out to employ an unlicensed accountant at the same time they were handling millions of dollars in government funds. Share claimed that they were the victim in this case, as they were unknowingly defrauded by a man who held himself out as a legitimate accountant. Fair enough. Share, however, might have noticed that their accountant was unlicensed were it not for the fact that share's treasurer, the man presumably responsible for handling all their money, was Lantz Rowland, an unqualified homeless man who lived in a tent. This nonprofit had total annual revenue of approximately a million dollars in 2016, which included grants from King County and the City of Seattle, and the people responsible for handling that money were an illegal accountant and a sixty-year-old homeless tent dweller with no discernible qualifications.

Leaving the West Coast for a moment, one finds similar outcomes arising from the overuse of nonprofits in the Windy City. In Chicago, an anti-violence nonprofit called CeaseFire has had a shocking number of its “violence interrupters” arrested for serious crimes since its incep­tion. This ought to surprise nobody given that these “violence interrupters” are almost universally convicted felons. Ceasefire workers convicted of crimes while employed by the organization include a fifty-one-year-old arrested for illegal gun possession, whom authorities alleged was also moonlighting as a national gang leader; a convicted felon caught naked under his bed with $50,000, an illegal firearm, crack cocaine, and heroin; and a woman who was hired despite four prior felony convictions and subsequently stole $10,000 worth of diamonds.

Chicago also has a state-funded “Peacekeepers” program in which “community-based organizations” deploy former convicts to act as vio­lence interrupters during times when tensions are expected to be high. Last Memorial Day, a “Peacekeeper” named Oscar Montes assaulted a motorist while on duty, leaving the man with potentially permanent eye damage. Montes was hired by the Peacekeepers program only a year after serving a ten-year prison sentence for shooting a rival gang member.

What is instantly noticeable about the above examples is that none of these people could draw a government paycheck unless it was laundered through a nonprofit. A police department could never hire a convicted felon with long-term ties to street gangs, but a private nonprofit has looser standards regarding who is allowed access to public funds. This not only squanders money on people who are not capable of performing the roles they're assigned, but is an active threat to public safety in circumstances where the state uses convict-staffed nonprofits for duties that ought to be reserved for the police.

The Progressive Doom Loop

At the start of this piece, I said that “the act of naming is a form of propaganda,” an aphorism which applies to nonprofits because the name they've been given is a marketing device, rather than an objective representation of their conduct and behavior. It's important to recognize, though, that nonprofits aren't the only group relevant to this story that has been given an inaccurate name as a marketing ploy. The political ideology that supports the nonprofit industrial complex is generally referred to as “progressivism,” which calls to mind the socialist-leaning Progressive movement of the early twentieth century. In spite of sharing a common name, however, today's “progressivism” has nothing in common with the Progressive movements of the last century, is not socialist in any real sense, and is, if anything, an extremist libertarian movement that destroys the ability of the government to function, rather than using state power for the betterment of the poor.

Once you start digging into the evidence, you find that the places where “progressives” wield the most power are some of the least socialist governments in the country. In 2022, San Francisco spent $5.8 billion on private contracts, over 40 percent of all city government spending, while the entire budget of Houston, a city 2.5 times as large, was only $5.7 billion. It is a strange form of socialism that runs more than two-fifths of its government through private contractors, instead of using publicly owned developers and social housing.

Portland, Oregon, meanwhile, has been suffering from a serious trash crisis for the past several years, due both to the city's soaring homeless population and the government's refusal to enforce antidumping laws. Portland's response to the festering trash piles now blighting a once-beautiful city has not been to dramatically increase the government's capacity to pick up and process garbage; instead, Portland, in conjunction with the state of Oregon, has paid millions of dollars to nonprofits to deal with the trash problem.

As Portland outsourced trash collection to private nonprofit organi­zations, the ability of the government to collect trash has been gutted by budget cuts and a lack of resources. According to local activist Frank Moscow, Portland used to sweep every street as a matter of course, but currently only has one functioning street sweeper in the entire city. Not that it matters much, since Portland's Bureau of Transportation sus­pended all street sweeping activities last June after another series of budget cuts.

