Trump puts the kibosh on Newsom

 
Buh-bye boondoggle!

Trump puts the kibosh on Dems' leading prez candidate

Rich Lowry, Jewish World Review 

We're a long way from the transcontinental railroad.

We built the iconic American infrastructure project in the 1860s in about six years, putting down 1,776 miles of track and blasting 15 tunnels through the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Granted, working conditions back then didn't exactly meet OSHA standards. Yet, if today's rules and practices applied, the project would have been stalled for years somewhere outside Sacramento, California, caught up in endless environmental lawsuits.

The Golden State's emblematic, modern infrastructure project was supposed to be a high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Don't expect, though, to see the equivalent of the Golden Spike any time soon, or perhaps ever.

The high-speed rail project has been agonizingly slow. After about 15 years of grinding delay and cost overruns, not one piece of track has been laid, a record of futility hard to match. California high-speed rail is the West Coast's answer to Boston's notorious Big Dig that took about a decade longer to build than anticipated at a much greater cost, although it was eventually completed.

Now, the Trump administration is cutting off $4 billion in federal funds for the project, arguing that it doesn't want to pour any more money into a boondoggle.

The imagined bullet train was always a misfire. The idea of high-speed rail has a nearly erotic appeal to progressives, who love communal trains over individualized autos and think cars are destroying the planet whereas trains can save it. High-speed rail is to transit what windmills are to energy — an environmentally correct, futuristic technology that will always underdeliver.

California voters passed Proposition 1A getting the ball — if not any actual trains — rolling in 2008. The project was supposed to cost $33 billion and connect L.A. and San Francisco.

What could go wrong? Well, everything. Bad decisions about where to build the tracks, complacent contractors, environmental and union rules — you name it.

The initial, scaled-back line is now supposed to be completed by 2033, and even that is optimistic. Elon Musk might put a man on Mars before California Gov. Gavin Newsom or one of his successors manages to get even a much less ambitious high-speed rail system underway.

The current focus is a line between Merced (pop. 93,000) and Bakersfield (413,000). No offense to the good people of either of these places, but these aren't major metropolises. In Northeast terms, this is less a rail connection between New York City and Washington, D.C., and more a connection between Newark, New Jersey, and Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Passenger estimates for the California system have always been absurd.

The fantasy is that ridership will be double what it is now is in the Northeast corridor. But as Marc Joffe of the California Policy Center points out, population is much denser near Northeast stations, it's easier to get around cities in the Northeast on the way to or from the train, and a rail culture is much more embedded in the Northeast than car-centric California.

As for reducing greenhouse emissions, the long-running project is itself a significant source of emissions, and the benefit of fewer drivers in cars will be vitiated by the fact that more and more people in California will be driving electric vehicles.

The original estimated $33 billion cost is now $35 billion for just the scaled-back line and more than $100 billion and counting for the whole shebang. There is no reason that the feds should pour good money after bad supporting a preposterous project that doesn't have any national significance.

Newsom — too embarrassed to admit failure or too drunk on visions of European-style rail — remains fully committed.

In a statement, he said Trump's defunding decision is a "gift to China," as if Beijing cares whether people get to Bakersfield by car, plane or highspeed rail.

The project has already been a distressing object lesson in California's inability to build anything of consequence, and there's more where that came from.

The Biggest Conservative Victory in 30 Years

 

The Biggest Conservative Victory in 30 Years

Stephen Moore, Hot Air 

Everyone knows that the "big, beautiful" tax bill signed into law on the Fourth of July lowers tax burdens for families and businesses. It also averts a $4 trillion tax increase [that would have started] next year. That's enough reason to heartily celebrate.

Here is a list of some of the major policy victories:

• The law is the most aggressive federal advancement of school choice by allowing low-income parents to direct education dollars to private, charter or Catholic schools that are better for their kids.

• The law also expands eligibility for personalized medical savings accounts instead of conventional insurance. ...

• The law increases mining and drilling on federal lands to increase access to America's natural resource supplies to end our dependence on the Middle East or China or Russia.

• The law formally ends the absurd Biden student loan forgiveness program ….

• The law ends the electric vehicle mandate and phases out the Green New Deal, thus allowing Americans to buy whatever car they want.

• The law expands opportunity zones and extends tax benefits for investing in inner cities and economically depressed rural areas. ...

• The law increases the tax to 8% on the near-trillion dollars of bloated university endowments -- money that was never taxed. ...

• The law strengthens work requirements for Medicaid and food stamp recipients. History shows that work requirements end welfare dependency.

