I Almost Feel Helpless, There’s No Showing, There’s No Offers
It’s Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. “Axed workers among the thousands fired by DOGE say they can’t afford necessities, travel and health care. The workers filed affidavits as part of a multi-state lawsuit. ‘I have had to cut back on healthcare costs and discretionary spending. I am pushing off the new purchase of new contact lenses and not booking overnight travel for my kids’ weekend soccer tournaments in nearby San Diego and Orange counties. I am having to give serious thought to budgeting since unemployment benefits cannot cover the cost of my mortgage,’ said a California employee fired from the FDIC. One Education Department employee got ‘no reason for my termination’ from the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services. ‘I am in the process of building a new house in Maryland and if I do not find a new job soon, I may not get approved for my mortgage or be able to afford mortgage payments,’ said the ex-worker. A Minnesota worker at the Small Business Administration got fired even after ‘positive reviews’ during performance appraisals. ‘This was my dream job.'”
“A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employee in Delaware is no longer able to take in the ambiance of the local bar. ‘I am unable to contribute to local restaurants and businesses that I regularly patronize,’ said the worker, who focuses on groceries and a mortgage.”
“It’s been nearly three years since flames ripped through a condominium complex in northwest suburban Park Ridge. Since then, unit owners have continued to pay mortgages, homeowner association fees, insurance and more, even as the property’s reconstruction has stalled. ‘It was pretty much a total loss,’ condo owner Bonnie Lennon said. There were no serious injuries. The cause was determined to be accidental. Owners hoped for a quick rebuild. But only the roof and windows have been installed. ‘We have been told there is a gap between…how much the restoration company wants to charge and how much the insurance company believes they need to pay,’ owner Noreen Reilly said. Owners say they’ve been told the two sides are millions of dollars apart. ‘There’s no end in sight,’ Reilly said. ‘We don’t know.'”
“Real estate experts we interviewed say they’re not surprised. ‘Often times, there’s a delta between the cost to rebuild and what the insurance company is willing to pay,’ said Aaron Stanton, an attorney at law firm Burke, Warren, MacKay & Serritella P.C., and an expert on real estate and construction.”
“A Union County woman says a dispute with her Homeowners Association (HOA) over a few hundred dollars in unpaid dues cost her family their home. Taylor Sanders was living in Weddington Hills in 2020. She admits she owed dues to her HOA. According to HOA records, she owned $400. The HOA sent her multiple letters, but she told Action 9 investigator Jason Stoogenke she never received them. Then things snowballed. In February 2021, the board got a lien on her property. Then in April, it sent her a letter, saying she owed about $1,200 and that it was going to start foreclosure proceedings.”
“‘I thought it was a joke,’ she said. It wasn’t. According to county records, her 3,300-square-foot home sold for $49,000. She says just like that, it was gone. ‘Oh my God. It’s devastating for my children,’ she said. ‘I don’t wish this on anyone.’ Records show the person who bought the house turned around and sold it five months later for $850,000.”
“A newly built multimillion-dollar estate in Naples is headed for auction. After struggling to find a buyer the traditional way, the seller has decided to offer the 6,000-plus square foot home up to the highest bidder. The residence, with six bedrooms and nine bathrooms, in The Moorings, is listed for $13.9 million. It’s been on the market for nearly a year, with a lot of lookers, but no takers. In a buyer’s market, that’s often the case. ‘Buyers have not been making offers. They have been touring the property, just not making offers. There is still a lot of inventory out there,’ said Randy Haddaway, CEO of Elite Auctions. His company, based in Naples, is handling the auction. As usual, it’s without reserve, meaning the sellers don’t have a minimum price.”
“When wintertime calls, go where it’s warm. More than one million Canadians do just that every year, including heading south to the U.S., most often to Florida. Dorothy Chabot and her husband were among them. The London, Ont. snowbirds have travelled to the Sunshine State for the past 15 years, owning a condo in Port Charlotte and more recently renting at a 55-plus community southwest of Orlando. Chabot said a number of her neighbours were supportive, but recalled a frustrating interaction with one who gleefully told her, ‘Oh Dorothy, can’t you just wait ’til you’re our 51st state?’ What [Trump] has said about our country … These are our people. We love our people. We love our country. We’re not going back.'”
