Trump’s Next Anti-Crime Target? Memphis

Chicago is a mess, but, it’s just too dangerous for Trump to send in ICE and the National Guard. No reason to get into a war, and, really, if Chicago wants to have all that crime and shootings, let them.

Trump says National Guard deploying to Memphis, Tennessee, next amid anti-crime push

President Donald Trump announced on Friday that he would be deploying the National Guard to Memphis, Tenn., next as he continues his anti-crime initiative.

The president made the announcement during an appearance on “Fox & Friends,” adding that the deployment would not be limited to the National Guard and could include the Army if needed.

“Memphis is deeply troubled,” Trump said. “We’re gonna fix that just like we did Washington.”

Trump admitted that he would have “preferred going to Chicago.” The Trump administration has recently clashed with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson over possible National Guard deployment to the Windy City.

Trump told “Fox & Friends” that both Memphis Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat, and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, were on board with the plan to have the National Guard sent to what’s known as the Bluff City.

There was a lot of talk about the crime rate is at a 25 year low

Overall crime is at a 25-year low, with robbery, burglary, and larceny also reaching 25-year lows. Murder is at a six-year low, aggravated assault at a five-year low, and sexual assault at a twenty-year low.

These declines reflect focused strategies and collaboration. In recent years, MPD has launched initiatives focused on fugitives, violent repeat offenders, auto theft, and traffic enforcement, while strengthening partnerships with local, state, and federal agencies.

That’s good, but, the crime is still absurdly high. Neighborhood Scout ranks them a zero, meaning they are safer than 0% of other US cities (100 is best). There aren’t that many zeros. The violent crime rate is 26.05. The national median is 4. You have a 1 in 38 chance of being a victim. Property crime is 86.85, with the national median being 19. A 1 in 12 chance of being a victim. Hope you don’t like having possession of your car. Or being attached to your stuff.

Blue states shunned the National Guard. Tennessee governor is taking a different approach.

And Memphis may just be the start — GOP governors have shown a willingness to lean on the Guard to aid in crime fighting and deportation efforts. Before it was declared the next target on Friday, Trump had suggested he would dispatch the Guard to New Orleans — which GOP Gov. Jeff Landry celebrated. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders this week detailed the Guard to assist in immigration enforcement in Little Rock and Fayetteville. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has routinely sent the Guard to police the border, and in June authorized 5,000 troops in anticipation of protests against deportation raids.

Tennessee Republicans view the entrance of the Guard in their state as an opportunity to sharpen their attacks on Democrats over crime, an issue that remains one of the GOP’s biggest strengths.

“Why these blue state governors would act like dumbasses and not welcome the federal help to reduce the crime for their own citizens is beyond me,” said Tennessee Sen. Brent Taylor, a Memphis-area Republican who has long requested federal intervention in his city. “When it comes to the crime issue, blue state governors are as useless as a milk bucket under a bull.”

Let’s not forget that Memphis is a Democrat run city in a GOP state. Memphis has had only one Republican mayor (briefly) since 1968. In fairness, current Memphis Mayor Paul Young is still a little squishy, but, he’s a far sight better than most of his Democrat brethren, especially since he has been hearing from Memphis residents. And he may very consider that reducing crime is a good thing, even if it means working with Trump.

This could also be dangerous, because there are lots of gangs, at least 48, including Bloods, Crips, Gangster Disciples, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), and Vice Lords. And a newer one, AOB (All Off the Blade), which is even more violent than MS-13.

The Philadelphia Inquirer supports immigration lawlessness

Screen capture Philadelphia Inquirer website main page, September 8, 2025 at 8:20 AM EDT.

That our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper supports illegal immigration is no surprise to regular readers and me. The main article listed tells readers how “Rapid Response” activists have been tailing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to try to intimidate ICE in its apprehension of illegal immigrants, but the subsequently listed articles are all pro-illegal immigration.

