General politics thread

Leave her alone!

I still can't believe she was a Harvard Law School professor.

Really interesting story that shows the complexity of governmental regulation; the depths of corruption and political favors; Gavin Newsom's incompetence and arrogance; and why huge giveaways of government money rarely end well — and how the average person will always be the one to pay for it all in the end.

It's all a little complicated, like these things tend to be. So the Cliff's Notes version is:
• California, like a lot of other states, got $20 billion in federal loans during COVID.
• The next year, when California had a much-ballyhooed one-time budget surplus, it gave away the money as stimulus checks but did not pay back its loans. Newsom, who was fighting for his life during a recall campaign, took a victory lap over the surplus that was fueled by a one-time tax windfall from a bunch of tech IPOs. He never bothered to clean up the outstanding loans.
• At the same time, its own state-level unemployment program was scammed to the tune of $30 billion by God only knows how many people because it was handing out COVID stimulus money with little to no oversight.
• The California Secretary of Labor who oversaw all of this fiscal irresponsibility, Julie Su, was soon handed a high-ranking job in the U.S. Department of Labor and was then quickly promoted to acting Secretary of Labor.
• One of Su's first acts in her new job was to offer to forgive the delinquent COVID loans the federal government had given to states — effectively erasing and covering up her massive screw-up in California. The only two states who hadn't paid back the loans by then were California and New York. It's unclear if this has happened or been proposed, since someone in Congress noticed it and started asking questions.
• Meanwhile, because of the way federal law is written, the $20 billion loan isn't just wiped off the books. It's passed along to business owners. As long as their state government is in arrears on federal unemployment loans, business owners in that state see their unemployment tax creep up each year. This is starting to be felt in California, where the costs can quickly add up to thousands of dollars per year. At the small business level, that might mean the difference between making money or laying off some employees.

www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/read-my-lips-i-lied/

198 Democrats admit to treason. 

No one likes Harris. 

$100 million prob buys a lot of crickets and grasshoppers.