“It appears Chabot isn’t alone. Alexandra DuPont, a Fort Lauderdale Realtor who frequently works with Canadian snowbirds, said 36 listed condos with her. ‘I’ve never had this many listings in my life,’ said DuPont, herself a Canadian expat. At this time of year, she would normally have 10 to 15. ‘Buyers? I think I have one’ from Canada, she said. She wonders whether some were already thinking of selling over the weak loonie compared to the U.S. dollar, and pulled the trigger because of Trump’s threats. ‘A lot of my clients … they’ll email me, text me, call me. They want weekly updates. I almost feel helpless. There’s no update, there’s no showing, there’s no offers.’ More home purchases in the U.S. are done by Canadians than any other country — 13 per cent from April 2023 to March 2024, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) says. Half of all Canadian purchases were vacation homes, and roughly 41 per cent of sales were in Florida.”
“Buying a home in the Treasure Valley has been a challenging endeavor since the coronavirus pandemic, with prices spiking, a general lack of availability, and out-of-state buyers flooding the market with cash. However, Michael and Payton Heiser, a local couple, entered the market for their first home late last year and found a surprising outcome. ‘We got married in April of last year. We want to start a family. We figured the next step was to own a house before we start having kids,’ said Michael Heiser. The Heisers, aged 28 and 25, admitted they knew little about purchasing real estate but credited their connection to their realtor for helping them. Unexpectedly, they found options in price ranges and styles of homes. Through their realtor, they connected with lenders, found a home, placed an offer, and got accepted, all within a few months. For the Heisers, the experience was a welcome surprise, resulting in a new home to start their future at a price they never expected.”
“Jared Cook, an economist and real estate specialist at Zions Bank, said over 70 percent of the bank’s new home loans last year were to first-time homebuyers. ‘I think rents have gone up substantially, and so really your overall housing cost is elevated compared to what our parents paid,’ said Cook. ‘But sellers are really willing to negotiate right now, and so are builders. They’re giving away a lot of incentives to buy.'”
“Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed a lawsuit last week accusing multiple individuals and companies of engaging in an organized real estate scam. The defendants allegedly conspired to defraud homeowners facing foreclosure by using deceptive tactics to acquire properties far below market value. The fraudulent activity stripped vulnerable homeowners of millions of dollars in equity, according to the lawsuit filed Friday in Maricopa County Superior Court. ‘This scheme relied on an entire ecosystem of supposedly legitimate businesses to put a veneer of legality on blatant consumer fraud,’ Mayes said in a press release. ‘Title companies and law firms knew what they were doing, but they kept going because this scam generated millions of dollars — and they wanted their share.'”
“A string of high-profile bankruptcies accelerated store closures last year and are only expected to escalate further in the coming months. That has put debt servicers on high alert. At least $8.7B of CMBS loans are backed by properties where bankrupt retailers have decided to terminate their leases over the past year, according to a Bisnow analysis of reports by KBRA Credit Profile. ‘The debt is going to be bought for pennies on the dollar, the assets are going to be devalued, which sucks for everybody,’ said Lanné Bennett, a retail real estate broker and consultant in Los Angeles. ‘The banks are trying to work it out as much as they can, but it always gets to that breaking point. I get that call. It’s going to servicing. They’re just like, ‘Submit the best deal you can. Maybe we’ll see if we get the bank to approve it.’”
“More than a dozen times since 2008 the city of Syracuse has taken Brooklyn-based landlord Mendy Kletzky to court over the condition of his rental properties. Mayor Ben Walsh said he hopes that a lawsuit filed by the city on Monday will be the final battle. The lawsuit’s aim is to ‘rid the city of Mr. Kletzky once and for all,’ Walsh said. ‘This man has left a trail of destruction and despair everywhere he’s gone in the city of Syracuse, and he’s done it at a scale unlike anyone that we’ve seen in recent history.’ Corporation Counsel Susan Katzoff said Kletzky has not complied with orders to pay for the demolitions. ‘He puts no money into them. He wrings out whatever rent he can … and then walks away and leaves the city holding the bag to deal with demolition costs. So we can roll those onto taxes, but he doesn’t pay his taxes,’ Katzoff said.”