Chasing ICE: ‘Rapid-response’ activists follow agents, then stand up for immigrants during arrests

“They’re trying to do this quietly, they’re trying to do this when nobody is watching,” one immigrant-advocate said.

by Jeff Gammage | Monday, September 8, 2025 | 5:00 AM EDT

When ICE agents headed out to raid the Super Gigante food market in West Norriton this summer, they didn’t travel alone.

Following behind them were cars carrying members of the Montgomery County Watch rapid-response team, immigration activists who work to find and follow the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Their goal: to record agents’ activities, to alert people to protest at the scenes of arrests, and, at times, to loudly confront the officers.

The group had discovered ICE agents and cars gathering that July morning in the parking lot outside the Plymouth Meeting Regal Cinema movie theater.

From there it was 4½ miles to the supermarket. The two groups arrived nearly simultaneously.

As ICE arrested 14 people for immigration offenses, activists yelled at and questioned the masked agents, asking if they told their children that they worked separating families.

That’s what every law enforcement officer does when he arrests someone for breaking the law. When the Philadelphia Police Department arrests a gang-banger for shooting another gang-banger, he’s separating a family.

“Show your face! Show your face!” they demanded.

We know their reasons. The newspaper’s far-left columnist Will Bunch among others has decried ICE agents wearing masks for the very simple reason: they want to publicly identify and dox them, to intimidate them from doing their jobs.

“Get back!” an ICE agent shouted as a woman in sandals and a T-shirt approached him.

“Cowards!” came the rejoinder.

The agents did not respond to the taunt.

“They’re trying to do this quietly, they’re trying to do this when nobody is watching” ― and the rapid-response team aims to ensure that doesn’t happen, said Stephanie Vincent, an organizer who was among those who went to the supermarket that morning. “The citizens are front line right now.”

The front line of what, of protecting criminals? Because that’s what these people are trying to do, trying to protect people who are in the country illegally from being removed from the country. Further down, they admit that directly:

“People are showing up and protesting, to show we support [migrants] and don’t want them taken out of the community, and asking ICE to think about what they’re doing,” said Rachel Rutter, executive director of Project Libertad, a Phoenixville-based organization that assists immigrant families. “It’s a direct response to the increase in enforcement.”

In other words, they are aiding and abetting criminals, trying to keep the illegals from being deported.

ICE noted that the agents are performing legal enforcement actions, and that while everybody has freedom of speech, if they actually interfere with ICE while making arrests, they are committing a federal crime.

There’s a lot more to the article, noting the legality of the protests, but it’s heavily slanted toward glorifying the activists. That goes right along with the newspaper’s Editorial Board’s support of illegal immigration, saying “Heavy-handed immigration enforcement efforts accomplish little beyond the upheaval and inhumane treatment of people just trying to get ahead and make a better life.” They can try to get ahead and make a better life .  .  . in Mexico or Guatemala or from wherever it is they came! That’s our law, and they are breaking the law every time they cross our borders or overstay a visa and every time they provide forged documents to obtain jobs or work for cash and not pay income of Social Security taxes.

Kick them out, and if they want to return to the United States, they can apply for legal immigration from their home countries. That’s the American way!

Whenever There Is a Truth You Cannot Tell, That Is a Truth You Must Tell! Our Credentialed Media: All the News That's Politically Correct!

I have previously suggested that it was Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s devilishly clever scheme to let the thugs get away with ‘smaller’ s(tuff) until they graduated to a crime which could keep them locked up forever, and if that crime happened to eliminate other thugs, it was a win-win for the DA, getting two or more bad guys off the streets for good. Robert Stacy McCain was less charitable:

Democrats are objectively pro-crime. It is the de facto policy of the Democratic Party that mentally ill criminals should be turned loose on the streets until they stab somebody in the neck. Democrats are the psycho killer party, and the people who vote for Democrats don’t care how many people get killed as a result of their policy.

The Democrats would deny that, of course, but is there any evidence, any evidence at all that Mr McCain’s statement isn’t true? Forget what the left say; look at what they do, and Mr McCain’s statement makes perfect sense.