• The new law authorizes the sale of expanded spectrum to strengthen rural broadband, secure America's technological dominance and reduce the national debt by nearly $100 billion.

There's much more to shout about, but these are some of the greatest hits in a big and beautiful bill that advances America's freedom and prosperity. ...

(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...

Will John Brennan Ever Tell the Truth?

 

Will John Brennan Ever Tell the Truth?

Victor Davis Hanson, victorhanson.com 

When asked why the current Department of Justice might be investigating him, former CIA Director John Brennan answered, as was his wont, with a complete lie: “I am clueless about what it is exactly that they may be investigating me for.”

Clueless? Hardly. Brennan knows full well that his fingerprints are on some of the greatest scandals of the last decade. These machinations have threatened the very integrity of our institutions and elections.

He has a record of serially lying to Congress, the public, and the media, and doing so emphatically.

In 2011, as the government’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan absurdly insisted that the Obama administration’s drone strikes along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border had not killed a single civilian noncombatant. Yet multiple sources proved the claim was clearly false. In truth, the number of innocents killed was likely somewhere between 50 and 70.

In 2014, as director of the CIA, Brennan lied again, doubling down by denying that CIA operatives were hacking into U.S. Senate staffers’ computers.

“As far as the allegations of the CIA hacking into Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. . . . We wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the, you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we do.”

Here, too, he was caught lying and forced to apologize—but never charged with perjury.

But Brennan’s biggest fabrications came in 2017 when, as an ex-CIA director, he testified before a congressional committee that he neither knew who had commissioned the now-infamous bogus Steele dossier nor whether the CIA had relied on it for its intelligence assessments.

But Brennan knew well at the time that then NSA director Michael Rogers and James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, had both gone on record that the dossier did play a major role in the intelligence community’s interagency assessment. Indeed, the concocted dossier was delivered directly to President Obama. And John Brennan was one of its most ardent advocates, seeing in it a way to undermine the Trump campaign.

So, Brennan himself played a major role in disseminating the fake brief, more or less violating a cardinal CIA precept not to interfere in domestic surveillance and intelligence gathering. For example, Brennan approached the late Sen. Harry Reid to brief him in hopes that Reid would contact the FBI to help spread the lies of the dossier. And Reid did just that two days later, in a call to then-Director James Comey.

Brennan, against the advice of senior CIA Russian analysts, had insisted that the false dossier’s contents be made part of formal assessments presented to the president. He also must have known that Christopher Steele was also indirectly hired by the Clinton campaign, which had funneled his payments through three covert channels—the DNC, Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion GPS—to hide the campaign’s tracks.

Remember that Brennan was one of the chief architects of the now-infamous “51 intelligence officials” rounded up on the eve of the last 2020 presidential debate by Antony Blinken, a Biden campaign operative.

Blinken had called former CIA interim director Mike Morrel to assemble dozens of supposedly retired intelligence experts to falsely claim to the public that Hunter Biden’s laptop—then in the possession of the FBI, which had insisted on silence about its own authentication of its lurid contents—was a product of Russian intelligence to help Trump.

Brennan and the supposedly retired “authorities” (many of whom were still working for the CIA as contractors, despite claiming to be retired) sought to hide their tracks by the weasel words “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” What they meant by that wink and nod was that their deceptive letter was aimed at tarnishing Trump as a beneficiary of a collusive Russian disinformation project on the eve of the last debate.

The trick worked like clockwork, as an equally lying Biden cited the signed letter to counter Trump during the presidential debate:

“There are 50 [sic] former [sic] national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. They have said that this has all the … five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him and his good friend, Rudy Giuliani.”

Christopher Wray’s FBI also partnered with social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, to suppress any accurate news accounts about the genuine laptop, claiming it was “misinformation” or “disinformation.”

In other words, the FBI knew the laptop was real, kept that knowledge hidden, and then helped the media to suppress the truth—in ways that helped Joe Biden’s campaign win the election.

In retrospect, that colossal laptop lie likely affected the final 2020 debate and the news coverage that followed. A controversial post-election Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics poll found that some 79 percent of respondents said their vote might have changed had they known the incriminating laptop was authentic.

As an “expert” MSNBC analyst (relying on his security clearance to monetize his on-screen credibility) and social media gadfly, Brennan did his best to cover his tracks by periodically smearing then-President Trump with incoherent rants like the following:

“When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You will not destroy America . . . America will triumph over you.”

Brennan’s perfidy and lying are in addition to his adaptability, going from a Bush-era promoter of “enhanced integration” (i.e.,waterboarding at Guantanamo?) to a sudden Obama convert who lectured the nation about the good intentions of jihadists: “Nor do we describe our enemy as ‘jihadists’ or ‘Islamists’ because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community.”