“With lots of properties for sale, little competition and falling mortgage rates, now is a golden opportunity for young Canadians who feel secure in their jobs to purchase a house. But the sluggish condo market is throwing a wrench into the plans of even those lucky few would-be homebuyers. ‘People feel like they just can’t upsize,’ said John Pasalis, president and broker of record at Realosophy Realty in Toronto. In some cases, the problem is that sellers are pricing too high, he said. The value of a typical condo in the Toronto region in January was 18 per cent below the peak reached in April of 2022, according to data from the Canadian Real Estate Association. But even condo owners who’ve priced their units competitively sometimes struggle to find buyers, he added. For those who can’t wait to upsize, one solution is to rent, rather than buy, a larger home while renting out their condo, Mr. Pasalis said. ‘We had a client who couldn’t sell their condo. They had a kid, they needed to do something, so they just decided to rent a house,’ he said.”
“Sales activity in Newmarket saw a month-to-month bump in February, going from 35 sales to 63 in February. Jeffrey Graves, a sales representative with Royal LePage Your Community Realty, said Newmarket ‘tends to be its own market’ when compared to Aurora, with the sales increase potentially due to the town’s price’s being a little more ‘buyer-friendly.’ The average price of a house sold in Aurora dropped by more than $300,000 in February compared to the previous month, according to the latest numbers from the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board. The average price dropped from $1,501,173 in January to $1,147,807 in February. There was both a dramatic drop month-to-month and when comparing with this time last year, when the average price was $1,454,030. The median price was also down markedly, from $1,235,000 in January to $1,070,000 this past month. That’s also lower than the median from February 2024, which was $1,313,500.”
“Of those sales, 16 were detached homes, with six condo townhouses and four condo apartment units sold in February. Those 16 detached homes went for an average price of $1,369,587 this past month, versus an average of $1,758,975 across 44 sold detached homes in February 2024. The median was also down significantly, at $1,377,500 compared to $1,607,500.”
“It would appear that Cornwall is witnessing a decline in tourists as Brits are reportedly ‘abandoning’ the county for holidays abroad. Commenter Janet Smith thinks: ‘It’s not surprising really. Holiday home owners got very greedy with their charges, it’s expensive to eat out and it rains all the time. I live here but understand why people would go abroad.’ Alan Parsons agrees: ‘I moved to Cornwall three years ago, but I have recently left and moved back to Somerset. Why? Cornwall is just too crowded and too expensive. Parking charges are a rip off, as are cafe prices. Many good, useful shops closed down and turned into galleries. Most shops are now seasonal, meaning ghost towns in winter. In summer it is too crowded. I had enough and moved away from the land of second homes and tourist industries. Too many greedy people in Cornwall now.’ Sue Jones disagrees: ‘It’s karma, Cornwall is overpriced, overcrowded, there is a lack of dog-free areas/accommodation, it’s a parking nightmare with congested roads, attractions closing, so not much left. Greed has killed what was once a thriving business.'”
“New Zealand‘s housing market might have turned a corner, but it is still a tough time to be a seller. While activity and prices are picking up, there is large amount of stock on the market, and it is keeping a lid on prices. In January, there were 3774 sales nation-wide and 8904 new listings. The number of available houses for sale was up almost 19 percent on a year earlier. Real estate salesperson Brooke Gibson said auctions were a way to focus buyer interest. ‘If you’re a vendor and you want to sell you need urgency, you need to feed the buyers’ greed, and play that whole ‘you can get a bargain.’ She said she had sold two properties at auction last week for more than their council valuations.”
“Significant discounts on completed unsold inventory of Bangkok condos will be required to attract prospective buyers and investors, as developers grapple with mounting pressure from loans totalling over 156 billion baht, due for repayment this year. Frank Khan, executive director and department head of residential at property consultancy Knight Frank Thailand, said 2025 will be even more challenging for Bangkok’s condo market than last year. ‘What we will see is an influx of unsold inventory entering the market,’ he said. ‘Developers will lower prices and offer more promotions. Like last year, it will remain a buyer’s market. This year, investors will be more aggressive in the market because inventory from developers will be released with significant discounts. The entire year will be like this,’ Mr Khan predicted.'”
