As Trump did unto Biden, so his Democrat successor will do unto him

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Executive orders are ephemeral, yet almost all the changes we’ve cheered during Trump’s first year have been achieved through them, rather than more-difficult to undo legislation. Thanks, Republicans.

Mamdani’ first executive order wipes out most EOs issued by Adams

Earlier in the day, Mamdani signed executive order No. 1, which revoked all prior mayoral executive orders under former Mayor Eric Adams issued on or after Sept. 26, 2024, unless they were specifically reissued by Mamdani's administration.

They just can't seem to help themselves: The Bee's back to reporting straight news

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HAMPTON, NH — As millions resolve to briefly get back in shape, Planet Fitness announced a convenient new two-week gym membership just in time for the New Year's holiday.

According to sources, the New Year's holiday is the busiest time of year for the fitness industry, which is exactly why Planet Fitness plans to set itself apart with a convenient two-week gym membership for the coveted New Year's resolution demographic.

"Our competitors want to abuse the New Year's resolution by locking you into annual gym memberships, which is exactly why we're offering a low-pressure, zero-hassle two-week gym commitment so you don't pay for more than you need," said Planet Fitness CEO Colleen Planet. "We all know you're going to quit anyway."

Damn, I guess I'll have to cancel my flight and go to Disney World instead

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americans stay out!

Mali And Burkina Faso Retaliate Against Trump By Banning Americans

And there is a great weeping and wailing in U.S. travel agency offices throughout the land

Mali and Burkina Faso’s military regimes on Tuesday announced they will bar U.S. citizens from entering their countries, a tit-for-tat response to President Donald Trump’s expanded U.S. travel restrictions.

The bans, issued in separate statements by the two governments’ foreign ministers, mark the latest escalation between Washington and a bloc of West African juntas that have been drifting away from the U.S. and the Economic Community of West African States. 

Mali’s Foreign Ministry said it would apply “the same conditions and requirements to US nationals as those imposed on Malian citizens,” effective immediately, according to the Associated Press. Burkina Faso’s Foreign Minister Karamoko Jean-Marie Traoré issued a similar statement invoking the same reasoning.

The U.S. State Department has Mali under a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory, citing terrorism, kidnapping, violent crime, unrest and limited U.S. capacity to help Americans outside Bamako — and ordered non-emergency U.S. personnel and family members to leave in October. Human Rights Watch says Mali’s conflict with Islamist armed groups has displaced more than 402,000 people and fueled mass-casualty attacks and reprisals.

Burkina Faso is in even worse shape. The State Department also lists it as Level 4 “Do Not Travel,” warning that terrorist groups “continue to plan and conduct” attacks nationwide. UNHCR notes government data showing more than 2 million internally displaced people, one of the region’s most severe displacement crises. Human Rights Watch has accused Burkinabe security forces and allied militias of mass killings of civilians, while reporting that more than 60% of the country is outside government control amid the insurgency, the AP separately reported.

President Trump is doubtless huddling with State Department officials right this minute, reversing the ban and begging Mali’s and Burkina Faso’s foreign ministers to reconsider.

And a federal judge will be issuing a restraining order blocking this in 10, 9, 8 …

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Happy New Year: Trump Pausing Child Care Payments to All States, Not Just MN, Pending Records Reviews

In the wake of explosive fraud allegations in Minnesota and, now, Washington State, the Trump administration is freezing child care payments to all states pending a review of recipient data by the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS).

According to HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon, all recipients of funding are required to send data to HHS for review; recipients who are not suspected of fraudulent activity are only required to submit "administrative data," but those recipients who are suspected of fraudulent activity are required to submit additional records:

Nixon said that recipients of federal funding in Minnesota and those “suspected of fraudulent activity” have to provide the HHS with additional records that include “attendance records, licensing, inspection and monitoring reports, complaints and investigations.”

…. According to Nixon, until individual state-level allocations can be vetted, no further funding will be disbursed.

While investigations have been ongoing in the state since May and nearly two dozen of indictments have already been returned, independent journalist Nick Shirley's viral video documenting numerous taxpayer-funded "learing" centers with zero children in attendance brought nationwide attention to the scandal. 

Cam Higby, another independent journalist, documented similar issues in Washington State.

In a Truth Social post, President Trump hinted that investigations and indictments will be finding their way to California, where RedState has reported on pandemic unemployment fraud thought to be close to $60 billion at last count, and where our ongoing investigation into federally-funded day care centers (which will be published in January) suggests that similar fraud schemes are being carried out. Trump said, "There is more FRAUD in California than there is in Minnesota, if that is even possible."

It's very possible, Mr. President.

Damn, just as New York’s own fraud program is gettig warmed up

Tax hike on NY workers will be needed to fund universal childcare program backed by Mamdani, Hochul: report

Workers in New York will have to pay higher taxes to fund the massive universal childcare program backed by incoming Big Apple Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul, according to a new study.

