Friday, April 10, 2026

We have a name

I've been keeping my powder dry on the Eric Swalwell sexual assault allegations but now it appears like the dam has broken open: "CNN: Three More Women Describe Sexual Misconduct by Rep. Swalwell."

Ally Sammarco is the named woman and there's enough panic that Swalwell's co-campaign managers have both resigned.  As is his wont, there is a 100% chance Swalwell will blame Trump for forcing him to Snapchat his junk.



More - Powerline: "Swalwell goes down."  This dirtbag was front-and-center with his baseless allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.  Time for Swalwell to live by the rules he created.

Then resign from Congress.

Nose rings and useless graduate degrees

Reason: "Why Is It so Damn Hard To Find Sympathetic Student Loan 'Victims'? - Less than half of the Class of 2024 took out college loans averaging $30,000—a manageable amount that buys over $1 million in extra lifetime earnings."
Is any subgenre of journalism more debased and alienating than the student-loan sob story? If paying for college with heavily subsidized, federally backed loans was in fact the cause of the new, universal serfdom we hear so much about, you'd think that places like The New York Times would be able to scare up highly sympathetic young adults who tug at readers' heartstrings like orphans in a Dickens novel.

Instead, in stories like last week's "Student Debt Burdened Them, So They Moved Abroad and Stopped Paying," you get characters like 37-year-old Amanda Lynn Tully, who "graduated in 2017 with a master's degree in historic preservation from the University of Oregon, $65,000 in federal student loans and no job offers in the conservation field." Tully, reports the Times, "felt misled" and so "made a drastic decision: She moved to Prague, where she had completed an internship, and defaulted on her loans. She hasn't made a payment in over seven years."
This grown-ass woman defaulted on her student loan and fled the country because she "psychologically" couldn't pay $60/month. 

No free buses in NYC

PJ Media: "Comrade Mamdani Is Getting Smacked Around by Reality."
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani rode into office on a socialist unicorn after promising everything but free ice cream for life to the children of every voter. There are only two blocs in any electorate who vote for the kind of socialist utopian garbage that Mamdani spouted: young people who are too dumb to know any better, and older people who know better, but are so wealthy they don't care. The latter group is simply looking for a politician they might be able to control. Unfortunately, New York has a preponderance of both young, dumb voters, and rich, bored voters.
Imagine believing all these rainbow promises.  Politicians like Mamdani and AOC and Sanders keep insisting the "rich" are sitting on a Scrooge McDuck pile of gold coins and we can have every amenity under the sun if we just take it from them.

Thursday, April 09, 2026

All the journalists' egos

Twitchy: "All the President’s Men Turns 50: The Movie That Gave Journalists an Unbearable God Complex."

I've read the book and seen the movie.  The most insufferable part of the Woodward & Berstein saga is how they were spoon-fed every part of the story by Mark Felt and yet they're held up as this paragon of journalism.  It wasn't like they made any big breakthroughs on their own.  They took this unbelievable piece of professional luck and turn it into a half-century grift where every couple of years they appear on some news show to say the latest scandal is "worse than Watergate."

Wednesday, April 08, 2026

I think I spotted the flaw in the system

Christopher Rufo: "Gavin Newsom’s $30 Billion Fraud Magnet - California’s In-Home Supportive Services Program is ripe for scams, experts say."
The system operates largely on trust. Providers self-report their timecards and check-in records. In roughly 60 percent of cases, providers and beneficiaries live together, delivering care in private homes—typically without the threat of random, unannounced visits.
Suicidal empathy rears its head again.

Tuesday, April 07, 2026

We'll see

PJ Media: "BREAKING: Trump Announces a Ceasefire."

Delay is a perpetual tactic of the Iranians so I'm not as sanguine as the market futures.

Always with the class warfare

Fauxcahontas is on the warpath again: "Eating Jeff Bezos - Senator Elizabeth Warren proposes a wealth tax on "ultra-millionaires." Note that in 1913, the federal income tax was sold as a tax on the richest of the rich in America."

Warren and Bernie Sanders have exactly one schtick: that guy has more money than you - let's take it.

Monday, April 06, 2026

That's a whole lot of babysitting

Two Eric Swalwell stories today: "Report: Group of Women Preparing to Accuse Rep. Swalwell of Harassment" and "Thread OWNING Eric Swalwell for Nannygate Payments Takes CRAZY Turn to 'OMG, Is He a CREEPER' Town."

The latter grabbed my attention because the rules for paying for child care during a campaign are strictly defined and, by all appearances, Swalwell just paid his nanny a regular salary out of campaign funds.  A whopping $240,000 went for "childcare" reimbursements.

I'm not saying that Swalwell was paying off his nanny to keep her mouth shut about an affair.  I'm just saying that's a lot of cash for somebody who - allegedly - is going to be accused of a lot of DM sliding.

There's always a catch

Just the News: "Iran rejects 45-day ceasefire plan."

There was one minor quibble:


Sunday, April 05, 2026

Misdirection and logistics

It sounds like those factors are what saved that downed airman in Iran: "Second F-15 Pilot Rescued as Iranian Civilians Aid American Operation to Rescue Him."

The U.S. lured Basij militants to a location 100 miles away from where the guy was hiding while we built our own airport as a forward base.  Amazing.

Friday, April 03, 2026

Hollywood is dying

Long thread on Instapundit discussing this Wall Street Journal article: "See How Hollywood’s Job Market Is Collapsing - Studios are making fewer movies and shows than they did just a few years ago. The ones they do make are increasingly being shot outside the U.S."

It's easy to say Hollywood went woke and got broke but look at the evidence: the two biggest hits of the last couple years are "Top Gun: Maverick" and "Project Hail Mary" - movies that tell a compelling story with a strong male lead and zero lectures.  Meanwhile, Hollywood recently bestowed Best Picture to resistance porn "One Battle after Another," which arguably flopped.

But then there's California which destroys all it touches.  Shooting films or TV is way too expensive there so producers are looking to other states and countries.  I remember the craziest story I read is that it's cheaper for producers of the game show "The Floor" to fly all the contestants to Dublin than it is to shoot in the United States.

I love this headline

MSN: "Hospice with 97% survival rate accused of defrauding Medicare for $7.45M."

Why is the government arresting people with such a high level of success?  It's a mystery!

Wednesday, April 01, 2026

Massive, systematic, brazen fraud

City Journal: "Gavin Newsom’s Empire of Fraud - California has lost at least $180 billion to fraud, according to officials and experts."

This story is B A N A N A S:
Total budgeted Medi-Cal spending—which includes federal, state, and local contributions—has more than doubled on the governor’s watch, rising from $93.5 billion the year before he took office to $196.7 billion in the current annual budget. During the same period, California’s resident population declined by 0.2 percent.
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The state lost $32.6 billion dollars of taxpayer money to fraudulent applications,” he said. “In California, at one point, you had more people applying for unemployment insurance benefits than you had people over the age of 18.”
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Talcove estimates that the Medicaid fraud rate in California is 20 percent, which he calls a “very conservative” figure. Federal officials, however, believe that the current Medi-Cal fraud rate is even higher—and, given the state’s oversight failures and massive Medi-Cal expansion under Newsom, they are almost certainly right. Multiple high-ranking sources at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which is currently probing fraud in California, told City Journal on the condition of anonymity that their initial estimate for Medi-Cal’s fraud rate since 2019 is 25 percent.
That state needs a thousand Nick Shirleys.

Thank heaven

Fox News: "Artemis II launches astronauts around the moon in first deep space mission since Apollo."

I'm on record being nervous about this launch, so I'm glad it went off without a hitch.