SAD: Portlandia No More.

Stare wrongly at the wrong homeless person, cut off the wrong car in certain neighborhoods, or just be a bystander when the gangs start shooting, and you could end up dead. Was it always so? Not like this. Crime has skyrocketed since Brownstein’s character asked after the previous life and times of the chicken she was ordering for dinner.

Once a commenter on a story I’d written at a conservative website, after seeing that my bio included Portland, wrote: “Portland? You must feel surrounded.”

It’s true that Portland is blue. It gets a lot of conservative bad press. Urinals were omitted from blueprints for the new mega-million dollar city hall—something about gender neutrality? When Antifa besieged downtown in 2020, resulting in months of rioting and millions in property damage, President Trump offered to send in the National Guard. City hall refused the help, and vilified Trump instead. A Trump fan wearing an insignia was murdered by a rabble rouser who laid in wait at a parking garage. The killer was later gunned-down by federal agents in a Washington State apartment complex parking lot.

Downtown hasn’t recovered. Businesses are still fleeing. Slabs of plywood cover many street-level windows. Intractable homelessness besotting block after block and open-air shooting galleries have turned Portland into a no-go zone for thousands of locals and decimated the tourist and convention trade. The pandemic played a part in creating the current malaise, but that’s over, and there’s been little discernible bounce-back.

Decline is a choice, and one Portland voters make again and again.

JON GABRIEL: Hecklers at Trump’s arraignment have a lesson for us all.

Back in the real world, things aren’t going well.

Inflation continues and recession is likely. We’re $31 trillion in debt. Military threats are rising from China, Russia and other hostile powers.

Only 19% of Americans are satisfied with the way things are going. At least we can still yell at strangers about politicians who don’t even know we exist.

Let’s face it: few leaders in D.C. want to put in the work to fix our problems.

No one wants to calm the waters. The political class is content with ratcheting up the divisions until it all breaks apart. This isn’t some grand conspiracy; modern politicians are too incompetent to launch one.

Instead, they’re hyperfocused on winning today’s news cycle and the next election. A few bold visionaries look all the way to the election after that, but little thought is given to the long-term implications for the country.

They want us to keep yelling at each other. It’s a luxury we can’t afford.

Exit quote: “It’s more obvious than ever that no one is coming to save you. No candidate, no party, no movement. You need to save yourself.”

DECOUPLING: AirPods maker says Apple suppliers are rushing to get out of China faster than expected: ‘When can you move out?’

Behind the scenes, 9 out of 10 of Apple’s most important suppliers may be preparing large-scale moves to countries like India, which is dangling incentives to drive Narendra Modi’s Make in India initiative. Bloomberg Intelligence estimates it could take eight years to move just 10% of Apple’s capacity outside of China.

The GoerTek executive argues it’ll be far quicker.

Most Chinese tech manufacturers are experiencing the same pressure. “I would say currently 90% of them, they’re looking at that,” he added. “It’s the brand companies’ decisions.”

India is high on clients’ wish-lists — a reflection of its potential both as a market and a manufacturing base.

“We get requests from our clients almost every month. ‘Do you have any plans to expand to India?’” Yoshinaga said. “If they decide to build up the production lines in India, we may have to think about it seriously. Currently we are focusing on developing our Vietnam production facilities.”

Plus: Huawei Export Licenses Could Be Revoked by U.S. “The White House is now telling Commerce, ‘Cut off the 4G sales, the time has come to do more pain to Huawei, to try to finish their demise.'”

Positively Trumpian talk from the Biden White House.

THIS IS RIGHT: We Don’t Need A ‘National Divorce,’ We Need More Federalism.

I wrote the same thing over a decade ago. That said, I think we’re probably more likely to get secession than constitutional government at this point. Too much graft is tied up in federal overreach.

And I’m so old that I remember when Democrats were calling for secession if Trump engaged in “dangerous militaristic adventurism.” Instead, Trump — who started no wars and produced real peace in the Mideast to boot — was simply reviled on other grounds.

Related: “Secession is for losers, because under today’s federal government, losing is intolerable. If you think that you can’t win nationally, you want to secede locally. If we had a more tolerable federal government, even losers wouldn’t want to secede.”

JIM GERAGHTY: The Stray Voltage of George Santos.

Way, way back in the mid 2010s — a pre-Trump era that might as well be ancient history in U.S. politics — the Obama administration deployed the communications strategy of “stray voltage.” Major Garrett of CBS News laid out the approach in 2014:

This is the White House theory of “Stray Voltage.” It is the brainchild of former White House Senior Adviser David Plouffe, whose methods loom large long after his departure. The theory goes like this: Controversy sparks attention, attention provokes conversation, and conversation embeds previously unknown or marginalized ideas in the public consciousness. This happens, Plouffe theorizes, even when–and sometimes especially when–the White House appears defensive, besieged, or off-guard. . . .

