Month: May 2019

The City of Oakland is in such dire financial straits that it is planning to use $2.9 million from state gas tax revenues to keep the city’s lights on, rather than using the money to fix pothole-riddled roads, for which the funding was intended.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported Wednesday that the city is facing severe financial shortfalls, despite a booming economy that has seen wealthier households relocate from San Francisco across the bay to gentrifying neighborhoods.

The problem is that the city’s costs are rising faster than its growing revenues, thanks partly to pension obligations — an increasingly common challenge for large, Democrat-run cities that made ambitious promises to public sector unions.

El Paso Sector Border Patrol agents arrested two previously deported sex offenders who tried to sneak back into the United States. The criminal aliens attempted to use groups of migrants crossing the border in New Mexico, officials stated.

In the early morning hours of May 2, agents patrolling the border near the Santa Teresa Port of Entry tracked down a group of migrants who illegally crossed the border. The agents tracked the group’s footprints as they attempted to disappear into the desert after crossing the border. The group consisted of two Guatemalan males and two men from China, according to information provided by El Paso Sector Border Patrol officials on May 8.

The agents transported the migrants to the station where they underwent a biometric background investigation. The agents determined one of the men to be a previously deported illegal alien with a criminal history in Colorado. A Colorado court handed down a two-year prison sentence after the Arvada Police Department arrested the 44-year-old Guatemalan national for “first degree sexual assault.” Immigration officers deported the man following the completion of his prison term.

Despite endless efforts to boycott Chick-fil-A from the Left, Yahoo Finance reporter Myles Udland announced Wednesday that the fast-food eatery has become the third-largest restaurant chain in the nation and has tripled its sales over the last ten years.

Food service consultancy Technomic Inc. provided the new rankings showcasing Chick-fil-A’s steady boost in popularity, according to The Wall Street Journal. In 2018, the eatery hit $10.2 billion in sales and has just about doubled its number of locations since 2007.

“Each year since 2015, Chick-fil-A has been the top-rated fast-food restaurant on the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which considers factors such as staff courtesy and restaurant cleanliness,” reported the Journal, adding: “Among limited-service U.S. restaurants that mainly serve chicken, Chick-fil-A’s market share rose to 33% last year from 18% in 2009, while the market share of Yum Brands Inc.’s KFC chain fell to 15% from 29% in that time, according to data tracker Euromonitor.”

“We’ve been pretty consistent in how, over multiple decades, we’re going to take it slow and steady,” said Chick-fil-A senior director Mark Moraitakis. “It’s paid off for us.”

Though the restaurant has been praised for the friendly and efficient customer service and legendary chicken, it has also become a target of left-wing political backlash. Activists and politicians have tried to brand Chick-fil-A as discriminatory and anti-LGBT over the company donating to Christian charities and CEO Dan Cathy’s nearly-decade old remarks affirming that biblical marriage is between a man and a woman.

“It has been seven years since Dan Cathy affirmed biblical marriage in an interview. Seven years. Almost a decade. And yet the LGBT lobby has not yet dropped the matter. Against all odds, they have remained obsessed with the chicken chain for these 80 or so months,” The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh wrote last month. “Just recently, Chick-fil-A locations were blocked from opening at airports in Buffalo and San Antonio. Protests are still waged. Gay rights activists are still writing angry think pieces. We still are told that eating a Chick-fil-A chicken nugget is an act of bigotry against homosexuals. The chicken itself is labeled ‘hateful.’ All, again, because of views expressed by Dan Cathy during Obama’s first term in office.”

Walsh highlighted that Chick-fil-A has not been “accused of actively discriminating against gay people. They serve gay people. They hire gay people. They do not take any discriminatory actions of any kind against gay people.”

Notably, Chick-fil-A broke their rule of staying closed on Sundays and provided free food to people donating blood in response to the tragic 2016 terrorist attack at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. In other words, this was just another example of Chick-fil-A being really bad at “hating” gay people.

“But the founder is a Christian who believes what the Bible says. And that has been reason enough to spend seven entire years trying (unsuccessfully, and often hilariously) to destroy the man’s business,” continued Walsh.

Unsuccessfully, indeed.

