MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Politico Pretends Culture War Doesn’t Win School Board Races, But Dozens Of Pro-Parent Candidates Just Prevailed.

The public school activists were specifically thrilled that the publication’s education reporter, Juan Perez Jr., pointed to Democrat wins in recent school board elections as evidence that the right’s culture war issues were a brief and unsustainable phenomenon.

“General election voters are less interested in crusades against critical race theory and transgender students than they are in funding schools and ensuring they are safe,” Perez Jr. asserted.

He evidenced this claim by noting that Democrats and teachers’ unions in both Wisconsin and Illinois celebrated the wins of many of their preferred candidates in the more than 100 races they endorsed. Many of those wins came in districts in or near Democrat stronghold cities such as Chicago and Milwaukee, but that didn’t stop the author from concluding that Republicans “lost big.”

Perez Jr. included data from political action committees that clearly showed candidates on the right claimed several victories but discounted those results by claiming that at least “two conservative national education groups did not dispute that their candidates posted a losing record.”

Just seven paragraphs into the article, Perez Jr. included a half-sentence quote from 1776 Project PAC founder Ryan Girdusky — “We lost more than we won” — that seemingly backed up his belief that these results “offer lessons to both parties as they eye even more board elections this year.”

“We had an hour-long conversation. [Perez Jr.] left it to one edited half sentence,” Girdusky told The Federalist.

Those narratives don’t establish themselves, you know.

THE LATEST STRATEGYTALK: China versus Taiwan.

MEGAN FOX: Trial of Ohio Child Rapist Gerson Fuentes Delayed Again.. “Gerson Fuentes, the illegal alien arrested and charged in the rape of a ten-year-old child who was taken across state lines for an abortion last July by pro-abortion activists, will not stand trial today. Fuentes appeared in front of Judge Julie Lynch in an Ohio courtroom, where his case was continued for the third time to July 5.”

INTERESTING NEW AUDIO BOOK: Why Women Deserve Less. #CommissionEarned This quote makes sense:

Because whereas in the past a man’s sex drive is what drove him to become the best man he could be—providing for his family, protecting them, and ultimately building civilization—today it is your biggest weakness. Because while women no longer need you today, they’re not stupid enough to turn down any free help you’re willing to give them. And many know if they dangle the prospect of sex in front of you, you will provide them money, attention, and resources, essentially making you their part-time slave.

JOANNE JACOBS: ‘Lazy’ parents want librarians, teachers to protect their kids.

“SCIENCE:” Woke professors’ DEI study withdrawn for inaccuracies: Paper latest example of how woke U. Minnesota academics pass off political views as scholarly work.

RAPID UNSCHEDULED DISASSEMBLY: First Starship Orbital Test Flight Goes BOOM.

HISTORY: The Shot Heard Round the World: The American Revolution Began This Day in 1775.

Yesterday, actually, but I didn’t catch this one in time.

WELL: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. emerges as frontrunner among declared 2024 Democrats.

Expect the press to crap all over him since he’s a threat to Biden, or whoever the establishment choice is.

DOMESTIC TERRORISM: Violence erupts at the University of Pittsburgh over Michael Knowles event: Demonstrators threw flares at attendees trying to enter the building and lit an incendiary device outside of the venue.

It’s basically state-sponsored terrorism, too, given that there’s a near-zero chance the DOJ will go after the people behind it.

MARTIN GURRI: The Fifth Wave: The Golden Age of Substack: Defectors From the News Media Have Resurrected Investigative Reporting.

LIGHTNING DEAL: JLHT 40X60 Monocular Telescope High Power Monocular for Adults. #CommissionEarned

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Massive corporation Oracle severs ties with conservative blacklist group. “Oracle announced a ‘collaboration’ in 2021 with GDI, which has continued to come under fire from Republican lawmakers in connection to its covert operation of feeding blacklists of conservative websites to advertisers with the intent of shutting down disfavored speech. Egbert declined to comment on whether it has yet notified the British organization, which has two affiliated American nonprofit groups, and whether the action is effective immediately.”

STARSHIP LAUNCH SUCCESSFUL SO FAR. First stage separation looking iffy at present, though.

UPDATE: Oops. Well, it got up to 36 km or so, but separation went off with a bang. They were saying at launch that it was all gravy once they cleared the tower, but obviously they’d rather everything worked perfectly. Still, rocketry is a process of learning from iterative failures, and that’s something that SpaceX excels at.