But mostly, Brennan shouted on the air or tweeted his furor at Trump in increasingly unhinged fashion, “Your kakistocracy is collapsing after its lamentable journey… we have the opportunity to emerge from this nightmare stronger & more committed to ensuring a better life for all Americans, including those you have so tragically deceived.”

Given that Brennan was one of the founders of the Russian collusion hoax, he not only never apologized for the lie but continued to advance the falsehood of Trump-Russian collusion.

In 2018, Brennan called the president a veritable traitor:

“Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to and exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors.’ It was nothing short of ‘treasonous.’ Not only were Trump’s comments ‘imbecilic,’ but he is also wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you?”

For a former CIA director, Brennan proved strangely clueless about why Putin had invaded his neighbors during three of the last four American administrations—except Trump’s. When he called Trump treasonous, Trump had already lifted the Obama sanctions on providing offensive weapons to Ukraine. Trump would soon pull out of a disadvantageous missile deal with Russia. Trump would also lecture the Germans on the folly of cutting a natural gas pipeline deal with Putin. He sanctioned Russian oligarchs and ordered the destruction of a cohort of attacking Wagner Group Russian mercenaries in Syria.

Brennan was at the center of three of the greatest scandals in recent history that may well have changed American history. His promotion of the fake Steele dossier sought to destroy the Trump campaign and sway the election in favor of Hillary Clinton.

That continual false charge of Russian collusion in 2017-8 consumed 22 months of Trump’s first term, forcing the president to spend every day defending himself from the truly weaponized Mueller legal team vainly trying to concoct a collusion charge. Often on MSNBC, Brennan lied to the American people that President Trump was all but a traitor in league with Putin.

Not yet done, in 2020, Brennan and his associates likely changed the course of the last presidential debate by spreading a fantasy letter. Thereby, he helped turn a potentially disastrous Biden scandal into a false charge that Trump was once again “colluding” with the Russians to promote a supposedly fake Biden laptop. And those lies may well have swung the close 2020 election.

Now, Brennan thinks Trump has weaponized the Justice Department to investigate Brennan’s many lies and efforts to warp domestic elections. In truth, John Brennan, along with former FBI Director James Comey and James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, more or less destroyed the reputation of our investigative and intelligence bureaus by chronically lying, leaking, and weaponizing the government.

After all that, who would ever believe anything Brennan says—as he still projects his own past sins onto others?

America’s ‘useful idiots’

 

America’s ‘useful idiots’

 the left calls for revolution as the ultimate virtue signal

Jonathan Turley, The Hill

During the Cold War, Soviet communists reportedly referred to American liberals as “useful idiots.” Although the origin of the quote has been challenged (and attributed to both Lenin and Stalin), it captured many of the adherents of communism after World War II. From higher education to Hollywood, dilettantes on the left embraced Marxism with little real understanding of the philosophy or its implications.

We are now seeing the rise of a new generation of armchair revolutionaries who are calling for everything from the overthrow of the U.S. government to the seizure of factories and homes.

Democratic New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani personifies this new movement of young people lacking any memory of the failure of socialist and communist systems in the 20th Century.

Mamdani is perfect for trust-fund baby Trotskyites. The privileged son of a radical Columbia professor and a Hollywood producer, Mamdani went to the elite Bowdoin College, which charges over $70,000 annually in tuition. He is part of the “radical chic” of American higher education, where extreme views are fully mainstream.

Mamdani shows the appeal of mouthing Marxist manifestos as manifest truths. It is Marxism-lite — promises of everything from rent control to making “Halal eight bucks again.” 

In one speech before the Young Democratic Socialists of America conference, Mamdani even stated matter-of-factly how one of the goals is to “seize the means of production” in America.

“Right now, if we’re talking about the cancellation of student debt, if we’re talking about Medicare for all, you know, these are issues which have the groundswell of popular support across this country,” he said. “But then there are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s [boycott-divestment-sanctions against Israel] or whether it is the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment.”

Mamdani offers few details of what it would mean to seize all industry in this country or how such a system would work in the United States after failing in literally every nation where it has been attempted.

He has also called for the seizure of unoccupied luxury condos in New York to turn over to the homeless. With pledges of state-run grocery stores and other proposals, many are thrilled by the prospect of Marxism coming to America.

Polls show increasing support among young people for socialism and even communism. That is reflected in the New York primary, where Mamdani received significant support from wealthy and young college-educated voters.