In early April, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released its border crossing and apprehension numbers for the month of March. And as The Daily Wire has repeatedly noted, the situation was already so dire that CBP Deputy Commissioner Robert E. Perez referred to the onslaught, at the time of the release of the March numbers, as a “system-wide emergency”:

“We are currently experiencing a system-wide emergency in our processing and holding facilities. The humanitarian crisis created by a massive influx of family groups and unaccompanied children in recent months has forced CBP to reallocate resources away from law enforcement, trade and travel missions to process and provide care for those in our custody,” said CBP Deputy Commissioner Robert E. Perez. “The impacts to legitimate trade and travel cannot be overstated. As this crisis continues to worsen, it undermines CBP’s ability to perform its dual mission of protecting our borders and facilitating legitimate trade and travel.”

We are past the point of being in a full-on crisis at our southern border, as even an increasing number of Democrats and venerable leftist media outlets are willing to concede. And yet, as The Daily Wire reported yesterday, the brand-new CBP numbers released for the month are even more harrowing.

It is worth breaking down the numbers a little more. Per CBP’s official data release, total border apprehensions between points of entry in April rose 6.62% over March’s already-record-shattering pace. Astoundingly, April’s apprehension total of 98,977 is a full 94.04% higher than the monthly total from the beginning of the federal government’s fiscal year, in October 2018. In other words, apprehensions between points of entry along the border have nearly doubled in just the first seven months of the current fiscal year. As Daniel Horowitz observes, the combined total for points of entry inadmissibles and apprehensions between points of entry is 109,144, which is the highest monthly total since the second term of the George W. Bush administration. Furthermore, as Horowitz states, “it is very likely the highest number of unique individuals of all time, given that many in the past were the same individuals deported multiple times within the same week, while almost all of these are first-timers.”

It is also worth re-emphasizing the social transformation without representation that is currently transpiring with respect to our immigration numbers from Guatemala and Honduras, in particular. As the Department of Homeland Security has stated, over 1% of the populations of each country have entered the United States since September. But according to immigration policy expert Horowitz’s own math, “the size of these countries’ populations in America equal roughly 6.6% and 9.2% of their respective populations in Guatemala and Honduras.” Those are eye-gouging statistics.

TheBlaze broke down the single adults and family unit tallies: “CBP reported that most of those apprehended in April (58,474 or 59 percent) crossed the border in a family unit. Less than one-third (31,606 or 32 percent) were single adults. In contrast, most of those turned away at the border (6,144 or 60 percent) were single adults.”

CBP sounded the alarm yesterday on its official Twitter feed, tweeting, “As of Sunday, only 7 months into the fiscal year, #BorderPatrol has surpassed the TOTAL Southwest border apprehensions of every fiscal year since 2009.” It also tweeted, “#CBP is experiencing an unprecedented and unsustainable situation at the Southwest border. In April, CBP apprehended or deemed inadmissible 109,144 individuals along the SWB.”

“Unsustainable,” indeed. Hopefully our policymakers are paying attention.

Reuters on Tuesday took a close look at the adventures of the Chinese state-run CAMC engineering company, which somehow managed to pocket over a billion dollars from the socialist government of Venezuela for an agriculture project that never produced any food, even as the people of Venezuela descend into abject poverty and starvation.

CAMC was hired by current dictator Nicolás Maduro’s predecessor, the equally monstrous Hugo Chávez, in 2010. The Chinese company was to undertake a sweeping renovation of the remote Delta Amacuro region, providing it with infrastructure such as roads and bridges, the biggest rice-processing plant in the region, and “rice paddies twice the size of Manhattan.”

“Nine years later, locals are hungry,” Reuters reported. “Few jobs have materialized and the plant is only half-built, running at less than one percent its projected output. It hasn’t yielded a single grain of locally grown rice, according to a dozen people involved in or familiar with the development.”

Leftists who support Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and have occupied the Venezuelan Washington, DC, embassy since last week are holding a press conference at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Thursday to complain that the electricity has been turned off.

The leftwing groups, including the controversial group Code Pink, claim they are lawfully occupying the space, which diplomats abandoned when the effort to replace Maduro with the now legitimate interim president of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó, began to unfold in recent weeks.

The occupiers believe that the developments in Venezuela where Maduro still clings to power represent a military coup aided and abetted by the United States, even though the only military action there has been troops loyal to the dictator attacking pro-Guaidó protesters.