OK, kids, we know that the State of Delaware pulled out of the Great American Stale Fair. However, Delaware was represented, sort-of. You have until the end of the Open Thread to figure out just how. Assuming you don’t know, you might be able to figure it out. You’re officially on the clock.
Karl Baker Does A Deep Dive Into The Bond Bill:
Delaware’s proposed capital budget, unveiled last week with a string of pricey construction projects, relies heavily on a pot of money derived from unused gift cards, forgotten stock dividends, and other types of abandoned property previously held by companies across the globe.
While it is a uniquely Delaware way to pay for public construction projects — including an expansion of the Port of Wilmington — it comes as the unclaimed property program faces mounting legal scrutiny. In March, a federal judge remarked that the only thing clear about the Delaware fund was its lack of clarity.
Lawmakers publicly released the $1.26 billion Bond Bill on Thursday evening, giving the public only a few days to review the spending plan before an expected vote Tuesday — the final day of the legislative session.
If passed, the legislation would draw more than one-quarter of its funding from Delaware’s practice of scooping up unclaimed assets held by companies that maintain their legal home in the state.
The remainder would come from the state’s General Fund, bond sales and a transportation trust fund. (In other words, kids, the Bond Bill is not uniquely funded through bond sales.)
There are also several one-time outlays, including $110 million for cost overruns at the Port of Wilmington expansion; $35 million for a Legislative Hall renovation; $30 million for the state’s purchase of a marina and a parking garage; and $17 million to cover unforeseen renovation costs at a downtown Wilmington office building.
The bill also includes a $1 million appropriation for renovations at The Queen, a Wilmington music venue.
Asked why lawmakers are earmarking money for the private venue, Senate Democratic spokeswoman Sarah Fulton said the facility draws people into downtown Wilmington, benefiting nearby restaurants and hotels. She described it as a venue that “puts Delaware on the map.”
Well, that’s a precedent that really sucks. I see the line forming now.
You know what else sucks?: The membership of the Bond Committee, especially, as usual, the House membership. Reps. Heffernan, Cooke and Bush are the D House members.The House JFC/Grant-In-Aid D members are Kim Williams, Bolden, Chukwuocha and Griffith. In other words, not a single House D on the two key committees has anything approaching reform-minded credentials.
When Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met with Kazakhstan’s president at the St. Regis Hotel last September in New York, President Trump jumped in by phone as the men sealed a deal on a top priority for Washington.
During the call, Mr. Trump and his team won an agreement from the Kazakh leader to give a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips and other critical goods.
Ahead of the deal, the Trump administration approved preliminary applications for as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing for the American company, now called Kaz Resources, which plans to break ground on the project in rural Kazakhstan.
It was not only Mr. Trump and Mr. Lutnick who saw an opportunity.
Their sons were soon doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history.
Within weeks of the St. Regis negotiations, investors with a firm called Dominari Securities, which is housed at Trump Tower in New York and partly owned by the president’s two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, joined with other partners to take a 20 percent stake in a corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project.
Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment company controlled by Mr. Lutnick’s family and overseen by his sons Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, helped one of the lead investors working with Dominari on the Kazakh deal raise $210 million in new capital for a related entity. Such rounds of fund-raising typically net Cantor millions of dollars in fees.
The corruption has been so blatant and so relentless that we’ve become numb to it. We shouldn’t.
‘Criminally Made Algae’. Satire Is Dead:
President Donald Trump seemed to have a lot on his mind on Sunday. He unleashed a flurry of social media posts and reposts on everything from his $600 million ballroom project to the World Cup. But three words in the middle of a 589-word rant stood out to critics: “criminally made algae.”
Trump used those words in reference to the Reflecting Pool, which began suffering from peeling paint and a massive algae bloom almost immediately after he announced the completion of its $14 million renovation.
Experts have said that the new “American flag blue” bottom Trump installed may have, ironically, helped the algae thrive. But he has, without evidence, blamed vandals ― and did so again in his lengthy Sunday afternoon Truth Social post.
“The Reflecting Pool is now in full use after suffering great damage from Criminal, Radical Left Vandals, people that truly hate our Country,” Trump wrote.
Trump himself bragged only last month that the new bottom was like “powerful rubber” and couldn’t be cut with a knife. In his Sunday rant, however, the president claimed supposed vandals had “butchered a 350 foot long strip” and “put their hands underneath the surface, and ripped it.” He said the pool would be drained again after July 4 “to treat the damage caused by these ‘animals.’”
“In the meantime,” he added, “it is working well, the criminally made algae is gone, and the grass, which was destroyed, is being replaced shortly.”
Which is the perfect lead-in to the story of how Delaware is being celebrated at the Great American Stale Fair:
Some states that declined the invite had other organizations step in on their behalf. The potential perils of this were apparent in Delaware, where a Caesar Rodney impersonator was manning the booth (the Caesar Rodney Institute was the sponsor). A Founding Father who enslaved hundreds, Rodney has become something of a cause célèbre: His statue was pulled down in 2020 in Delaware, only for it to be remounted this year by the Trump administration in Washington, D.C.’s Freedom Plaza. The impersonator told me that he had come here because his state, in not participating, had politicized the event.
What do you want to talk about?
Nice of the Caesar Rodney institute to take time off from fighting wind power to go to DC to fight politicizing a political event.
If “stale fair” isn’t a typo it’s a brilliant name for that travesty on the mall. If it is a typo, it’s still a good name for it.
No typo. Merely another manifestation of my brilliance.