Shhh! Democrats at work deconstructing the United States of America

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Off the Deep End: Dems Make 'Abolish ICE' Official Position

The DNC kicked off its summer meeting in Austin by deciding that voters got it all wrong two years ago. The committee that handles policy resolutions approved two proposed additions to the party's official positions in the midterms. The first would "reform" Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), while the second would abolish it altogether. The full membership passed both by unanimous acclamation:

The Democratic National Committee adopted a resolution Saturday urging congressional Democrats to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), alongside a competing measure calling only for reforms to the agency, at the party’s summer meeting in Austin, Texas.

The abolition measure, known as Resolution 27, cleared the DNC’s Resolutions Committee on Thursday in a 25-12 vote with one abstention before heading to the full membership, Newsweek reported. Both resolutions were bundled into a larger package and approved by the full membership on a unanimous voice vote, according to the Washington Times. The vote is nonbinding and does not change the party platform for 2028. ... 

The resolution calls on Democratic members of Congress to enact legislation dissolving ICE and winding down the immigration detention system. It seeks to restrict Department of Homeland Security funding unless certain enforcement activities end, including workplace raids, mass roundups, arrests at courthouses, arrests at ICE check-ins, and actions near schools and houses of worship. It also calls for terminating contracts with private detention providers.

How do you know a stale listing? When you see that the broker's paid Greenwich Time to do a profile on it

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74 Rock Maple Road is a perfectly good house on a nice street, so the fact that it’s lingered on the market 90 days is evidence enough to believe it’s overpriced, but its appearance in the paid real estate “reporting” section of Greenwich Time today removes all doubt.

$7.45 million Connecticut home comes with its own indoor basketball court and pool

The property started off May 20th at $7.950 million, dropped to $7.450 July 16th and, depending on how today’s marketing effort does, may see another price cut in the future.

Driven by his biological needs, yet still the NYPost shows no mercy for this candle thief. Tsk Tsk.

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Just last week we were educated by NYC state representative Emily Gallaher that shoplifting for ‘biological need’ is OK. Despite that, the cruel editors of the NY Post persist in their calls for punishment f these unfortunate people:

150 arrests and he still walks: How NY laws push criminals to grow worse

Meet career crook Shaquan Seth, cut loose last week after five, count ’em five, shoplifting busts in Queens — less than six days after he got out of Rikers after a five-month stint for previous thievery — because New York law forbids cash bail for offenses like Seth’s. 

No matter that he was no sooner back on the streets than he was eagerly reoffending, nor that he stole $600 worth of fancy candles, when the no-bail believers insist such theft is mostly out of need, like Jean Valjean. 

No matter that he threatened to shoot a young female clerk who was brave enough to try stopping him.

He was put right back on the street. 

But that’s what our “reformed” laws encourage: years of offending and reoffending as the perp gradually works his way up from petty crime to homicide. 

Seth has already done jail time for larceny, robbery, resisting arrest and assaulting a cop; it’s clear he has much worse in him than candle theft. 

He belongs in prison (or, conceivably, locked up in a mental institution). 


The global economy is not something that can be flipped off and then on again like a lightswitch — duh

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Many of us were screaming this as the lockdown loomed, but “science” and “experts” insisted we knew nothing. I’ve never believed that the people leading the world into disaster didn’t know better; they achieved exactly their desired result.

Posted this morning on InstaPundit:

SPENCER PRATT: Bombs, Burnt Beef, and the Big $20 Burrito Battle.

At some point, we will have to reckon with the fact that we shut down the world’s largest economy over the flu. You can’t do that. You can never do that. Not for global wars, not for nuclear holocaust, you never ever shut down your economy. Despite what decades of communist propaganda may have you believe, concern over the economy isn’t just vanity, it’s not greed…the economy is the proxy for our collective lives. Shutting down the economy means people die from missed cancer screenings, business owners kill themselves because their legacy family restaurant shuts down for good, people can’t afford basic human needs. We crippled the global economy and attempted to backfill the void by printing more money than had ever been printed in the history of human civilization and doled it out with alacrity. This grand experiment in universal basic income led to hyperinflation on a level that we only see in collapsing communist countries. The factories went dormant while the money printer went “brrrrrrrr”, so with too many dollars chasing too few goods, there was only one predictable outcome; prices go to the moon.

It will take decades for us to absorb and dilute the shock of the deluge of cash flooding into our economy. In 2015 in Mexico, eight straight days of torrential rainfall on Cozumel flooded the coast with freshwater. This temporary disruption of the salinity in the marine ecosystem was devastating for aquatic life, and it took years for the system to stabilize and recover from that singular shock. Similarly, it will take decades for us to absorb and dilute the shock of the deluge of cash that flooded into our economy during the government’s irrational shutdowns.

