May 21, 2026

SACRAMENTO LOOKS AFTER ITS OWN: Bill that tried to kill secret agreements with your tax dollars now faces its own silent death.

It’s costing taxpayers at least $1.1 billion, but there’s only so much lawmakers are allowing the public to know about the California Capitol Annex Project.

The project has been shrouded in secrecy for years due to thousands of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) preventing people from talking about the project. Now a bill attempting to invalidate those secrecy agreements is set to die behind closed doors without any discussion, debate or public input.

Assemblyman Josh Hoover, R-Folsom, introduced Assembly Bill 2445 in February. Three months later, the same lawmakers tasked with running the Capitol Annex Project never assigned AB 2445 to a committee. The bill never received a hearing and is scheduled to automatically die on May 27.

Hoover said the irony is not lost on him; his idea to kill secret agreements is scheduled to be secretly killed rather than publicly debated, approved or voted down on the merits.

“It would seem odd to me that there’s so much passion to kill this bill,” Hoover said. “But, certainly, someone is pressing to keep this from getting heard.”

And preventing people from seeing where the money went.

Posted at 11:43 am by Stephen Green

CRUEL, BUT TRUE:

Posted at 11:27 am by Stephen Green

STILL THE PRESUMPTIVE DEMOCRAT NOMINEE FOR SENATE:

Posted at 10:56 am by Stephen Green

THE ENEMY WITHIN: Palestine Chronicle editor-in-chief admits cousin was top Hamas commander who carried out suicide attack. “Ramzy Baroud, editor-in-chief of the US-based nonprofit The Palestine Chronicle, openly admitted during a recent interview that his cousin was a senior Hamas commander who later carried out a suicide attack in Gaza, revelations that surfaced as his organization is facing a federal lawsuit accusing it of aiding a Hamas operative, who was one of its journalists, that was holding Israeli hostages captive in his family home after the October 7 attacks.”

“Non-profit” seems to cover a multitude of sins these days.

Posted at 10:41 am by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE RELIGIOUS LEFT:

One of the best? The L.A. Times tells us that Colbert is the Catholic evangelist:

In any case, I prefer my Catholic evangelists to be a bit more G-rated:

UPDATE: Brian Stelter jumps onboard the St. Colbert procession:

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT THAT WAY…:

Posted at 10:25 am by Stephen Green

AND NOW, A FIRESIDE CHAT FROM MAYOR FRANKLIN DELANO MAMDANI:

It’s an “unexpectedly” appropriate comparison:

● FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.

—Frontiers of Freedom, December 14th, 2015.

● New Documents Reveal FDR’s Eugenic Project to ‘Resettle’ Jews During World War II.

—Steve Usdin, Tablet, April 29, 2018.

● A controversial executive order leads to internment camps:

The executive order didn’t specify Japanese-Americans as a group, but the U.S. military detained more than 100,000 people in the next six months and moved them to camps and facilities with armed guards and barbed wire.

There were 10 camps set up nationally, and about 120,000 people were interned in the camps during the war. About two-thirds of them were Japanese-Americans who were born in the United States. People of Italian and German heritage were also detained.

The controversial moves were met with legal challenges, which eventually were unsuccessful in freeing the detainees from the camps, despite the serious constitutional issues involved.

—The National Constitution Center, February 19th, 2024.

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX stacks Starship V3 rocket, completes major fueling test ahead of debut launch.

The rocket’s two halves, the Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage, were stacked yesterday (May 19) at the newly-built pad at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas. Starship V3 is scheduled to launch no earlier than 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT) on May 21.

It’s the second time the two stages have been mated in the last several days, as SpaceX has rolled Ship to and from its Starbase hangar for extensive prelaunch checkouts and tests. Super Heavy has undergone its own assessments in recent weeks, including test firings of the booster’s 33 Raptor 3 engines.

Starship Flight 12 will be a suborbital launch, with soft landing splashdowns in the Gulf of Mexico and Indian Ocean for Ship and Super Heavy, respectively, rather than a return to Starbase for recovery and reuse. Ultimately, SpaceX has designed Starship for full reusability, and has successfully recovered Super Heavies using the launch tower’s “chopstick” arms to catch the booster in midair, but has not yet attempted a catch of the Ship upper stage.

Faster, please.

Posted at 9:39 am by Stephen Green

YES:

Exit quote: “A nation that cannot verify who is voting is a nation that is slowly surrendering the meaning of citizenship itself.”

Posted at 9:23 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Texas Soy Boy Talarico Is Giving Dems Premature Electoral Elation. “Talarico’s moderate shtick means little in the context of 2026 Democratic Party politics. It just means that he’s more boutique Eurotrash socialist than full on Castro Cuba Commie. He’s trying to pass himself off as a Texas normie all the while yammering on about needing to stop eating meat to save the planet.”

Posted at 9:08 am by Stephen Green

SO WHAT’S THERE LEFT TO TALK ABOUT?

Posted at 8:52 am by Stephen Green

UGH: Soros Redirects $300 Million to US, Targeting Trump Policies.

The New York-based organization announced the initiative Tuesday after years concentrating much of its activism overseas, including in Africa and the Middle East.

OSF now says the U.S. has become a frontline political battleground.

“We certainly believe that civil society is essential and must stay on the playing field,” Laleh Ispahani, OSF’s managing director for the U.S., told The Guardian.

Ispahani, previously senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, compared current conditions to countries where “autocratic administrations” targeted civic groups.

Soros has donated more than $32 billion to his Open Society Foundation, which funds progressive legal groups, voting-rights organizations, and left-leaning policy initiatives worldwide.

Well, Elon?

Posted at 8:37 am by Stephen Green

THE MEDIA CAN’T SEE THE POPULIST VOTE CLEARLY TO SAVE THEIR LIVES:

If you’re looking for an explanation of Massie’s defeat in a Republican primary election, consider the extraordinary possibility that Republican voters might have had something to do with it, having made their own evaluation about the quality of his service in public office. The change in the last two years is that Massie entered into a political partnership with Democrats, allying with the Bay Area Congressman Ro Khanna, a particularly repellent Democrat, to try to harm Trump politically. He was also one of two Republicans in the House to vote against the Big Beautiful Bill, the landmark legislation of Trump’s second term.

Republican voters are punishing elected officials who don’t work consistently to advance the agenda of the Republican Party and its much-ignored base, while also telling a clear story about working to advance a Republican agenda. Republican voters are … Republicans. Massie didn’t lose because of Donald Trump or because of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

CHANGE: Schlitz beer discontinued after 177 years.

UPDATE AND BUMP (FROM GLENN): Schlitz was once one of the top brands in America. Then the bean-counters got involved, cutting corners to save production costs. Customers noticed it didn’t taste the same, switched brands, and never came back, even when Schlitz ran a series of ads saying they’d fixed the problem featuring their master brewer.

A cautionary tale for other companies, and for political parties.

Posted at 8:24 am by Stephen Green