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Newsom faces backlash over $33K taxpayer-funded portrait amid state financial strain

California Governor Gavin Newsom is facing significant criticism after including $33,000 for a formal portrait of himself in the state’s proposed 2026-2027 budget, amid increasing concerns over budget deficits and rising costs of living in the Golden State.

The budget proposal prompted backlash from both Republicans and Democrats, with opponents arguing that Newsom (D-Calif.) is neglecting pressing issues such as soaring housing costs, high gas prices and expensive health care services.

The timing of the governor’s request adds fuel to the ongoing debate surrounding his final, record-setting $349.9 billion budget proposal. The $33,000 would allegedly be pulled from California’s General Fund.

While the administration maintained that the massive spending plan was designed to protect core state services and invest in California’s long-term infrastructure, fiscal critics argued that even small, symbolic line items like the portrait allocation represents an out-of-touch approach to government spending while ordinary residents face severe financial hardships.

The money is reportedly set aside for the “traditional painting of the Governor’s portrait” which would eventually hang inside the California State Capitol alongside portraits of previous governors. However, the proposal comes during a time when lawmakers remain extremely cautious about new discretionary spending due to the state’s long-term financial challenges.

State Senator Suzette Valladares (R-Calif.) sharply criticized Newsom’s budget and emphasized the poor timing of the proposal.

“Only in Sacramento would a governor look at struggling families and think, ‘You know what this moment needs? A painting of me,’” Valladares said.

Assembly member Alexandra M. Macedo (R-Calif,) also mocked the proposal while rebuking Newsom’s controversial high-speed rail project.

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Mediaite Founding Editor Colby Hall Out After Suspension for ‘Fabricated Quotes’

Colby Hall, the founding editor of the far-left media site Mediaite, is out after a 30-day suspension for, among other things, fabricating quotes.

In the middle of last month, Mediaite’s editor-in-chief Joe DePaolo announced Hall’s suspension.

“We presented the findings to Colby Hall, who insists the errors were purely a result of sloppiness in how he aggregated and categorized information, not from the use of AI,” DePaolo wrote. “Regardless, it is completely unacceptable, and Colby has been suspended from Mediaite pending further investigation.”

What was fascinating is that Hall was exposed by his ideological counterparts in the far-left media. From my earlier report:

On Monday, the far-left media outlet Status told Semafor that One Sheet “appeared to outright fabricate a quote and attribute it to our very own Jon Passantino, putting us on heavy blast on its website and newsletter for something we never did.”

Semafor further reports that since its launch, One Sheet has serially misattributed quotes to the wrong people and outlets, including CNN, Fox News, Status, and Politico. In other words, those dumb enough to pay for One Sheet were misinformed about who said what. Hell, I can’t imagine anyone dumb enough to read Mediaite for free.

Semafor summed it up as a “series of mishaps… including misattributed information and made-up quotes.”

Apparently,  DePaolo’s “further investigation” didn’t come out too well for Hall because Hall has announced he’s out at Mediaite to spend more time with his Substack.

“After 15 years as Founding Editor of Mediaite, I’m stepping away from the site I helped launch, and that has been my obsession for well over a decade,” he announced last week. “The decision follows the editorial errors in the One Sheet newsletter that surfaced in April. I addressed those mistakes on the record at the time, and I stand by what I said then.”

He then spun the 30-day suspension as a plus. “What I didn’t expect, when the suspension started in April, was that the past month would turn out to be one of the most clarifying experiences of my professional life,” he said. “It also gave my brain a chance to do something it hadn’t done in a long while: rest.”

He does admit that the suspension was “about as dark as anything I’ve gone through professionally.” But it was still good because he realized “I’d been running on fumes for longer than I wanted to admit, and that some of what I thought was professional rigor was actually just exhaustion dressed up as urgency.” Whatever that means.

We all make mistakes, and out of humility and even self-preservation, we need to show some grace when others make those mistakes. Making up quotes doesn’t sound like a mistake. You can accidentally plagiarize by not indenting a paragraph. I’ve done that. You can accidentally misattribute a quote. I’ve done that. The thing, though, is that after you make those errors, you know you’re prone to making those errors, so you’re extra careful about double-checking. Fabricating quotes, though?

Now, Hall says, he plans to do some consulting and disappear into that massive pile of Substack with the rest of the disgraced, like Jim Acosta and Taylor Lorenz and Ryan Lizza and Terry Moran…

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Police escort pro-Hamas marchers into Tim Hortons while Jewish protesters shut out

Rebel News reporter Scarlett Grace reports from the intersection of Bathurst and Sheppard, where the Jewish community in Toronto continues week after week to face harassment by a crowd that openly supports terrorism — a violation of Canada’s criminal code. 

The pro-Hamas demonstrators have gathered in larger numbers this week, largely at the behest of activist Firas Al-Najim — an open supporter of the IRGC. 