The report from the liberal think tank the Fiscal Policy Institute found that tax hikes on corporations and millionaires alone won’t cover the $8 billion annual statewide bill for the program.

Other income earners will need to chip in, likely with a payroll-tax hike, to finance the pledged childcare for kids ages 6 months and up, said the labor-backed group.

It’s a safe bet that the tax hikes will prove permanent regardless of the eventual outcome of challenges to Trump’s order, because that’s just how these things work.

Besides, Mamdani has plenty of other grift programs in the pipeline: “The lefty pol has also vowed to quickly deliver on his big-ticket campaign promises such as offering city-run grocery stores, free buses and freezing rents — a slate of socialist freebies and other agenda items that are expected to cost more than $10 billion.”

Unfortunately, what worked for Hercules probably won’t clean the stables here

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David Strom, HotAir:

Denaturalizing Fraudsters Will Accomplish Almost Nothing

With all the talk of denaturalizing and deporting the Somalians who committed the welfare fraud in Minnesota, a much bigger truth is being ignored. 

Almost every Somali in Minnesota is a US citizen, with about 60% of the Somali population born in the United States. And Somalis have one of the highest birth rates of any ethnic group in the nation, and by some measures, the absolutely highest.

Evicting a few dozen will accomplish nothing aside from providing emotional satisfaction that at least a few people faced justice. 

Liberals will say—in fact, Tim Walz has already said—that Somalis are part of the fabric of Minnesota, and if there is a fraud problem here, it is mostly white men who commit the fraud, and among the Somalis, it is only a few bad apples in any case. There is no system problem, and the only reason people say otherwise is racism. 

That is, unfortunately, entirely wrong. Not so much wrong in the sense that most Somalis are directly involved in any particular fraud. Rather, the Somali culture is clannish, and Somalis have among the highest rates of welfare use. They do not integrate, are very politically savvy, and are using their growing political power to take over the politics of the places where they have settled. 

….

In the Minneapolis mayor's race, almost all the competition for votes centered around getting one Somali clan or another to vote for one of the two major candidates. Both candidates made commercials in Somali, and Mayor Jacob Frey is still making videos while speaking Somali. 

My current mayor, Jacob Frey, social media feed is still full of appeals to Somalis. He speaks Somali first, and only after does he shift into English to...defend Somalis. 

As I wrote earlier, the state government is STILL funneling money to the Feeding Our Future scammers, just using a different program run under Medicaid. That money gets spread around the Somali community, flows back into Democratic Party coffers, and even gets flown across the globe in suitcases back to Somalia. 

While we don't do studies like this in America for very obvious reasons, in Nordic countries, they have crunched the numbers and found not only that immigrants from Somalia consume the most welfare and bring a net negative "contribution" of hundreds of thousands of dollars per migrant over their lifetime, but that their children actually are worse in both crime and welfare use. 

Fromhttps://t.co/PfFxqOiuCZ

— Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) August 3, 2025

We are fooling ourselves if we believe that deporting a few dozen Somalis who get convicted of fraud will accomplish much at all. As with Great Britain, the mistake was importing these migrants at all and allowing them to become citizens. Somalis still practice female genital mutilation, have created "no-go" zones within American cities, and are stubbornly against any form of integration. 

It's true that this is not true of all Somalis; it's also true that, as a class, they have proven indigestible because their culture is incompatible with ours. 

I get that politicians pander but, good grief, has some level of self respect https://t.co/l632ACagD5

— Fusilli Spock (@awstar11) December 31, 2025

Westerners, particularly liberal Westerners, don't want to face the fact that diversity is not, in fact, our strength. Western societies work because they are high-trust societies where most people are basically honest, and where we punish fraud vigorously to ensure that this remains the case. 

But...our political class has figured out that they can get in on the fraud, so they enable it. We are in danger of turning into Mexico, where the costs of opposing corruption is high, and the benefits of participating in it equally high. 

Liberals believe that the backlash against Islamic immigration is an Eastern European thing in the EU, but actually the Nordic countries woke up and started paying migrants to leave and rejecting new ones. They are among the most anti-immigrant countries in the world, as they saw their high-trust societies begin to crumble. 

I'm not exactly certain what we can legally do to solve the problem that lax immigration and refugee programs created, but we need to get serious about recognizing and dealing with the problem. 

Denaturalizing and deporting convicted criminals is all well and good, but it won't make much of a difference. 

A Martin Luther King Boulevard for the dupes in San Francisco

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When my son John was young and just beginning to drive, I cautioned him to never get off the highway onto an exit for "a Martin Luther King Boulevard” because, I explained, they were always in the worst part of a city’s slums. “The politicians come in, promise to do all sorts of good things, then name a street after the man and leave, never to reappear until the next election”.( I’d made that discovery on my own back when I was hitch-hiking and driving cross-county several times in the early 70s, but Warren Beatty’s 1978 film Bulworth captured its essence perfectly.)