“According to Prasert Taedullayasatit, president of the Thai Condominium Association, the total value of newly completed condo supply in Greater Bangkok reached 178.4 billion baht last year, and is projected to reach 140.6 billion baht in 2025. Of that amount, a significant portion remained unsold. Additionally, among the sold units, not all will be transferred to buyers due to stricter mortgage lending rules imposed by banks amid a high level of household debt. ‘The market’s ability to absorb this surplus remains uncertain,’ Mr Prasert said earlier this year. ‘Developers, eager to generate revenue, are grappling with limited demand and challenges in issuing new debentures to refinance maturing ones.'”
‘I have had to cut back on healthcare costs and discretionary spending. I am pushing off the new purchase of new contact lenses and not booking overnight travel for my kids’ weekend soccer tournaments in nearby San Diego and Orange counties. I am having to give serious thought to budgeting since unemployment benefits cannot cover the cost of my mortgage’ said a California employee fired from the FDIC’
Overnight travel for a soccer game?
‘A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employee in Delaware is no longer able to take in the ambiance of the local bar. ‘I am unable to contribute to local restaurants and businesses that I regularly patronize,’ said the worker, who focuses on groceries and a mortgage’
You can read the affidavits at the link. These people are barflys.
“Overnight travel for a soccer game?”
Some of those other soccer moms and dads… 🙂
[sarc] And if my team doesn’t win I am going to stamp my little feet, throw a hissy fit, sue DOGE and send insulting text messages to Elon Musk [sarc / off]
Didn’t some judge order that these probationary employees be reinstated? But they shouldn’t get too comfy. They can still be re-laid off, just by the correct supervisor this time.
And even if their immediate supervisors don’t lay them off, the agency heads have already determined that they are disposable. They will be first in line for a RIF.
How did you loser yer airbox Bonnie?
Often times, there’s a delta between the cost to rebuild and what the insurance company is willing to pay.
‘The residence, with six bedrooms and nine bathrooms, in The Moorings, is listed for $13.9 million. It’s been on the market for nearly a year, with a lot of lookers, but no takers. In a buyer’s market, that’s often the case. ‘Buyers have not been making offers. They have been touring the property, just not making offers. There is still a lot of inventory out there,’ said Randy Haddaway, CEO of Elite Auctions. His company, based in Naples, is handling the auction. As usual, it’s without reserve, meaning the sellers don’t have a minimum price’
Yer just asking to give it away Randy.
They weren’t even buyers Randy. They just wanted a peek, like in Cribs.
‘I thought it was a joke,’ she said. It wasn’t. According to county records, her 3,300-square-foot home sold for $49,000. She says just like that, it was gone. ‘Oh my God. It’s devastating for my children,’ she said. ‘I don’t wish this on anyone.’ Records show the person who bought the house turned around and sold it five months later for $850,000′
Maybe the laws are different in North Carolina but Taylor’s lender probably has first lien. Somebody got fooked, that’s fer sure.
[From Down Under …]
Tech Giants quietly drop renewables and sign pledge to triple Nuclear Power.
https://www.joannenova.com.au/2025/03/tech-giants-quietly-drop-renewables-and-sign-pledge-to-triple-nuclear-power/
Renewables are so over.
Just like that — the renewables bubble went phht.
After twenty years of hailing wind and solar, suddenly the world’s tech giants are cheering for nuclear power. Worse — they don’t even mention the words carbon, low emissions or CO2. The new buzzwords are “safe, clean and firm“. They talk about needing energy “round the clock”, and they talk about “energy resilience” — but they don’t say nuclear is “low emissions”. It’s like they want everyone to forget their activism. Did someone say something about climate change?