Like Mamdani, these young voters have no inkling of what life was like under socialist and communist governments. They were not alive when radical shifts to socialism in Great Britain and France destroyed their economies and had to be reversed. They did not see the collapse of the Soviet Union or the move toward capitalism by China to avoid economic meltdowns.

Yet, as Mamdani stated, the radical left has to wait to seize such powers until it has “the same level of support at this very moment.” Unfortunately, socialist programs can produce the very dire conditions that lead to even greater consolidation of state controls and power.

Notably, most of Mamdani’s proposals would violate the Constitution or bankrupt the city. For example, efforts to seize multimillion-dollar luxury condos would constitute unconstitutional takings unless he was prepared to buy the units at their market value — a virtually impossible proposition.

Such considerations are rarely raised, let alone resolved, in radical conferences. Earlier this month, University of Minnesota liberal arts professor Melanie Yazzie joined others for a “teach-in” in which she delighted the audience with calls for the overthrow of the country by “people who come from nations who are under occupation by the United States government.”

She added, “it’s our responsibility as people who are within the United States to go as hard as possible to decolonize this place because that will reverberate all across the world. Because the U.S. is the greatest predator empire that has ever existed.”

That includes forcing “[the] U.S. out of everywhere,” including “Turtle Island” (the Native American name used to describe North America). Yazzie insisted that “the goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States for the freedom and the future of all life on this planet. It very much depends on that.”

Yazzie is an example of how most faculties in this country now run from the left to the far left. Applicants who espouse center-right viewpoints are often rejected as lacking “intellectual rigor” or depth. However, you cannot be too far left to secure a position in many departments that do not have a single Republican or conservative.

Take University of Chicago Assistant Professor Eman Abdelhadi, who used her recent appearance at the Socialism 2025 conference to denounce the University of Chicago as an “evil” and “colonialist” institution. Nevertheless, she insisted that she wanted to remain at the evil institution — not for its intellectual community, but to “organize” and “leverage” to build a socialist coalition.

Keep in mind that the faculty not only decided that Abdelhadi was worthy of a faculty position in the university’s Department of Comparative Human Development, but then also made her the Director of Graduate Studies.

For some, the calls of professors like Yazzie to “dismantle” the U.S. constitute the ultimate virtue signal. Like demands to seize factories and homes, the willingness to burn down the system is a cheap and easy way to establish your bona fides as one of the enlightened — something to brag about with your other 20-something fellow travelers as you order your $7 latte on the way to your Hyrox workout.

Lenin once mocked many in the West as idiots who would “transform themselves into men who are deaf, dumb and blind [and] toil to prepare their own suicide.”  What he never imagined was how some would still be transforming themselves decades after the revolution failed.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and the best-selling author of “The Indispensable Right.”

Antifa Goons Charged With Attempted Murder

Open warfare?

Ten Antifa Goons Charged With Attempted Murder After 4th of July Ambush on Texas ICE Facility

 Debra Heine, American Greatness

Ten antifa agitators from the Dallas-Fort Worth area were charged Monday with attempted murder after allegedly ambushing an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas on the 4th of July.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a press release that the militants were “heavily armed with military gear, guns, AR-15 style rifles, 12 sets of Kevlar bullet proof vests, masks, goggles, tactical gloves, two-way radios, and helmets.”

An Alvarado Police officer was shot in the neck at around 11 p.m. Friday night while responding to reports of suspicious activity outside the facility.

The shooting, like the attack on the Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas, on Monday, was designated a “planned ambush” by authorities.

According to the criminal complaint filed in the Northern District of Texas, the defendants, dressed in black military-style clothing, began shooting fireworks at the the Prairieland Detention Center to lure law enforcement to the facility “as part of an organized attack.” The center is used to hold people who have committed immigration violations and are awaiting deportation.

After about ten minutes, one or two of the agitators allegedly broke off from the main group and began to spray graffiti on vehicles and a guard structure in the parking lot, while another agitator, armed with an AR-style rifle, positioned himself in the woods nearby.

Included in the complaint are photos of the graffiti, flyers, flag, body armor, and magazines containing ammunition.

Correctional officers called 911 to report “suspicious activity,” and when an Alvarado police officer arrived at the scene, the agitator in the woods shot the officer in the neck.

Another armed assailant across the street allegedly “fired 20 to 30 rounds at unarmed correctional officers who had stepped outside the facility,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office stated.  AR-style rifles were reportedly found at the scene.