Adding to Portland's trash-addled misery is the city's inability to stop anyone from dumping their trash where it is not legally allowed to do so. In 2016, the city issued thirty-one citations for illegal dumping; in 2021, they issued a grand total of one citation, for a measly $154. An opinion column published in the Oregonian in 2022 asserted confidently that “you could dump 10 large bags of garbage in Pioneer Square tonight and drive off without fear of being caught or penalized,” before going on to complain that Portland picks up trash from residential units every two weeks, instead of offering weekly trash pickup like almost every other city of comparable size.

This is the state of affairs in almost every city where “progressives” have a large impact on local politics. Progressives claim to support government spending programs, but also have an anarchistic, anti-governmental attitude that can be seen in their support for policies like police abolition in 2020. Although progressives want the government to fund public programs, their opposition to centralized state power means they often don't want the government to run the programs being funded.

The cities progressives control therefore tend to underfund core government agencies in favor of “community-based organizations,” by which they mean NGOs and nonprofits. Once the government can no longer meet its responsibilities, progressive cities outsource those ser­vices to nonprofit organizations, effectively privatizing the government.

A serious problem then occurs. Using several nonprofits instead of one government agency is inherently inefficient due to weak oversight and an inability to take advantage of economies of scale. That's why cities on the West Coast spend so much on homelessness to no end whatsoever. San Francisco's spending on homeless services increased from $200 million in 2016 to an astronomical $1.1 billion in 2021. Despite this incredible investment, on an average night there were a thousand more homeless San Franciscans in 2022 than there were in 2015. In fairness, there was a decline in the city's homeless population between 2019 and 2022, leading the deputy director at the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing to declare that “investment works.” Yet San Francisco's population fell by seventy thousand resi­dents between 2019 and 2022, meaning the minuscule re­duction in homelessness was likely a mere by-product of massive population loss.

Nor are the problems that cities like San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle have with falling population unrelated. By funding inefficient nonprofits instead of more centralized, accountable government initia­tives, progressive cities have high taxes but poor services; residents receive nothing in return for the taxes they pay. Portland has one of the highest municipal income tax burdens in the country, but is forty-eighth out of the fifty largest cities in police staffing, has piles of festering, uncollected garbage littering its streets, and only has two thousand shelter beds for a homeless population of 6,300, requiring four thousand homeless Portlanders to sleep outside even if every one of them wanted a bed.

Contrary to the conservative assumption that high taxes are an inherent evil, people are often fine with higher taxes provided that the taxes are utilized to improve local living standards. What is taking place in America's most performatively socialist urban areas is that taxes are constantly raised in order to fund public services, resulting in some of the most heavily taxed populations in the country. But this tax revenue is then squandered on private contracts to unaccountable nonprofit organizations whose activities do little to rectify the problems they are nominally being funded to address.

Taxes soar in concert with the collapse in local living standards and the decay in public services. Public parks where children used to play fill up with homeless drug addicts who leave used needles near jungle gyms; a six-year-old girl in California mistook a syringe for a thermometer and put it in her mouth, and an eleven-year-old stepped on a needle while swimming in Santa Cruz. The streets grow increasingly unsanitary due to spiraling homelessness, reintroducing diseases once considered eradi­cated by civilized living. Los Angeles had three deaths from flea-borne typhus in 2022, the first such deaths in three decades; a reverend who works on Skid Row lost both legs to an infection he contracted simply walking the neighborhood's streets; and Portland's Old Town recently experienced an outbreak of Shigella, a disease mostly seen in developing countries that spreads through fecal matter.

The inability of nonprofits to properly manage services results in European taxes for third-world state capacity. Residents don't know what the problem is: they don't know that their taxes go to “violence interrupters” who are convicted felons; they don't know affordable housing nonprofits use taxpayer money to lobby against affordable housing; and they don't know money is being misallocated due to insuf­ficient oversight of nonprofits.

All they know is they pay high taxes for no reason. And so they leave. Oregon's largest county lost 2.5 percent of its population between 2020 and 2022. As the population declines, the tax base shrinks. San Francisco's sales tax revenue fell 22 percent between 2019 and 2022, with the worst decline seen downtown, where office buildings now have record-high vacancy rates.

Many articles have been written recently about the threat such cities face of an “urban doom loop,” in which a falling population guts tax revenue, which forces cuts to city services, thus reducing livability and causing an accelerating population exodus in a vicious cycle. To my knowledge, however, nobody has ever argued that a major contributor to this death spiral is outsourcing government services to unaccountable nonprofit organizations, rather than increasing state capacity and im­proving the government's ability to solve problems itself. In this contrarian narrative, American cities are not failing because they're too socialist; they're failing because they aren't socialist enough.