As a theory, “stray voltage” exists in a kind of strategic void. It can’t be dismissed or embraced as workable because creating controversy for the sake of controversy is, well, achievable. Like getting soup from the White House mess. It’s also self-reinforcing and internally didactic. Everyone looks around and says, “See. There’s controversy. It’s working.”

* * * * * * * *

But you can see why Kevin McCarthy might find it worthwhile to let the gears of the consequences for Santos turn slowly. A Washington press corps that is obsessed with Santos’s incessant lying and potentially shady connections isn’t spending as much time insisting that the House GOP is the root of all evil. Sooner or later, the consequences of Santos’s voluminous deceptions will catch up to him. But between now and then, he’s a glasses-wearing, nervous-looking lightning rod, and the more lightning that strikes him, the less there is to strike the rest of the GOP House majority.

Santos is also a daily reminder that he’s far from the only DC politician with plenty of lies on his CV:

JON GABRIEL: You know what Biden is missing? That key Nerd to guide the White House.

In business, this might be the chief technology officer, chief financial officer, or something else. On a ship, it’s the Engineer. When The Jerk orders The Nerd to make more widgets; The Nerd tells The Jerk they need the larger Widgetmaker 3400 and 670.2 more square feet of factory floor. He’s read the latest research, studied the schematics, knows what’s possible and how to make it happen. The Nerd might not have social skills, but hand them a spreadsheet and a user manual and they won’t leave their office before knowing everything about everything.

If I walk into a company, I look for each of these roles. It might take a while to suss out since official titles vary. Maybe the chairman really calls the shots while the CEO inherited that title from their parents. But if the organization doesn’t have this Iron Triangle, I know it’s chaotic, inefficient and has high turnover.

The administration may thought the nerd was going to be played by Pete Buttigieg, but he was too lazy to learn his part:

In the case of the latest FAA failure, which grounded more than 10,000 flights, there were complaints for years about the FAA’s creaky, outdated Notice to Air Mission (NOTAM) system. (The complaints had even prompted Representative Pete Stauber (R., Minn.) to propose reforms before any of this happened.) Yet the only discernable step taken by Buttigieg was to rename NOTAM in December 2021 from its original name, Notice to Airmen, which was deemed insufficiently gender-inclusive. It speaks volumes about Buttigieg’s values, and the depth of his understanding of DOT’s responsibilities, that this was a higher priority for him than making sure the planes would not get grounded. 

It hasn’t helped Buttigieg that there is still no Senate-confirmed head of the FAA. Confirmation should be easy in Chuck Schumer’s Senate, but nominee Phillip Washington — who was nominated in July 2022 after the prior Trump-appointed head stepped down in March — still has not even had a confirmation hearing. This has less to do with Republican opposition than with the baggage that the nominee, presently the CEO of Denver International Airport, brings to the job.  

Washington, who ran the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority from 2015 to 2021, was already under fire for lacking long experience in aviation, and then the news broke in September 2022 that he had been named in a Los Angeles County search warrant involving allegations of corruption in a no-bid contract given “to a nonprofit group headed by one of Los Angeles County Supervisor and Metro board member Sheila Kuehl’s friends to shore up Kuehl’s support.” He had other issues: “In one case, he issued a no-bid contract for a nonprofit group to establish a sexual harassment hotline for the agency with a cost that worked out to $8,000 a call.” There is a whistleblower, who 

claims that Washington ordered her to pay a bill of $75,000 to Peace Over Violence in 2015, before the MTA had even authorized the contract. “He stated he’d rather not upset any of Supervisor Sheila Kuehl’s friends rather than dispute the veracity of the bill,” according to the warrant’s account of witness testimony, adding that Washington said “he would rather pay the $75,000, so he could later use that to his advantage when he needed a political favor from Supervisor Sheila Kuehl.” 

It is unlikely that Buttigieg had much to do with Biden’s nomination of Washington, but he obviously didn’t have the knowledge of the field and its players necessary to push back at the choice. That is a recurring issue: Being out of his depth, Buttigieg has to leave the serious work to others. In the rail-freight strike, the Biden administration deployed Labor secretary Marty Walsh as its point man, while Buttigieg — as Jim has again covered comprehensively — was doing public appearances at the Detroit Auto Show, appearing on late-night talk shows, and pushing Democratic talking points about inflation, climate, and race. 

