Category Archives: News

My thoughts on the news of the day, both local, Colorado, national and international.

Rule Five Flying Illegals Friday

As if the situation at the southern border wasn’t bad enough, now we see that illegal aliens are just flying into the country, hopping off their international flights, and being welcomed with open arms by the Biden(‘s handlers) Administration.  This is intolerable, to say the least.

Over the past year, “more than 200,000 people from four countries” used a direct-flight parole program to enter the United States illegally, says Todd Bensman, senior national security fellow at the Washington-based think tank devoted to researching immigration issues.  

Those 221,456 illegal aliens are from Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, Bensman writes in a report published Thursday.

Through a Freedom of Information Act request, or FOIA, Bensman says, he learned of the federal government’s “CBP One” mobile application parole program, which “permits inadmissible aliens to make an appointment to fly directly to airports in the interior of the United States, bypassing the border altogether.”  

The Biden administration introduced the CBP One mobile app to illegal aliens as a way to schedule an appointment at a port of entry and be paroled into the interior of the United States. (The acronym CBP refers to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security.)

200,000 people is, we must admit, small potatoes compared to the hordes being brought across the border by coyotes or cartels or simply slipping across in the dead of night, to the point where even life-long Democrat pols in the border states are screaming bloody murder.  But this is something different; on the border, the Imperial City is  just turning a blind eye to the invasion.  In this case, the Biden(‘s handlers) Administration has deliberately put a policy in place to allow this.

President Joe Biden said the program was part of an effort to form “lawful pathways” for illegal aliens to enter the country and seek asylum. Illegal border crossings between ports of entry at the southern border appeared to decline in June as more illegal aliens presented themselves at a port of entry.  

But, according to Bensman’s findings, migrants also are presenting themselves at ports within the interior of the country.

One of the “least noticed, mysterious, and potentially the most controversial of the new rechanneling programs that use the CBP One app allows migrants to take commercial passenger flights from foreign countries straight to their American cities of choice, flying right over the border—and even over Mexico,” Bensman writes in the Center for Immigration Studies report titled “New Records: Biden DHS Has Approved Hundreds of Thousands of Migrants for Secretive Foreign Flights Directly Into U.S. Airports.”

Did you get that? The Biden DHS has approved these flights.  Why?  These people are coming here illegally.  Oh, sure, they claim that they are fleeing political and economic unrest; welcome to the rest of the fucking world, and hidey-ho from a Presidential administration who apparently is looking to duplicate the successes of Venezuela, Uganda and Zimbabwe here in the once and former Land of the Free, now apparently to be re-named the “Land of the Free to Pay Your Taxes, Shut The Fuck Up and Do What You’re Told.”

Sack-o-crap Alejandro Mayorkis has this to say about the situation:

“Temporary protected status provides individuals already present in the United States with protection from removal when the conditions in their home country prevent their safe return,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Wednesday in a written statement.

The Biden administration is “granting them the protection that the law provides,” Mayorkas said. “However, it is critical that Venezuelans understand that those who have arrived here after July 31, 2023, are not eligible for such protection, and instead will be removed when they are found to not have a legal basis to stay.”

In other words, they’ll never be removed.  These illegal aliens know exactly what buzzwords they need to use to be allowed to stay in the U.S., and the current administration is perfectly happy to let them stay, gather public benefits, bring in their families, and eventually vote Democrat.

That’s a feature, not a bug.

2024 can’t get here fast enough – if it’s not already too late.  It may well be.

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

The very first brain cells may have been in evidence as long as 800 million years ago.

Researchers from Spain and Germany have discovered characteristics of specialized secretory cells in simple animals called placozoans which could identify them as a prelude to neurons in other organisms.

Roughly the size of a grain of sand, these basic creatures have no organs, consisting of little more than a colony of different cell types. Much as they still do today, placozoans once hunted microbes and browsed algae in the warm shallows of seas 800 million years ago.

So 800 million years ago we have evidence of emerging brains.  Any guesses as to when we might see evidence of brains in Congress?

And so…

Continue reading Animal’s Hump Day News

Goodbye, Blue Monday

Goodbye, Blue Monday!

Thanks as always to The Daley Gator, Pirate’s Cove, The Other McCain, Flappr and Bacon Time for the Rule Five links!  As always, if I’ve missed your link, let me know in the comments and I’ll add you to the Monday acknowledgment.

It’s a long way until the 2024 election, but damned if things aren’t starting to get interesting.  President Biden(‘s handlers) prospects are looking pretty bleak.