Unfortunately, this reckoning with our past mistakes is unavoidable. We can’t legislate nor print our way out of the most colossal fuck-up in the history of economic policy. No government program can unring that bell. The $20 burrito is a teachable moment: NEVER SHUT DOWN YOUR ECONOMY. EVER. The problem is, we have short memories, so nobody is going to connect the expensive burrito to the bad choices of yesteryear.

Read the whole thing.

The Week in Pictures was posted yesterday, but I was away from my computer

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And as seen over at InstaPundit:

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And Trump, of course

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PowerLine:


Posted on August 15, 2026 by Bill Glahn in Fake News

“They framed Nixon”

I occasionally see a clip on the interwebs of comedian Bill Murray appearing on the Joe Rogan Podcast talking about his friend John Belushi.

The appearance occurred in early 2025. Murray was describing to Rogan his reaction after having read the first five pages of the Bob Woodward biography of Belushi, Wired (1984),

Oh my God, they framed Nixon.

I’ll let Variety describe the exchange,

If he did this to Belushi, what he did to Nixon is probably soiled for me too. I can’t take it.

Over the past two decades I’ve been directly involved in politics and/or media. I’ve been lucky/had the misfortune to be a direct witness to newsworthy events and then to read/see the media coverage of those same events. If you’ve had that experience, you understand where Murray is coming from. He knew Belushi, personally, they were friends and co-workers. He did not recognize the Belushi that appeared in Woodward’s  book.

If they could frame Nixon, who else did they frame? Joe McCarthy? What else have we been told in our history books that just isn’t true?

On the other side of the coin,

During one stretch in my years in politics, I had the task of going around Minnesota giving speeches on the topic of energy. I gave one such talk to a small audience circa 2009 in the Twin Cities metro area. During Q&A I heard from an audience member, a lady older than me at the time, say,

Commissioner Glahn, if anything that you said was true, I would have already read about it in the Star Tribune.

As I've said here for several decades now, if global warming is real, why do they have to lie about it?

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the money would be better spent stopping the brainwashing of children

Worldwide, we’ve spent an estimated eleven trillion dollars “fighting” global warming, $2 trillion in each of the past two years alone. That’s a windfall for the manufacturers and vendors of windmills and solar panels and the “non-profit” groups who are pushing the hysteria, but a tragedy for the rest of us.

David Strom:

How to Sell a Scam

I am old enough to remember when the Maldives were drowning due to global warming. 

Back in the days when television was broadcast in 4x3 and Al Gore was a thing, the Maldives and Tuvalu both got on the map as early victims of the West's ravenous appetite for fossil fuels, destined to drown due to our slavish devotion to the burning of dead dinosaurs and plankton. 

People were drowning. Coral reefs were getting bleached. Whales were being boiled alive, screaming for us to save them. Cabinet meetings were being held underwater, begging for...foreign aid. 

Which, by the way, they dutifully got. Lots of foreign aid has streamed into climate endangered islands, and no doubt it has done real good. 

Lots of it, in fact. 

It's worth noting that after their theatrical 'emergency' meeting underwater with politicians in diving gear signing a UN climate declaration, they received a multi million dollar 'climate rescue fund' which they spent on brand new beachside airports. It's also worth noting that none of these were underwater airports.

In 2004, the BBC warned the Maldives were "soon to be uninhabitable," claiming sea levels were rising 0.9 cm per year and that 80% of the islands could vanish within a century. 

More than two decades later, though, reality says otherwise. The Maldives haven't sunk, they've exploded with growth: 12 new airports, expanded international terminals, record tourism of over 2 million visitors a year, and more than 170 resorts. 

Instead of drowning, this so-called "paradise in peril" has shown no statistically significant sea level rise since the 1980s, according to satellite data. 

Here we have another climate catastrophe headline completely undone by time.

Twenty-two years ago, here is how the BBC described a visit to the Maldives, a dying hellhole that needed our help badly. They needed international aid to deal with the impending doom the West created, and they needed us to impoverish ourselves by stopping the insane use of fossil fuels — something the British government proceeded to do. 

To visit the Maldives is to witness the slow death of a nation.

For as well as being blessed with sun-kissed paradise islands and pale, white sands, this tourist haven is cursed with mounting evidence of an environmental catastrophe.

The country is portrayed by travel companies as a tropical paradise

To the naked eye, the signs of climate change are almost imperceptible, but government scientists fear the sea level is rising up to 0.9cm a year.

Since 80% of its 1,200 islands are no more than 1m above sea level, within 100 years the Maldives could become uninhabitable.

The country's 360,000 citizens would be forced to evacuate.