And that, alas, is the state of the great American city in the early twenty-first century, where nothing is as it seems. Ours is a country where “progressivism” has nothing in common with the movement from which it takes its name; where “socialists” privatize government services at every opportunity; and where countless “nonprofits” exist solely for the misbegotten profit of the people who run them. Again and again, the names we use to explain the realities of modern urban politics are propagandistic marketing terms and not an accurate representation of what is taking place.

Just like with the invention of the Chilean Sea Bass, however—which is neither Chilean nor a bass—many people are making money off the scheme. Who cares if it's all a lie?

🚨 Just Announced 🚨

The Supreme Court ruled today that Texas SB-4 law is constitutional which grants Txs the right to detain, arrest, and expel anyone crossing the Texas border illegally

Big round of applause 👏 folks

The majority on the Scotus acting like one....

(6-3) ⚖️ pic.twitter.com/cRQG1DQ8qJ

— Chicago1Ray 🇺🇸 (@Chicago1Ray) May 28, 2024

!chuds !nooticers

/r/LeopardsAteMyFace : https://old.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/1d2mh7z/dems_in_fullblown_freakout_over_biden/

/r/StupidPol: https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1d2lhrv/politico_dems_in_fullblown_freakout_over_biden/

A pervasive sense of fear has settled in at the highest levels of the Democratic Party over President Joe Biden's reelection prospects, even among officeholders and strategists who had previously expressed confidence about the coming battle with Donald Trump.

All year, Democrats had been on a joyless and exhausting grind through the 2024 election. But now, nearly five months from the election, anxiety has morphed into palpable trepidation, according to more than a dozen party leaders and operatives. And the gap between what Democrats will say on TV or in print, and what they'll text their friends, has only grown as worries have surged about Biden's prospects.

“You don't want to be that guy who is on the record saying we're doomed, or the campaign's bad or Biden's making mistakes. Nobody wants to be that guy,” said a Democratic operative in close touch with the White House and granted anonymity to speak freely.

But Biden's stubbornly poor polling and the stakes of the election “are creating the freakout,” he said.

“This isn't, ‘Oh my God, Mitt Romney might become president.' It's ‘Oh my God, the democracy might end.'”

Despite everything, Trump is running ahead of Biden in most battleground states. He raised far more money in April, and the landscape may only become worse for Democrats, with Trump's hush-money trial concluding and another — this one involving the president's son — set to begin in Delaware.

The concern has metastasized in recent days as Trump jaunted to some of the country's most liberal territories, including New Jersey and New York, to woo Latinx and Black voters as he boasted, improbably, that he would win in those areas.

While he's long lagged Biden in cash on hand, Trump's fundraising outpaced the president's by $25 million last month, and included a record-setting $50.5 million haul from an event in Palm Beach, Florida. One adviser to major Democratic Party donors provided a running list that has been shared with funders of nearly two dozen reasons why Biden could lose, ranging from immigration and high inflation to the president's age, the unpopularity of Vice President Kamala Harris and the presence of third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Donors ask me on an hourly basis about what I think,” the adviser said, calling it “so much easier to show them, so while they read it, I can pour a drink.”

The adviser added, “The list of why we ‘could' win is so small I don't even need to keep the list on my phone.”

On the day after news broke that Biden had trailed Trump in fundraising last month, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey raised the pressure on donors as she introduced the president to a crowd of 300.

The cluster of fundraising events Biden attended in Boston that day were expected to bring in more than $6 million for his political operation. But Healey said that wasn't good enough.

“To those of you who opened up your wallets, thank you,” said Healey, a Democrat in her first term. “We'd like you to open them up a little bit more and to find more patriots — more patriots who believe in this country, who recognize and understand the challenge presented at this time.”

Laughter rippled through the room. But Healey's voice turned serious. With unusual urgency for Healey, the governor implored the room of high-dollar donors and local Democratic leaders to “think long and hard” about the stakes of the election.

There have been few moments in Biden's term as president that haven't been second-guessed, and his aides have made sport of sneering at grim predictions, compiling dossiers of headlines and clips in which the president was underestimated. Biden campaign aides and allies point to some positive polls, including in the battlegrounds, and Trump's comparative lack of campaigning and infrastructure in the key states, including staff, organizing programs and advertising.