President Joe Biden’s job approval rating is 19 points underwater, his ratings for handling the economy and immigration are at career lows. A record number of Americans say they’ve become worse off under his presidency, three-quarters say he’s too old for another term and Donald Trump is looking better in retrospect — all severe challenges for Biden in his reelection campaign ahead.

Forty-four percent of Americans in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll say they’ve gotten worse off financially under Biden’s presidency, the most for any president in ABC/Post polls since 1986. Just 37% approve of his job performance, while 56% disapprove. Still fewer approve of Biden’s performance on the economy, 30%.

President Trump, currently in the middle of trying to pull off a Grover Cleveland and become the second President to serve two non-consecutive terms, is looking better – at least by comparison.

Trump, for his part, has improved in retrospect. When he reluctantly left office in January 2021, 38% approved of his work as president, essentially the same as Biden’s rating now. But currently, looking back, 48% say they approve of Trump’s performance when he was in office — matching his peak as president. Essentially as many — 49% — now disapprove, down from 60% when he left the White House.

Comparison with Biden may be a factor. Among the 56% of Americans who disapprove of Biden’s work in office, a wide 75% say that, looking back, they approve of Trump.

As for the 2024 election, still over a year out:

Head-to-head in a hypothetical November 2024 matchup, Trump has 51% support while Biden has 42% — numerically up 3 points for Trump and down 2 points for Biden from an ABC/Post poll in February, shifts that are not statistically significant.

There’s even less change from the most recent ABC/Post poll in May, which had the race at 49-42% (again with a different, but comparable, question wording). Still, with Trump inching over 50% — and other polls showing a closer contest — a close look is warranted.

Before anyone gets too worked up over this one set of poll data, keep a couple of things in mind: 1) President Biden is likely to not be the Democrat’s candidate.  His physical and mental deterioration seems to be accelerating there are a number of prominent Democrats who have expressed doubts about his ability; also, he is facing an increasingly-serious primary challenge from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

As for the Republican side, there’s a big primary field, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been hitting the trail hard, and not one primary election vote has yet been cast.

Still – if national Democrats aren’t worried, they should be.

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

Just overnight, our juncos are gone, headed south for the winter.

Dark-Eyed Junco

One day there were a lot of them about, gleaning seed from under the feeders; the next day they were gone.  Juncos are one of our last summer birds to leave in the fall.  Friday is the first official day of autumn,  but our brief Great Land summer has already given way; we had our first hard frost Monday night, it’s raining more, the leaves on the birches are turning, and the fireweed is all come up in red.

Winter is coming!  Next month we’ll start getting snow, if things go as usual, and that’s fine.  Our winters are every bit as beautiful as our summers.  We have a full heating oil tank and two and a half cords of firewood put away.  We’re ready.

And so…

Continue reading Animal’s Hump Day News

Goodbye, Blue Monday

Goodbye, Blue Monday!

Thanks as always to The Other McCain, Pirate’s Cove, The Daley Gator, Whores and Ale, Flappr and Bacon Time for the Rule Five links!

No news today; I’d instead like to hand some bandwidth to blogger pal The Daley Gator, who has some family issues going on.  If you can, see his post, and flip him some shekels if you can.  Regular posts will resume tomorrow.

Rule Five WaPo Gets Real Friday

Remember what they always say about blind hogs and acorns?  The liberal Washington Post recently found a big old whopper of an acorn, as Issues & Insights reports.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post let it slip that all is not well in Bidenomicsville. The deficit, it reports, could end up hitting $2 trillion when the current fiscal year ends in three weeks, which it describes as an “unexpected deficit surge.”

In other words, the deficit will nearly double this year, calling the lie on one of President Joe Biden’s favorite boasts about how he cut the deficit more than any president in history.

But while this apparently comes as a shock to the Post, as well as other liberal news sites that picked up on the Post report, anyone paying attention knew this was happening.

I should say so.  Plenty of folks have seen this coming for a while now; the bill, as the old saying goes, always comes due.

Back in February, for example, we pointed out that Biden’s reckless economic policies had added more than $5 trillion to projected deficits, even as he claimed he’d done more to cut the deficit than “any president in history.”

In early June, we noted that revenues had been plunging this year, despite all the boasts about a strong economy, and that “the projected deficit for the entire year is now close to $1.6 trillion, which is almost $300 billion higher than Treasury projected at the start of this fiscal year.”

In July, we pointed out that Bidenflation was pushing up the cost of federal entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, and had resulted in a 37% increase in interest payments on the national debt in the first nine months of this fiscal year. That was the result of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes, which were also a result of Bidenflation.

