Hypocritical, disgraceful Republican Speaker of the U.S. House Mike Johnson thwarts democracy, slow-walks swearing-in of Adelita Grijalva (AZ-7), newly-elected on September 23rd

 Republicans refuse to swear in newly elected Democrat, delaying success of Epstein petition

 Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and House Republican leaders refused requests from Democrats to swear in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) on Tuesday, saying she will be sworn in when the House returns to regular session.

Grijalva, who was elected last week in a special contest [September 23rd] to replace her father, the late Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), has already vowed to sign the discharge petition as soon as she’s sworn in, and the bipartisan lawmakers pushing to release the Epstein files had hoped to launch the process as quickly as possible. ...

Although there are no votes scheduled, the House floor opened up briefly at noon on Tuesday for a pro forma session, a routine procedure allowing one chamber to pause floor activities for long stretches without the consent of the other.

Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) presided over Tuesday’s pro forma session, gaveling out and refusing to recognize Democrats shouting on the floor as they attempted to force a vote on a Democratic proposal to keep the government open. He did not swear in Grijalva. 

“Historically, you do it when the House is in session other than pro forma,” Griffith said after the session when asked about not swearing in Grijalva.

Grijalva noted that Florida Republicans were sworn in during a pro forma session earlier this year, on April 2, the day after their special elections. The House had been in session the day before. ...

A shutdown would not prevent Grijalva from being sworn in. The full House was sworn in during a government shutdown when a new Congress started in January 2019. ...

“It is common practice in the House of Representatives that Representatives-elect are sworn in immediately following their decisive election, with some being sworn in as little as 24 hours after they have won,” wrote Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) . . ..

Imagine Democrats doing this to Republicans. The latter would be howling in front of the cameras about Democrats killing democracy.

"My ex had DDs" is actually good now lol

 

If your partner says any of these phrases about their ex, ‘it’s a red flag,’ says psychologist

 

... if they constantly bring up their ex in purely negative ways ... 

Speaking of Margaret Thatcher, "right-wing" candidate for Japan PM backs "hardline conservative" policies of easy money and aggressive spending of it LOL

"Let''s devalue the Yen and spend the hell out of it"

 

Right-wing Sanae Takaichi is set to be Japan’s first female prime minister

Japan’s ruling party picked hardline conservative Sanae Takaichi as its head on Saturday, putting her on course to become the country’s first female prime minister in a move set to jolt investors and neighbors. ...

Takaichi, who says her hero is Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister, offers a starker vision for change than Koizumi and is potentially more disruptive.

An advocate of late premier Shinzo Abe’s “Abenomics” strategy to boost the economy with aggressive spending and easy monetary policy, she has previously criticized the Bank of Japan’s interest rate increases. ...

It's obviously the nationalism, anti-globalism, and possible militarism which really bother the writer from Reuters:

... But her nationalistic positions — such as her regular visits to the Yasukuni shrine to Japan’s war dead, viewed by some Asian countries as a symbol of its past militarism — may rile neighbors like South Korea and China. ...

Takaichi also favors revising Japan’s pacifist postwar constitution and suggested this year that Japan could form a “quasi-security alliance” with Taiwan, the democratically governed island claimed by China. ...

“We hope she will ... steer Japanese politics in an ‘anti-globalism’ direction to protect national interests and help the people regain prosperity and hope,” Sanseito said in a statement.

 

If Japan really wanted to scare the world, maybe it could peg the Yen to the price of plutonium, the vast majority of which in the world it owns, and start aggressively selling it to the highest bidders. 

 

"That will teach them"

 

 

 

 

 

 

It never occurs to homo Andrew Sullivan that Christianity in Great Britain has already been replaced by, well, himself

 

... The fart in a coffin [his high school classmate, PM Keir Starmer] did his best this week — and survived. Critically, he acknowledged the centrality of mass immigration to the national discourse, the way it has undermined a sense of common culture, undercut wages, begun to replace Christianity with Islam, required ever higher levels of censorship, killed Jews, and turned the cities my grandparents knew into something they wouldn’t even recognize as British. ...

More.

The new archbishop of Canterbury, first among equals of the Church of England, is a woman. And not just any woman, but a self-described liberal, feminist, dyslexic [one of us! one of us!], supporter of fetus-murdering and LGBT. It's not like she's Margaret Thatcher for God's sake.

That's not Christianity. 

How utterly lost is the left, he asks.

How utterly lost is he. 

Disapproval of Trump is at the highest level of his second term at 53.1%

 

Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth wants you to know he was just following orders

German General Anton Dostler was executed by firing squad in December 1945 after admitting he ordered the executions of fifteen captured American soldiers in March 1944 because he was ordered to do so by Field Marshal Albert Kesselring.

The latter was convicted in the Ardeatine massacre of hundreds of Italian citizens and sentenced to death in May 1947, but, incredibly, pressure exerted by the sympathetic English, including by Winston Churchill and Harold Alexander, resulted in a commutation of his sentence to life in prison by General John Harding in July 1947.

Kesselring would have died in prison, but even more incredibly was released from there in October 1952 for health reasons, and didn't die until 1960 of a heart attack.

The Kesselring affair is emblematic of the decadent trajectory of the English character still plumbing new depths even today, a trajectory America is also on. At least the Americans of the time dispatched Dostler expeditiously within months of his arrest.

The Italians hated Kesselring about as much as they hated Mussolini.

It's probably too early to guess how Pete will be remembered here. After all, he has crimes to go before he sleeps, and promises to keep.

 

These fools have the temerity to double down on progressives' flight from reality while their guy is madder than a hatter

 

The Progressive Flight From Reality

Peder Zane, RealClearPolitics

 

 

 

In the absence of labor statistics because of the federal government shutdown, here's Initial Claims for Unemployment, not seasonally adjusted, for 48 states, DC, and Puerto Rico through 9/27/25

  The states continue to collect their data and it gets transmitted to FRED at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank for each state. You just have to hand-tally it since the Feds won't due to the shutdown.

My result for 9/27/25 for 48 states and DC and PR reported this morning: -2,229.

MA, AZ, and Virgin Islands initial claims reporting lags by a week. 

The largest downtick was in Texas at 3833.

The largest uptick was in Kentucky at 3049. 

Declining initial claims is good. 

Compare 9/20/25 at -14,822:

 

In the absence of labor statistics because of the federal government shutdown, here's Continued Claims for Unemployment, not seasonally adjusted, for 48 states, DC, and Puerto Rico through 9/20/25

 The states continue to collect their data and it gets transmitted to FRED at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank for each state. You just have to hand-tally it since the Feds won't due to the shutdown.

My result for 9/20 for 48 states and DC and PR reported this morning: -21,866.

MA, AZ, and Virgin Islands continued claims reporting lags by a week. 

Texas was down 4994, California 3562, Pennsylvania 2765, New Jersey 2351, New York 1439, Connecticut 1437, and Virginia 1275.

The largest uptick was in Michigan at 940, followed by Kentucky at 430.

Declining continuing claims is good. 

Compare 9/13/25 at -32,092:

 

Oh yes, the poor, poor dollar, that old thing

Dollar heads for worst week since July; yen underpinned by BOJ

Gold hit record high $3,896.49 today

 Reuters.

Trump couldn't defeat the Houthis in the Red Sea, now picks on someone his own size in what is both a phony and illegal Caribbean war, all because he needs a victory to save face

 Trump ‘Determined’ the U.S. Is Now in a War With Drug Cartels, Congress Is Told

 

...  In this case, the Trump administration is conflating the trafficking of an illicit consumer product and associated crime with an armed attack, asserting in the notice that cartels “illegally and directly cause the deaths of tens of thousands of American citizens each year.” But it has not explained how selling a dangerous substance constitutes a use of force, and Congress has not authorized the use of any type of military force against cartels. ...

Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, accused Mr. Trump of deciding that he could wage “secret wars against anyone he calls an enemy.” The president “offered no credible legal justification, evidence or intelligence” for the strikes, Mr. Reed said.

“Drug cartels are despicable and must be dealt with by law enforcement,” he said. “But now, by the president’s own words, the U.S. military is engaged in armed conflict with undefined enemies he has unilaterally labeled ‘unlawful combatants,’ and he has deployed thousands of troops, ships and aircraft against them. Yet he has refused to inform Congress or the public.” ...

Kamala Harris owed everything to Joe Biden, so stabbing him in the back like this means she's finished

She says she was hypnotized by Joe Biden lol, I mean by Dark Brandon, just like the 49ers were on February 11, 2024 at 10:46pm ET.

 

Speaking of fatsos, here's a picture of a slightly pudgy Patton, who died aged 60 after an auto accident in Germany in December 1945

Rank has its pudgy privileges.

 

Just think of all the money Pete Hegseth wasted on all those military VIP flights for his fat-shaming session

 

Musk rigged the X algorithm to boost his posts above all others, just as he's rigged it to boost those who pay and suppress those who do not

It is in no way the free speech paradise that he claims it is. 

You have to be a fool to pay for the blue checkmark. 

 'I have 100 million followers, and only getting thousands of impressions'...

... “Thanks to the middle-of-the-night participation of 80 company engineers, the ‘high urgency’ issue was quickly solved,” Silverman writes, detailing the changes made that ensured “Twitter’s systems to privilege Musk’s posts above all others.” ...

Trump's Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is on the same page as George Will

 

Bessent: 'I Kind of Like Mamdani Winning'

Max Mitchell, UnHerd

 

 

 

Amazingly accurate

Real average per annum return from SPX 1/1871-9/2025, dividends fully reinvested: 7.07%.

Seen here:

 

 

 

Trump is not the president of all the states and has turned the office into a partisan political weapon which a future Democrat president will happily wield against Red States

 

Trump administration cancels nearly $8 billion in climate funding to blue states: Vought

 

... Vought said the projects affected by the decision are in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington state.

In the 2024 election, President Donald Trump lost those states to then-Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee whom he defeated in the Electoral College. ...

 

Gold makes 39th record high of 2025

... “Gold’s status as a safe haven is well publicized, but the inexorable rise in the gold price over the last few years has been truly astounding, with the metal hitting fresh highs today,” Michael Field, chief equity strategist at Morningstar, told CNBC in an email on Wednesday. ... 

“Still, we are still very early in the game as gold, and gold related investments are barely 2% of an average investment portfolio worldwide,” [Philippe] Gijsels [chief strategy officer at BNP Paribas Fortis] added. “To say it in baseball terms, we are only in the second or third inning. $4,000 [will not be] the endpoint — just the start of the strongest bull market in precious metals the world has ever seen.” ...

In a note to clients on Wednesday morning, UBS Strategist Joni Teves also argued that gold remains under-owned.

“We expect gold’s bull run to continue over the coming quarters, driven by rising investor positions and a continued broadening in gold’s investor base. With the Fed easing cycle under way, dollar weakness and declining real rates should be bullish for the gold price,” she said. ...  we expect ... prices to stabilise at historically higher levels over the long run,” she added.

More.