April 2, 2025

BLUE CITY BLUES: Seattle mayor reveals $47 MILLION payroll tax deficit as companies flee the Emerald City.

Last week, the mayor of Seattle announced that the Emerald City collected $47 million less in payroll taxes last year as large companies continue to flee the liberal oasis. According to the Seattle Times, the mayor and Seattle City Council expected the tax to haul in over $400 million in revenue from the tax, but instead, the city brought in only $360 million in 2024.

The $47 million payroll tax deficit adds to a $260 million budget deficit Seattle was already facing from out-of-control spending.

On Tuesday, Mayor Bruce Harrell said in a joint statement with Councilmember Dan Strauss, “Today’s announcement that [payroll expense tax] revenues collected in 2024 were $47 million lower than projected requires action to ensure our budget remains balanced.”

Harrell’s statement went on to blame… Trump.

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green 49

PRESIDENT KLAIN DISSEMBLES: Ex-Biden aide Ron Klain was alarmed by ‘out of it’ prez ahead of disaster debate, book says.

Ron Klain, a longtime aide to former President Joe Biden known for his intense loyalty, is insisting he “never doubted” Biden’s mental fitness — as a new book describes Klain’s distress ahead of Biden’s dismal June 2024 debate against Donald Trump.

In “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History,” author Chris Whipple writes that Klain viewed Biden, then 81, as “out of it” and even “half-seriously” worried that Biden thought he was “president of NATO.”

“I never doubted the president’s mental acuity,” Klain told The Post Wednesday after a report on Whipple’s book was published by the Guardian.

“He had become singularly focused on foreign policy and detached from Democratic allies in the pursuit of GOP support on Ukraine and Israel,” Klain said of his impressions of the 46th president.

“He thought that being a great foreign policy president was enough.”

* * * * * * * *

Whipple writes that Klain, Biden’s White House chief of staff from 2021 to 2023, was “startled” when he arrived at Camp David to help with debate prep.

“He’d never seen him so exhausted and out of it,” the author relates.

I suspect former President Klain saw former (P)resident Biden exhausted and out of it on numerous occasions when he was part of the Democrats’ brain trust running the show in DC under Biden’s name:

More on Klain and Biden’s career ending debate with Trump: In a new book, top Biden aide describes ‘out of it’ president before Trump debate.

Ron Klain served Biden from 2021 to 2023, then returned to his side last June to run debate preparation as he had for numerous Democratic presidents before.

According to Klain, it turned out that Biden “didn’t know what Trump had been saying and couldn’t grasp what the back and forth was”; left preparation and fell asleep by the pool; obsessed about foreign leaders, saying “these guys say I’m doing a great job as president so I must be a great president”; “didn’t really understand what his argument was on inflation”; and “had nothing to say about a second term other than finish the job”.

As described by Klain to the reporter Chris Whipple, at one point Biden had an idea.

“If he looked perplexed when Trump talked, voters would understand that Trump was an idiot. Klain replied: ‘Sir, when you look perplexed, people just think you’re perplexed. And this is our problem in this race.”

Flashback:

What struck me instead as I read Leibovich’s slightly tongue-in-cheek profile was the distance between the bourgeois comfort of Klain’s personal and professional life and the facts, as they say, on the ground. One cannot finish reading the Leibovich piece without coming to the conclusion that, all in all, things have worked out pretty darn well for Ron Klain. For America? Not so much.

Klain is the most powerful chief of staff in recent memory, the beating heart of Joe Biden’s White House, a man whose portfolio is so wide-ranging and whose boss is so (let’s face it) odd that Republicans on Capitol Hill refer to him as “Prime Minister Klain.” Like most Washingtonians, he is a well-degreed workaholic, a graduate of Georgetown and Harvard Law School who has spent decades rotating from positions in Democratic administrations to lucrative gigs at the intersection of law, technology, and finance. He calls his expensive home in Chevy Chase, Md., “the house that O’Melveny built,” after legal giant O’Melveny & Myers, where he was a partner from 2001 to 2004.

Among his clients there were AOL Time Warner and Fannie Mae. In 2004 the chairman of AOL Time Warner, billionaire Steve Case, invited Klain to join his D.C.-based venture capital firm, Revolution. Leibovich informs us that Klain’s salary in 2020 was some $2 million. That buys you a lot of hors d’oeuvres.

What Ron Klain actually did in the private sector—besides tweet—is no mystery. By the alchemical process through which influence is manufactured in Washington, he converted his relationships with Democratic power brokers into cash money. “At times,” wrote Michael Scherer in a November 2020 profile for the Washington Post, “Klain appears to have worked with every Democratic leader of the past three decades.” Such a network is worth something to the incalculable number of interests seeking out favors, damages, or relief from the federal government.

