Author Archive: Stephen Green

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Sir, This Is a Wendy’s. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn how to get charged with pretty much everything, the worst excuse for speeding, and how they (almost) get home from the liquor store in Kentucky these days.”

COLONIALISM, STRAIGHT UP:

WELL, YEAH — BUT THAT WAS BEFORE ANYBODY CALLED THEIR BLUFF:

IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™: Hey, Where’d All That Money Go? “Here’s the truth. The insiders in Sacramento, Salem, and Olympia have been using social service non-profits, NGOs, and questionable charitable groups as passthroughs for their friends and pet constituencies for years. Billions have been gifted to insiders and friends. And now — at long last — actual taxpayers have gotten wise to the grift. You can thank independent journalists for highlighting these absurd expenses in a much simpler and understandable way than thick books or endless PDFs filled with intentionally confusing stats, opaquely written conclusions, and puffed-up executive summaries that don’t reflect the data can ever do.”

NEW ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION DIRECTOR EXITS THE CLOSEST THING TO A FREE-SPEECH PLATFORM ON THE INTERNET:

Meet the new boss, not at all like the old boss.

THE DONROE DOCTRINE: Tracking China in the Americas: Adiós, Amigos.

A few years ago, I was on a road trip in Costa Rica with a friend who lives there — we were driving across the country from Tamarindo to Puerto Viejo — and we stopped at a gas station to get some drinks. He came out and handed me my Gatorade Zero and said, “Are there a lot Chinese businesses in Atlanta?”

It wasn’t something I’d thought much about, so I told him I wasn’t sure, and he told me they were popping up all over Costa Rica at rapid speed. He said something like, “I don’t know how they do it. It all just falls into place. It’s like they sold their souls to the devil. Everything works out for them.”

Later, he asked me what I thought of Chinese car brands. I told him we didn’t really have that in the United States, and he told me they were flooding the Costa Rican market, and the cars were awful. “Give me a Ford over a Chinese car any day,” he said.

Up until that point, I had no idea just how much China had infiltrated Costa Rica and/or Latin America, but after that I started learning. It was ugly. It’s what prompted this “Tracking China in the Americas” series that I began writing last fall.

But here’s the good news: The tides are turning in many places.

Read the whole thing.

THAT SEEMS BOTH WISE AND OBVIOUS: Don’t ask students to ‘discover’ math before they’ve learned fundamentals. “‘In many classrooms, students are encouraged to ‘discover’ math principles, come up with multiple problem-solving strategies and explore patterns before they’ve mastered core procedures, such as 6 x 8 = 48, she writes. ‘he intention is deeper understanding. But teachers frequently report student frustration, uneven mastery, and widening gaps between those who enter with strong background knowledge and those who do not.'”

So many of today’s teaching fads leave the weaker students even further behind that you have to wonder if that’s the intent.

OUCH: USPS suspends contributions to employee pensions after warning of ‘cash crisis.’

The USPS contributes about $400 million a month to its employee pension plan, the agency said in a statement on Thursday. The postal service said it will continue to send worker contributions to the retirement plan and will also transmit employer automatic and matching contributions, as well as employee contributions to the Thrift Savings Plan, another retirement program for federal workers.

The temporary halt in contributions to the USPS program comes after Postmaster General David Steiner warned Congress last month that the postal agency is heading for a financial crisis without a course correction. Those changes could include raising the cost of a first-class stamp to 95 cents or reducing delivery from its current six days per week schedule to five or fewer, he said.

Without such changes, Steiner said, the USPS could run out of cash within 12 months, which could result in a stoppage of mail delivery.

There’s FedEx for important mail, UPS for packages, and USPS for junk, mostly.

THIS IS A RESURFACED CLIP FROM 2022, BUT IF THAT’S HOW LEFTIES WERE TALKING WHEN THE DEMS HELD THE WHITE HOUSE AND CAPITOL HILL…:

THIS LOOKS ABOUT RIGHT, BUT IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE:

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Comrade Mamdani Is Getting Smacked Around by Reality. “Like all leftists, Mamdani is a cop-hater, so this ought to get ugly. He prefers police who can’t do any real policing. His wish list for the department looks to weaken it wherever he can. The NYPD is still reeling from the Defund the Police attack in 2020. There might not be any cops left in New York by the time Mamdani’s one term is up.”

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Why Doesn’t Andy Beshear Think Young Adults Deserve to Exercise All of Their Civil Rights? “’While he claims to be a ‘different kind of Democrat,’ Gov. Beshear has revealed himself to be just one more anti-gun-rights politician adhering to the party’s increasingly far-left dogma,’ said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. ‘He has shown his true colors by preventing a provisional license for 18- to 20-year-olds to carry a concealed handgun in public, amounting to a direct attack on young women, especially young women of color, who are frequently in need of protection. The late, great First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who was one of the first women in New York State to have a full carry license, is probably spinning in her grave.'”

DOOM AND GLOOM AND… A BOOMING TOURISM INDUSTRY?

UNSUSTAINABLE: U.S. added $1.2 trillion to national debt in six months.

The U.S. government added $1.2 trillion to the national debt over the past six months, borrowing $163 billion during March alone, the Congressional Budget Office reports.

At the current rate of borrowing, federal deficits are on track to top $2 trillion by October, the end of the current fiscal year.

But the president’s recent budget request – which lawmakers will use as a blueprint for the 12 fiscal year 2027 appropriations bills – calls for $2.1 trillion in discretionary spending alone, without touching entitlement program spending.

“Both Congress and the President continue to ignore the urgent need to get our borrowing under control,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said in a statement.

“As lawmakers consider the budget process for the upcoming fiscal year, we hope that they come up with plans to reduce deficits from the too-high 6% of GDP to a more sustainable 3% of GDP; secure our nation’s ailing trust funds for Social Security, Medicare, and highways; and ultimately fix the broken process that got us into this mess.”

That would be nice, yes, but unlikely under a GOP Congress and impossible under a Democrat one.

TIMES CHANGE:

I liked Spain better before the Counter-Reconquista.