Archive for the 'Your tax dollars at work – and play.' Category
27th March 2025
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Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong – a transplant surgeon-turned-biotech billionaire renowned for inventing the cancer drug Abraxane – has issued a startling warning in a new in-depth interview with Tucker Carlson.
Soon-Shiong, founder of ImmunityBio ($IBRX) and owner of the Los Angeles Times, claims that the COVID-19 pandemic, and the very vaccines developed to fight it, may be contributing to a global surge in “terrifyingly aggressive” cancers. In the nearly two-hour conversation, the Los Angeles Times owner leveraged his decades of clinical and scientific experience to outline why he suspects an unprecedented cancer epidemic is unfolding. This report examines Dr. Soon-Shiong’s background and assertions, the scientific responses for and against his claims, new data on post-COVID health trends, and the far-reaching implications if his alarming hypothesis proves true.
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26th March 2025
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A federal law granting broad immunity to vaccine administrators and others does not preempt charges that a mother’s constitutional rights were violated when her son was given a COVID-19 vaccine without her consent, the North Carolina Supreme Court has ruled.
What goes around comes around.
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26th March 2025
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Since returning to the White House on Jan. 20, President Donald Trump has unleashed a storm of executive orders, a great many of which have been halted or blocked—not by the now-Republican-controlled Congress, but by federal district courts. According to numbers compiled by the Harvard Law Review, U.S. district courts have issued more sweeping injunctions against Trump in the past two months than they have against three former presidents over their entire terms.
Since Jan. 20, lower courts have imposed 15 nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration, compared to what the Harvard Law Review recounts as six over the course of George W. Bush’s eight-year presidency, 12 over the course of Barack Obama’s eight years in the White House, and 14 during Joe Biden’s single four-year term.
During his first term, Trump was subjected to 64 nationwide injunctions. If inferior courts continue issuing nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration at the current rate (15 for every two months in office), then the second Trump administration will have accumulated 360 nationwide injunctions by the time the president leaves office—and a grand total of 424 over the course of both of Trump’s terms. However, there have been a total of over 45 rulings or more targeted injunctions leveled against the second Trump administration overall, according to The New York Times.
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26th March 2025
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In 1974, Congress created the Legal Services Corporation to connect lower-income Americans involved in civil disputes with free legal help. The law that established the agency stipulated that authorization for its funding would expire in 1980, when lawmakers were required to vote on whether to keep it alive.
They never did. Still, Congress has funded LSC every year since. In fiscal 2025, its 51st year, LSC’s 135 employees will spend 95% of its now $560 million annual budget paying legal groups to represent Americans in cases such as eviction, domestic violence, and disputes over government benefits, according to Ron Flagg, the agency’s president since 2020.
“LSC would welcome reauthorization,” Flagg said. “We haven’t hidden from it. Every budget cycle, we go through an exhaustive process before Congress appropriates funds — dozens of meetings with leaders of both parties. We demonstrate our return on investment, how we help 2 million Americans get life-saving legal help.”
The Legal Services Corp. now stands as America’s oldest “Zombie” program, but it’s far from unique. At a time when the Trump administration is moving aggressively to scale back government, including eliminating the entire Education Department, it’s sobering to note that 1,503 agencies or programs live on despite expired authorizations, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Another 155 will expire on Sept. 30. The Zombies, nearly half of which have been officially dead for more than a decade, persist in a budgetary netherworld. In a deep dive last year, CBO analysts were able to find dollar amounts for 491 of the programs, with total expenditures of $516 billion. They don’t know how much funding the other programs received.
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24th March 2025
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Over the past three weeks, anyone interested in free speech (or not) has been on the receiving end of a non-consensual firehouse of flood-the-zone information warfare. Every man and his DOGE has chimed in, capturing via screenshot a score of Osama bin Laden of censorship hideouts – “It’s USAID!” “It’s NED!” “It’s NIH”!
USAID in particular has been made responsible for everything, from funding chemtrails in Naples to biting your own cheek. It’s a shame the word misinformation is of so little use anymore.
USAID is important, but the censorship happens via a system comprising hundreds, possibly thousands, of organisations, small and large. Is there a secret bunker? I don’t know, it isn’t impossible, but the approach is cartoonish. There are key nodes, organisations, and networks that are more important than others, particularly those that hand out money. In fact “complex” was the term that quickly gained favour during the Twitter files, precisely because it captured the system’s complexity – it’s what made it work and minimised public scrutiny.
