June 9, 2026

BREAKING: We Have the Verdict in the Karmelo Anthony Murder Trial.

A Collin County jury has delivered its verdict in the trial of Karmelo Anthony, who faced murder charges for fatally stabbing 17-year-old Austin Metcalf during a high school track meet in Frisco, Texas, on April 2, 2025. Now he knows his fate.

The jury found Karmelo Anthony guilty of murder.

The facts of this case were never particularly complicated. Anthony, also 17 at the time, wandered under a tent belonging to Memorial High School during a rainy multi-school track meet at Kuykendall Stadium. He had no business being there. Multiple student athletes asked him to leave multiple times.

Anthony reportedly told students, “Touch me, and you’ll find out,” and “If you want me to move, you have to move me.”

Austin Metcalf, by contrast, told him, “I’m not going to fight you at a track meet.” Multiple witnesses testified that Metcalf had no interest in a physical confrontation. At least one witness said Anthony appeared to be “looking for a fight.” Throughout the exchange, Anthony kept one hand inside his backpack. Some students thought he was bluffing. He wasn’t.

Prosecutors called 21 witnesses who built a clear picture: Anthony escalated a verbal dispute into a deadly encounter by pulling a knife from his backpack and driving it into Austin Metcalf’s chest. After the stabbing, Anthony told a police officer, “I’m not alleged, I did it. He put his hands on me. I told him not to.”

The defense bizarrely tried to spin all of that as self-defense, essentially asking jurors to believe that a teenager who invited physical contact with “touch me and you’ll find out” and had brought a knife with him was somehow the victim.

Summer riot season to commence shortly?

Posted at 4:07 pm by Ed Driscoll

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Do So Many Prosecutors Let Criminals Who Have Illegally Converted GLOCK Pistols Walk? “In any case, whatever scary or misleading lingo politicians employ to justify these gun bans, it’s just so much noise if criminals who illegally modify guns aren’t actually prosecuted. On May 30, for instance, St. Louis, Missouri police ‘detained two people in [a recklessly-operated] vehicle and found several guns that had been modified with auto-sear switches, converting them to fully automatic firearms.’ The police department publicized the arrests, saying the city was ‘safer today because of the proactive work of these detectives, which led to dangerous weapons being removed from the streets.’ Nevertheless, the dangerous individuals themselves were reportedly and inexplicably back on the streets.”

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

CHANGE:

Posted at 3:39 pm by Stephen Green

BECAUSE OF COURSE:

Posted at 3:02 pm by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: More than 10,000 applicants vie for 15 affordable apartments in Seattle.

More than 10,000 applicants are vying for 15 rent-reduced apartments under a new Seattle affordable housing program funded by a city tax on workers who make more than $1 million a year.

Amazon, Microsoft and other companies fought the tax, but voters approved it in a 2025 referendum.

The program was expected to create only several hundred apartments a year, as the so-called social housing developer constructed new buildings.

But the first allotment of apartments is even smaller because the social housing developer decided to buy an existing luxury apartment building and won’t require tenants to leave.
…
The Social Housing Developer announced last month that it purchased a 150-unit building by the Pike Place Market for around $60 million.

It looks to me like The Social Housing Developer used taxpayer money to buy a luxury apartment building because the profits are better, and that they’ll get around to the less lucrative affordable housing stuff sometime between mañana and inshallah.

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green

ROGER SIMON: Who the Hell Is Nithya Raman?

I worked in Hollywood. I wrote for newspapers and websites. I knew politicians, journalists, studio executives, activists, and assorted crackpots of every description.

I arrived when Sam Yorty from the San Fernando Valley was mayor. All of us smartypants film-and-drama-school wannabe literati thought he was a yahoo. I lived through Bradley, Riordan, Hahn, Villaraigosa, Garcetti, Bass (from afar—by then I had left), and others. I watched Hollywood transform, newspapers shrink, neighborhoods burn, homelessness proliferate, and the city grow from a sprawling postwar metropolis into something quite different.

Yet when Nithya Raman emerged as a serious contender for mayor, my first reaction was not approval or disapproval.

