Month: November 2023

The complete and total destruction of San Francisco and the surrounding area, consisting of streets overrun by drug addicts and corporations and retail establishments simply giving up on the city, is almost finished. Thanks, liberals!

The latest chapter in the once great city’s demise came this week when Google pulled out of a $15 billion investment in Santa Clara County that would have built 15,000 homes, according to Gizmodo. 

The report notes that Google and Lendlease have jointly terminated their $15 billion deal, originally struck in 2019, to develop housing and commercial spaces in Sunnyvale, San Jose, and Mountain View, the latter being the home base for the tech giant.

The ‘Downtown West’ project in San Jose was set to feature 4,000 affordable housing units, sufficient office space for 20,000 workers, a 300-room hotel, and 10 parks. Instead, San Francisco now “gets nothing”.

Gizmodo wrote that in 2021 the San Jose City Council gave the green light for the Downtown West construction plans by Google and Lendlease, a project which, according to an active post on Google’s site, was shaped through close collaboration with the city and community members to support community building.

The project’s progress was halted in April during the demolition stage, leaving its future uncertain and potentially becoming a blight on the San Jose landscape at a time when economic injections are sorely needed.

Compounding the issue, the San Jose Spotlight has highlighted that opioid overdoses in San Jose have seen a threefold increase since 2018.

In a press release issued Friday, Lendlease said: “The decision to end these agreements followed a comprehensive review by Google of its real estate investments, and a determination by both organizations that the existing agreements are no longer mutually beneficial given current market conditions.”

Alexa Arena, Google’s Senior Director of Development, commented to Gizmodo: “We’ve been optimizing our real estate investments in the Bay Area, and part of that work is looking at a variety of options to move our development projects forward and deliver on our housing commitment.”

By Rebecca Pifer of HealthcareDive

Summary

• More than 10 million low-income Americans have lost Medicaid coverage as states continue checking eligibility for the safety-net program following the pandemic.

• The U.S. passed that marker as of Nov. 1, according to a tracker by health policy nonprofit KFF, which started collecting data on Medicaid enrollment in April when states could begin redeterminations.

• To date, 35% of the 28 million people with a completed renewal were disenrolled, while 65% had their coverage renewed. Disenrollments vary widely by state — Texas has the highest disenrollment rate at 65%, while Illinois has the lowest at 10%, KFF found.

Disenrollment rates have been rising steadily since this summer, as more states start rechecking their Medicaid members’ eligibility for the program.

The Biden administration enticed states to put those checks on hold during the COVID-19 public health emergency in exchange for more generous federal funding. That continuous enrollment period caused Medicaid’s rolls to swell to some 94 million people earlier this year, making the program the largest source of insurance coverage in the U.S. during the pandemic.

Millions of people were expected to lose coverage at the end of Medicaid unwinding, though the actual number is currently very much in flux. Patient advocates, Democrat lawmakers and health policy researchers have raised concerns about redeterminations, as high numbers of people have lost coverage for administrative errors, not actual ineligibility. In addition, states’ different strategies are complicating efforts to get a clear national picture of how redeterminations are playing out.

Disenrollment figures are almost certainly an undercount, due to data lags, KFF noted.

But across states with available data, 71% of all people disenrolled lost coverage for procedural reasons like not filling out paperwork by the deadline, or the state being unable to contact them. That’s a small dip from earlier this year, when the KFF found 74% of terminations were procedural.

The Biden administration has taken a number of steps in an effort to curb procedural disenrollments, including offering states more flexibility in how they pursue redeterminations. To date, all states have taken the CMS up on the additional assistance, except Florida.

Regulators have also threatened state agencies with sanctions over an administrative glitch that improperly removed children from Medicaid coverage, and forced states with high levels of procedural terminations to pause redeterminations.

Those actions are resulting in more Medicaid members rejoining the program after being kicked off, according to health insurance executives.

In recent third-quarter earnings calls, Centene, Molina and Elevance — all of which contract with states to manage the care of their Medicaid beneficiaries — said they’re seeing the rate of reconnects accelerate as compared to earlier this year.

In addition, states are revising rates to reflect changing acuity as payer’s membership rolls change, which should insulate insurers from extreme unexpected medical costs.

Despite that, however, redeterminations continue to stress payers’ financial outlooks. Earlier this year, Centene lowered its 2024 earnings guidance due to expectations that Medicaid redeterminations will increase spending and lower premium revenue next year. And Molina in October lowered its member retention expectations after redeterminations are completed, from 50% to 40%.

Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, who has railed against “socialism,” corporate “wokeness,” and the Biden administration, recently spoke with FOX Business Charles Gasparino about why he is in a “particularly pissed-off mood” these days. 

“I’ve said this to all of my friends, anybody who would listen: if this election goes the way the last one went, this country will be a Third World country,” the 94-year-old billionaire told Gasparino. 

Marcus blames the social and economic mess consuming the country on President Biden, calling the president a “dunce” and saying he’s the “most divisive president we’ve ever seen.” Labeling half the country as a ‘MAGA Republican’ was never a way to promote ‘unity,’ he continued. 

The billionaire then talks about Biden’s deteriorating mental state, saying, “Somebody is feeding him like a puppet.” He warned against the massive spending increase and numerous policy errors that triggered high inflation and an explosion in debt. 

Marcus acknowledges some positives during the Trump administration, such as increased wages, higher employment among minorities, and low inflation. However, he expresses concerns about Trump’s personality, particularly his inability to “keep his mouth shut . . . I’m afraid if he’s elected, the first thing he does is go after his enemies, starting with the Republicans.” 

Marcus said, “I think [Trump] has the policies if he would just follow the script and do what he has to do.”

Gasparino asks the billionaire if he could build another Home Depot in today’s environment. The short answer is ‘no’: “Regulations and all this woke crap” have made starting a public company near impossible, he said. 

He added: “I ran a business for 60 years… I would never get involved with a social issue outside of business. That was not my business.”

Marcus said there was some hope for the future of the company as Americans were quickly turning on radical leftists. The example he gave was the Bud Light boycott:

“They were No. 1 . . . and they turned stupid overnight,” he said. “The American people remember; their sales are going to stay down.”

He concludes by saying the American people are worth saving from what he believes is a progressive apocalypse… 

In a separate interview earlier this year, Marcus told Americans to “wake up” to the reality that the economy is in “tough times” following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. 

Months before that, in December 2022, he railed against “socialism” for why nobody wants to work and warned capitalism is in dire straits. 

Marcus’ warning is similar to co-founder and retired CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, who recently warned that “socialists are taking over” and ‘capitalism cannot be replaced with disastrous socialism.’ 

The positive takeaway is that the Bud Light boycott serves as a barometer of American sentiment, indicating widespread discontent with progressive policies across the corporate world to local, state, and federal governments.

Has Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky just initiated his next publicity stunt? After all, just days ago he publicly complained that war in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas is “taking away the focus” from the Ukraine conflict.

Now, he’s lashed out at former President Trump while inviting him to come and see the war in Ukraine for himself. Zelensky said the provocative words in a new NBC “Meet the Press” interview. He sarcastically batted down Trump’s prior claims that he could negotiate peace within 24 hours.

Zelensky responds to Trump saying he could end the Ukraine war in 24hrs:

“I invite President Trump. If he can come here, I will need 24 minutes … to explain to President Trump that he can’t manage this war. He can’t bring peace, because of Putin.” pic.twitter.com/WqGFsCDKoC

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) November 5, 2023

“Former President Trump said that about 24 hours, that he can manage it and finish the war,” Zelensky said in response. “For me, what can I say? So he’s very welcome as well.”

“President Biden was here, and I think he understood some details which you can understand only being here,” Zelensky added. “So I invite President Trump. If he can come here, I will need 24 minutes,” he said in a swipe and direct challenge to Trump. 

Zelensky then emphasized that achieving peace or a ceasefire deal is not an option so long as President Vladimir Putin is in power. He’s maintained this staunch position since nearly the start of the war.

“He can’t bring peace because of Putin,” the Ukrainian leader told NBC further. “If he’s not trying and if he’s not ready to give our territory to this terrible man, to Putin, if you are not ready to give it, if you are not ready to give our independence, he can’t manage it.”

Many outside observers have emphasized that the only way to lasting ceasefire is to get Kiev to agree to territorial concessions in the east – but this is the very thing that Zelensky says in a non-starter. The Zelensky government has also held on to the dream of ‘liberating’ Crimea, which has been under clear Russian control for well over half a decade. 

Trump over the weekend reiterated that he’s the only candidate who can prevent World War Three, telling the Florida Republican Party’s “Freedom Summit” in Kissimmee that “we are closer than anyone understands” to “obliteration.”

U.S. presidential candidate and former president Donald Trump told Republicans at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference that he was the only candidate who could prevent ‘World War Three’ pic.twitter.com/N8BNQ5Dg3w

— Reuters (@Reuters) March 5, 2023

Trump also told the crowd that “When you think of it, how important elections are, you’d have millions of people alive right now if the 2020 election was not rigged. They would be alive. Ukraine, Israel. The attack would have never been made. All of these people would be alive, the cities would be thriving.”