A Biden campaign adviser granted anonymity to speak freely stressed that the president's team never made any indication that Trump's hush-money trial would help — or hurt — him. Instead, the adviser contended that Trump will be forced to defend cutting back abortion rights, attacking democracy and advancing corporate interests as president.

“Trump's photo-ops and PR stunts may get under the skin of some very serious D.C. people as compelling campaigning, but they will do nothing to win over the voters that will decide this election,” Biden campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz told POLITICO. “The work we do every day on the ground and on the airwaves in our battleground states — to talk about how President Biden is fighting for the middle class against the corporate greed that's keeping prices high, and highlight Donald Trump's anti-American campaign for revenge and retribution and abortion bans — is the work that will again secure us the White House.”

Biden supporters who remain optimistic say they'd rather be him than Trump, before rallying around abortion and issues of reproductive rights, which Rep. Dan Kildee, a Michigan Democrat, called “a fundamental game-changer.”

“We have to run a campaign, where honestly, we drive home the message that Donald Trump takes us back to the 19th century. Biden takes us further into the 21st century,” Kildee said.

He did not remark on whether such a campaign is being run, or run to his satisfaction.

“A lot can happen between now and then,” acknowledged Rep. Ann Kuster, a Democrat from New Hampshire, who is retiring after the fall election. She, too, pointed to eroding abortion rights under the conservative-led Supreme Court remade by Trump. “I know a significant number of voters are going to be motivated by the Dobbs decision.”

But Democratic critics of the campaign's approach — while agreeing that abortion should be a winning issue — said they're challenged when pressed by friends to make the case for why Biden will win.

“There's still a path to win this, but they don't look like a campaign that's embarking on that path right now,” said Pete Giangreco, a longtime Democratic strategist who's worked on multiple presidential campaigns. “If the frame of this race is, ‘What was better, the 3.5 years under Biden or four years under Trump,' we lose that every day of the week and twice on Sunday.”

In the swing state of Michigan, Democratic state Rep. Laurie Pohutsky suggested Biden's standing is so tenuous that down-ballot Democrats can't rely in November “on the top of the ticket to pull us along.”

“In 2020, there was enough energy to get Donald Trump out and there were other things on the ballot that brought young people out in subsequent elections.”

She said, “That's not the case this time. I worry that because we've had four years with a stable White House, particularly young voters don't feel that sense of urgency and might not remember how disastrous 2017 was right after the Trump administration took over.”

Whatever the Biden campaign has been doing over the past two months — and it's a lot of activity, including $25 million in swing-state ad spending, according to AdImpact — it has had only a limited effect. According to FiveThirtyEight, Biden's average job-approval rating on March 7, the date of his State of the Union Address, was 38.1 percent. As of Friday, it's 38.4 percent.

And his standing against Trump has also changed little. On April 22, the day Trump's criminal trial began, the presumptive GOP nominee held a 0.3-point lead in national polls, according to FiveThirtyEight. Trump is up about a point since then, currently leading Biden by 1.4 points in the FiveThirtyEight average.

Asked about polling, Munoz said: “The only metric that will define the success of this campaign is Election Day.”

Trump, meanwhile, has already started his incursion into safe blue states. His campaign's psychological warfare in New York, California and New Jersey — where House districts will determine control of Congress' lower chamber — is spiking Democrats' already-elevated blood pressure.

“New York Democrats need to wake up,” said Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine. “The number of people in New York, including people of color that I come across who are saying positive things about Trump, is alarming.”

Biden's weaker numbers bear that out. A Siena College poll released Wednesday showed Biden leading Trump in New York by only 9 points — 47 to 38 percent among registered voters. Four years ago, Biden won the state by 23 points. The president is under water with every demographic delineated in the poll — other than Black voters. Fifty-three percent of Latinx and 54 percent of whites reported having an unfavorable opinion of him. To that end, Biden released TV and radio ads in the Empire State on Thursday, ahead of Trump's campaign rally in the Bronx.

Levine has been something of a Paul Revere in New York, sounding alarms two years ago when a Trump-aligned Republican gubernatorial candidate, Lee Zeldin, appeared to be gaining on Kathy Hochul, the moderate Democratic incumbent. Hochul narrowly held him off.