The Maldives' survival as a sovereign nation is truly at stake.    

No wonder it was the first country to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol, which sets targets for cuts in industrialised countries' greenhouse gas emissions.

No wonder that Male, the capital, is surrounded by a 3m-high (9.8ft) wall, which took 14 years to construct at a cost of $63m. Unable to foot the bill themselves, the government happily accepted aid from Japan, which paid for 99% of the cost.

But the wall offers protection for just one of the Maldives' 200 inhabited islands - and then only against tidal surges rather than the rising sea level, the longer-term threat.

Strom": “A few years back I decided to check on how the Maldives was doing. Were they becoming as extinct as the polar bear? When I decided to check in on these dying islands, I found this on their website. “


….. There's a reason why I compare liberal politics to organized crime. It's because liberal politics, or essentially almost all politics, is akin to organized crime. As bad as it is, though, the disorganized crime of radical politics is even worse, and climate change politics combine the two in the most toxic of all brews. 

Well, not quite. COVID politics was far more toxic, and DSA-style communism is a step even farther, which is why even the Organized Crime Democrats are fighting like hell to kill it. 

By now we should recognize the scams as they come along, and many of us do. We are far more cynical today than we were back in the 1990s or the 1970s, when fewer of us immediately scoffed when "experts" told us that overpopulation would kill us or that global warming would cause mass extinctions the world had never seen since the dinosaurs died off. 

Unfortunately, a large proportion of the population hasn't learned the lesson, and with new generations being born those of us who have die off all too quickly.

There's a new sucker born every minute. 

See also:

John Stossel: The ‘climate crisis’ racket

… . “Climate change is making droughts worse,” writes Earthjustice.

“Droughts are absolutely not getting worse,” says Lueken. “The media love to share stories when there is a drought somewhere, some specific location. They completely ignore previous years with record low amounts of drought.”

Globally, there’s been no increase in drought.

Climate alarmists have a better argument when they say rising sea levels will cause floods.

But the media’s claims are silly.

In 2004, The Guardian claimed a “secret report” said: “European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas… by 2020.”

Yes, six years ago.

The “experts” also predicted rising seas will “completely cover” the Maldives. But since then, the islands have grown in size. They are even building new airports.

“Sea level rise is absolutely occurring, but it’s been slow,” says Lueken. “About an inch a decade. There is no way people wouldn’t be able to adapt.”

More than 100 million people already live below sea level in places like Holland. Dikes hold back water.

Climate change may cause real problems. But we can adapt, rather than get hysterical about mythical threats.

…. Environmental groups push these myths to get your money.

“Scares drive donations,” says Entine. “The oxygen for these organizations is money donated by people who think they’re doing good.”

We think of environmental groups as little guys — fighting big polluters. But today environmental groups are big guys spending millions on lawsuits that block progress.

Greenpeace pulls in more than $400 million a year.

Your donations to the World Wildlife Fund pay for its elegant 250,000-square-foot headquarters.

The Natural Resources Defense Council funnels your hard-earned dollars into extravagant, star-studded galas.

Update: Even CNN Admits It: Americans “Don’t Care” about Climate Change Hysteria

In fact, honey, those items are stolen for resale, but your point is insane in any case

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Former Queens Councilman Robert Holden (D) SUMS IT UP NICELY:

“Gallagher is a major dope,” 

Socialist NY lawmaker Emily Gallagher says shoplifting for ‘biological need’ is OK

A Brooklyn socialist lawmaker declared this week that shoplifters have a right to swipe items like soap and toothpaste from local stores without getting busted — because of their “biological need” for the products.

State Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher strongly suggested shoplifting should be legalized while joined at a news conference outside Manhattan Criminal Court on Thursday by other lefty pols and criminal justice advocates with Court Watch NYC. The group claimed it monitored 360 arraignments over four days and found more than half were for misdemeanor offenses.

“Most of what we saw were crimes of poverty-people who are stealing things like toothpaste, people who were stealing things like, you know, soap. And that means if you’re stealing those things, you need them,” said Gallagher, who reps Greenpoint and other sections of woke northern Brooklyn.

“And we are choosing to protect billion-dollar companies, like CVS and Walgreens, over the people who are struggling to get by. So I would say that the true crime is that there is such incredible wealth disparity in this city that there are people who can be thrown in jail simply for having a biological need.”

The card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America said she would continue to push for “treatment-not-jail” punishments – all but ignoring that first-time shoplifting offenders rarely get jailtime and that lack of enforcement pushed by lefty pols like herself statewide has forced many drugstores to lock products in plastic cases.

AOC was making the same claim back in 2022; it was debunked then, thoroughly, yet its flawed logic and “facts” persist among the criminal political class.