Meta, Amazon, and Google have flipped like a school of barracuda. Five minutes ago, life on Earth depended on achieving Net-Zero with fleets of wind farms in the sunset, now, they just want energy and lots of it. The big tech fish and their friends have signed a Large Energy Users Pledge admitting that the demand for energy is rising rapidly, that nuclear should triple by 2050 and that large energy users depend on the availability of abundant cheap energy (Small energy users too, Mr Bezos-Zuckerburg-Pichai.) The closest they come to hinting at the ghost of renewables is when they say they want energy that’s not dependent on “the weather, the season, or the geographical location”.
There’s no “Sorry we got it wrong”. There’s no apology for hectoring us, censoring us, or wasting billions of dollars. It’s just Mr Don’t-Look-Over-Here telling us what most engineers knew for 30 years. This is the billionaire club asking the taxpayers to build them more nuclear plants.
Signatories include Siemens Energy, which suffered a 36% share price fall 18 months ago when it admitted it was losing billions trying to maintain wind turbines.
It’s the perfect storm. Just as renewable investments wallow in their failures, the AI race is escalating, and it needs monster data, which means monster energy. As we saw in Texas the new grid entrants are asking for a whole gigawatt of capacity each, and peak demand is expected to rise by a wild 75% in the next five years.
Less than a year ago Microsoft was making the “biggest ever renewable energy agreement” but now it’s resurrecting the old Three Mile Island nuclear plant.
And of course, Donald Trump is in the White House, so the subsidies are gone and the mood has changed. Indeed, it’s almost like the Tech Giants are afraid to mention “climate change” too much lest it annoy the new President, or remind all their shareholders how much money they wasted.
Other governments need to adjust their policies at speed. Run, don’t walk…
…telling us what most engineers knew for 30 years
Yet there was money to be made from government subsidy.
And many people maybe most believed electricity came out of the ground for free. Ca a big green energy mouthpiece buys power from coal burning neighboring states when the sun goes down. fail
“…many people maybe most believed electricity came out of the ground for free…”
Probably the same gang of geniuses that the tree planted in their backyard would provide an endless supply of free government money.
‘Chabot said a number of her neighbours were supportive, but recalled a frustrating interaction with one who gleefully told her, ‘Oh Dorothy, can’t you just wait ’til you’re our 51st state?’
Zing!
‘‘I’ve never had this many listings in my life,’ said DuPont, herself a Canadian expat. At this time of year, she would normally have 10 to 15. ‘Buyers? I think I have one’ from Canada, she said. She wonders whether some were already thinking of selling over the weak loonie compared to the U.S. dollar, and pulled the trigger because of Trump’s threats. ‘A lot of my clients … they’ll email me, text me, call me. They want weekly updates. I almost feel helpless. There’s no update, there’s no showing, there’s no offers.’ More home purchases in the U.S. are done by Canadians than any other country — 13 per cent from April 2023 to March 2024, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) says. Half of all Canadian purchases were vacation homes, and roughly 41 per cent of sales were in Florida’
These people are degenerate gamblers using borrowed money. Their peso is on the rocks and they are trying to sell at the worst time for Florida condos evah.
[So now Climate Change (aka Global Warming) is seen as being a good thing.]
The next ice age is coming in 10,000 years — unless climate change prevents it.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/next-ice-age-coming-10-150000529.html
[Here are some snips …]
A pattern of encroaching and retreating ice sheets during and between ice ages has been shown to match certain orbital parameters of Earth around the sun, leading to researchers being able to predict that the next ice age will take place 10,000 years from now.
“The pattern we found is so reproducible that we were able to make an accurate prediction of when each interglacial period of the past million years or so would occur and how long each would last,” said Stephen Barker of Cardiff University in Wales, who led the study, in a statement. “This is important because it confirms the natural climate change cycles we observe on Earth over tens of thousands of years are largely predictable and not random or chaotic.”
However, don’t rush for your woolly hat and scarf just yet, because the long-term effects of human-made climate change could prevent the next ice age from ever happening.
Our planet has always undergone cycles of warm and cold, ice ages and interglacials. These cycles are quite separate from human-induced climate change, which is well documented, incontrovertible and is largely overriding Earth’s natural climate cycles.
