Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Musk
2. Mar-a-Lago
3. Secret Service
4. Menendez
5. SAVE
6. Project 2025
7. Conspiracy
8. Moonshine
9. UNRWA
1. Musk. Elon Musk had himself quite a week. Not only did he announce moving SpaceX and X headquarters from California to Texas, but he also announced financial support for Trump. Worst of all, he seems to be bringing other tech billionaires along with him.
- His announcement about headquarters move cited newly signed Cali legislation prohibiting schools from telling parents that they were transitioning their kids without their knowledge as the last straw. He previously moved his residence to Texas. The new law personally touches Musk as an estranged 18-year-old daughter changed her name and gender in 2022, dropping her Musk last name and adopting her mother’s name.
- One of the reasons for moving X from Cali is San Francisco’s gross receipts tax. This local tax multiplies total gross receipts by the portion of the business total payroll in San Francisco. X has been looking into getting into the financial business since Musk purchased it. Even Austin doesn’t levy this sort of tax. Yet.
- There was a big deal made of a Musk promise to donate $45 million/month to a pro-Trump PAC. Turns out that story was bogus. Musk is actually donating to an anti-DEI activity rather than a political PAC focused on a single candidate.
- Final Musk story has him actively trying to bring other tech billionaires over to Trump with him. Note that this is tempered by Jeff Bezos’ lawsuits aimed at limiting the number of Starship launches out of Cape Canaveral. Bezos’ Blue Origin has opted to dabble in lawfare following its inability to get into the reliable rapidly reusable spaceflight business.
2. Mar-a-Lago. The big news the day before the assassination attempt on Trump was Judge Cannon throwing out Jack Smith’s classified documents case against President Trump. Reason was that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional, something Justice Thomas mentioned in his opinion on the Jan 6 obstruction case. Smith was never confirmed by the Senate and as such was trying the case as a private citizen. There are some other ramifications of this given Smith was given an unlimited budget for his prosecution. Who or what accounts for that improperly or illegally spent money? Attorney General Merrick Garland has some ‘splanin’ to do. For his part, Smith appealed the opinion to the 11th Circuit. He will also attempt to get the 11th Circuit to remove Cannon from the case, something Andrew Weisman and the rest of the anti-Trump lawfare warriors have been demanding for over a year. Trump lawyers are already using both the Thomas opinion and Cannon’s action in an attempt to get the DC case in front of Judge Chutkan tossed. Note that half of that case (two of four indictments) is already gone due to the SCOTUS Jan 6 obstruction opinion.
3. Secret Service. We continue to be in the fog of war regarding the Secret Service and their actions connected to the assassination attempt against President Trump a week ago. As they and their DEI leadership are in terminal CYA mode, I expect it will be a while to get a straight answer out of anyone involved. But I do expect to finally get an answer. Rather than engage in endless micromanaging, I would prefer a blunter approach. Fire the Director immediately. Task the second in command with identifying the problem and fixing it. When that person isn’t responsive, fire him/her too. Keep working your way down the food chain until you get to the bottom of the problem or remove leadership begging to be removed. My guess is that it was incompetence, enforced by a complete embrace of DEI under this regime. We won’t know for sure for a while.
4. Menendez. Senator Bob Menendez (D, NJ) was convicted in a federal trial in Manhattan on all 16 counts of corruption. He accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in the form of cash, gold bars, mortgage payments and more in exchange for his political clout as Chair of the the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Menendez was essentially acting as a foreign agent for Egypt. And he was brazen about it. Menendez is running for reelection as an indy in NJ. While senate leadership can and should remove him, they would also lose their 51-49 majority in the senate, so don’t expect him to go anywhere any time soon. He claimed holding hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash and gold bars in his home was a Cuban thing.
5. SAVE. The House passed the SAVE Act 221 – 198 two weeks ago. The legislation expands proof of citizenship requirements to vote in federal elections. It also changes some purge requirements for voter rolls. The legislation was sent to the Senate where democrat leadership promptly buried it. This puts democrats squarely in the position of wanting to have illegals vote in federal elections, something that will be difficult to defend. Democrats in both houses of congress ramped up the rhetoric calling it racist and xenophobic. Biden also promised to veto the legislation should it make it out of the senate. Fun part of this is a senate plan to offer it as an amendment to the expected omnibus spending legislation in Sept necessary to keep the government open. We will see if democrats have the cojones to close the government so that illegals can vote in federal elections.
