Thursday, February 5, 2026
Note to Ldotters:
Please remember, no duplicates, no blog posting
unless you have permission from staff, no local crimes and
no posting just to elicit nasty reactions.
Any post with three lines or fewer will be deleted.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Lucianne.com Ad-Free Subscription
Learn More or Enter Code
Latest Posts
The baseball world is mourning the loss of a player who made history with the Detroit Tigers. Mickey Lolich, remembered as the Tigers’ hero in the 1968 World Series, has died, the Tigers announced. He was 85. Lolich is the last MLB pitcher to win three games in the World Series. He was named World Series MVP that year. The Tigers said Lolich’s wife informed the franchise that Lolich was recently in hospice care. The cause of death was not released.
Hamas terrorist Muhammad Issam Hassan al-Habil, who, according to the Israel Defense Forces, killed 19-year-old surveillance soldier Corporal Noa Marciano while she was held hostage in Gaza, is no longer with us, the IDF reported Wednesday. The Hamas cell commander was eliminated in an airstrike in Gaza City’s Shati refugee camp, they announced. The IDF alleged that the savagely violent group violated the fragile ceasefire negotiated by the Trump administration, and that this was the consequence.
So long:
California’s already sky-high gas prices are expected to surge after Valero abruptly shuttered its Benicia refinery amid a spiraling “oil crisis,” a new report claims.
The Benicia refinery began shutting down on Saturday, four months earlier than planned, a former Valero manager told the California Globe Tuesday. Thermal imaging showed the facility went cold as the Crimson Pipeline – which transports crude oil from Southern to Northern California – was also taken offline.
“We are in an unprecedented oil crisis,” oil expert Mike Ariza told the publication.
Valero Energy Corp. announced its plans last spring to pull the plug on its 145,000-barrel-per-day refinery by April,
LA Mayor Karen Bass secretly altered Palisades
fire analysis to downplay LA’s failures: report replies
fire analysis to downplay LA’s failures: report replies
Embattled Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass secretly altered the official Palisades Fire response report to downplay the failures made by the city and fire department when the deadly blaze erupted, a new report said.
Bass, after seeing an early draft of the after-action report, wanted key findings of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s shortcomings scrubbed or watered down — and even warned then-interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva the unedited conclusions could expose the city to legal liability, sources close to the Democrat’s staff told the Los Angeles Times.
Bass was cautioned that the self-serving tweaks in with the report was a “bad idea” that could torpedo her political career,
Can the Center Hold?
replies
It’s a worn-out trope by now to conjure yet again Yeats’s immortal poem, yet perhaps forgivable if we dissect its most famous phrase, “the center cannot hold.” Because exactly what we mean by “the center,” and how we determine what holds it together, may answer the question of how we might do exactly that.
As it is, one example of the “center” is millions of friendships that remain strong, held between left-of-center pro-business Democrats who are skeptical about MAGA, and right-of-center Republicans who believe MAGA policies are the best route to our country achieving goals we all share: broadly distributed prosperity and an affordable middle-class lifestyle.
But those friendships are fraying.
With nothing else to run on, Democrats appear to think that demonizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers will be enough to win them control of Congress come November.
“In their campaigns, Democrats across the country are responding to the anger felt by many communities over the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations,” reports CBS News. If they can sustain today’s anger, the argument goes, voters will turn out in droves to clip the Trump administration’s wings in his last two years in office.
But there are a multitude of reasons why this strategy isn’t likely to work.
First, November is a long way off.
Every so often there’s a piece of content in The New York Times or a similar publication that’s meant to create suspicion but without saying exactly why, usually for the purpose of politicizing something mundane. The story this week about National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard being on site during an FBI operation in Atlanta is one of those pieces of content, but in this case, the reason for the manufactured suspicion is obvious.
The Times on Monday wrote that it was “unusual” for Gabbard to appear at an FBI field office following the agency’s seizure of 2020 ballots from an election center in the ever-so-seedy Fulton County.
Nearly two-thirds of likely 2026 midterm election voters support deporting illegal aliens from the United States, a new poll released Monday shows.
In its latest survey of 1,004 likely 2026 voters, the political polling firm Cygnal found that respondents support removing illegal aliens from America and sending them back to their country of origin by a nearly 2:1 margin (61 to 34 percent). The poll also found strong support for ICE enforcement of federal immigration laws and agreement that illegally entering the United States is a violation of such laws.