This type of rhetoric has not only angered the Ukrainian government, which sees in Trump a manifestation of GOP resistance to a ‘black check’ approach to funding Kiev, but also ardent Ukraine supporters and hawks, including the neocons. 

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

Two analysts have noted that special counsel Jack Smith might be on shaky legal ground in his federal election-related case against former President Donald Trump.

Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor, said that the Trump charge of corruptly obstructing an official proceeding hasn’t been “extensively litigated” over the past several decades, adding that a ruling could come on whether it is appropriate in the former president’s case.

Multiple defendants who were charged in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach have “argued that Congress certifying the electoral votes was not an ‘official proceeding’ and courts have universally rejected that argument,” she told Newsweek last week.

“This bigger question is, what satisfies the ‘corruptly’ requirement? Is it any criminal conduct, such as trespassing in the Capitol building or submitting fake electors? Or does the corrupt conduct have to relate to the other subsections of 1512, which prohibit destroying or concealing evidence?” she asked.

She continued: “If the corruption requires consciousness of guilt, then Trump can argue that he genuinely believed the election was stolen. Either way, this issue will likely end up before the United States Supreme Court because it is a novel issue that affects hundreds of criminal defendants, including the former president.”

Lawfare’s Roger Parloff wrote in a recent article that the Department of Justice (DOJ) recently won two “fragile” victories in two cases involving Jan. 6 defendants, and Mr. Smith has “relied on [a] statute” that was used by other prosecutors to charge at least 317 individuals in the Jan. 6 case.

“Smith has relied on that statute and its conspiracy equivalent, 18 U.S.C. § 1512(k), for two of the four counts in his indictment against former President Donald Trump for allegedly conspiring to overthrow the 2020 election,” Mr. Parloff wrote. “Those counts, whose legal sufficiency Trump challenged in a motion to dismiss this week, are the most serious leveled against Trump in that case, carrying a maximum 20-year term of imprisonment.”

Three appellants in a Jan. 6 case are now petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to review a recent appeals court ruling that favored the DOJ, he noted, but he said that the D.C. appeals court judges “can’t agree about its holdings, and its holdings determine the viability of a 20-year felony that an ex-president and major presidential candidate now stands charged with violating.”

“Moreover, at the appeals court level, judges’ acceptance of the Justice Department’s interpretations of that law have been 100 percent correlated with the political party of the judge’s appointer,” he wrote.

“If that trend continues, and if either case climbs one more rung up the appellate ladder, the department (and Mr. Smith) faces bleak prospects indeed.”

The comments come as constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley warned that the gag order targeting President Donald Trump is “unconstitutional” and said that an appeals court ruling to rescind the order last week was a “quite significant” development.

Several weeks ago, District of Columbia Judge Tanya Chutkan placed a gag order on the former president in the Jan. 6-related case, saying President Trump cannot speak about potential witnesses, court staff, or prosecutors. An appeals court in the district froze Judge Chutkan’s order late last week, with oral arguments being set for Nov. 20.

“They could have left it to continue, to continue while they reviewed it, but they decided perhaps in an abundance of caution to order this stoppage until they can give it a full review,” Mr. Turley, a professor for George Washington University, said on Fox News on Nov. 3. “The reason I think this could be quite significant is because I think the order is unconstitutional.”

He added that it is “very odd” to issue the order because the same court “insisted on having this trial before the election, sort of shoehorned it in before Super Tuesday,” referring to the key GOP presidential nominating date.

“And everyone in this election is going to be talking about these cases,” the law professor said, “except one person under this gag order and that is Donald Trump.”

With the order, the former president “can’t criticize the prosecutors, he can’t criticize witnesses, and special counsel Jack Smith just asked for this order to be expanded in an equally unconstitutional way, and that has drawn the criticism even of the ACLU, which is a staunch critic of Donald Trump, but the ACLU has said look, this is flagrantly unconstitutional,” Mr. Turley said, referring to the American Civil Liberties Union.

On Nov. 3, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote they were pausing Judge Chutkan’s order to provide them more time to consider the former president’s request while his appeal continues. The three judges on the appeals court panel were all appointed by Democratic presidents, while Judge Chutkan was appointed by former President Barack Obama.

Judge Chutkan had ruled against President Trump’s attorneys and argued that the gag order was not illegal because the former president is a criminal defendant. The gag order was issued at the request of special counsel Jack Smith’s team of prosecutors, who claimed that the former president’s criticism of witnesses, the judge, prosecutors, and Washington itself threatened the integrity of their case.