And as a result:

AS PER USUAL: Democrats’ latest attack on Trump is a giant nothingburger.

House Democrats just set a precedent that will surely come back to haunt them. Using the power of the House Ways and Means Committee, they recently obtained and publicly released former President Donald Trump’s tax returns from 2015 to 2020. They did so because Trump refused to release his tax returns, like most presidential candidates do, and in hopes of somehow embarrassing or incriminating him.

It backfired spectacularly. . . .

Basically, the returns revealed that Trump claimed large losses from his various real estate and investment properties and declared this “negative income” to avoid paying much federal income tax over the five-year period, despite his self-declared wealth. In other words, he used perfectly legal deductions and loopholes in the tax code to pay as little in taxes as he could get away with under the law.

Shocking! Who wouldn’t want as little of their money stolen and wasted as possible?

It’s ironic, too, because the members of Congress complaining about Trump using tax loopholes are responsible for the tax code. Many of them have been in office for decades and could have changed these loopholes at any time. They didn’t do so because their donors and allies benefit too, but now they want to pretend it’s outrageous that Trump made use of them.

Yet what’s more important is what Trump’s tax returns did not show: any corrupt connection to Russia. Democrats for years suggested that the real reason Trump wouldn’t release his tax information was because it would show that Putin had something on him.

Just for an example, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in 2018, “The president has refused to release his tax returns, but these bizarre actions that he has taken, which seem so to indicate that President Putin has something over President Trump, something personal, and it might be financial. We need to see the tax returns.”

Well, now we have them, and Trump’s tax returns show nothing of the sort. It’s not exactly new at this point for Democratic warnings about Trump-Russia collusion to later prove baseless, but it’s still worth revisiting just how far removed from reality their claims were.

Yes, the tax returns did show that while in office, Trump held foreign bank accounts and his businesses conducted business internationally. But that’s not a surprise. The public elected him in part because he was a successful international businessman; what else would you then expect?

Time to finally pass the Hall-Rabushka flat tax. Not because it has anything to do with this, just because it’s time.

“PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE FLAILING:” Trump unleashes his disdain for pro-life voters.

Donald Trump just made his first significant political error of the 2024 nomination battle, and it’s a doozy.

After being asked about the abortion issue by Semafor reporter Shelby Talcott, Trump took to Truth Social to post the following:

It wasn’t my fault that the Republicans didn’t live up to expectations in the MidTerms. I was 233-20! It was the “abortion issue,” poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on No Exceptions, even in the case of Rape, Incest, or Life of the Mother, that lost large numbers of Voters. Also, the people that pushed so hard, for decades, against abortion, got their wish from the US Supreme Court, & just plain disappeared, not to be seen again. Plus, Mitch stupid $’s!

It’s hard to express how many factually false claims Trump makes in this “Truth”.

* * * * * * * *

But if abortion was the determining issue of the cycle, you would expect a slew of pro-life candidates to struggle. Instead, they all won — even in high stakes targeted races. Marco Rubio and Ron DeSantis won easily in Florida, Brian Kemp won in Georgia, Greg Abbott won in Texas, Mike DeWine and J.D. Vance won in Ohio and the long list of Trump-endorsed Senate candidates who won — such as Ted Budd in North Carolina, Eric Schmitt in Missouri, Markwayne Mullin in Oklahoma and Katie Britt in Alabama — were all solidly pro-life. Arguing that abortion politics was more to blame for the one Senate seat that flipped — Pennsylvania’s — than the utter failure of Trump-endorsed gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano to even field a campaign is quite the stretch.

Third, Trump says pro-life voters got what they wanted from the Supreme Court then “just plain disappeared, not to be seen again.” There is literally no evidence for this statement whatsoever. The Republican Party had a massive success in turning out its voters, winning the popular vote nationwide by 51-48 percent. There’s plenty of evidence that Democrats increased the number of young voters, which was the largest in a midterm in thirty years, thanks to the abortion issue. But the increase of the pro-abortion vote doesn’t decrease the other side. Trump’s suggestion that pro-life voters didn’t show up is just a lie.

Ron DeSantis smiles.

DON SURBER: Just do what Trump did.

“Author Chris Whipple claims in The Fight of His Life, out Jan. 17, that Biden became ‘furious’ as the number of migrant encounters at the US-Mexico frontier spiked almost immediately after he took office in January 2021.”

The story went on to say that Biden asked a staffer, “How would you feel if you were me and these were the solutions you had?”

But the solution has been there all along. All Biden has to do is do everything President Donald John Trump did.

Biden needs to resurrect the Remain in Mexico policy in which those seeking asylum in the USA had to stay in Mexico until an administrative law judge determined whether asylum should be granted.