By August, Treasury had upped its projected deficit for this fiscal year to $1.9 trillion. (Treasury will release its updated projection for the year later this month. Don’t be surprised if the new projection for the 2023 deficit is higher still.)

We are, in my not-so-humble opinion, already past the point of no return here.

I’m not sure what the answer here is, other than some kind of major economic collapse.  (We could talk about just repudiating the debt, but that would likely lead to a global economic collapse, so there’s little comfort there.)  A few years back I would have said – and did say – that with strong pro-growth policies it would be possible to grow our way out of the debt, but I’m skeptical of that idea now.

I know I keep repeating this, but there’s only one answer  now:  Cut.  Spending.

There are a whole nest of Imperial alphabet-soup agencies that were not mentioned in the Constitution and therefore prohibited by the Tenth Amendment.  Get rid of them.  Shut them down.  If the individual states want an Environmental Protection Agency, let them set it up and fund it, within their own borders, within their own budgets.  We’ll see then which states rise and fall, and one would hope, adjust accordingly.

Something along these lines has to happen, because we’re on the road to ruin right not.

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

Housekeeping note:  Since my Wednesday links posts have always been long, and are getting longer, I’m going to try sticking the actual links below a “Click to Read More” tag.  This will help me to keep my already crowded front page a tad less cluttered while I consider how to go about a more involved revamp of the site. I’m still using the 2014 theme for WordPress, and while I like the looks of it, it may be time to update.  It’s been almost ten years since the last major site revamp, so we’ll see.  And, of course, please do let me know in the comments if you like/dislike and changes or have any other comments.

And so…

Continue reading Animal’s Hump Day News

Goodbye, Blue Monday

Goodbye, Blue Monday!

Thanks as always to The Other McCain, Pirate’s Cove, Whores and Ale, Bacon Time, Flappr and The Daley Gator for the Rule Five links! As always, if I’ve missed your link, let me know in the comments and I’ll get you added to the rotation.

Now then: Reading the news and opinion pages can be distressing lately, but there are some bright spots.  One of them is my good friend and Townhall Media colleague Stephen Green (Vodkapundit)’s Florida Man Friday posts.  Here is last week’s edition.  A sample of the Florida Man shenanigans documented therein:

Florida Man had a dream. His dream was to construct a human-sized hamster wheel out of buoys and giant red balls and paddles and stuff and then run all the way from Florida to London.

I dunno, maybe he likes the food there.

Nothing would stop Florida Man’s pursuit of his dream. Not the 4,400-mile trip. Not the treacherous waters. Not being entirely sure where London is.

Florida Man claims to have been raising money for charity, but none of the stories I read made mention of any actual charities or donors. Anyhoo, the Coast Guard caught up with him about 70 miles offshore from Tybee Island, Ga. Apparently, there was some kind of issue with the “manifestly unsafe” watercraft he was paddling. There was also a problem with Florida Man’s paperwork for the vessel, in that he didn’t have any.

Florida Man has certainly become an internet meme, and not without some justification.  But Florida or elsewhere, the common thread is “crazy rednecks,” and this is a topic I know something about, having grown up amongst crazy rednecks.  I have, though, and will continue to maintain that you haven’t seen crazy rednecks until you’ve seen crazy Alaska rednecks.

Crazy rednecks and Darwin Awards, by the way, go together like biscuits and gravy.  That’s OK.  The gene pool needs to be cleaned every now and then.

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

Last Monday was, of course, Labor Day, and while I tend to shy away from too much serious discussion on holidays, I did come across a good piece on some disturbing trends.  I thought it was worth highlighting here.

Unfortunately, the evidence is clear that working-aged men are not doing well at all. Across the board, they are suffering a generational decline in quality jobs and falling out of the labor force in staggering numbers. These problems have grim consequences, not just for men, but for women, children and our nation as a whole. 

Read the whole thing.  Give it some thought.  Now then…

On To the Links!

What could possibly go wrong?

Biden Family Business Boomed After Joe Attended Key Dinners

Probably not.

Here’s the thing; I don’t think Joe Biden knows he’s lying. I don’t think he’s mentally competent enough to understand the difference.

Of course they are.

Radioactive boars.  Yes, really.  See the full write up at the RedState link below.

I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway.

Of course they don’t want to solve the problem. There’s too much money to be made perpetuating it.

Navajo Leaders Challenge Chaco Canyon Drilling Ban.

Mark my words: Nothing will come of this.

Likely, yes. Inevitable, no.

MSNBC’s War on Truth.  That’s something of an understatement.

No.  All civilizations are not equal.

