In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I vaguely knew that there was some sort of fraud involvoing the terrorist organization al-Shabaab in Minnesota, but this story brings up another, completely different one : Around $250 million was handed out by the Minnesota government to provide meals to schoolchildren during the pandemic from 2020 onward. Instead, it was pocketed by corrupt business owners, including Salim Ahmed Said. He’s the co-owner of Safari Restaurant, where [Rep Ilhan] Omar held her 2018 congressional victory party. Said was found guilty in August of stealing over $12 million for serving 3.9 million “phantom” meals during the COVID-19 pandemic. He blew much of the money on a $2 million Minneapolis mansion and a $9,000-a-month shopping habit at Nordstrom, according to prosecutors. . . . Most of the money in Minneapolis was funneled through the now-defunct nonprofit Feeding Our Future. It allowed both nonprofits and for-profit businesses to be reimbursed with taxpayer money for feeding k...

I noted last month that media, both alt and legacy, had built up the idea that the governor elections in both New Jersey and Virginia were tossups in the polls and even potential upsets. Instead, we got predictable results in both, blue states electing Democrats. Then, almost immediately, we got both alt and legacy media pushing the idea that the special election in the Tennessee 7th House district was a tossup and could be an upset. For instance, intellectual welterweight Glenn Reynolds in the New York Post , the day before the election: This week, a special election in Tennessee’s 7th District, pitting GOP military veteran Matt Van Epps against far-left candidate Aftyn Behn, will show them just how far their base can take them. Going by conventional wisdom, this should be a walkover for Van Epps: The district leans Republican by 10 percentage points, and Van Epps’ policy positions echo those of the previous incumbent, former Rep. Mark Green, who resigned in July to...

Trump's media people, especially 2.0, are pretty darn good, while it's clear that only the B team is left at the Washington Post. I was wondering all Sunday why they dropped the big war crime story -- maybe the biggest scoop since Deep Throat -- on Black Friday, Nov 28, in the middle of a four-day weekend, when everybody would be bloated with Thanksgiving leftovers or off to the Black Friday sales. And then they just stood there while the White House got its ducks in a row the following Monday, which was yesterday. By then, even Real Clear Politics was having doubts : "What happened in this case depends on the sequence," [Carl]Cannon said [on the RCP podcast]. "These stories are not precise. Did Hegseth say 'kill them all' after the first drone strike had disabled this boat?" Tom Bevan suggested these reports are conveniently timed following the recent video from Congressional Democrats urging service members to disobey illegal ...

Robert Spencer asked over the weekend , "Hey, Why Was the DC National Guard Shooter Naked Except for a Pair of Socks?": The first photograph that circulated of Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who shot two National Guard members in Washington on Wednesday, murdering one of them, showed him lying on a gurney, naked except for a pair of socks. Initial reports took due notice of this odd fact, without making any attempt to explain it[.] I'll get back to this. But via the New York Post : A leading national refugee agency was warned multiple times that the Afghan terror suspect accused of murdering one National Guard member and critically injuring another was spiraling into mania and mental illness beginning in 2023, according to a bombshell email leak. Despite this, and an alleged failure to maintain his mandated contact with state social services, he still managed to win asylum in April of this year. Rahmanullah Lakanwal‘s behavior was so ...

I don't know if this is any sort of stunning insight, but ruminating on the latest "illegal orders" kerfuffle, it occurred to me yet again that Trump's whole political career can be understood as an extended Road Runner cartoon. In the 2016 election alone, a number of issues arose, including allegations of Russian collusion and hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, that would resurface in repeated attempts to bring him down in two impeachments and several criminal cases, but to no effect. The Access Hollywood tape was an October surprise that just about everyone was convinced would destroy his 2016 candidacy. Repeated attemnpts to tie him to the January 6 Capitol incursion have been just as ineffective. The Schumer Shutdown, ditto. Now it turns out that even before the shutdown, the idea of creating some sort of "illegal orders" scandal was a glimmer in certain eyes : A left-wing group is putting up billboards in high-crime cities where Pre...

Whether the "Seditious Six" casmpaign to convince military members to refuse "illegal" orders from Trump is actually a CIA operation is up in the air, but it's separate from the recent allegations that the shootings of two National Guard members in Washington last Wednesday are "Trump's fault". The most respectable version of this line can be found at Real Clear Politics in a piece from The Atlantic, A Terrible and Avoidable Tragedy in D.C. : The troops, deployed in an effort to reduce crime, are untrained in law enforcement; their days are spent cleaning up trash and walking the streets in uniform. Commanders, in a memo that was included in litigation challenging the high-visibility mission in D.C., argued that this could put them in danger. The Justice Department countered that the risk was merely “speculative.” It wasn’t. There are costs to performatively deploying members of the military—one of which is the risk of endangering ...

When I last looked at the January 6 pipe bomber two weeks ago , I noted that there were two competing stories coming out of one FBI. The best-publicized was that the individual in loose-fitting clothes, hoodie, and mask was a literally moonlighting female Capitol Police officer whom we'll call Ms C, who planted the bombs while wandering around Capitol Hill for an hour on the evening of January 5. The other story was that it wasn't Ms C, or maybe not even the figure wandering around in the videos at all. Instead, the bombs may have been planted shortly before they were discovered on January 6 by someone completely different. The main problem with this version is that on one hand, we have to discount the figure wandering around the previous evening, and on the other, we have to identify someone else planting the bombs the following morning. We must assume hundreds of man-hours have already been expended searching the relevant video footage for this without result. But be...