Over the weekend, Liberal MP Salma Zahid faced backlash after taking a photo with Firas Al-Najim, who was sporting a shirt featuring the faces of the supreme leaders of the Islamic Republic. 

Zahid issued an apology after the photo went viral, claiming she had not noticed the shirt and saying she “would never have agreed to such a photo if [she] had.” Najim fired back that she had noticed the shirt, that they had discussed it and Israel’s actions, and that she had nodded in agreement with him, implying that her apology was disingenuous. 

Najim asked people to come this week in honour of Daniela Bonamico, a local pro-Hamas activist who was detained and deported by Israel after trying to enter Gaza via a flotilla that departed from Italy. 

Channel 12 in Israel reported that two of the organizers of the flotilla were identified as Hamas operatives, making everyone on board collaborators with a terrorist organization. 

Several of the pro-Hamas crowd, along with a police escort, marched down the street to a local Tim Hortons. Pro-Israel and Jewish demonstrators were barred from the building as long as they were inside. 

Present among the pro-Hamas demonstrators present to welcome Bonamico back was Vancouver-based activist Farhood Moayed, known for outrageous antisemitic postings on X under the name “Kritical Kanadian.”

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Justice Clarence Thomas Blasts Supreme Court For Refusing To Hear Florida’s Lawsuit Against Blue States Issuing Driver’s Licenses To Illegal Alien Truckers

Justice Clarence Thomas delivered a scathing dissent Tuesday as the Supreme Court refused to let Florida sue California and Washington over their lawless practice of handing out commercial driver’s licenses to illegal aliens who cannot read English road signs.

The Court denied Florida’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint in the original jurisdiction case, leaving the state with “nowhere else to bring” its claims, Thomas wrote. He was joined by Justice Samuel Alito.

This decision comes after the horrific August 12, 2025, crash on the Florida Turnpike. Illegal alien Harjinder Singh, an Indian national who entered the U.S. illegally through the Mexican border, obtained CDLs from both California and Washington despite failing English proficiency tests at least ten times in Washington and once in California.

Singh approached a clearly marked “no U-turn” sign for official use only, ignored it, and swung his massive tractor-trailer across both lanes of the highway. The trailer crushed a minivan traveling behind him. All three passengers in the minivan were killed.

Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration testing after the crash confirmed Singh could not correctly answer most verbal questions and identified only one out of four highway signs.

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Tulsi Gabbard To Go Nuclear On Deep State Before Leaving ODNI

Last week, Tulsi Gabbard, President Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, announced she will step down on June 30 to care for her husband, Abraham, who has been diagnosed with what she called “an extremely rare form of bone cancer.” 

“My husband, Abraham, has recently been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer. He faces major challenges in the coming weeks and months. At this time, I must step away from public service to be by his side and fully support him through this battle,” she wrote in her resignation letter.

“I cannot in good conscience ask him to face this fight alone while I continue in this demanding and time-consuming position.” 

Since taking the position of DNI, Gabbard has moved aggressively to overhaul the intelligence community, trying to root out the politicization and corruption, including exposing the deep state’s war on President Trump. 

Gabbard revoked the security clearances of officials found to have “abused public trust,” shut down DEI programs across the intelligence community, and redirected its focus toward foreign terrorist organizations.

Gabbard also prioritized transparency, and by May 2026, Gabbard had overseen the declassification of more than 500,000 pages of previously secret government documents.

Those documents span an almost surreal range of American history: assassination records on President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.; files connected to Amelia Earhart’s 1937 disappearance; and Biden administration documents detailing the federal government’s “Strategic Implementation Plan for Countering Domestic Terrorism.”

She also pushed the declassification of materials she argues expose the full mechanics of the Russia investigation, which her office says proved that the Obama administration weaponized intelligence to undermine Trump’s 2016 campaign.

She may be leaving, but between now and her final day as DNI, Gabbard intends to make her departure felt by the deep state. 

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Global Sumud Flotilla Urges Probe of US Complicity in Members’ Abduction and Torture by Israel

Testimonies published Tuesday from activists, journalists, medical professionals, and others who took part in the latest international flotilla attempting to break Israel’s genocidal siege of Gaza called for an investigation into US complicity in their illegal high-seas abduction and alleged torture, sexual assault, and other abuse by Israeli forces.

“As testimonies from the 428 participants illegally kidnapped by the Israeli regime continue to surface, the United States’ critical role in the abuses and torture of humanitarian volunteers and journalists has become undeniable,” Global Sumud Flotilla’s (GSF) media team said in a statement.

“This role goes beyond the State Department’s diplomatic shielding and the US Embassy’s refusal to assist American families seeking information,” GSF continued. “It includes the very ship on which volunteer participants were illegally detained and tortured, and the weapons used to inflict life-threatening trauma against them.”