My good friend Matt Van Swol tweeted a list of major news sources, the credentialed media writ large, which did not cover this story, so I checked my primary newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a site search for the (alleged) killer’s name, Decarlos Brown, returned nothing. I didn’t check Mr Van Swol’s list in its entirety, but doing site searches of the websites of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN resulted in just what Mr Van Swol said, nothing.

Remember: bandwidth is ridiculously cheap, and there are no real limitations on space for those news organizations.

It was an old joke that New Yorkers riding the subway would have the Times very visible, while actually reading the New York Post hidden inside, and yup, the Post covered the murder with three separate stories.

I guess this story wasn’t part of the news that’s fit to print.

We’ve seen this before. The Inquirer’s publisher specifically said that, to achieve her goal of making the newspaper an “anti-racist news organization,” she was establishing guidelines that would reduce the newspaper’s coverage of crime, because it often “stigmatized” certain “Philadelphia communities”. Decarlos Brown is black, and he (allegedly) stabbed a white woman to death, for no known reason other than he is just plain crazy.

But there’s more. Mr Brown is a career criminal, with a rap sheet which dates back to his juvenile years, but while there are many arrests noted, only one actual criminal conviction is listed; he’s been let go without any serious action several times since he got out of prison. This is exactly the thing about which sensible people have been complaining, and liberals ignoring, in their zealous attempts to not ‘stigmatize’ black Americans.

Thus there are two problems for the credentialed media when it comes to Mr Brown:

  1. Mr Brown is black, while his victim was a very pretty white woman, and the media certainly don’t want to point out that; and
  2. The Brown case demonstrates what liberal law enforcement yields.

With President Trump’s actions to send in National Guard troops to help with law enforcement in our more dangerous communities, the left are saying that it’s raaaaacist to do that, because it disproportionately impacts black communities.

Imagine this story in 1985! Because the credentialed media didn’t want you to know about it, it wouldn’t have been published much beyond the local Charlotte Observer, so for the vast majority of the nation, that crime didn’t happen. It’s only due to social media and this internet thingy that Al Gore invented that this is a story at all, because as far as The New York Times is concerned, it never happened.

The Inquirer? That august newspaper is all-in on demanding new funds for SEPTA, and a story about an innocent woman stabbed to death for seemingly no reason at all certainly won’t push more Philadelphians to take public transportation!

Mr Brown should never have been out on the streets, and should have been in the loony bin, but no one wants to say that. It took the sacrifice of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska to bring this to the fore.

Abuse of the asylum claim system

My good friend William Teach noted that the illegal immigrant accused of human trafficking and a known wife beater, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, that darling of Will Bunch and the rest of the American left, has now been notified that he will be deported to Eswatini, a small nation in Africa. But even Mr Bunch would have to admit that Mr Abrego Garcia and his shysters are attempting to abuse the asylum law:

ICE tells Kilmar Abrego Garcia he’ll be deported to tiny African country

DHS mocked Abrego Garcia on social media, saying, ‘Homie is afraid of the entire western hemisphere’

by Peter Pinedo and Bill Melugin | Friday, September 5, 2025 | 7:56 PM EDT

An attorney representing the Department of Homeland Security and ICE has notified high-profile illegal immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia that he will be deported to the tiny African nation Eswatini, after the alleged gang member’s lawyers said he fears persecution in 22 other countries.

According to a removal notice shared with Fox News by ICE sources, the agency notified Abrego Garcia that in light of his claims of fear of persecution or torture in nearly two dozen other countries, “we hereby notify you that your new country of removal is Eswatini, Africa.”

“Dear Mr. Abrego Garcia,” the notice reads, “As you know, the United States seeks to remove you from the United States based on your final order of removal. Currently, you are designated to be removed to Uganda. Your attorney has informed us, however, that you fear persecution or torture in Uganda.”

There’s more at the original.

