Disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner is finally free after serving 21 months in prison and an additional several months in a halfway house in New York City for sending lewd photos to a minor across state lines, a federal crime.

Weiner walked out of his Manhattan halfway house early Tuesday morning, to a gaggle of reporters.

“It’s good to be out,” he said. “I hope to be able to live a life of integrity and service. I’m glad this chapter of my life is behind me.”

Weiner has been in jail since late 2017, after he pleaded guilty to “one charge of transferring obscene material to a minor,” according to CNN, stemming from a sexting incident — the third such incident for Weiner, who lost both his job in Congress and his campaign to become mayor of New York City because he was unable to resist the urge to court women using private messaging services.

Weiner resigned in disgrace from Congress in 2011, after he was discovered to have engaged in “inappropriate, extramarital relationships with several women he met online” — relationships which involved sending lewd photos of himself to the women using Twitter’s private direct messaging service. After making a mistake and posting one photo publicly, Weiner’s habit of conducting affairs using the social media platform was revealed.

In 2013, after hiding out for two years, Weiner tried to re-enter politics, this time running for mayor of New York City. His campaign was widely considered a “test balloon” for then-Senator Hillary Clinton’s potential 2016 presidential run. The effort allowed Weiner’s wife, close Clinton aide Huma Abedin, to get a sense of donor availability in NYC and compile a list of potential Clinton supporters.

But Weiner eventually ruined that effort, too, sending a series of racy texts to a Democratic aide in Indiana named Sydney Leathers, using the moniker “Carlos Danger.”

Although both incidents were clearly inappropriate and unethical, Weiner escaped criminal prosecution until 2017, when federal agents discovered he had again been texting with a female, but this time, she was a minor in Kentucky, and Weiner’s sexually aggressive texts — which included photos — ran afoul of federal laws against sending salacious material across state lines.

Weiner pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a term of around two years in federal prison. He served 21 months in a minimum-security federal facility in Massachusetts and was then transfered, for the final three months of his sentence, to a halfway house, where he was expected to abide by house rules, find a job, and work on re-entering public life.

Weiner has been mum on his future plans — it certainly wouldn’t be beyond belief for him to make a third run at a political career, even this late in the game — but the New York Post reported last month that Weiner has been shopping around a book proposal, likely a memoir of his life.

No one has bitten.

“Every Simon & Schuster imprint has passed,” a source told the Post. “The project is being repped by the hot downtown boutique agency Foundry Literary + Media — which was behind nonfiction best-sellers by ‘Daily Show’ host Trevor Noah, New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton and ‘Jersey Shore’ star Vinny Guadagnino.”

Here is one more staggering number to put into perspective the all-encompassing crisis currently transpiring at our beleaguered southern border: According to Texas-based border agents, an astonishing 5,500 illegal aliens cross the border every day in South Texas alone.

Fox News reports:

New Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan toured the border in South Texas on Saturday with Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan.

“We’re not going to leave until the border is secure,” said Shanahan, who is trying to transfer $1.5 billion from numerous defense projects to secure the Southwest border.

In South Texas, border agents the last several days apprehended 229 migrants an hour, or 5,500 a day, forcing the agency to set up tents in parking lots and hiring jets at $16,000 a flight to send adults to nearby Del Rio just for processing.

Pictures released by the Rio Grande Valley sector show migrants piling up in makeshift tents in parking lots as agents struggle to handle the surge

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) numbers continue to show the inundated migrant influx affecting America’s 1,900-mile-long border with Mexico. The Daily Wire reported last week on CBP’s April border numbers:

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.”

As The Daily Wire has also noted before, part of the reason for the influx is the dissemination in Central America’s “Northern Triangle” region of transparently false claims pertaining to America’s asylum statute. Our asylum statute, 8 U.S.C. § 1158(b)(1)(B)(i), is operative for those who are persecuted in their native countries for “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” For instance, ethnic Yazidis persecuted in Islamic State-overrun Iraq should qualify — but purely economically motivated migrants simply hoping to “seek a better life,” in the abstract, should not.