"The assailants fled from the detention center but were stopped by additional law enforcement officers. Some defendants were wearing body armor, some were armed, and some had two-way radios. A total of twelve sets of body armor were found during searches of vehicles associated with the defendants, on their persons, and in the area around the Prairieland Detention Center."

"Additionally, officers found spray paint, flyers stating, “FIGHT ICE TERROR WITH CLASS WAR!” and “FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS,” and a flag stating, “RESIST FACISM – FIGHT OLIGARCHY.” One of the alleged attackers had cell phones inside a “Faraday bag,” used to block phone signals and commonly used by criminal actors to try to prevent law enforcement from tracking their location."

The Justice Department named the ten defendants charged in the shooting: Cameron Arnold, also known as Autumn Hill; Savannah Batten; Nathan Baumann; Zachary Evetts; Joy Gibson; Bradford Morris, also known as Meagan Morris; Maricela Rueda; Seth Sikes; Elizabeth Soto; and Ines Soto. One suspect remains at large.

Each of the agitators have been charged with three counts of attempted murder of a federal agents and three counts of discharging a firearm during, in relation to a violent crime. Each of the individuals faces a mandatory prison term of ten years to up to life in prison, said Acting U.S. Attorney Nancy E. Larson, Monday night.

“Make no mistake, this was not a peaceful protest,” Larson stated during a press conference announcing the charges. “This was an ambush on federal and local law enforcement officers. This increasing trend of violence against law enforcement will not be tolerated in the Northern District of Texas. Those who use violence against law enforcement officers will be found and prosecuted using the toughest criminal statutes and penalties available.”

“While one suspect remains at large, the remaining 10 are being charged with ATTEMPTED MURDER and DOMESTIC TERRORISM,”  ICE’s official X account posted on Tuesday. “If convicted, they could spend the rest of their lives in prison.”

The investigation was conducted by multiple law enforcement agencies, including the Dallas FBI, the ICE Removal Office, Homeland Security Investigations, the ATF, Texas Department of Public Safety, Alvarado Police Department, and Johnson County Sheriff’s Office.

Border Czar Tom Homan told Fox news Monday that the suspects appeared to be “typical protesters that go from protesters to criminals.”

Since President Trump returned to office, left-wing “protesters” have escalated their violent tactics against their political enemies while the corporate media has attempted to excuse or downplay the violence.

Early into Trump’s 2nd term, agitators targeted then-DOGE chief Elon Musk by vandalizing and firebombing Tesla dealerships and harassing Tesla owners.

In May, Elias Rodriguez, 30, opened fire on Yaron Lischinsky, 28, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, at the Capital Jewish Museum, killing both.  He shouted “Free, free Palestine” as he was being arrested.

Last month another pro-Hamas  radical shouted “Free Palestine” as he threw Molotov cocktails at Jewish demonstrators in Boulder, wounding thirteen people, and killing one.

Also in June, downtown Los Angeles saw antifa-fueled anti-ICE riots where agitators assaulted immigration officers, slashed tires, torched vehicles and and defaced public buildings.  President Trump had to call in thousands of National Guard troops and 700 active-duty U.S. Marines to the city to quell the violence.

Left-wing militants also clashed with federal officers at an ICE facility in Portland, Oregon on the 4th of July, with hundreds of agitators attempting to storm holding cells.

Kyle Shideler, Director for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism at the Center For Security Policy, commented Tuesday that antifa’s escalation of political violence was foreseeable.

“For several years we have warned that Antifa cells were moving from mass movement protest tactics to small cell violent direct action, including firebombing police cars, pregnancy resource centers, and Tesla dealerships, and now attempted murder of police,” Shideler posted on X.

"These warnings aligned with the historic practice of the New Left communist urban guerrillas from which Antifa is a direct linear descendant, as we proved in testimony submitted to the U.S. Senate.

This was also the conclusion of the German ministry of interior as early as 2020, which my colleague Michael Waller was first to report, making available in English translation intelligence reports on the growing threat of Antifa violence.

We’ve provided this information to hundreds of local, and state agencies as part of our law enforcement program. Antifa remains our most requested briefing subject because, officers tell us they just can’t get the info anywhere else.

We have also consulted with state legislators on anti-terror and anti-rioting legislation which has passed in multiple states, and which directly counter and criminalize Antifa tactics.

Warning has been provided, and off the shelf and easily customizable legislative solutions are available. Now action has to be taken."

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) introduced legislation in January to deem certain conduct of members of Antifa as domestic terrorism and designate Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. So far, no action has been taken on the measure.

Debra Heine is a conservative Catholic mom of six and longtime political pundit. She has written for several conservative news websites over the years, including Breitbart and PJ Media.