“I'm worried it's going to be a 2022 situation, where everyone wakes up in the last seven weeks and has to scramble,” Levine said of his state, which hasn't swung to the GOP since Ronald Reagan in 1980.

This cycle, Democrats also have to contend with the war in Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Hamas, which has deeply divided their ranks and contributed to a sense of chaos. Rep. Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat known for his ardent defense of Israel, was similarly concerned for his party, though he pointed to the higher cost of groceries and goods that started during the pandemic and has yet to abate.

“The greatest political challenge confronting the president starts with an “i,” but it's not Israel, it's inflation,” Torres said. “The cost of living is a challenge that we have to figure out how to manage.”

He said Biden should focus on issues around affordability and continue to tout his success in capping insulin costs in areas with high rates of diabetes, like his Bronx district.

“The election is more competitive than it should be, given the wretchedness of who Donald Trump is,” he said. “In a properly functioning democracy, Donald Trump should have no viable path to the presidency. The fact of a competitive race is cause for concern.”

Trump has railed against blue-state officials, starting with the justice system in New York. In California, he dispatched his daughter-in-law, Lara, and one of his sons, Eric, to hold up the West Coast's Democratic heavyweight as a cautionary tale.

“I'm sorry you have to live in communism,” Eric Trump said Wednesday at the Stampede, a country music venue in Temecula, an inland community between Los Angeles and San Diego. Trump casually dismissed California Democrat Gavin Newsom as the nation's “worst governor.”

“Make no mistake,” Trump said, “there is a war happening in this country.”

The elder Trump is set to appear in early June at the San Francisco fundraiser hosted by tech investor David Sacks and his wife, Jacqueline, a clothing brand executive, along with venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya.

Palihapitiya's past political donations run the gamut, from Elizabeth Warren to a super PAC supporting Kennedy Jr. He also gave to the recall committee against Newsom in 2021 and briefly considered running for governor. Silicon Valley's red pilling has brought even more unwanted national attention on issues of open-air drug use, homeless encampments and gangs of thieves who ransack retail stores across the Bay Area.

And as in New York, California Democrats are bracing for more incoming from Trump.

“San Francisco has changed with the taxpayers, the job creators, the tech CEOs who want to engage with the city and its politics,” said Harmeet Dhillon, the RNC committee member from California.

Dhillon was reflecting on her run-ins with Democrats in the city, where she spent years leading the local GOP before her law firm represented Trump in legal fights to remain on state ballots. Few Democrats are willing to confide in Dhillon about their fears, she conceded, but no one is sharing a sense of enthusiasm for Biden, either.

“The most diplomatic thing I hear from Democrats is, ‘Oh my God, are these the choices we have for president?'”

🔥BREAKING: Robert De Niro gets hilariously HECKLED by Trump supporters as he tries bashing him across the street from the courthouse! THIS IS PRICELESS!😂👇 pic.twitter.com/9dxkaG07Vb

— Michelle #FJB (@MichelleRM68) May 28, 2024

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1d2e9yw/canada_pledges_more_visas_for_gazans_says_its/

https://old.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/1d1uh2e/trudeau_government_announces_fivefold_increase_in/

https://old.reddit.com/r/QuebecLibre/comments/1d1x014/le_gouvernement_trudeau_annonce_quintupler_le/

Trudeau government announces fivefold increase in number of visas for Palestinians

Canada's immigration minister has announced a major increase to the number of visas available for Palestinians in Gaza.

Marc Miller said this morning that applications for the “temporary resident visa” program will be expanded from 1,000 to 5,000.

He said in a statement that his government is “deeply concerned about the humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Gaza.”

The visas allow Palestinians who live in Gaza and are related to a Canadian citizen or permanent resident to move to Canada.

The program also extends to people related to a citizen or permanent resident who isn't yet in the country but who intends to live in Canada.

When these people enter Canada, they are permitted to stay for up to three years on the visa.

Gaza's government, the Islamist terrorist organization Hamas, launched a war against Israel on Oct. 7 last year when it massacred over 1,000 people, most of them civilians, during an invasion of its neighbour.

The group also kidnapped hundreds of people, including children and seniors.

Israel has since struck back, leading to an unknown number of deaths. Hamas claims more than 36,000 people have died in Gaza since it attacked Israel.

“While movement out of Gaza is not currently possible, the situation may change at any time,” Miller said in his statement.

“With this cap increase, we will be ready to help more people as the situation evolves. Our focus remains on keeping families together.”