Chief Justice Roberts Finally Moves to
Secure Supreme Court Processes; Leaky
Media Hardest Hit replies
Secure Supreme Court Processes; Leaky
Media Hardest Hit replies
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has made a move to secure the deliberations, private discussions, and working drafts of the court. According to the New York Times, Roberts is requiring all clerks and permanent staff to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
The writer writes about this in a hushed tone, as though she is laying out the plot of a murder mystery. But there is nothing mysterious about the erosion of the court's integrity, which points directly to publications like the NYT and POLITICO happily disseminating what is leaked to them.
The chief justice acted after a series of unusual leaks
Who watches the “ICE watchers”?
replies
In yesterday afternoon’s Wall Street Journal Best of the Web column, James Freeman asks the question: “Who watches the ‘ICE watchers’?” The answer to Freeman’s question is Christina Buttons/City Journal. Another answer to the question is not the Star Tribune. That much I can tell you.
I’m afraid Freeman would include the Star Tribune publisher, editors, reporters, and columnists among “the incurious media” to which he refers at the top of his column. That does not do justice to the phenomenon.
Ms. Buttons reports on what she found watching the ICE watchers
Every civilization eventually confronts the same problem: how to measure value, settle obligations, and store trust across time. Money is often treated as a technical instrument—an accounting tool, a policy lever—but history reveals something deeper. Money is a political institution first, an economic one second. It encodes power, defines sovereignty, and silently disciplines or enables entire populations.
Today’s global monetary order—dominated by dollar-denominated fiat currencies and managed by central banks—did not arise because it was optimal. It arose because it was survivable. The question now confronting the world is whether it remains so.
Shocking Cost of Migrant Crime: Each Year,
More Americans Are Murdered by Illegals
Than Died on 9/11 replies
More Americans Are Murdered by Illegals
Than Died on 9/11 replies
Tennessee has roughly 186,000 illegal aliens. California has over 2.2 million.
We have absolutely no idea how many Californians are murdered, raped, assaulted, or victimized by illegal aliens, because Gov. Gavin Newsom refuses to track the data or share it with the federal government. It’s allowed Democrats to argue that illegal aliens are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.
Only it’s probably not true.
Because, unlike California, Tennessee actually tracked its year-to-year illegal alien crime statistics. And what they discovered was shocking and appalling.
From the Chattanoogan.com:
21,648 total criminal charges [against illegal aliens] in 2025
2,183 violent offenses
41 homicides
1,592 assaults
145 sexual offenses
11 child rapes
The Trump administration is pulling 700 federal agents out of Minnesota, White House border czar Tom Homan announced Wednesday, just over a week after he arrived in the Twin Cities to overhaul an immigration enforcement operation that was facing massive public backlash.
An “unprecedented” number of counties have begun informing Immigration and Customs Enforcement when they have an immigration target in custody, allowing ICE agents to collect the individual in the safety of the jail rather than on the street, Homan said. That change, which Homan said was facilitated by Minnesota’s Democratic leaders, will allow ICE to reduce its footprint by nearly 20 percent “effective immediately.”
“Given this increase in unprecedented collaboration
The FBI and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department provided an update on the investigation into an alleged illegal biological lab found in a northeast Las Vegas home on Saturday. During a press conference on Monday, Metro confirmed the house was owned by the same individual, Jia Bei Zhu, connected to a prior investigation of the alleged illegal biological lab in Reedley, California, in 2023. The second suspect arrested is 55-year-old Ori Solomon, the property manager of the house. More than 1,000 samples were collected. On Monday morning, all samples were loaded onto an FBI aircraft and transported to the National Bioforensic Analysis Center in Maryland for testing.
Exposure to property linked to Las Vegas
bio lab probe left 2 ‘deathly ill,’
police report says replies
bio lab probe left 2 ‘deathly ill,’
police report says replies
Employees of a man arrested in connection with what authorities say was an illegal biological laboratory became “deathly ill” after entering a garage containing beakers with “reddish liquid” at a property linked to the investigation, according to an arrest report.
Ori Solomon, 55, appeared in federal court in Las Vegas on Tuesday. He has been charged with a count of being a prohibited person in possession of a firearm. Authorities have identified him as the property manager for an east Las Vegas Valley house that law enforcement entities have investigated since the weekend and that is connected to Chinese citizens facing their own federal case in California.
It's no secret that NBC's "Today" show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie's 84-year-old mother Nancy Guthrie is missing.