CBP has sounded the alarm on Twitter, tweeting last week: “#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.”

One unanswered question is why the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has aborted its unilateral rewriting of the much-ballyhooed and highly flawed Flores consent decree, which the Trump administration cites as hamstringing much of its detention and enforcement efforts at the border.

CNN senior political commentator and former Obama adviser David Axelrod on Tuesday reacted to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) going after former Vice President Joe Biden over climate policy.

According to Axelrod, the far left, anti-establishment taking on the traditional centrists  “is a fundamental fissure in the Democratic Party.”

On Fox News Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) gave Donald Trump Jr. the advice of ignoring the recent subpoena issued by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) to come and testify, again, regarding the fake news Russian collusion investigation. Senator Graham is not the only one of Senator Burr’s colleagues who has been critical of the subpoena.

Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has been dismissive of Burr’s efforts and has said that Don Jr. and the President “shouldn’t worry.” That’s in advance of any testimony.

So why has Senator Burr decided to stand against his colleagues and subpoena Don Jr.? I’m afraid the reason is clear and the motivation as flawed as it is dated. Senator Burr wants to have his Sally Field moment with Democrat colleagues, the liberal press, and progressive activists.

Should abortion proponents sit out celebrations of motherhood?

Workers at a “socialist paradise” food co-op in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope say they’re tired of being oppressed by their bourgeoisie management and are demanding that they be allowed to unionize, per the New York Post.

The Park Slope Food Co-op is supposed to be a safe haven from capitalist grocery stores, where member-volunteers can put in a few hours of work a month in exchange for 20% to 40% off the price of “low-cost, environmentally friendly fare.” But the co-op also has around 75 employees, who say the realities of the socialist system are a far cry from Marx’s utopia.

“Employees of the Brooklyn food collective recently alleged unfair labor practices by the co-op in a filing with the US National Labor Relations Board,” the Post reports, adding that, in response, the company’s “iron-fisted management” “threatened and punished those who support the effort” and suggested that workers looking to form a union could look elsewhere for employment.

“Most of the employees were afraid to provide details of their union battle, telling The Post that they feared their bosses would crack down on them. But one source said the overworked employees are demanding more staffing, better scheduling practices and more transparency from co-op brass,” says the Post.

Management, which consists of six individuals who are also part of the co-op’s roster of 75 employees, reportedly wants to bust efforts to create a union in order to preserve the image that the socialist co-op is a worker’s paradise. Management says they support the effort to organizse, but are fighting to make sure that the socialist principle of collective decision-making is preserved.

“Following Coop principles, we would like to see that any decision by our staff will be made democratically,” the group of six said in a statement, according to Patch.com. That means management would prefer to see all employees, customers, and members of the co-op participate in a vote to unionize.

The co-op dates back to 1973, and is considered one of the oldest, continuously operating food co-ops in the country. A former member described the shop to the Post as “something between an earthy-crunchy health food haven and a Soviet-style reeducation camp.”

In the past, ironically, the co-op’s management has announced boycotts against American companies who they claim employ unfair labor practices. At times, they’ve resisted selling Coca-Cola, Domino sugar, and products from a local Kosher bakery. And in 2008, management began an effort to rid the store of all Israeli-produced products in solidarity with those fighting against the “occupation of Palestine.”

Both the Post and Patch report that this isn’t the first time the co-ops bourgeoisie management and customer base has been exposed. In 2017, two of the six managers were accused of dipping into the store’s coffers to fund expensive flights to Europe, and in 2011, an internal investigation revealed that some of the co-ops “members” were actually household staff of Brooklyn’s wealthier families, who were being shuttled to the co-op to work shifts so that their employers could recieve the grocery savings without having to get their hands dirty.

The employees’ claims will have to go in front of the National Labor Relations Board. They are being represented by the Retail, Wholesale Department Store Workers Union.