He added: “Canada continues to put forward the names of those who have passed preliminary screening to local authorities to secure their exit from Gaza.”

Miller has recently been under fire from some Palestinian and Muslim groups in Canada. He and the Trudeau government have been accused of failing to act as promptly or as generously as they did when Ukraine was invaded by Russia in 2022.

He is set to provide a briefing about the visas today when he appears before the House of Commons immigration committee.

His department has said 179 visas have been issued under the Gaza program so far, but doesn't know how many people, if any, have since come to Canada.

The vast majority of people living in Gaza cannot leave the territory since both of its land neighbours – Israel and Egypt – have sealed their borders.

Its sea and air space, meanwhile, are both controlled by Israel.

!nonchuds

!neolibs

I hate that my brain thinks this way now but the free part of the article doesn't say, but so much of the anti lgbt and antisemitism in Europe seems to come from immigrants, were they ethnically French?

Remember to hate yourself if you notice basic patterns !nooticers

Young AfD politician convicted after publishing gang r*pe statistics in connection with Afghan migration

A member of Germany's right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has had her conviction for incitement to hatred upheld on appeal, after using official statistics to warn that Afghan immigrants are disproportionately liable to commit sexual violence against women and girls.

The crime committed by Rotenburg AfD leader Marie-Thérèse Kaiser was to respond publicly to news that Afghan migrant workers would be relocated to Hamburg by citing figures which she claims show Afghani males are disproportionately involved in the perpetration of serious sexual offences in Germany.

The original offence took place in August 2021, a few weeks before the country took to the ballot box for federal elections and state elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, when Kaiser wrote on social media: “Afghanistan refugees; Hamburg SPD mayor for ‘unbureaucratic' admission; Welcoming culture for gang r*pe?” The 27-year-old politician went on to warn about the threat posed to women by “culturally alien masses”.

!chuds !neolibs

https://old.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1d0vyh7/leaked_national_service_plans_dont_rule_out/

Leaked National Service plans don't rule out arresting teens for not taking part

Tory plans to bring back mandatory national service are in chaos after a leaked briefing paper suggested young people could be arrested for not taking part.

Rishi Sunak has announced that all 18-year-olds will be forced to take part in his proposed new programme. Young people would be given a choice between a full-time placement in the armed forces for 12 months or spending one weekend a month for a year "volunteering," in their community.

The Mirror has seen an internal Tory briefing paper on the policy that does not rule out arresting youngsters if they fail to take part.

In a Q&A section of the document, it asks: “Will you arrest people who don't comply?” The response is: “It is right that those who contribute to our system are duly rewarded, and those who refuse receive none of the benefits. The Royal Commission will explore an appropriate incentives regime.”

Ministers have attempted to quickly backtrack as the policy descended into shambles this morning. Home Secretary James Cleverly insisted 18-year-olds would not be sent to jail if they refused. Asked on Sky News whether the consequences of resisting the compulsory scheme could involve a prison term, he said: "No, there's going to be no criminal sanction. There's no one going to jail over this."

The Conservatives have said they would establish a Royal Commission bringing in expertise from across the military and civil society to establish the details of what they described as the "bold" national service programme. The party said this commission would be tasked with bringing forward a proposal for how to ensure the first pilot is open for applications in September 2025.

After that, it would seek to introduce a new "National Service Act" to make the measures compulsory by the end of the next Parliament, the party said. It estimates the programme will cost £2.5 billion a year by the end of the decade and plans to fund £1 billion through plans to "crack down on tax avoidance and evasion".

The remaining £1.5 billion will be paid for with money previously used for the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF), which is a package to support charities and community groups, the Tories said.

The Prime Minister said: "This is a great country but generations of young people have not had the opportunities or experience they deserve and there are forces trying to divide our society in this increasingly uncertain world. I have a clear plan to address this and secure our future. I will bring in a new model of national service to create a shared sense of purpose among our young people and a renewed sense of pride in our country.

"This new, mandatory national service will provide life-changing opportunities for our young people, offering them the chance to learn real world skills, do new things and contribute to their community and our country."

Opposition critics have dismissed the plans as unserious. Labour pointed out that David Cameron introduced a similar scheme - the National Citizen Service - when he was prime minister. Lord Cameron's announcement had no military component to it, instead encouraging youngsters to take part in activities such as outdoor education-style courses as part of his "Big Society" initiative.