The Trump legal team had argued that the order denied him the right to free speech, especially while he is the leading GOP candidate for president.

In 12 days, Mike Johnson (R-LA) will need to whip out a compromise between House conservatives and Senate Democrats along with RINO republicans in order to keep the government from default, yet again.

Johnson is also going to need to appease the renewed vigor for a Biden impeachment among House Republicans – which we wouldn’t be surprised to see linked to shutdown negotiations.

According to Punchbowl News, Johnson has been keeping his cards close to his vest and hasn’t shared much of his thinking with his leadership team.

The GOP whip operation is not currently in action at all. Remember, when GOP speakers move government funding bills, the majority leader and whip operation typically hold listening sessions and begin to work the vote days — if not weeks — in advance. That hasn’t happened yet.

The House Republican Conference is slated to meet on Tuesday behind closed doors and sources in the speaker, majority leader and majority whip’s office told us that they don’t expect much of an answer on the path forward until after that gathering.

Here are Johnson’s options, per Punchbowl:

1) A ‘clean’ bill would allow federal funding agencies to operate until the middle of January, Johnson’s preference in terms of duration of this latest band-aid. This would be the ‘path of least resistance’ for Johnson.

2) Pairing an extension with H.R. 2, the GOP immigration bill which would strengthen the US-Mexico border. That said, H.R. 2 is broad, and has provisions that most senators will reject. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, say they’re working on a separate border plan which they insist won’t amount to a conservative wish list, and which they’ll seek to attach to the national-security supplemental funding bill. House Republicans could also cherry pick aspects of H.R. 2.

That said, if Johnson and crew attempt to slash federal spending in relation to a two-month stopgap, they’re gonna have a bad time.

3) A ‘laddered approach’ – pushed by Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), which would extend government funding for each agency for different periods of time. This has exactly zero support in the Senate.

Impeachment?

While Democrats impeached Trump for simply asking Ukraine about obvious (and increasingly evidenced) Biden corruption, and then impeached him again over Jan. 6 (using a MSM producer to choreograph the ‘show’), Republicans are spinning their wheels over Biden, because they suck at this.

Johnson has cautioned over rushing an investigation, calling impeachment the “heaviest power that we have.”

That said, as a prominent member of the House Judiciary Committee, Johnson insisted that bribery is “what happened here.”

The White House has vigorously denied any wrongdoing by Biden and noted that even as Republicans have pored over the business dealings of his brother and son, they’ve failed to connect the president to their work overseas.

But as Johnson takes the helm from a former Speaker who at times seemed reluctant to pursue the matter, he said last week the House would soon have to determine how to move forward with an investigation shared across three committees. –The Hill

“I do believe that very soon we are coming to a point of decision on it,” Johnson said on Thursday.

“I have been very consistent, intellectually consistent in this, and persistent that we have to follow due process, and we have to follow the law,” he continued. “That means following our obligation on the Constitution and doing appropriate investigations in the right way at the right pace, so that the evidence comes in, and we follow the evidence where it leads. You follow the truth where it leads.“

Chairmen Comer, Jordan, and Smith have my full faith and backing as they continue their investigations into the Biden family.

We will follow the truth where it leads and deliver for the American people. pic.twitter.com/NRTrjV0VC3

— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) October 29, 2023

“We’ve not predetermined the outcome of this. We’ve not prejudged it,” Johnson said. “But I think everyone can see how it is unfolding.”

The underlying allegation stems from when Biden was Vice President and threatened Ukraine’s former president with a quid-pro-quo to withhold US foreign aid unless they fired the prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden’s employer.

“The president bribed or pressured a foreign leader to fire that country’s top prosecutor because the prosecutor was investigating his son, and he used $1 billion of U.S. taxpayer money to have that bidding done, and then he bragged about it on video,” Johnson said on Fox News in August.

According to Rep. James Comer, it’s up to Johnson.

Comer tells Maria Bartiromo he thinks Biden should be impeached but is leaving it up to Mike Johnson pic.twitter.com/g2MI0PNiwh

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 5, 2023

 

Authored by Matt Lamb via TheCollegeFix.com,

A Columbia University journalism fellow said Elon Musk’s support for free speech on X, formerly known as Twitter, is both “immoral” and “dangerous.”