That vessel, the amphibious landing ship INS Nahshon, was built by Bollinger Mississippi Shipbuilding in Louisiana and was fully financed by the US government. GSF activists first became aware of what they now call the “torture boat” when it was used to detain members of the previous Gaza-bound flotilla, dozens of whom required medical attention for broken ribs, noses, and other injuries inflicted by Israeli forces.

This time, according to GSF, “detained humanitarians, doctors, and journalists were processed one by one through a darkened shipping container. Inside, groups of three to five soldiers systematically brutalized each person who came through the door while those waiting outside listened to the screams.”

Flotilla participant Yassine Benjelloun described his mistreatment by his Israeli captors.

“All of a sudden I hear, ‘Welcome to Israel.’ And I start getting hit, like first hit on the head, second hit in the ribs, then I fall, then they kick me,” he said. “What lasts maybe three or five minutes seems like a lifetime. You don’t know that the door is going to open, and they’re going to kick you out.”

Dr. Jihan Alya Mohd Nordin, a Malaysian physician aboard the flotilla, documented 35 GSF members with fractured or dislocated bones, as well as severe head injuries including concussions and eye or ear trauma, and 14 cases of sexual assault.

“Being a doctor, the main aim is to reduce the sufferings of people,” Jihan said. “But when we cannot do anything to help them, it was the worst and most horrible feeling that I have. It was so devastating.”

Jihan said she was shoved, struck, punched, kicked, and choked by her captors, who forcibly stripped off her hijab.

In addition to the ship, the weapons used against the civilian flotilla members were also made in the USA.

“Stun grenades and metal-bearing projectile rounds were identified by manufacturer markings as products of Combined Tactical Systems (CTS), a brand of the Jamestown, Pennsylvania-based weapons manufacturer Combined Systems Inc. (CSI),” GSF said. “These weapons were fired at close range in enclosed spaces against participants who were sitting down or trying to sleep, a direct violation of the manufacturer’s own usage guidelines.”

GSF argues that “none of this was accidental.”

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Former Senior CIA Officer With Top-Secret Clearance ARRESTED After FBI Raid Home And Seize 300 Gold Bars Worth $40 Million — Plus $2 Million Cash And 35 Luxury Watches

A former senior CIA officer with top-secret security clearance has been arrested after federal agents raided his Virginia home and seized roughly 300 gold bars worth more than $40 million, along with approximately $2 million in cash and 35 luxury watches, mostly Rolexes.

The officer, identified as David Rush, who held a management position at the agency, now faces charges of criminal theft of public money.

According to NBC News, Rush allegedly used his position to request large amounts of gold and foreign currency, claiming they were for “work-related expenses,” only to allegedly divert and stash them at his Fairfax County residence.

On May 18, federal agents searched the home and walked out with the massive gold hoard. Investigators had earlier found only a portion of the funds in a storage space near his office.

Rush had requested the assets between November and March, according to an FBI affidavit.

The CIA’s own internal audit couldn’t account for the gold or significant foreign currency, prompting CIA Director John Ratcliffe to refer the matter to the FBI for criminal investigation.

More from NBC News:

Asked about Rush’s case, a CIA spokesperson said in a statement joint statement with the FBI that the FBI had arrested a person after a referral from the agency.

After a CIA internal investigation identified potential violations of the law, CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred the information to the FBI for a law enforcement investigation,” the written statement said. “The FBI is working closely with our partners at the CIA and the Department of Justice as we continue to investigate this matter fully. We are committed to following the facts, ensuring accountability, and pursuing justice in accordance with the law.”

The case raises questions about the effectiveness of the federal government’s security vetting, which is supposed to ensure intelligence officers or other government employees don’t betray the public trust or spy for foreign countries.

The U.S. government conducts background investigations on every prospective employee at the CIA and other agencies granted access to sensitive and secret information. And after employees are hired, the government continues to monitor their financial activities, travel, credit records and other information through automated checks to ensure they aren’t vulnerable to blackmail.

The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, which falls under the authority of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, oversees the background check program, known as “continuous vetting.” When the program flags a potential problem or anomaly in an employee’s records, officials investigate further.

It wasn’t clear how the investigation into Rush began, and it also wasn’t clear when he left the CIA. His home was raided just last week.

Rush is also accused of a long-running fraud scheme in which he allegedly falsified time sheets, inflated his hours, and lied about his background for nearly two decades to secure and maintain his high-level position and extra pay.

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Newsom signs bill restricting law enforcement access to California ballots

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation Wednesday aimed at tightening California’s election security rules ahead of the June 2 statewide primary.

Senate Bill 73 takes effect immediately. It limits when law enforcement can access ballots, voter lists, rosters or certified voting technology.

The bill comes after Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco seized more than 650,000 ballots from last fall’s Proposition 50 Special Election. The investigation was later halted amid legal challenges from California Attorney General Rob Bonta.

“We have to clarify the rules of engagement. That’s why this legislation is important. There are fines associated with it, criminal fines, and jail time, three years,” Newsom said at Wednesday’s signing ceremony.

The bill prohibits peace officers from interfering with election administration, except in urgent public health or safety situations. It also requires a court order before law enforcement can take possession of key election materials. Removing packages containing voted ballots from the custody of elections officials would also be a crime. The law allows civil penalties of up to $50,000 for ballot custody violations.

The measure also directs the attorney general to issue guidance to local election workers on how to respond to law enforcement requests.

“SB73 puts in protections to ensure that ballots will be secured and that voters have confidence in our election system that their voices will be heard at the ballot box,” said California State Senator Sabrina Cervantes, one of the primary authors of the law.

Bianco, who is running as a Republican candidate for California governor, said he seized the ballots as part of an investigation into claims of voting discrepancies. Election officials disputed those claims.

Bianco later called the effort to halt his investigation “politically motivated.”

The bill signing came on the same day Assembly Democrats brought 23 separate U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement-related bills to a floor vote.

That legislation includes restricting federal law enforcement presence near polling places, stopping ICE officers from becoming California peace officers, requiring hotels to notify workers and guests when ICE has a reservation on site and withholding state tax breaks from companies that contract with the Department of Homeland Security.

“Don’t do that, man,” Republican Assemblymember James Gallagher said. “There’s several people on that side of the aisle I’m looking at. You know that’s wrong.”

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Zelensky sends letter to Trump, Congress pleading for Patriot interceptor missiles

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sent a letter to President Donald Trump and the United States Congress requesting more Patriot interceptor missiles.

In the multi-page letter sent on Tuesday, provided by CBS News, Zelensky said it had already been “proposed that Ukraine is ready to purchase the number of Patriot systems and interceptor missiles” needed.

The Ukrainian president recognized and expressed gratitude for U.S. support but emphasized the country’s reliance on the United States for ballistic missile defenses.

“And when it comes to defending against ballistic missiles, we rely almost exclusively on the United States,” Zelensky said. “Patriot systems remain the most effective defense against every type of Russian ballistic missile.”

While asking for the product, he recognized the high demand for “Patriot antiballistic missiles” in many regions, including in the Middle East.

“For us–for a nation fighting for its survival–there is hardly anything more painful to see than Patriot batteries with no missiles loaded. I ask for your help in protecting Ukraine’s skies from Russian missiles,” the leader said.

He claimed that ballistic missiles remain Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “last major advantage on the battlefield.”

“The one challenge that remains extremely difficult for us–and the one that Europe cannot solve alone at this stage–is Russian ballistic missile threat,” he said.

“They can be intercepted. With Patriots. With your help. And you have the power to help,” Zelensky added.

Zelensky’s letter comes in the wake of one of the largest Russian attacks on Kyiv since the war broke out, involving nearly 700 air attack assets.

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Seattle Residents Forced To Barricade Their Streets To Protect From Gun Violence

Fed up with years of gun violence and repeated shootings near Aurora Avenue, some residents in North Seattle have started installing their own street barricades in an effort to protect their neighborhoods, KOMO News writes. 

Neighbors living near North 97th, 98th, and 102nd streets recently placed large planter boxes, piles of dirt, and gravel across parts of residential roads that connect to Aurora Avenue North. The goal, residents say, is to make it harder for shooters to speed through side streets during violent incidents linked to ongoing prostitution and human trafficking activity in the area.

Tensions escalated again over the weekend after another shooting near Aurora Avenue N and N 98th Street. Seattle police said officers found around 40 shell casings at the scene after multiple people exchanged gunfire. Security footage reportedly captured several seconds of rapid shooting, with bullets hitting nearby apartments, homes, and parked cars. In one recent case, a stray bullet entered a family’s home and came to rest near the bassinet of a 6-week-old baby.

The KOMO report says that many residents say the violence has become unbearable and accuse city leaders of failing to respond effectively despite years of complaints and calls for stronger enforcement. In response to the latest incidents, Seattle police said they are increasing overnight patrols along Aurora Avenue and assigning additional resources from the department’s Gun Violence Reduction Unit.

The homemade barriers, however, have sparked disagreement within the community. Some residents worry blocked streets could slow firefighters, ambulances, or police responding to emergencies. Others point out that Seattle requires permits for any structures placed in public roadways, meaning the barricades could eventually be removed by the city.

Still, supporters argue the measures are necessary to keep residents safe, especially children and families living near the repeated violence. They say enough routes remain open for emergency vehicles and believe the immediate threat from ongoing shootings outweighs concerns about the temporary roadblocks.

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