A Labour spokesman said: "This is not a plan - it's a review which could cost billions and is only needed because the Tories hollowed out the armed forces to their smallest size since Napoleon. Britain has had enough of the Conservatives, who are bankrupt of ideas, and have no plans to end 14 years of chaos. It's time to turn the page and rebuild Britain with Labour."

A party source mocked the plans, saying that under the Tories it would be “maths to 18 and then straight off to war”.

!britbongs

INCOMPETENCE: @ElonMusk built more than 50K EV chargers at a total cost of $1.1B. Biden's $7.5 billion effort to build EV charging stations began in 2021 resulting in 7 or 8 completed chargers or .2 stations per month. Watch as this CBS reporter laughs in @PeteButtigieg's face. pic.twitter.com/c8gTQBZTkA

— @amuse (@amuse) May 26, 2024

The governing Mises Caucus faction of the Libertarian Party spent two years gearing up for a presidential race in which their preferred candidate could not handle a high-profile post-Trump-speech rebuttal slot because he was too high after eating a gummy. https://t.co/m2nFxXPANP

— Matt Welch (@MattWelch) May 26, 2024

Smartest contrarian thinks that "you shouldn't get way too high to give a speech before your speech" = against all recreational drug use.

"United we stand, divided we fall. Indict our president, you'd better indict us all"

The scene outside the Trump rally in the Bronx.

Footage by @NJEGmedia pic.twitter.com/EvE5ugP8nZ

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) May 23, 2024

https://old.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1d05v27/labour_would_allow_16yearolds_to_vote_in_future/

Labour would allow 16-year-olds to vote in future general elections

Party intends to lower voting age within first year if it wins power on July 4

Labour is looking to introduce votes for 16 and 17-year-olds in its first year in government if it wins the election.

The party is closely studying how Scotland and Wales lowered the voting age and believes there is no reason why lowering the national voting age for general elections would need to take longer.

Sir Keir Starmer pledged to extend the franchise to younger voters in September with no indication of how quickly the policy would be implemented should it win the election. Party sources now say that while there is yet no commitment that the policy will be in the King's Speech, it is nonetheless expected to be enacted quickly. “I would be extremely surprised if it wasn't in the King's Speech,” one said, describing the legislation needed as “extremely straightforward”.

About 1.5 million people under the age of 18 would be given the vote in general elections under plans agreed by Labour in the final draft of its national policy forum. It would be the largest change to the electorate since 1969, when the voting age was reduced from 21 to 18.

The party is looking to the example of Scotland and Wales and believes a similar time frame for enactment is possible. Scotland has already lowered the voting age for local and Scottish parliament elections to 16 and Wales has done so for local and Welsh parliament elections.

The process of lowering the age in both was swift. In Scotland, it took less than six months from Scotland being handed the power to reduce the age to the passage of legislation. Researchers at Sheffield and Edinburgh have found that the move resulted in young voters being more likely to turn out as they grew older.

In Wales, where the Labour-run government has been consulted by the party in Westminster on how a nationwide extension could work, the two pieces of legislation both passed no more than a year after being introduced.

!britbongs

New degrowther idea just dropped in the UK:

Instead of making it legal to build more housing, they're just gonna... checks notes... reallocate the spare bedrooms in "under-occupied" houses. pic.twitter.com/Ei7IA7gh1Z

— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) May 22, 2024

!neolibs !britbongs

South Africa is one of a handful of countries along with the United Kingdom that is significantly poorer than it was a decade ago: its GDP per capita has declined from $8,800 in 2012 to $6,190 in 2023.

!britbongs

An incredible 47 per cent of South Africans rely on social grants as their primary source of income, a measure of both the relative success of the government's welfare programme and the economic disasters of the past decade.

MK's platform is a mix of Zuma's sense of personal victimhood, Zulu nationalism, opposition to constitutional rule, nationalising strategic industries, ending South Africa's green energy policies, the creation of a new upper house for indigenous kings and queens (a decolonial House of Lords), as well as the expropriation of all land without compensation by the state and for it to be under the custody of traditional leaders.

@kaamrev @sneedman !africans

Reasonable response sitting at -3 at time of reporting.

With a reply of it's a good thing, chud.

I will pay 2000DC, cash on the barrelhead, for gigacute twink /u/Independent-Low-2398 's permaban.