John was skeptical, and probably mistook his father’s cynicism for racism, but some years later after he’d made his own trips across the country and up and down the coasts, he remembered what I’d warned him, and told me, “Dad, you were right”.

So all of that wordage was to lead into this story, reported today:

San Francisco mayor quietly signs reparations fund that could lead to $5M payments per person

The fund would be a remedy for alleged historic discrimination and displacement, according to an ordinance

The mayor of San Francisco signed an ordinance that creates a "Reparations Fund" that could one day grant each of the city's eligible Black residents up to $5 million in reparations for alleged historic discrimination and displacement.

The ordinance, which was passed by the Board of Supervisors earlier this month, was signed by Democrat Mayor Daniel Lurie two days before Christmas. It establishes the legal framework for the fund but does not allocate funds or guarantee payments. The fund can be financed with private donations, foundations and other non-city sources. 

It proposed that the city "[p]rovide a one-time, lump sum payment of $5 million to each eligible person [estimated at 46,000 “victims”."

Any taxpayer-funded reparations payouts would require separate legislation, an identified funding source and mayoral approval. Lurie told Fox News Digital that no taxpayer money would be paid into the potential pot, given the city's $1 billion budget deficit.  

"I was elected to drive San Francisco’s recovery, and that’s what I’m focused on every day," Lurie said in a statement to Fox News Digital. "We are not allocating money to this fund — with a historic $1 billion budget deficit, we are going to spend our money on making the city safer and cleaner."

….

So: another meaningless street renaming, with a couple of new agencies to provide some no-show jobs for the pols’ cronies, and that’s it, period:

The report also recommended a guaranteed annual income tied to area median income and the creation of new city agencies, including an Office of Reparations, to administer programs. It also called for major housing interventions, such as rental assistance, homeownership support and city-backed funds to purchase property along Black business corridors, as well as multi-million-dollar investments in Black-owned businesses.

Here’s Bulworth:

Mamdani's Ruin begins at midnight, but Seattle's mayor has started early

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Zohran Mamdani will be first mayor to be sworn in on Quran during New York City inauguration

Following up on his DEI appointment of a new Fire Commission, a black lesbian who’s never, you know — actually fought a fire, the soon-to-be Mayor today turned his attention to destroying what’s left of the city’s school system:

MAMDANI PICKS EDUCATOR WHO WORKED TO DISMANTLE GIFTED & TALENTED PROGRAM AS NYC SCHOOLS CHANCELLOR 

And:

Mamdani’s Plan to Strip the NYPD’s Boss of Disciplinary Power Would Threaten Public Safety

…. One is a proposal by Zohran Mamdani to shift final say on matters of police officer discipline away from the NYPD’s commissioner and give it to the notoriously anti-cop Civilian Complaint Review Board.

Currently, once the CCRB substantiates a complaint against a member of the NYPD, it makes a recommendation for sanctioning the alleged misconduct.

Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post

______________________

The bio of the author of this piece, caught eye because it states :Rafael Mangual is the Nick Ohnell Fellow and head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.”

Nick Ohnell is not only a Greenwich resident, he was the extraordinary man who took a chance on hiring a newly minted philosophy major and set him to work selling very expensive PBX phone equipment to businesses around the country. These things were terribly expensive — an ITT switch, for instance, sold for $30,000 in 1976 dollars, and probably had 1/10th the power and speed of an iPhone today, but they were a huge leap forward from the Bell crap, and paid a very tidy commission. Dumbest career move I ever made was to leave Nick’s employ and go to law school; I had perfect score LSATs burning a hole in my pocket, and thought I’d do better as a lawyer. Wrong: three years hard work later, I graduated and found a job paying, at best, 1/3 of what I’d have been earning with Nick, and I certainly am not in a position to endow any sort of fellowhip at the Manhattan Institute of, for that matter, a local Dairy Queen. Ah well, at least I had the experience of working for an excellent boss and a great guy.)

In any event, back to this post:

Mamdani’s sure to bring the fun back into Fun City, but wait! Seattle’s Katie Wilson says, “hold my beer”:

Despite Brave Sir Jussie's valiant attempt to stop them

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he tried his best

No worries, Mon — if things get too hot in the Land of Lakes, just shuffle off to Ohio, where they understand these things.

Happy New Year!

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A number of readers have donated to the cause as 2025 limps to a close, and I thank them profusely. But I’m also grateful not only to them and to those who have contributed previously, but to the commenters and readers who make this blog such a fun little community. It’s a blast to write it, but none of it works without you guys, so thank you, and let’s see how much fun next year will be. Whoo boy.