—“The Mark of Klain,” Matthew Continetti, the Washington Free Beacon, July 23rd, 2021.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll 44

“EVIL PEOPLE”: Organized ‘Bankrupt Tesla’ Group Tied To Formerly USAID-Funded Disinfo Queen. “On Tuesday morning, former Biden administration ‘disinformation czar’ Nina Jankowicz repeatedly refused to disclose who’s funding her new gig – the ‘American Sunlight Project’ – which cropped up after a stint at the USAID-funded UK-based Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) – for which she registered as a foreign agent while serving as their Vice President.”

The American Sunlight Project has secret funding because of course it does.

Posted at 12:44 pm by Stephen Green 66

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Shot:

Chaser:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 43

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A story about enrollment at Howard University, a leading HBCU founded in 1867, reveals that Howard’s student population is only 25% male. Apparently, this is not that unusual for HBCUs. “This very much seems like a problem worth addressing. As someone quoted in the story points out, it’s hard to achieve upward mobility in today’s world if you don’t go to college. But I also wonder if this isn’t a case where something has changed more generally and black male students are just a leading indicator. There have been plenty of recent stories about a gender gap among all students headed to college.”

Posted at 12:17 pm by Glenn Reynolds 93

SHOCK — WOMEN’S TV SHOW DISAVOWS 19th AMENDMENT! The View Lauds Ellie Mystal, Claims All Laws Pre-1965 Are ‘Unconstitutional.’

ABC News’s The View had become a home for far-left extremist politics. That fact was obvious during Tuesday’s episode where they invited far-left extremist writer Elie Mystal to promote his unhinged book designed to tear at American’s elevation of the rule of law. The liberal ladies gleefully welcomed his ridiculous pontifications about how all laws pre-1965 shouldn’t be considered legitimate and how there shouldn’t be voter registration laws.

There to promote his book Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America, co-host Sunny Hostin heaped praise on Mystal. “I love this book! You are dead on and it is a fantastic book! One of the laws you write about is playing out right now, the Immigration and Nationality Act,” she touted.

“One of my premises for the book is that every law passed before the 1965 Voting Rights Act should be presumptively unconstitutional,” Mystal explained. “Because before the 1965 Voting Rights Act we were functionally an apartheid country!”

* * * * * * * *

Laws passed prior to 1965 that Mystal, and the cast of The View, would presumably support included most laws against murder, the First Amendment (freedom of speech, 1791), the Fourth Amendment (unlawful search and seizures, 1791), the 13th Amendment (the abolition of slavery, 1865), the 19th Amendment (women’s right to vote, 1920), and the National Firearms Act (1934); just to name a few.

Between Mystal disavowing all laws passed prior to 1965* and the environmentalist far left destroying Teslas, the party that once preached a tolerance for diversity have entered further into Taliban statue toppling territory, which is what they spent the summer of 2020 doing. It’s a Mirror Universe cargo cult — since they can’t create anything new, they’re determined to burn it all down out of spite.

Flashback: Beyond the Culture of Repudiation:

As a modern conservative, [the late Roger] Scruton defends a form of democracy unknown to Aristotle. Following David Hume and Edmund Burke, however, he opposes the idea that the “political order is founded on a contract.” For Scruton, the state of nature is a chimera—an invention of modern political philosophers who had forgotten the debt and gratitude owed to our predecessors. The fictitious state of nature—so central to philosophical liberalism—obscures the fact that membership in a community, with its requisite duties and obligations, is a precondition for meaningful freedom. “Absolute freedom”—doing whatever one wants—is always an invitation to anarchy or tyranny. In the modern world, the nation is the political form that guarantees membership and self-government.

In all of his political writings, Scruton takes on the Left for scorning existing norms and customs, and for promoting a “culture of repudiation.” The Left is “negative.” It dismisses “every aspect of our cultural capital” with the language of brutal invective: accusing every defender of human nature and sound tradition of “racism,” “xenophobia,” “homophobia,” and “sexism.” Like 1984’s “two minutes of hate,” this language tears down, intimidates, and can never build anything humane or constructive—it is nihilistic to the core. At the same time, Scruton wants to reach out to reasonable liberals who eschew ideology and who still believe in civility and the promise of national belonging. His conservatism can discern the truth in liberalism (another Aristotelian trait) while the partisans of repudiation see half the human race as enemies.