So, the alleged human trafficker fears persecution or torture in twenty-two separate countries? How, exactly, is that a reasonable fear? What reason would Uganda have to persecute Mr Abrego Garcia?

At some point, it has to be asked: have Mr Abrego Garcia’s attorneys, who are legally officers of the court, overstepped in making unsubstantiated and unreasonable claims to seek asylum? What could motivate twenty-two countries to persecute that man? And if twenty-two other countries do have reasons to persecute him, is that not evidence in itself that he’s a bad, bad guy?

One thing is certain: Mr Abrego Garcia needs to never set foot in the United States as a free man. He needs to be in prison, or at the very least, out of here!

Once again, Will Bunch defends the bad guys.

If Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran had just enough weapons-grade uranium to put together an atomic bomb, and then shipped it out on a boat to pull into New York harbor, to do what they could to destroy our largest city, Will Bunch would scream bloody murder if the CIA found out about it, and President Trump ordered the boat sunk in international waters. “Why,” he would yell, “didn’t we arrest them when they pulled into New York harbor?”

Trump won’t get to heaven if he keeps murdering people on boats

There was no legal or moral justification for the Trump-ordered boat bombing that killed 11 Venezuelans. It could be just the start.

by Will Bunch | Thursday, September 4, 2025 | 1:16 PM EDT

If Donald Trump is serious about wanting to get to heaven, he has a very odd strategy.

Several paragraphs deleted, in that they are just Philadelphia Inquirer columnist bloviating on what it takes to get to Heaven. Given Mr Bunch’s vocal support for pre-natal infanticide, homosexuality, and transgenderism, I have some difficulty believing the notion that the columnist has any idea what it takes to get to the Heaven he probably doubts exists in the first place.

Just hours after Trump’s plea for everlasting life, he ordered, then celebrated, the mass killing of 11 human beings on a boat in the southern Caribbean Sea, somewhere off Venezuela. This was kind of like scribbling down your 2025 New Year’s resolution to lose weight while sitting in the drive-thru line at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The U.S. military missile strike Tuesday that obliterated the power boat — which the Trump regime alleged, with zero evidence, was manned by Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang members bringing a shipment of narcotics to the United States — was such a shocking event that it took a day or so for the America media to even wrap their arms about what the heck just happened here.

Some of that, to be fair, stems from a complete lack of transparency by the White House and the Defense Department. Trump and his minions were eager to boast to the world about their ability to kill people, as the president quickly posted the 28-second South American “snuff video” of the boat’s annihilation to the White House social-media accounts.

In 1941, before the United States was officially at war with Germany, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued his “shoot-on-sight” order, directing the Navy to attack any ship threatening U.S. shipping or foreign shipping under escort. President Trump’s order to sink a drug-running boat when it could be sunk is pretty much the same thing: the drug runners were, in effect, attacking the United States directly, and individual American citizens. Mr Bunch, a journolist[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading in our nation’s sixth largest city, is very much aware of the devastation drugs have wrought on the Kensington section of the city, and, less famously, much of the rest of Philly.

The Trump regime offered no legal justification — let alone a moral one — for blowing up in international waters a ship carrying civilians from a nation with which the United States is not at war. Or why the standard practice of warning and then interdicting a ship believed to be involved in drug trafficking — and arresting any suspects and bringing them to trial — wasn’t followed in this case.

My far too expensive Philadelphia Inquirer subscription. I could use a senior citizen’s discount right about now.

“(W)arning and then interdicting”, huh? In other words, give the crew a chance to dump the drugs and destroying the evidence, as well as giving them a chance to open fire and perhaps wound or kill an American sailor or Coast Guardsman? Or perhaps failing to interdict the boat at all before it beached itself to unload its cargo on the Outer Banks or Rehoboth Beach or somewhere else along out hundreds of miles of coastline?