Those natural cycles are caused by changes in three properties of Earth and its orbit around the sun. Together, they are referred to as Milankovitch cycles, after the early 20th century Serbian physicist Milutin Milankovitch.
“We found a predictable pattern over the past million years for the timing of when the Earth’s climate changes between glacial ‘ice ages’ and mild warm periods like today, called interglacials,” said paleoclimatologist Lorraine Lisiecki, who is a professor of the University of California, Santa Barbara and a member of Barker’s team.
“We were amazed to find such a clear imprint of the different orbital parameters on the climate record,” said Barker. “It is quite hard to believe that the pattern has not been seen before.”
They also discovered that obliquity seems to be the sole driver behind starting a new ice age.
With this knowledge, Barker’s team predicted that the next ice age would ordinarily take place in 10,000 years’ time.
However, the effects of human-made climate change will be so long-lasting that they could prevent the next ice age from ever happening.
“Such a transition to a glacial state in 10,000 years’ time is very unlikely to happen because human emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere have already diverted the climate from its natural course, with longer-term impacts into the future,” said Gregor Knorr of the Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany.
“Now that we know that climate is largely predictable over these long timescales, we can actually use past changes to inform us about what could happen in the future,” said Barker. “This is vital for better informing decisions we make now about greenhouse gas emissions, which will determine future climate changes.”
Barker’s team predicted that the next ice age would ordinarily take place in 10,000 years’ time.
If that were the case, it would have already happened. There is some interesting research that indicates a 250,000 year cycle.
In 10,000 years we will have a ice age because of man made carbon emissions .
My first reaction is who cares what happens 10 thousand years from now. We have to many things that can wipe us out now that are of much higher priority.
UN Judge, Onetime Columbia University Human Rights Fellow, Found Guilty of Slavery.
https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/un-judge-found-guilty-of-slavery/
A United Nations judge was convicted on Thursday of trafficking a young woman to the United Kingdom and forcing her to work as a slave.
Ugandan judge Lydia Mugambe, 49, “exploited and abused” the victim, prosecutors said, forcing her to work as an unpaid maid and caregiver while barring her from seeking other employment. A jury found Mugambe guilty of multiple offenses, including facilitating illegal immigration, forced labor, and witness intimidation, the Independent reported.
Mugambe was a fellow housed within Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, whose fellows work to “address some aspect of a history of gross human rights violations in their society, country, and/or region,” in 2017.
Columbia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mugambe became a judge on the U.N. International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in May 2023, even though police had been called to her home in Oxfordshire three months earlier, according to the Independent. Mugambe was studying for a law Ph.D. at Oxford at the time.
A jury agreed with the prosecution’s case that Mugambe, who also serves as a judge on Uganda’s High Court, conspired with Ugandan diplomat John Leonard Mugerwa in a “very dishonest” quid pro quo. Mugerwa, the prosecutors said, arranged for the Ugandan embassy to sponsor the victim’s entry into the United Kingdom under false pretenses, while Mugambe attempted to influence a judge overseeing a case in which Mugerwa was involved.
Mugambe denied the charges, insisting she always treated the young woman with “love, care, and patience,” the BBC reported.
Trump ICE Reveals Biden “Cooked Books” In Illegal Alien Arrests.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trump-ice-reveals-biden-cooked-books-illegal-alien-arrests
President Trump’s Homeland Security Department has introduced new transparency regarding the illegal alien invasion under the Biden-Harris regime. The data now reveals that the previous administration “cooked the books,” creating the illusion that illegals were being arrested and detained—when, in reality, many were caught and then dumped into communities nationwide.
“We have uncovered that the previous administration… was cooking the books on ICE data,” acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told reporters on Wednesday.
Lyons explained, “They were purposely misleading the American people by categorizing individuals processed and released into the interior of the United States as ICE arrests.”
“A comprehensive review was done internally here with ICE. We found tens of thousands of cases that were recorded as arrests when, in fact, these instances were illegal aliens that were simply processed and released into the American communities,” he said.