The Weekend at Bernie’s Presidency continues.

That’s gonna be one hell of a struggle.

I Left Out the Full Truth To Get Published at Nature

My RedState Stuff:

Note:  Thanks to a really good suggestion that I should have thought of myself, I’ll now start noting here which of these are VIP (pay-walled) stories.

If Biden Backs out of the 2024 Race, Who Can Take His Place?

Nick Begich Announces Another Run for Alaska’s Sole House Seat

The Myth of Nonviolent Crime

Radioactive Boars Threaten Europe

Alaska Board of Education Votes to Exclude Biological Males From Girls’ Sports

Is America Under the Thumb of a Shadow President?

Making Super Potatoes More A-Peeling

Homeless Squatters Trash Closed Motel in Casper, Wyoming

GOP Senator JD Vance to Introduce Bill Banning Federal Mask Mandates

Eric Swalwell to Appear at Juneau Fundraiser for Mary Peltola

VIP Stories (Pay-Walled):

Firearms Researcher Dr. John Lott: FBI Is Deliberately Misleading Americans on Defensive Gun Use

Sunday Gun Day VI – Five Rifles You Should Shoot Before You Die

What Is Labor Day All About?

A 98-Year-Old Nazi, Captured: Who Shall Answer For Evil?

This Week’s Idiots:

Salon’s Heather Parton (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.

CNN’s Nicole Hemmer is an idiot.

The Nations’ John Nichols (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.

CNBC’s Scott Cohn is an idiot.

MSNBC’s Zeeshan Aleem is an idiot.

Paul Krugman (Repeat Offender Alert) remains a cheap partisan hack, and an idiot.

The daffy old Bolshevik from Vermont (Repeat Offender Alert) is still an old fool, and an idiot.

This Week’s Cultural Edification:

Bob Dylan, America’s Songwriter, has crossed a lot of genres in his sixty-plus year career.  Folk, rock, gospel, even country (see his album Nashville Skyline) and more, the Maestro covers them all.

One of my favorite bits of his work almost takes the form of a hymnal, that being the 1967 song I Shall Be Released.  Here, then, is that tune; enjoy.

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

We have family visiting from the Lower 48, so the weekly links may be a bit on the thin side.  But we’ll try to make sure that, even if the quantity drops off a little, the quality remains the same!

Now then…

On To the Links!

Trump Indictments: The Charge Is the Fraud

Hawaiian business owners slam Biden(‘s handlers) non-response to Maui fires. Never underestimate Joe Biden’s ability to fuck things up.

Related:  This should come as a surprise to no one.

President Biden’s Haplessness Isn’t Funny Anymore

If this isn’t the understatement of the week, it will do until a better one comes along.

Hint:  They are leaving blue states and going to red states.

New York City Rat Problem so Bad Now They’re a Tourist Attraction

This guy is a frickin’ hero by any standard.

No shit, Karl.

China’s growth may be over.

Of course Joe the Plumber was right about Obama.

My RedState Stuff:

The State of America – Are We Too Late?

Raccoons in Germany Have Started to Steal Beer

The Legacy Media and the Coup Du Publique

Americans Could Be Limited to Two Beers a Week

Trump Appears in a Swedish Steak

Defanging the Three-Headed Monster Wrecking Our Economy

Sunday Gun Day V – Five Shotguns You Should Shoot Before You Die

Rock Legend Alice Cooper Angers Trans Activists, Gets Canceled by Makeup Company

America Has a Critical Shortage of Skilled Workers

The Pipsqueak 5.56mm, the AR-15, and Relative Power Levels

We May Hold Him Deer, but He’s a Thief All the Same

Vox Reporter Calls for Government-Subsidized Fake Meat Research

This Week’s Idiots:

MSNBC’s Michael Cohen (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.

The Nation’s Joan Walsh is an idiot.

Maureen Dowd beclowns herself.

If President Biden(‘s handlers) listen to the daffy old Bolshevik from Vermont, he’s dumber than we thought.

The Hill’s Glenn Altschuler is an idiot.

Paul Krugman (Repeat Offender Alert) remains a cheap partisan hack, and an idiot.

Vox’s Julieta Cardenas is an idiot.

This Week’s Cultural Edification:

I’ve been a fan of Bob Dylan since the mid-Seventies, when my hippie brother first got me listening to his older acoustic work. What a lot of people don’t realize about America’s Songwriter is that he’s still working, still touring, and still turning out some pretty great music.  In 2012, he released the album Tempest, which included the fun, rollicking tune Duquesne Whistle.  The video is pretty fun to watch, too.  Here it is; enjoy.