6. Project 2025. One of the summer hoaxes trotted out by democrats over the last month or so was Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a policy roadmap for a second Trump term in office. The actual document is a 140-page book that nobody is going to read. Economic, governance, energy recommendations are pretty good. The social ones read a lot like red meat that will be used to spin up and terrify democrat women voters to the point that one might assume democrat insiders participated in its preparation so as to drive their turnout. The book is sufficiently dense and impenetrable that there are multiple other books explaining what it says, all about the same length or longer, on Amazon. The books warning of nuclear winter / Handmaid’s Tale should this be adopted are prominently listed on Amazon, ranked as highly as the original. Many of them have similar covers, so be careful what you purchase. Heritage has been doing this for a long time, which is a problem as they haven’t learned that the political world changed significantly since they started doing this, laying the groundwork for the Reagan years. Note that nobody read those books (which were much shorter) either. From a persuasion viewpoint, this was a real mistake, an unforced error. Why? We gave the Other Side an empty vessel that they could pour all the lies they wanted to pour without recourse. And to their credit, they laid it on thick, though that has been muted following the assassination attempt and Biden dropping out of the race. For our part, Trump has disavowed Project 2025, though he could be clearer. The Republican Party cleaned up its platform to a list of 20 short statements that seem to have pretty good agreement.
7. Conspiracy. In the wake of Biden’s letters over the weekend announcing he was dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing VP Kamala Harris for president, we might want to dabble in the world of recreational conspiracy theories for a while. With tinfoil hat firmly donned, let’s proceed.
- First conspiracy theory would be a signed letter and no physical sign of Joe. Normally these sorts of things are publicly announced (LBJ and Nixon) to the nation. This one wasn’t. The longer we go without a Joe sighting, the wilder the conspiracy theories will get. Second indicator is the absence of Jill. If she is good with the decision, we will see her very soon. If she is not, it will be a while, perhaps a long while if this was another party stunt. Rabid conspiracy theory is that Joe signed the letter at the behest of whomever is taking care of him without knowing what he was signing, not unlike what many of us with elderly parents have had to do late in their lifetimes. He might have signed without knowing what he was signing. Fourth conspiracy theory is whomever is in charge of him is separating him from his family and support network.
- If the signature is on the up and up, and all the previously mentioned conspiracies didn’t happen, what made him make the decision to drop out? First guess is that the COVID must have been really bad in conjunction with his rapidly weakening condition. We know he hates both Hilly and O’Bama, mostly because they shunted him aside for the 2016 race. My guess is a large sum of money was promised coupled with complete immunity for his crime family. Given how low budget Biden is, that sum will be in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars rather than billions, though given the billionaire supporters of democrats these days, those sums are doable. The immunity will be via pardons for everyone on his way out the door, which may be one of the things delaying his resignation.
- Depending on how this all works out, the jockeying between various crime families involved in the operation of the democrat party will be fascinating. The Clinton crime family has been close to Kamala and may very well believe they have some measure of control over her. Most of her early staff were Hillary people. Most of those already left. I don’t know who’s loyalists they were replaced with. We also have Huma Abedin being inserted into the Soros operation marrying Soros heir Alex Soros. When you see Huma, you should think Hillary, and the Clinton Crime Family gets fortified with Soros money. Finally, we have O’Bama himself not endorsing Kamala, likely because of her proximity to the Clintons. O’Bama may end up being the guy who blows this little game up.
8. Moonshine. Ten days ago, a federal judge (Trump nominee) found that a federal law banning home distilling was unconstitutional. The ban is over a century old. Those found guilty under the law face fines up to $10,000 / five years in prison. Jimmy Carter signed a law that allowed home brewing of beer, cider and wines in 1978. Distilling spirits for home use has remained illegal. Expect to see more of these sorts of opinions as power is devolved out of DC back to the states.
9. UNRWA. I normally don’t cover a lot of what is going on in Gaza, as everything on both sides is generally garbage. This one caught my eye, with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs notifying the UN that at least 100 operatives of UNWRA, the UN relief agency for the Palestinians are Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives operating in Gaza. International funding from the US and Germany (among others) fund UNRWA’s operation. Hamas penetration into the agency allow them UN cover for their activities and allow them to seize international aid into Gaza and use that aid for their own purposes. The 100 names included are a small fraction of all Hamas and other Islamists working for UNRWA. It is fitting that Israel outs the UN for actively being on the Palestinian side of the war after decades of UN resolutions aimed at destroying Israel. What other surprises do the UN have for us?
More later –
- AG