At least four houses in Oakland were raided by the FBI on Thursday morning with one of the residences belonging to Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao.
One other house was identified as belonging to Andy Duong, a member of a family that owns Cal Waste Solutions. Cal Waste Solutions has been investigated over campaign contributions to Thao and other elected city officials. That was back in 2020.
San Francisco has ranked as America’s worst-run city, thanks to its looming $1.4 billion budget deficit and social problems from homelessness to crime and cash-strapped public schools.
Researchers at WalletHub found that San Francisco was the worst-managed of all the 148 major cities assessed in its report, in a damning indictment of the administration of Mayor London Breed.
The personal finance website ranked other big-name cities among the lowest-performing ten.
A new dominant class of oligarchs and woke bureaucrats has bled the Golden State dry.
For generations, California has led the world in creating cutting-edge ideas and opportunities for newcomers. As actor-turned-governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger once said:
‘We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta… Not only can we lead California into the future… we can show the nation and the world how to get there.’
Today, the Golden State once again foreshadows the future, but this time it should be read as a warning.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson managed to burn through $30,000 on personal grooming in one year, with most of the money being spent on makeup.
To pay for makeup and hair appointments, Johnson used the money his supporters contributed to his Friends of Brandon Johnson campaign fund.
Most of the $30,000 went to Denise Milloy, a makeup artist and self-professed ‘skincare enthusiast’ who operates on the south side of the city.
Some downtown businesses fed up with vandals and thieves are considering moving on. What can be done about it?
… The chaos “makes operating very, very difficult,” said owner Sunan Spriggs, who started the shop in 2016 and has since added a Toronto location.
Spriggs attributes the crime and vandalism — which her store has dealt with constantly as well — to the nearby overdose prevention site and too many damaged and desperate souls on the streets. “When you have users, you have low-level drug dealers, and the users have to afford their habit.”
Ontario’s Minister of Health, Sylvia Jones, is warning Toronto’s medical officer of health to drop her request for a B.C.-style exemption from federal laws to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of hard drugs in the city, saying if she fails to rescind its application, the province will be forced to act.
In a terse letter sent on Friday to Toronto Medical Officer of Health Eileen de Villa, Ms. Jones also says that after a review of supervised drug consumption sites, prompted by a fatal shooting outside one such facility in Toronto’s Leslieville area, she plans to bring in unspecified “enhanced accountability measures” for these sites “to ensure that the safety and wellbeing of the public is protected.”
Progressives love it when junkies litter the sidewalk.
Jonathan Martin has written a column over at Politico asking the same question I’ve been hammering on relentlessly since at least April of last year: “Between Protests and a Rookie Mayor, Is Chicago Ready for the DNC?” If you’re familiar with Betteridge’s Law of Headlines or my written corpus to date, you already know the answer is “No.” And it’s primarily because of the unique combination of malevolence and incompetence embodied by Mayor Brandon Johnson …
Chicago, like so many of our major cities, is out of control. Homelessness, smash-and-grab robberies, carjackings, gangs effectively taking over parts of the city – Chicago is in free fall. On Sunday, another incident in Chicago’s meltdown was revealed when the Chicago Police Department canceled the city’s Cinco de Mayo parade “out of an abundance of caution,” due to gang violence and large-scale fighting in the area of the parade.
Would have loved to have seen @ChicagosMayor's exalted "violence interrupters" quell this feud between gang members.
Gangs don't negotiate. Gangs fight.
Gangs require a police response.
Video: @KyleMazzaWUNF. pic.twitter.com/ixnewmN7xf
— Chicago Contrarian (@ChicagoContrar1) May 5, 2024
Chicago man (driver of the black sedan) gets shot and killed during a "street takeover" this weekend…#urban #Chicago #CityLife #StreetTakeover #crime #democrats pic.twitter.com/alVxTcG1ra
— Mrgunsngear (@Mrgunsngear) May 5, 2024
h/t XC
On May 3, 2013, violence erupted in the hallways of Woodlawn High School.
As many as six separate fights between unruly students broke out that day – part of an annus horribilis that saw 61 arrests made at the racially diverse school in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Looking on in despair was Norman Browning, who had recently spent 15 years volunteering as a sports coach at Woodlawn.
A suburb of Atlanta sought to secede as well.
Covid is long since over, but the protesters still wear face masks: the ignorant, entitled little delinquents running riot in so many of the world’s greatest universities are truly an embarrassment. The product of a catastrophic social experiment, of years of brainwashing and coddling, they embody all of the Western world’s most debilitating pathologies.
Communist cosplay is the worst side effect of this generations indoctrination. They been spoon fed the good side of communism (free this, free that, go frolic in the park, protest) instead of what it actually is. Oh well. Most cone from affluent families so I hardly feel bad. https://t.co/5NMXEACdZh
— Lobbyist_pundit 💸 (@Lobbyist_pundit) April 29, 2024
Caesar Duarte didn’t flinch as an Amazon truck barreled down the busy 110 Freeway in Los Angeles, missing his makeshift home by just a few feet.
The only thing that stood between Duarte’s outdoor kitchen and speeding vehicles was a three-foot retaining wall and metal fencing.
The 44-year-old mechanic and house painter said he has learned to deal with the danger and noise since he erected his homestead by the freeway about four years ago.
San Francisco residents are balking at the sky-high cost of the city’s new homeless cabins.
A complex of 60 ‘tiny homes’ for unhoused Californians each cost taxpayers an eye-popping $113,000.
That’s several times higher than the price of similar cabins in nearby Oakland and San Jose.
The city of Oakland has experienced a dramatic crime surge since 2020 as arrests plunge and the police department struggles to fill vacancies.
From 2020 to 2023 burglaries increased by 99 percent, motor-vehicle theft surged by 72 percent, robberies jumped by 53 percent and homicides went up 16 percent, according to a supplemental police report on the Oakland public safety committee’s April 9 agenda. Arrests plummeted by 50 percent over the same period.
Retailers can’t get enough of leaving their hearts in San Francisco, or at least just leaving. Everybody from higher-end retailers like Nordstrom and Saks Off 5th, to global brands Uniqlo, Gap, and H&M, to corner Walgreens and CVS outlets have called it quits on The City That Knows How to Make Everything Worse.
Amid more deadly disorder in New York City, young women are being randomly punched in the face.
In recent days—deadly ones in New York—another alarming trend has apparently emerged in the city: sudden, violent attacks on young women. The flustered victims, all relatively young and white, report that they were walking down the street in lower Manhattan when a passerby punched them in the face. Videos on TikTok are made on the fly, immediately after the attack, and show women in a state of shock, some with bruises, some crying, some just flabbergasted.
The women getting punched in New York? We think it’s coming from those nasty right-wingers. pic.twitter.com/gIPKJQpdBC
— Dr. Jebra Faushay (@JebraFaushay) March 27, 2024