Mr Bunch sure does like to root for the bad guys. This afternoon he expressed the wish to give eleven drug traffickers a fighting chance, while, as we noted last June, he was cheering on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, even while admitting that he did “find quite troubling the allegations of domestic abuse that caused Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, to briefly seek a protective order.” He complained about universities taking steps, at President Trump’s direction, to fight anti-Semitism on campus. Mr Bunch complained that no one should be above the law when it came to pardoned police officers and the January 6 Capitol protesters — even though most of the J6 defendants had already been railroaded convicted and served their sentences — but he defends those who have broken our immigration laws.

If it weren’t for double standards, Mr Bunch would have no standards at all!

There are times I actually wonder if Mr Trump is playing some secret four-dimensional chess. He has managed to get the American left defending transgenderism even when trans killers have murdered children in school and when some of them are invading minor girls locker rooms and beating them in girls’ sports, illegal immigrants even when some of them are trafficking in drugs and raping 7-year-old girls, and urban criminals in general. The President has managed to push the left so far around the bend on issues important to the American people that it’s amazing

References

References
1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

Whenever there is a truth you cannot tell that is a truth you must tell!

Rational people want rational explanations for everything. The worst mass murder event in the United States was on October 1, 2017, as 64-year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire on a music festival crowd from the Mandalay Hotel, killing 60 people and wounding 413 others. Coupled with the ensuing panic, a total of 867 people were injured. Unlike other mass murder events, the killer did not leave any explanation or ‘manifesto,’ and even years later, there has been no ‘official’ explanation.

And so it is with the latest mass murder attempt, the shooting by disturbed man male who thought he was a girl. From The New York Times:

What Motivated the Minneapolis Church Shooter? We May Never Know.

Investigators combing through piles of evidence from an attack on a Minneapolis church cautioned that these kinds of shooters often leave more questions than answers.

by Ernesto Londoño | Sunday, August 31, 2025 | 5:02 AM EDT

It has become a hauntingly routine paradox in the aftermath of horrific shootings.

An assailant leaves piles of evidence that investigators scrutinize. But law enforcement officials are often left with more questions than answers as they seek to determine a motive.

Officials in Minneapolis were bracing for that outcome as they examined the writings and social media posts of the person they say opened fire through the window of a church packed with schoolchildren on Wednesday, killing two.

“We will follow all of the evidence to its logical conclusion,” Brian O’Hara, the Minneapolis police chief, told reporters on Thursday. “This may not ultimately provide the answers that our public is looking for.”

We were told the same thing following the killing of six people at the Covenant School outside of Nashville, Tennessee, by Audrey Hale, the 28-year-old white woman who was so mentally ill that she thought she was a male named ‘Aiden.’ The authorities scrutinized Miss Hale’s writings, and then kept them hidden away. When conservative — the media called him “right-wing” — podcaster Stephen Crowder managed to obtain photocopies of three pages from her notebook, and published them, the authorities were far angrier that the information was leaked than they were about the killings.

Robin Westman, 23, carried out the attack and died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the authorities said. The attacker left behind a lengthy suicide note, journal entries and scribbling on the weapons used in the ambush at the Church of the Annunciation, which is affiliated with an adjacent Catholic school.

Note here that the Times used the killer’s fake name, rather than his real name of Robert, and the feminine pronouns to refer to him. The credentialed media do that pretty consistently, because they want to at least tacitly support the notion that girls can be boys and boys can be girls. Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer is right along with that, with an opinion piece in support of transgenderism, just a few days after a ‘transgender woman’ killed two kids, and wanted to kill more.

The content includes disparaging messages about President Trump, Christians, Black people, Hispanic people, Jews and Israel.

“The shooter expressed hate toward every group imaginable,” said Joseph H. Thompson, the acting United States attorney in Minnesota. “The shooter’s heart was full of hate.”

The sprawling nature of the assailant’s rantings and grievances led government officials and other observers to zero in on single pieces of information in the immediate aftermath of the attack, which also injured 15 children and three adult parishioners.