WELL, YES: New Senate Report: Covid Pandemic Likely Caused by Wuhan Lab Leak. That they started trying to develop a Covid vaccine in November of 2019 seems pretty damning all by itself.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Even the Lying Democrats Can’t Play Make-Believe Forever About Fetterman. “I’ll repeat the question that I’ve asked about Joe Biden many times in the last few years: Isn’t there anyone close to this man who loves him enough to make him stop?”

FROM EACH ACCORDING TO THEIR EXPERIAN SCORE…: How the US is subsidizing high-risk homebuyers — at the cost of those with good credit.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will enact changes to fees known as loan-level price adjustments (LLPAs) on May 1 that will affect mortgages originating at private banks nationwide, from Wells Fargo to JPMorgan Chase, effectively tweaking interest rates paid by the vast majority of homebuyers.

The result, according to industry pros: pricier monthly mortgage payments for most homebuyers — an ugly surprise for those who worked for years to build their credit, only to face higher costs than they expected as part of a housing affordability push by the US Federal Housing Finance Agency.

“It’s going to be a challenge trying to explain to somebody that says, ‘I worked my whole life for high credit and I’ve put a lot of money down and you’re telling me that’s a negative now?’ That’s a hard conversation to have,” one worried Arizona-based mortgage loan originator told The Post.
…
Under the new rules, high-credit buyers with scores ranging from 680 to above 780 will see a spike in their mortgage costs – with applicants who place 15% to 20% down payment experiencing the biggest increase in fees.

Did you scrimp and save to maintain good credit and put down a large down payment so you could build equity quickly?

Sucker.

WELL, THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE VIDEO GETS OUT: Most believe government agents ‘provoked’ Capitol riot.

THIS ADMINISTRATION IS LIKELY TO TURN OUT AS THE WORST IN AMERICAN HISTORY: Afghanistan whitewash even worse than you think. No, really. It is. “For more than two decades there has been a SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) tasked with trying to ferret out all the corruption. Needless to say their reports have been largely ignored, but they have been tracking things as they happened. Well, the Biden Administration has shut down all the information flow to SIGAR, and the Inspector General is pissed.”

EXCEPT THAT HE’S CLEARLY INCAPABLE OF SHAME: Marjorie Taylor Greene Brutally Embarrasses Eric Swalwell in Hearing.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Biden’s Embattled HHS Secretary Violated Federal Ethics Law, Special Counsel Rules.

GOODER AND HARDER, GERMANY: Germany shut down its last nuclear energy plant on Saturday. On the same day, Germans learned their power bills were about to go up 45%.

Nobody ever said salving the consciences of the elites was going to be cheap.

THEY’RE WHITE CHRISTIANS, NOBODY AT THE WHITE HOUSE CARES ABOUT THEM: Peter Doocy asks KJP if Covenant families get WH invite like Tennessee 3, gets jaw-dropping answer.

That may sound provocative, but it’s literally true.

They don’t even want you to see the shooter’s manifesto.

THEY DON’T WANT IT TO GOVERN AI, THEY WANT IT TO GOVERN US: Do we need a World Congress to govern AI?

21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Farmers ‘crippled’ by satellite failure as GPS-guided tractors grind to a halt.

Tractors have ground to a halt in paddocks across Australia and New Zealand because of a signal failure in the satellite farmers use to guide their GPS-enabled machinery, stopping them from planting their winter crop.

The satellite failure on Monday was a bolt from the blue for farmers in NSW and Victoria, who were busy taking advantage of optimal planting conditions for crops including wheat, canola, oats, barley and legumes.

“You couldn’t have picked a worse time for it,” said Justin Everitt, a grain grower in the Riverina who heads NSW Farmers’ grains committee.

“Over the past few years, all these challenges have been thrown at us, but this is just one we never thought would come up.”

Tractors that pull seed-planting machinery, as well as the massive combine harvesters that reap Australia’s vast grain crops, are high-tech beasts that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They are enabled with GPS tracking and can be guided to an accuracy within two centimetres, enabling seed-planting equipment to sow crops with precision to drive up efficiency, prevent wastage and boost environmental sustainability.

All that went out the window when the Inmarsat-41 satellite signal failed.

Precision farming with this degree of accuracy is great, but a single point of tech failure is a terrible idea.

Plus: “If the Medibank and Optus data breaches didn’t make the agriculture industry sit up and take notice, the implementation of kill switches on stolen Ukrainian tractors in 2022 should have been a three-alarm wake-up call.”