Senior officials told Fox News that ICE made 113,431 arrests in 2024 that were classified as “pass-through” arrests, meaning zero enforcement action was taken against the foreign nationals, who were instead released and dumped into communities via a web of NGOs funded by taxpayers and controlled by far-left organizations. The ploy here was about about rigging future elections for Democrats.
A combination of open southern borders and catch-and-release under the Biden-Harris regime explains why thousands of criminal illegal aliens and terrorists have now called America home.
Last year, a leaked US Army North Division memo warned that 5,000 armed Venezuela prison gang Tren de Aragua members were embedded in US cities and towns nationwide.
As for the interior, ICE agents made 33,242 arrests last year, which is only 29% of all arrests from the immigration enforcement agency. For comparison, ICE agents made 32,809 arrests from January 20 to March 10, indicating they will surpass the 2024 figures in a matter of days.
“What we are doing now is actual immigration enforcement, not enforcement theater,” an official said.
Another official said, “The difference between these recent arrests and those from last year is now we are actually taking enforcement actions on each and every illegal alien arrested.”
The latest border figures show that border book-ins to ICE plunged from 628 a day in February 2024 to 163 daily last month.
“We are empowering [ICE agents] to do their jobs,” Lyons said, adding, “After four years of not being allowed to effectively do their jobs, our agents and officers are excited to get to work and fulfill the agency’s mission.”
Realtors are liars.
“Free chickens with full-price offer”
Its a 61 year old house that needs some TLC. Its not necessarily a bad house, but its located close to a large smelly paper-mill and other heavy industries. The free chickens offer does make it tempting though.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1762-Elna-Rd-Cantonment-FL-32533/44708009_zpid/
“…The free chickens offer does make it tempting though….”
Small contract print: You still have to feed the squirrels.
Remember “Suzanne said we can do this”
BTW, What ever happened to Suzanne? Is she still working in the REIConplex?
Beeare the Ides of March.
Is the bottom of the stock market’s CR8R already visible?
S&P 500: RBC says current selloff not enough to send a buy signal yet
Sam Boughedda, Author
Published 03/12/2025, 07:14 AM
…
https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/sp-500-rbc-says-current-selloff-not-enough-to-send-a-buy-signal-yet-3923400
CBS News – Trump to invoke wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to carry out deportations to Guantanamo.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-alien-enemies-act-1798-deportations-guantanamo/
President Trump is planning to invoke a wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as soon as Friday to authorize the summary deportation of some migrants, including to Guantanamo Bay, escalating his government-wide immigration crackdown, multiple U.S. officials familiar with the plan told CBS News.
The 227-year-old law gives presidents the extraordinary power to order the arrest, detention and deportation of noncitizens who are 14 years or older and come from countries staging an “invasion or predatory incursion” of the U.S.
Mr. Trump is expected to cite the 18th-century statute to order the swift detention and deportation of suspected members of the Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang with prison origins that his administration has designated a foreign terrorist organization, said the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Officials have made preparations to send suspected gang members to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, soon after Mr. Trump invokes the Alien Enemies Act, two of the U.S. officials said. At Mr. Trump’s direction, officials have been detaining some migrants awaiting deportation at the naval base, though the holding facilities were left empty earlier this week.
Those subject to the Alien Enemies Act would not be allowed to have a court hearing or an asylum interview since they would be processed under an emergency, wartime authority — not immigration law. Instead, they would be eligible to be detained and deported, with little to no due process, under Title 50, the section of the U.S. code housing America’s war and defense laws.
CNN first reported Mr. Trump’s plans to invoke the law as early as Friday.
The Alien Enemies Act has been invoked only a few times in U.S. history, including during World War II, when the government used it to surveil and detain Italian, German and Japanese immigrants in the U.S.
Its invocation to target migrants from countries with which the U.S. is not actively at war is almost certain to face legal challenges.
Mr. Trump previewed his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act in an executive order issued on his first day back at the White House. It directed the secretaries of state and homeland security to plan for the potential invocation of the law and prepare facilities “necessary to expedite the removal” of those subject to it.
“By invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, I will direct our government to use the full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement to eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks bringing devastating crime to U.S. soil, including our cities and inner cities,” Mr. Trump said in his inaugural address.