And Biden needs to talk Mexico into having its National Guard patrol the border.

Finally, Biden needs to complete the 30-foot-tall wall that President Trump began.

Why would Biden be angry over the skyrocketing number of illegal immigrants?

● Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”

● Former Trump administration senior adviser Stephen Miller: Biden’s Immigration Plan Would “Erase America’s Nationhood.”

● “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser. Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.”

Fortunately though, ABC News knows who to blame: Martha Raddatz Blames Border Crisis On Republicans Warning That Border Is Wide Open.

BIGLY! Trump ridiculed for ‘major announcement’ that he’s selling digital trading cards.

Former President Donald Trump is being mocked over his “major announcement” that he’s selling digital trading cards featuring himself depicted as a superhero.

“MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT! My official Donald Trump Digital Trading Card collection is here!” Mr Trump wrote on his platform Truth Social on Thursday.

“These limited edition cards feature amazing ART of my Life & Career! Collect all of your favorite Trump Digital Trading Cards, very much like a baseball card, but hopefully much more exciting,” he added. “GET YOUR CARDS NOW! Only $99 each! Would make a great Christmas gift. Don’t Wait. They will be gone, I believe, very quickly!”

Twitter users were quick to mock the announcement.

As Michael Walsh recently described Trump: ‘A Man Who Could Have Been Great.’

ROGER SIMON: Trapped by Apple—a Tale of the ‘Great Reset.’

Apparently, they are more upset with Elon Musk for trying to bring a modicum of transparency to Twitter, pulling their ads from his newly purchased platform and, according to Musk, threatening to remove the Twitter app from their app store.

Yet worse, in China, Apple has restricted AirDrop file sharing, the very method the demonstrators have been using to communicate privately out of earshot of their totalitarian masters. Was this on advice from the communist regime or did Apple just figure out for themselves what was in their best interest to do? It wouldn’t have been hard.

Meanwhile, Apple stock has lost some ground because these protests may be interfering with their iPhone production. Poor things. Further, according to Bloomberg, violent protests have erupted at Apple’s main iPhone plant in China. (Wasn’t Apple supposed to be leaving China for production? I guess not.)

Sadly, what’s going on isn’t surprising. Apple is acting in tandem with our administration, which also, not surprisingly, has stayed mostly mum about what’s going on in China and Iran. Freedom is of no interest to them.

Behind the Iran silence is, obviously, the three-letter word oil, for which President Joe Biden has only himself to blame for having seriously restricted our domestic supply for the most dubious of reasons.

As for China, Biden, we recall, is the man who insisted the Chinese—meaning the regime—were our friends, before he recanted that for electoral purposes. The true story of the Biden family and the Chinese communists, some of which must reside on Hunter’s laptop, is yet to be fully exposed.

What all this adds up to is Apple and the rest of Big Tech cooperating with the administration in the big lie that domestic terrorists (Trump, et al.) are the threat to democracy when they themselves are.

True democracy, whether manifest as a democratic republic or otherwise, has become an inconvenience for them in the march to globalism and the “Great Reset.”

When its guru Klaus Schwab said, “You will have nothing and you will be happy,” it’s not hard to imagine that he would exclude the iPhone or its equivalent implanted under our skin—“the better to track you with, my dear,” they might say in a modern version of a Disney classic.

Whatever their disagreements with Musk, “Elon Musk meets Tim Cook, says Apple never considered removing Twitter app,” according to CNBC.

PROMISES MADE, PROMISES KEPT: Fact check: Fauci warned Trump administration in 2017 of surprise infectious disease outbreak.

A Google search of the headline revealed that the screenshot of the article is authentic and came from Healio News, a specialty clinical information website and was, in fact, published on Jan. 11, 2017.

The article, “Fauci: ‘No doubt’ Trump will face surprise infectious disease outbreak,” states Fauci’s remarks came during a forum on pandemic preparedness at Georgetown University.

* * * * * * * *

Healio News reported that, according to experts who spoke at the forum, “preparing the U.S. for pandemics requires proper funding and starts by battling disease outbreaks overseas.”

Fauci said during his remarks that a lesson learned from emerging diseases over the years is that “you have to commit substantial financial and human resources.”

Fact check: US government did not engineer COVID-19

Our ruling: True

The claim that Dr. Anthony Fauci, in 2017, warned the Trump administration of the likelihood of an infectious disease outbreak is TRUE based on our research. Fauci did not warn about the coronavirus specifically, as some posts claim, but rather, that a more general “surprise infectious disease outbreak” would take place.

Earlier: