DL Open Thread: Thursday, August 6, 2026

FINALLY, Police Crack Down On Massage Parlors.  Meaning, they’re cracking down on human trafficking:

When police raided a massage “therapy” spa in suburban Wilmington in July, officers said they found more than 100 red condoms inside a drop ceiling and a fake jar of peanut butter.

Up in the ceiling, officers said they also discovered $16,000 in cash hidden in the lining of suitcases.

According to police, two male customers and four female employees, including the manager, were inside the Crystal Spa, located between a sub shop and smoke shop on Foulk Road, along an affluent stretch of Brandywine Hundred.

The men admitted they were there for sex, court records state. The three employees who serviced customers gave different accounts of their jobs, but according to court records, all told detectives they had been at Crystal Therapy for several weeks and had not left once, eating all their meals there and sleeping in makeshift beds.

But one employee allegedly admitted what undercover officers had already determined: along with massages the workers also offered sex acts for up to $200 extra.

The women, who police say didn’t have licenses as massage therapists, allegedly worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. According to court records, one employee said they lived under the strict orders of the manager, known as the mamasan, who “cooks, cleans and yells at them,” and tells them where to get and dispose of the red condoms.

That sordid scene detailed in court records was one of several similar ones the New Castle County Police Department’s Human Trafficking Investigations Team has reported encountering in recent months. Created last year to target what law enforcement authorities and victim advocates agree is a persistent and growing problem, the unit has been focusing on what they call “illicit massage businesses.”

The women identified as possible trafficking victims aren’t arrested. Instead, they’re offered services such as transportation and referrals to housing options or substance abuse treatment. While some haven’t accepted the offer of assistance or acknowledged they were involved in illegal activity, 12 women have been provided resources since the unit was formed, including the three workers at Crystal Spa, police said.

Master Cpl. Richard Chambers said human trafficking is nothing new, but detectives in drug and other investigations kept finding suspected victims, so the administration decided to commit resources to stemming the illicit practice in Delaware’s largest county, where 588,000 people live.

“We were seeing that there’s a bigger picture out there,” Chambers said. “We have started focusing on finding out where these victims are coming from, how they’re getting here and why they’re here. Obviously they’re coming from Asian countries. They’re forced to work very long hours and paid hardly anything, if anything. And it’s very disturbing.”

Most women at the illicit massage businesses in Delaware and across the country are middle-aged and hail from rural villages in China, South Korea or other parts of Asia, Poore said. They either speak English poorly or not at all.

Recruiters for the criminal enterprises lure the women to America with the promise of work to support their families, Poore said.

She said some of the trafficked women think they’re going to work as housekeepers or at other labor-intensive jobs, or in the case of one woman rescued in Delaware recently, as a yoga instructor, her profession in China.

The women who are trafficked to the East Coast are flown overseas into Philadelphia or New York, and are taken to Flushing, New York, which Poore calls the “criminal hub” of the illicit massage business network. Then they’re assessed by members of the trafficking organization and transported, often by bus, to degrading houses of prostitution in Delaware and elsewhere, Poore said.

While it’s great that this is finally happening, it should have taken place long ago.  It’s been over a decade since the General Assembly passed a really strong package of bills addressing human trafficking.  One of the crowning achievements of then-Sen. Patti Blevins.  Why it’s taken so long to address this is beyond me.

‘Chuck Schumer Eats Shit’.  Major props to Paula, who doesn’t comment here nearly enough, for flagging this story:

Imagine if Donald Trump went all-in endorsing a candidate for the Senate, campaigned for them and helped raise eleven times as much money as their opponent — who then lost.

There would be wall-to-wall media coverage declaring the end of Trump’s influence and of the Republican Party as we know it. “Trump’s Bitter Defeat,” The New York Times would say; “The End of an Era ,” The Washington Post would echo.

This actually just happened in Michigan’s Senate primary — with one detail glaringly absent.

Basically the entire Democratic Party leadership supported Haley Stevens, who outspent El-Sayed eleven to one amid a relentless campaign of warnings about how bad news bears he would be for state, party, country — but lost. And the media’s response? ‘He didn’t win by that much,’ ‘Now comes the hard part, the general election,’ and so on.

Bullshit.

This is a massive defeat for the Democratic Party old guard and an affirmation that the new crop of outsider, renegade candidates are the people’s choice.

Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — basically the entire Democratic establishment endorsed Haley Stevens, a textbook party stooge. For her to still lose is a repudiation and humiliation of not just Stevens but the entire political death star behind her.

El-Sayed’s insufficiently “big” win is in fact the highest-level Democratic upset since Barack Obama. The irony here is that Obama actually won the 2008 presidential primary by less than El-Sayed — just half a percent of the popular vote.

Imagine the headline, “Obama supporters didn’t get the big election night they wanted.” Would anyone be able to read that without laughing?

As with Obama, young people in Michigan voted for El-Sayed at rates that Washington types consider implausible or even impossible. Young people don’t vote, the conventional wisdom goes.

As I’ve written about before, from Zohran Mamdani to El-Sayed, the impossible keeps happening — because it’s only impossible if you follow the Washington obsessed and dominated news media. They rely on the very army of strategists, consultants, and pollsters for their spin, the same people who keep calling these races wrong and don’t seem to know a single American outside of the Acela Corridor.

That last ‘graf is what I like to call ‘the truth’.  Which reminds me:

The embattled establishment of the Democratic Party searched furiously for a political reset after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s progressive victory in Michigan handed the party’s long-dominant moderate wing its most painful defeat of the year.

Some strategists urgently pressed to adopt a sharper edge to tap into the fury among Democratic voters that was felling its centrist candidates. Others wanted to attack democratic socialism, undercutting a budding movement now set to have far more than a toehold in the next Congress. Yet another young democratic socialist ousted an incumbent congressman in Detroit on Tuesday.

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” said Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism.

Hmmm, The Third Way, eh?  Carper and Coons’ old stomping grounds.  Oh, and guess who else is a former co-chair?  Yep, that Lisa Blunt Rochester:

House Representatives: Jim Himes (CT), Gregory Meeks (NY), Terri Sewell (AL), Tony Cárdenas (CA), Josh Gottheimer (NJ), Brad Schneider (IL), Tom Suozzi (NY), Marc Veasey (TX), Darren Soto (FL), Sharice Davids (KS), and Marilyn Strickland (WA). (Past co-chairs also include former Reps. Derek Kilmer, Cheri Bustos, Kathleen Rice, Stephanie Murphy, and Lisa Blunt Rochester).

BTW, I don’t want to say that this Jonathan Cowan is a DINO-saur.  However:

With the bipartisan help of former U.S. senators Paul Tsongas (D-MA) and Warren Rudman (R-NH),^[2] Cowan co-founded, with Rob Nelson, the organization Lead…or Leave in 1992.^[3] The organization, with no paying members,^[4] was primarily funded by American businessman Pete Peterson.^[5]

Ah, yes, Pete Peterson.  Y’all remember who had a man-crush on Pete Peterson?  There was a time when Cassandra Marshall was a great blogger here.  Let her tell the story:

ONCE AGAIN we see Representative Carney getting focused on something that still isn’t the first priority of Americans. Second, this Concord Coalition does claim to be nonpartisan, but keep in mind that one of its founders is none other than Pete Peterson, the man who has spent almost a half of a billion dollars of his own money to destroy Social Security and Medicare. Of course, Peterson and his groups (including the sham that is Fix the Debt) never quite see their way past cutting back on New Deal commitments to get to deficit (or debt — I never understand which they are trying to get to) as their preferred solutions to the US money problems. I haven’t seen them advocating cutting back on the DOD, or maybe cutting back on the funds available to local law enforcement for arming themselves to the teeth. I certainly never see any of them talk about making sure that corporations actually pay their fair share of taxes — eliminating their loopholes and even their subsidies. Or how about growing the economy as a way to reduce deficits?

But hey, I don’t know what is on the agenda of Carney’s meeting, other than it it being supported by a Pete Peterson stalking horse. It is (according to the poster on Facebook) an “interactive exercise, developed by the non-partisan Concord Coalition, that lets you make decisions about the priorities and challenges of the Federal budget.” Which means that it could be a live exercise of something like this book tries to accomplish (and the group that supported this book has Pete Peterson as an Honorary Board Member). If it is, it could be a useful exercise in demonstrating just how difficult the budget problem is.

Delaware’s Democratic leaders have sucked for a long time.   Which reminds me–I think I’ve got a story coming up on the latest proof of this…

What do you want to talk about?