CBS News reached out to representatives of the White House and the Department of Homeland Security for comment.
Cost of undocumented healthcare in California is billions over estimates, pressuring Democrats to consider cuts
Gov. JB Pritzker proposed a $330-million budget cut last month to scale back an expansion of healthcare coverage for undocumented adult immigrants in Illinois, where a state audit found that services for certain age groups exceeded estimates by more than 280%.
California soon may face the same financial pressure to reduce coverage.
California became the first state in the nation to offer healthcare to all income-eligible immigrants one year ago, which gave Gov. Gavin Newsom another liberal achievement to tout when lauding the Golden State as a national trailblazer.
But the $9.5-billion price tag of California’s program is already more than $3 billion above the budget estimate from last summer and is expected to grow even higher. In Sacramento, the governor and Democrats in the state Legislature now are under pressure to reduce coverage to bring down costs during a budget crunch.
Billionaire Elon Musk, a top Trump confidant, has also weighed in, alleging to Fox that healthcare is “a mechanism by which the Democrats attract and retain illegal immigrants by essentially paying them to come here and then turning them into voters.”
“Democrats are pushing hard to maximize payments to illegals, e.g. free luxury hotels in New York and free medical care for illegals in California, as that is their current and future voter base,” Musk said on his social media platform X.
The potential for cuts to Medicaid, the federal government’s health insurance for low-income residents, could also leave Democrats at the state Capitol forced to decide whether they should maintain coverage for immigrants if services for legal residents must be significantly reduced.
Absent federal cuts, California’s financial footing already was so shaky that Newsom proposed taking $7.1 billion from the state’s rainy day fund, which acts like a savings account to buffer the budget during an economic crisis, to cover the cost of state programs next year.
The California Department of Finance said $8.4 billion of the funding to provide healthcare to undocumented immigrants is paid by state taxpayers through the state’s general fund. The remaining $1.1 billion pays for emergency room visits and pregnancy care, which the federal government covers under a federal law that requires hospitals to stabilize and treat uninsured patients in emergency departments.
The governor’s advisors have warned lawmakers the state has a lot to lose if federal funding is slashed by the Trump administration.
Federal funds typically make up about one-third of the state budget. Medi-Cal relies on $107.5 billion in federal funds in the current budget year, nearly two-thirds of all federal dollars received by the state. Roughly 15 million Californians, a third of the state, are on Medi-Cal and more than half of the children in California receive healthcare coverage through the program.
“The possibility of a dramatic decrease in the federal workforce, or a decrease, pause, or termination of funding, would have a detrimental impact on California’s ability to provide services that its residents rely upon, such as Medi-Cal or highway safety,” said Mary Halterman, who works for a unit within the California Department of Finance that tracks federal funding to the state, during a recent budget hearing. “California does not have sufficient resources to backfill the gaps in programs that California residents rely upon that would be created by the withdrawal or reduction of federal funds.”
Newsom grew the Medi-Cal coverage pool to include all income-eligible immigrants in California under a multiyear expansion by age categories that began in 2020 and concluded in 2024.
But the program has been plagued by cost overruns since it started.
The cost estimate to provide coverage to all-income eligible undocumented immigrants was $6.4 billion in the 2024-25 state budget approved last summer, which marked an increase from earlier projections.
In February, the Newsom administration told lawmakers at a budget hearing at the state Capitol that the cost of expanding coverage to all immigrants for the current year had ballooned again from $6.4 billion to $9.5 billion. The California Department of Finance attributed the increase to “higher-than-anticipated enrollment, and higher pharmacy costs.”
The governor’s office attributed the cost increase in California’s program to higher-than-expected enrollment, an aging population and rising healthcare costs across Medi-Cal, not just for the undocumented community.
But that didn’t stop Republicans from criticizing Newsom for overspending.
“Newsom has literally become that degenerate brother-in-law who squanders his money and then comes back asking for a loan,” said Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher (R-Yuba City) on the social media site X.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/cost-of-undocumented-healthcare-in-california-is-billions-over-estimates-pressuring-democrats-to-consider-cuts/ar-AA1AS8vn