(snip)
Aside from Savannah, Nancy Guthrie has two other children: Camron Guthrie, who is a retired F-16 fighter pilot, and Annie Guthrie, who is a writer and poet.(snip)Tommaso Cioni is the husband of Nancy Guthrie's oldest daughter, Annie Guthrie. Parade.com reports that a LinkedIn account that "appears to belong to Cioni" says that he works in Tucson as a sixth-grade science and biology teacher at Basis Oro Valley School.
The European Union now constantly violates fundamental Western rights to freedom of speech and freedom of religion and claims the power to ban speech across the globe, European witnesses testified to the U.S. Congress Wednesday morning. (snip) "American speech is already being affected," testified Lorcan Price, an Irish lawyer. (snip) The House Judiciary Committee recently released two reports (snip) indicat[ing] that the hub of Western speech suppression online has shifted rom the United States under the Biden presidency to the European Union.
Experts are warning that a new social media platform launched on January 28 exclusively for artificial intelligence bots is “a security nightmare.”
Modeled after Reddit, “Moltbook” allows autonomous AI “agents” to post, comment, upvote, and interact with each other in real time.
AI agents are intelligent digital workers that actively perform tasks on behalf of users or organizations.
The platform was created by entrepreneur Matt Schlicht, who used his own AI agent, Clawd Clawderberg, to manage and run the site. The AI agents on Moltbook are primarily powered by OpenClaw (formerly Moltbot/Clawdbot), an open-source, locally-run AI system developed by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY)threatened Monday to shut down the government unless Republicans drop their efforts to secure elections and keep noncitizens from voting. (snip) [A]s Congress debates a new spending bill (snip) Senate Majority Leader John Thune suggested there could possibly be efforts to vote on the SAVE Act as a standalone bill in the Senate. While noncitizen voting is already illegal, current federal law is largely toothless. Prospective voters check a tiny square box on a federal form attesting under penalty of perjury that they are a citizen. Such an insecure system has led to thousands of noncitizens either register to vote or even vote.
Las Vegas Police and the FBI raided a illegal Chinese biological lab running out of a Las Vegas home on January 31, collecting more than 1,000 samples. Several people allegedly became sick after being exposed to the laboratory in the home’s garage, 8 News Now reported.
“Initial search of the residence on Sugar Springs identified a bio-safety hood, a bio-safety sticker, a centrifuge, multiple refrigerators, red-brown unknown liquids in gallon-sized containers and refrigerated vials with unknown liquids,” said Christopher Delzotto, FBI Special Agent in Charge at the Las Vegas office.
You're Gonna Laugh Your Head Off When
You Find Out Why Jasmine Crockett's Opponent
Is In Trouble replies
You Find Out Why Jasmine Crockett's Opponent
Is In Trouble replies
The Texas Democratic Senate primary race took a bizarre turn when a TikTok influencer claimed one of the candidates made a racist remark about former Rep. Colin Allred, who had dropped out of the race.Morgan Thompson, a black political TikTok personality, dropped a bombshell allegation on Sunday. She claimed she had a private conversation with state Rep. James Talarico, who is running neck and neck with U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett for the Democratic Party’s nomination.
During the conversation, Talarico insulted Allred, allegedly telling her that he “signed up to run against a mediocre black man, not a formidable, intelligent black woman,”
Democratic New York Rep. Gregory Meeks screamed at Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday for over a minute while he attempted to answer his question.
Meeks confronted Bessent on a firm in the United Arab Emirates that secretly bought a stake in President Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency company and did not allow Bessent to answer whether he would hold a complete investigation into the matter. The congressman continued shouting at Bessent and demanded that he stop covering for Trump.
“All you have to ask is yes or no. No, Congressman. All you have to ask is yes or no,” Meeks said.
“The [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] is an independent entity.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday cleared the way for California to use its new congressional map that adds up to five Democratic-leaning seats for the midterms, rejecting Republicans’ emergency bid to block it.
Supported by the Trump administration, the California GOP has challenged the map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. They point to the mapmaker’s comments boasting about strengthened Latino voting power under the new design.
When a Dope Argues That Knowing English
Doesn't Matter in the U.S., Tell Them
About This Case replies
Doesn't Matter in the U.S., Tell Them
About This Case replies
It's bad enough that non-English speaking commercial truck drivers in the U.S. don't know the rules of the road or how to read highway signs, but this case out of Los Angeles should put you on high alert about how not knowing English can put Americans' very liberty at risk. Or set sex perverts free.
The existential threat of English-free commercial truck drivers — mostly given their CDLs by Washington state and California — has resulted in a lot of dead Americans. The case of the UCLA gynecologist, accused of sexually abusing his patients for years, however, portends more nuanced problems ahead. We're now all witness to what happens when