It was: “Who the hell is Nithya Raman?”

Well, now I know her politics are supposed to be on the far, far left of the Democratic Party as she heads into a runoff against merely far-left (one far) former Fidelista incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, whom Ms. Raman endorsed (before Nithya did or did not throw in the towel, depending on who you believe).

Speaking of which, it’s hard to believe she actually beat out Mr. Pratt. The redoubtable Dan Greenfield has a good analysis of that —‘The LA Mayoral Election is Being Stolen”. Subtitle: “How does the third-place candidate win the majority of late-arriving ballots?”

To be fair, it’s good to see L.A. awarding someone for being extremely competent at her job — that job being to increase the “Homeless Industrial Complex” to a size that would make the Manhattan Project seem like a neighborhood 7-Eleven:

Tweet continues, “in 2017, [Raman] ran for city council in 2019 on a ‘fix homelessness,’ promptly firehosed infinite taxpayer cash at other ‘homeless non-profits,’ and now suddenly says ‘it’s not okay for people to be sleeping on the streets.’ ‘We can fix this’? Yeah, we can, if the ‘we’ doesn’t include you.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

YES:

“This is YOUR identity politics. Never was ours. Maybe in the south when it was run by Democrats but not for most of the nation.”

Posted at 1:29 pm by Stephen Green

IF YOU’RE MENOPAUSAL, DON’T WAIT: Does HRT Actually Protect the Heart After Menopause? “The Penn State data suggests estrogen-based hormone therapy improves several key cardiovascular markers. But the protective effect depends heavily on timing. Benefits appear most significant when treatment starts within 10 years of menopause or before age 60. After that window, the calculation changes.”

Posted at 1:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

FINGERS CROSSED, I SUPPOSE:

One the one hand, riots are bad. On the other, they tend to turn off normies who don’t much care for them or for convicted murderers.

Posted at 12:58 pm by Stephen Green

OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: Newsom targets undocumented Californians with new healthcare cost increase.

At the end of 2023, Gov. Gavin Newsom framed it as a matter of principle when under his administration, California became the first state in the nation to pay for undocumented immigrants to use Medicaid.

“In California, we believe everyone deserves access to quality, affordable health care coverage – regardless of income or immigration status,” Newsom said in a statement to ABC News at the time.

People flocked to the system, with about 1.5 million undocumented Californians using the state’s Medi-Cal healthcare by November 2025. But now Newsom and fellow Democrats in Sacramento are walking back on their promise to provide healthcare access to all.

Lawmakers have slashed the program in a series of cuts over the last year with more expected to come. In January, the state froze any new undocumented adults from applying for the program. Dental benefits for undocumented people are set to expire in July. And Newsom’s latest budget proposal, released in May, calls for increasing premiums from a planned $30 to $50 for undocumented people starting in July next year.

Illegal aliens paying a lousy $50 premium for taxpayer-subsidized insurance, and SF Gate frames it as “It’s getting harder for undocumented people in California to get insurance.”

You cannot despise these people enough.

Posted at 12:43 pm by Stephen Green

OLD AND BUSTED: #FIGHTFOR15.

The New Hotness? McDonald’s testing AI at the drive-thru.

A robotic voice may soon be taking your order at the drive-thru.

McDonald’s is testing out an artificial intelligence-based operating system called ArchIQ, the company announced this week. The voice-activated AI system is being tested at five locations around the country, Restaurant Business Magazine reports.

A franchisee showed off a demo of the technology, nicknamed Archy, on X. The video shows ArchIQ taking orders in English and Spanish.

While it’s currently in a test phase, the franchisee, who posts under the popular account McFranchisee, said “every McDonald’s in the US” is getting a technology upgrade in anticipation of the new tech.

More here: “Taco Bell and Wendy’s previously announced that they had launched their own AI-powered drive-thru ordering systems. [Jonathan Maze, editor-in-chief of Restaurant Business, told ABC News that] the trend could significantly reshape the industry in the years ahead. ‘You can imagine a future five, 10 years down the line, where no orders at McDonald’s are actually taken by a human being,’ he said.”

As a wise man once said, “the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they either lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll