DL Open Thread: Saturday, February 8, 2025

Why don’t we just close this ‘nothing to see here, folks’ portion of the Open Thread with Dan Cruce waxing rhapsodic about where he lives?:

We are kings of our bikes. So, we are again really lucky to live in Rehoboth, when we park a car, we have to get back into the car. We can hop on our bikes and our ritual is that we are always biking from our home to Louis. We do a little bit of walking around, a little bit of margarita, a little bit of good food – there’s amazing food then bike right back. So the ritual, on our bikes, every chance we can, any place we can go, and eliminate the cars.

It’s a very inclusive state from the North to the South and so it’s beautiful that, that is the case. It’s certainly because of the LGBT history and our allies as well down here that made it such a wonderfully warm and welcoming space. There’s a bunch of us in our community and incredible comfortable and it’s a wonderful place for those in our community to build businesses. Small businesses are the bedrock of our state. And so there too, our community has the chance to be part of the economy and to build the strength of the state.”

You see what happened here:  Anthony Albence, who really should be fired by Matt Meyer ASAP, has, without evidence, certified that Dan Cruce lives in SD 1.  Me?  I prefer to take Cruce at his word.  Silly me.

Whoa!  More BHL Shenanigans??  Let’s see what Ray Seigfried’s favorite corrupt former public official did this time:

After Delaware’s governor and lawmakers jockeyed over control of the Port of Wilmington, the state’s independent auditor announced Friday that her office would open an investigation into the Diamond State Port Corporation – the state-owned entity that oversees the port facility and directs its $635 million expansion plans.

The probe – called a performance audit – will scrutinize Port Corporation operations more thoroughly than the auditor’s standard financial audit, and could include interviews with current or former board members of the entity, including former-Secretary of State Jeffrey Bullock.

Specifically, the investigation will examine the Port Corporation’s recent handling of hundreds of millions of taxpayers dollars that have been committed to fund construction of a new container terminal at the site of a former chemical plant in Edgemoor, State Auditor Lydia York said in an interview with Spotlight Delaware.

Its problems continued last fall after a federal judge revoked a key permit needed to dredge a shipping lane in the Delaware River to the site of the planned port terminal.

Despite the judge’s ruling, state officials pressed on with their plans, and in late December formalized an agreement with the Port of Wilmington’s new private operator, Enstructure, to share the costs of building the $635 million port facility.

Two weeks after the agreement, state officials expedited a transfer of nearly $200 million to the Diamond State Port Corporation to be used for the construction of Edgemoor.

The transfer occurred five days before Gov. Matt Meyer’s inauguration, during former-Gov. Bethany Hall-Long’s two-week tenure as the state’s top elected official.

Internal state emails obtained by Spotlight Delaware show one finance director telling his staff to “expedite” the bulk of the money transfer. He said on Jan. 16 that the transfer needed to be done ASAP, adding that questions about interest the money had earned could be dealt with “next week.”

York said she decided to conduct the performance audit after learning about the money transfer, which she described as a “big, big number” that nearly doubled the size of the state’s historic investment in the Port of Wilmington.

Though then-Gov. John Carney officially announced the appropriation last spring, York said she found it odd that the transfer occurred rapidly last month, and that the money was moved all at once.

She said she was alerted to the transfer in late January by her staff who were startled by a $200 million sum being moved so quickly.

Were there a functioning Department of Justice, you’d think that someone might be looking closely at what’s going down at the Port.  At least the State Auditor is.  That’s progress.

Courts Put Brakes On Trump’s Most Egregious Offenses.  For now.  Here’s the scorecard from Forbes.  The most recent, and certainly one of the most important:

NEW YORK — A federal judge issued an emergency order early Saturday prohibiting Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service from accessing personal and financial data on millions of Americans kept at the Treasury Department, noting the possibility for irreparable harm.

U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer’s decision also ordered Musk and his team to “immediately destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems, if any.”

In a four-page order, Engelmayer said the states that sued the Trump administration “will face irreparable harm in the absence of injunctive relief.”

“That is both because of the risk that the new policy presents of the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking,” Engelmayer wrote.

He adopted arguments by the states that Treasury records from the agency’s Bureau of Fiscal Services can only legally be accessed by specialized civil servants “with a need for access to perform their job duties.”

Under the order, the Trump administration is prohibited from giving access to political appointees, special government employees or government employees that are not assigned to the Treasury Department. The White House has said that Musk has been designated a special government employee.