Anika Navaroli used to work on Twitter’s “Trust and Safety Team,” the unit within the company that censored information, oftentimes true. Musk eliminated the team. She now is a senior fellow at Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

“What has now become clear is that Musk’s vision of speech on X is one of the greatest dangers to democracy, especially leading into the 2024 elections,” Navaroli (pictured) wrote on Thursday in The Hill.

She praised workers like herself for “thanklessly” working behind the scenes to defend “institutions.”

Navoli and her co-workers, in her telling, “were one of the last defenses to American democracy leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021 mob attack on Congress” which “led ultimately to our deplatforming former President Donald Trump.”

She wrote:

Much like poll workers, social media trust and safety workers toil thanklessly and behind the scenes for years to protect the safety and integrity of our most vital democratic institutions. Rather than invest in that crucial work, Musk took a page out of Trump’s playbook, repeatedly and publicly attacking trust and safety workers. He unleashed the Twitter Files, which revealed the names, images, and contact information of former Twitter trust and safety employees.

The journalism fellow said speech is “evolving,” “complicated,” and “sticky.”

“It requires tradeoffs, flexibility, and tough decisions. It shouldn’t be dictated by an autocratic CEO with absolutist ideologies,” Navoli wrote, repeating prior statements she has made on the subject.

“Instead of asking just free speech versus safety to say free speech for whom and public safety for whom,” she previously said during a Congressional hearing.

“So whose free expression are we protecting at the expense of whose safety and whose safety are we willing to allow to go the winds so that people can speak freely.”

She is correct in that our conceptions of speech are complicated – I do not think there is some broad First Amendment right for the authors of pornographic books targeting kids to have their works in libraries.

Nor are men cross-dressing and scandalizing kids equal to the concerned parent speaking out at a school board meeting about sexualized curriculum  in terms of the First Amendment. (Neither does the Biden administration, which favors the former but not the latter).

But I don’t think it is “complicated” that there was true and verified information about Hunter Biden’s laptop that the Twitter team censored.

Navoli’s fears are just the latest that began more than a year ago, prior to Musk’s completion of his purchase of the platform in October 2022.

For example, a Vanderbilt law professor said the purchase was “deeply troubling.”

University of California Berkeley Professor Robert Reich also believes Musk’s support for open debate on social media is a threat to “democracy,” calling it “the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue and modern-day robber baron on Earth.”

“In Musk’s vision of Twitter and the internet, he’d be the wizard behind the curtain – projecting on the world’s screen a fake image of a brave new world empowering everyone,” President Bill Clinton’s former Labor Secretary wrote.

X is still plagued with throttling problems, as The College Fix has seen. But overall the platform has improved and truthful speech (i.e. on gender) is better respected.

That is a good thing and not complicated at all.

After journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger won a $100,000 award from the National Journalism Center / DAO for excellence in investigative journalism regarding the Twitter Files, WikiPedia editors threw a fit – with one, who goes by “Specifico”, removing all mention of the award until other editors were in ‘consensus for inclusion.’

Bari, Michael and I are very grateful for this significant award, which we hope will provide encouragement to future independent journalists to take on unpopular subjects and confront powerful institutions.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) November 2, 2023

First, from Taibbi’s acceptance speech:

More than two dozen reporters worked on the Twitter Files at different times, including Lee Fang, Paul Thacker, David Zweig, Aaron Maté, Matt Farwell, and many others, across the political spectrum. Journalists from left-leaning publications and reporters with conservative backgrounds both worked on this story, which was unique enough to employ pseudonymous citizen journalists like “Techno Fog” and Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Schmidt. Susan is here tonight, and has a new Twitter Files piece coming out on Twitter and Racket in the coming days.

This was apparently too much for Wikipedia – which has been the de-facto leftist ministry of bullshit for years.

An editor who goes by “SPECIFICO” took it upon themselves to nuke the DAO award from Taibbi’s profile, writing “I reverted the addition of this item. PPlease see the reason im my edit summary. It should not be re-added prior to consensus for inclusion.”

2/2 This is what happened first. Report is they have relented: pic.twitter.com/vgXMtb7toJ

— Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) November 6, 2023

Another editor replied: “I am curious. How does one determine that an award is not “credible”?”

Specifico, as it were, is a total weirdo. Shocker, we know.

If you’d like to experience more of Wikipedia’s legendary professionalism and integrity, I highly recommend clicking on SPECIFICO’s username to view their personal page.

Behold, the “Master Editor” (which means they have 42,000+ edits!) who removed the Dao Prize mention: pic.twitter.com/pdB0uqSGQ4

— Casey Muratori (@cmuratori) November 6, 2023

Fortunately, less-woke minds prevailed, and the award is now visible on Taibbi’s page.