And from 2019, VDH: Waging War Against The Dead. “Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on the past. In 2001, the primeval Taliban blew up two ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan on grounds that their very existence was sacrilegious to Islam. In 2015, ISIS militants entered a museum in Mosul, Iraq, and destroyed ancient, pre-Islamic statues and idols. Their mute crime? These artifacts predated the prophet Mohammed. The West prides itself on the idea that liberal societies would never descend into such nihilism. Think again.”

* I wasn’t expecting the House of Stephanopoulos to sign onto invalidating the 22nd Amendment, but Trump supporters are everywhere, apparently.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 85

THIS:

Congresscritters need to stop showboating and get to work. But as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, Congress is now less a place to commit serious acts of lawmaking and more of a perch for launching lucrative social media side gigs and sweetheart stock trades.

Posted at 11:55 am by Stephen Green 71

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE WAS LAST SEEN GLAMPING ON THE MEXICAN RIVIERA: Zuckerberg’s Right-Wing Metamorphosis Still Has A Long Way To Go.

As for censorship related to public health, a spokesperson for Meta told the Daily Caller that the company fully abandoned its previous policies around Covid-19 misinformation in response to 2022 guidance from its Oversight Board.

That guidance read, in part, “Given Meta’s insistence that it takes a single, global approach to COVID-19 misinformation, the Board concludes that, as long as the World Health Organization (WHO) continues to declare COVID-19 an international public health emergency, Meta should maintain its current policy.”

Despite Zuckerberg’s confession about truthful speech being banned under that policy, Meta’s community guidelines still contain a section on “harmful health misinformation” that covers non-Covid-related public health issues. The policy reads, “We consult with leading health organizations to identify health misinformation likely to directly contribute to imminent harm to public health and safety.”

Meta did not address a Daily Caller question about whether or not they are still working in conjunction with the same public health agencies they did during the Covid-19 pandemic or whether they’ve consulted more stakeholders.

Also still on the no-no list: questioning “election and census integrity.”

Posted at 11:42 am by Stephen Green 26

CORN, POPPED: Elon Musk reveals DOGE’s new target — members of Congress who got ‘strangely wealthy.’

One attendee at the town hall had asked Musk if DOGE had uncovered evidence of funds wired from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

“They’ll [the government] send the money overseas to one NGO [non-governmental organization], then they’ll go through a bunch of them, and then I’m highly confident that a bunch of that money then comes back to the United States and lands in the pockets of the people you just mentioned,” Musk replied.

“But it is a circuitous route. It doesn’t go directly, but let’s just say that there’s a lot of strangely wealthy members of Congress where I’m trying to connect the dots of, ‘How do they become rich?’”

Look into their stock market picks while you’re at it.

Posted at 10:40 am by Stephen Green 130

2028 PREVIEW:

To be fair, dead people are a rock-solid Democrat constituency — and Booker is looking forward.

Between eight years of Obama’s ME! ME! ME! administration and the Biden cabal poisoning everything it touched, the field is wide open for 2028.

Posted at 9:38 am by Stephen Green 136

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: I have a post up at Sarah Hoyt’s Mad Genius Club. In Praise of Longhand.

Posted at 9:15 am by Charlie Martin 43

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Now We Know — Flailing IS the Dems’ Strategy. “Booker wasn’t filibustering any proposed legislation, he was having a very expensive, taxpayer-funded public airing of his daddy issues. Once again, the American public had to foot the bill for a mentally unstable Democrat to be able to get his attention whore fix.”

Posted at 9:07 am by Stephen Green 50

IT’S ALL THEATER:

After a few weeks of major excitement from the left akin to that time they beat Susan Collins in Maine but actually did not, and the Democrats did not take Mike Waltz’s seat in Florida.

Randy Fine did, well, fine. The Gaetz seat was no surprise. The hype from the left was just that — hype.

In Wisconsin, the Democrat-backed progressive won the state Supreme Court seat. Despite the GOP outspending her and having Elon Musk campaign for Brad Schimel, Susan Crawford trounced him. It turns out it is harder than progressives claimed to buy elections.

The left is now, yet again, trying to get Trump to oust Musk. They wanted to blame him for Randy Fine’s loss. They cannot do that. So they’ll do their best to pin Schimel’s loss on him.

Given how special elections go against parties in power, it is hard to pin this on Musk, particularly in Wisconsin, but they’ll try.

It is all theater.

The theater also played out in the United States Senate.

Well, that’s what happens when you put the theater kids in charge.

Posted at 8:45 am by Glenn Reynolds 147