I cannot (legitimately) publish the entire Times article, but please, feel free to click on the title and read the rest yourself. The author points out that Mr Westman and Miss Hale were ‘transgender,’ but also tries to focus on other things, along with noting that some mass shooters taken alive and talk about their actions are often unable to provide coherent reasons.

But one thing I have noticed is that, while these shootings usually generate considerable talk about stricter gun control laws, that has been mostly missing in this case, because every proposal I have ever seen includes banning the mentally ill from purchasing firearms, and the last thing the left want to do is concede the obvious point, that the ‘transgendered’ are, by definition, mentally ill.

Colbert King of The Washington Post did raise that question .  .  . sort of:

Suppose Westman had undergone mental health screening to qualify for acquiring a lethal weapon. Would disqualifying mental health conditions have been identified? Would she have passed go?

Some psychological and psychiatric disorders render people ineligible for certain roles in life due to safety risks. Ought not the ability to own deadly weapons also be subjected to tests? And should that decision, with all due respect, be left to pawnbrokers?

Of course, Mr King didn’t write, probably didn’t dare write, that ‘gender dysphoria’ should be number one on the list of “psychological and psychiatric disorders render people ineligible for certain roles in life due to safety risks,” because acceptance of the delusions of the ‘transgendered’ is practically a cause célèbre among our friends on the left, and even a very liberal person on other things, like author J K Rowling is hated by those who support ‘transgenderism.’

Whether the editors of the Post would have spiked such an addition to Mr King’s column is unknown.

We previously reported, noting Robert Stacy McCain’s story on the Tennessee Star, one of those evil, reich-wing news and commentary sites, doing the actual journalism — not journolism — in investigating the parts of the story the FBI and Nashville authorities tried to keep secret concerning Miss Hale:

Thanks to The Tennessee Star, this week we learned a whole lot more about Audrey Hale, the deranged 28-year-old woman who wanted to be a man named “Aiden” and who killed six people at Covenant School in Nashville before being shot dead by police. Among the revelations this week, we learned that Hale had been a “patient of mental health professionals at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC)” since she was six years old! Heck of a job, “mental health professionals.”

At the time she perpetrated the Covenant School massacre, Hale was under treatment by both a psychiatrist and a therapist. The distinction is important — a psychiatrist is an M.D., who can write prescriptions, whereas a therapist is basically a counselor, someone with a degree in psychology, to whom the patient talks about their problems. So medication and conversation are, in such a case, handled by two separate “mental health professionals” who, we suppose, consult with each other.

The fact that Audrey/“Aiden” Hale was not healed by this treatment — to the contrary, she became a worst-case scenario of therapeutic effectiveness — is not unusual. Most people who are subjected to treatment by “mental health professionals” never really become healthy. With the assistance of anti-depressants or other medications, they may be able to get through life OK, but how can you say turning someone into a drug addict is “success”? Excuse me for speaking so bluntly, but if the goal is “mental health” and you require Prozac (Zoloft, Paxil, etc.) just to make it through the day? No, you haven’t achieved “mental health.”

Mr McCain is, of course, one of those evil Republicans, so you’re not supposed to pay attention to him either, but he noted that the Star actually did the journalistic legwork. I’m not going to go over the part in which he documented that Miss Hale was just plain crazy; you can read his original, which is not behind any kind of paywall.

Mr McCain went into the efforts by the federal Department of Justice, specifically the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to keep the evidence about Miss Hale suppressed. It wasn’t as though evidence needed to be protected for her trial, since she was killed by the police when they responded to the attack.

It’s hardly a surprise, because the Biden Administration specifically and the left in general are all in on normalizing ‘transgenderism,’ and the last thing they want is documentary evidence that a transgender school shooter and mass murderer not only was crazy, but knew she was crazy, and was taking a drug store’s worth of medication to suppress the crazy, and it still didn’t work. They most certainly don’t want people associating ‘transgenderism’ with people being just plain nuts. And in the Minneapolis case, though we now have a sensible regime in the Department of Justice, you can bet your last euro that Minnesota officials will do whatever they can to keep this quiet. The New York Post, our nation’s second oldest continuously published newspaper, has a conservative editorial policy, and has been reporting on this case all along, reported that one of the Minneapolis killer’s former teachers revealed that he had been a troubled student all along.

Did being crazy make the school shooters transgender, or were the feelings of ‘gender dysphoria’ what led to them being crazy in other ways? Who can say, but we do know that most of the credentialed media have been soft-peddling the ‘transgender’ part about the killers, because they do not want the public believing that the ‘transgendered’ are just plain nuts. That is a truth that must be told.

Now this pisses me off!

We noted, in December of 2021, that my wife and I bought a house. No, we didn’t buy it for ourselves, but for my wife’s sister, as she was retiring back to the Bluegrass State, and couldn’t really afford to do it herself. When we croak, it’ll be inherited by our two daughters, and my sister-in-law’s son.

Fortunately, we bought it in a small town without the ridiculous prices in larger cities — it would probably have cost $100,000 more in Lexington — and before Bidenflation hit interest rates. Alas! we couldn’t just pay for it in cash, as we did for our present home, but had to get a mortgage. And during the negotiations for the mortgage loan, when I mentioned that it was a rental house, I was informed that the mortgage rate for a non-primary residence would be one percentage point higher, while I might have thought ‘darn’ and ‘heck’ and even ‘shoot!’ we nevertheless didn’t try to list it as a primary residence, because that would have been a lie.

Lisa Cook is a well-connected former academic who currently serves on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors — currently serves perhaps being outdated, in that President Donald Trump is trying to fire her — with a guesstimated net worth if $1.1 million to $2.7 million. Dr Cook apparently declared both of her homes as her primary residence, supposedly to get the interest rate down. If Mrs Pico and I, who have a net worth of much less than Dr Cook and her husband, can tell the truth and bite the bullet on the higher interest rate, why can’t wealthier people?

But this is the part which really pisses me off. From The New York Times:

Trump Is Claiming Mortgage Fraud to Attack Enemies. Is Your Information Public?

After President Trump accused a Federal Reserve governor of mortgage fraud, everyday citizens are waking up to just how much information is out there.

by Ron Lieber and Tara Siegel Bernard | Thursday, August 28, 2025 | 10:00 AM EDT

Politicians are using mortgage data against their enemies, so it’s time to figure out how much of it is available and what law-abiding citizens can do to shield it from prying eyes.

On Monday, President Trump said he was removing Lisa Cook from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. He has accused her of declaring both of her homes as her primary residence, which can be a form of mortgage fraud given that interest rates are often higher for vacation homes or investment properties. . . . .

Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who asked the Department of Justice last week to investigate Ms. Cook, suggested this week that she wouldn’t be the last person to face such charges.

“There is too much mortgage fraud in Chicago,” he said on social media, calling out the city where Mr. Trump has threatened to send troops. Mr. Pulte also asked for tips on fraud from the public.

Ms. Cook also wasn’t the first public figure to come in for this scrutiny. Other Trump adversaries, including Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, and Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, are facing similar inquiries. The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, a Republican, has also had to answer for his housing records.

Dr Cook is, of course, suing the President over her firing, saying that he’s a big meanie-hoonie, and it’s “illegal and unprecedented” for him to fire her “for cause“. Dr Cook listed two separate residences as her primary residence in 2021, before President Joe Biden appointed her to the Board of Governors in 2022.

Someone who looks a lot like me starting the bathroom renovation at the rental house.

The five quoted paragraphs, if the reader got only that far, leads the reader to believe that this is all political, all Mr Trump using the law to attack his political enemies. Given the multitude of ways that Democrats attempted to attack and even imprison him at the end of his first term, I don’t blame him one bit for returning the favor.

But if you read further, you’ll see that the meat of the article is telling people what information is publicly available at the county clerk’s office, in the property deed of trust or filed mortgage, and that it is public information; anyone can look it up.

The article notes things like primary residences, whether the home is a rental or second home, of, in my case, whether it has a property-tax-saving “homestead exemption”, something we have on our real residence but which we did not claim for the rental house, because that would also be illegal.

The thrust of the article is informing readers what they can do to restrict the publicly available information, or, simply put, how to better commit mortgage fraud.

My wife and I are retired, and we were working-class throughout our careers. A lot of working-class people have bought more than one home, primarily to use as rental income sources, which my wife and I are doing, though the entirety of the rental payments are used for paying off the mortgage; we’re not making a profit off of this. [1]Full disclosure: we bought our current home in 2014, as our retirement home, three years before we moved here, and we rented it out, making a small profit, but we didn’t have to make any … Continue reading

But the people like Dr Cook, who have two residences they use themselves? The people with the money for vacation homes or the hoitiest and the toitiest of summer homes aren’t working-class people. They are the people who have connections in government and can afford the extra interest percentage point, and I admit that I have very little sympathy for those committing fraud to save what, for them, are a few bucks. And that The New York Times is trying to help some of their readers commit mortgage fraud is just plain wrong.

References

References
1 Full disclosure: we bought our current home in 2014, as our retirement home, three years before we moved here, and we rented it out, making a small profit, but we didn’t have to make any “homestead exemption”, because we were a bit too young to qualify for it at the time, or “primary residence” claims, because we bought it for cash, and had no mortgage on it.

You in a heap o’ trouble, boy! Philly's gang-bangers are just plain stupid!

In the 1997 cult classic Paul Verhoeven film Starship Troopers, Johnny Rico, played by Casper Van Dien, who had kept some of his personal life private, is asked why he joined the Mobile Infantry, but refuses to answer. Then, in the famous shower scene, Dizzy Flores, played by Dina Meyer, who knew Mr Rico at home in Buenos Ares, is asked, and she responds that “He’s here because of a girl.”

And so it is that Zaakir McClendon is now looking at spending the rest of his miserable life in prison because of a girl. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

The sixth, long-sought suspect in the Roxborough High shooting is finally in custody, police say

Zaakir McClendon was charged in the shooting that killed Nicolas Elizalde and wounded four other teens outside Roxborough High School.

by Ellie Rushing | Friday, August 15, 2025 | 11:45 AM EDT | Updated: 2:33 PM EDT

The sixth and final person involved in the Roxborough High School shooting that killed Nicolas Elizalde and wounded four other teens is in custody, police said — a significant development in a case that law enforcement has spent the last three years working to fully solve. Continue reading

Killadelphia: I check Bluesky so you don’t have to! The last thing the criminal-loving and police-hating Larry Krasner wants is more law enforcement

According to the Census Bureau, the population of Philadelphia was 1,573,916 as of July 1, 2024, while the Philadelphia Police Department reported that there had been 269 homicides in the city during all of 2024. According to my precise calculations[1]269 ÷ 15.73916 = 17.091128116112931058582541889148, that meant the City of Brotherly Love had a homicide rate of 17.09 per 100,000 population. Apparently, District Attorney Larry Krasner thinks that’s just hunky-dory, a perfectly acceptable figure.

In a skeet on Bluesky, the city’s George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police-hating District Attorney, Larry Krasner, posted a bit from an interview with CNN, saying:

The 10th Amendment says he cannot take over the Philadelphia Police Department as he is doing in D.C. D.C. is different. It’s not a state. Pennsylvania is a state, and Philadelphia is its biggest city. Our police department is controlled by the mayor. And oh, trust me, this mayor does not work for Donald Trump, and neither do we.

So, we will stand on this constitutional right that has been there forever. We will stand on the reality that you cannot claim, It is an emergency, when Philadelphia, as of today, has the lowest number of homicides in over 50 years. We may set the record, the record, for lowest crime overall in Philadelphia for more than 50 years, and at the same time we have some of the lowest incarceration. That’s not an emergency. Continue reading

References

References
1 269 ÷ 15.73916 = 17.091128116112931058582541889148