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24th March 2025
Open the Books.
Last month Open the Books auditors?took a closer look at the Federal Register?– the official publication of the U.S. government. It publishes every new rule and regulation, every Executive Order and Congressional hearing, and much more. It should be a reliable encyclopedia of government, but we found at least 75 of the 441 entities listed were defunct – defunded, disbanded, renamed, merged with another entity, completed their mission, etc.
We all know waste is rampant – but this was more evidence that federal recordkeeping is also a big mess. The scope and complexity of the task before DOGE became even clearer in this context.
So we set out to catalog every agency that reports data – not just their current costs, but the size of their staffs and spending stretching back decades. The result will be the clearest picture yet of government’s growth over time.
We released the?two batches of data in the ensuing weeks, tracking spending and headcounts for big Cabinet-level agencies like the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Education, and State; as well as more obscure, independent ones like the Administrative Conference of the United States.
At agency after agency, we found spending outstripped growth of the staff and even inflation – often many times over.
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24th March 2025
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Former Wall Street money manager and financial analyst Ed Dowd of PhinanceTechnologies.com is back with an update of a report on “Danger of Deep Worldwide Recession in 2025.”
It was not just heavy government spending on illegal immigration, but “mind shocking” fraud that has been revealed with DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency).
Investigators have uncovered $115 billion so far with many hundreds of billions more to be exposed. Dowd says, “Both sides of the aisle are probably going to have problems…”
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24th March 2025
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What happens when you cross a Third-World tribal culture with an urban Democratic establishment? You can probably guess the outcome, but in Minnesota we don’t have to guess. We have seen it on display in the sprawling Feeding Our Future case that represents the largest COVID fraud discovered so far in the United States.
A cast of almost entirely Somali immigrants is charged with siphoning some $250 million from the federal child nutrition program administered by the Minnesota Department of Education into their own pockets between March 2020 and January 2022, when federal agents assembled from around the United States to raid the many scenes of the crime around the Twin Cities. Since then 70 defendants have been charged, 37 have pleaded guilty, and 7 have been convicted in the two trials conducted in the case so far. The others have yet to be tried.
Minnesota—mostly the Twin Cities area—is home to some 100,000 Somali immigrants, the largest Somali population in North America. Starting in the 1990s, the State Department directed thousands of refugees from Somalia’s civil war to Minnesota. As Kelly Riddell reported in a 2015 Washington Times story, Minnesota affords these refugees “some of America’s most generous welfare and charity programs.” Riddell quoted Professor Ahamed Samatar of St. Paul’s Macalester College: “Minnesota is exceptional in so many ways but it’s the closest thing in the United States to a true social democratic state.” After a dip in 2008, the inflow of Somalis has continued unabated and augmented by Somalis from other states. If it takes a village, Minnesota has what it takes.
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23rd March 2025
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“Donald Trump has officially declared war on America’s students,” Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., posted on X.
Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, responded to the news by accusing the administration of aiming to “demolish the nation’s public education system.”
“I’m so mad, I’m spitting mad about this, because it’s hurting the people who can’t vote, children don’t vote!” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said on MSNBC.
These people know, of course, that eliminating the Department of Education doesn’t actually mean “declaring war on America’s students” or demolishing the “public education system.” (Even school choice, which may weaken public schools by allowing tax dollars to follow students to home schooling and other options, will only introduce competition for public schools, not destroy them.)
President Trump didn’t order the demolishing of schools—he ordered the Department of Education to begin the process of turning its functions over to state education departments and to other federal agencies.
The Department of Education wasn’t ever doing any education, much less the education of children. It’s function was to funnel money taken from taxpayers to various education-related Democrat groups, like teachers’ unions, ‘education’ think-tanks, and left-leaning colleges and universities.
“Teacher unions benefit from access to a central place where they can advocate for programs that benefit them,” Butcher told The Daily Signal in a Friday interview. He mentioned Title II spending, which funds teacher training and recruitment. “Any increase in federal Title II spending allows them to promote the idea that they need to hire more staff, which potentially gives them more members.”
“Having access to a central office from which they can lobby for large sums is more cost-effective to them than 50 different states,” he explained. However, having a central office may become a two-edged sword.
Follow the money….
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23rd March 2025
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The “autopen” is in vogue. On March 17, President Donald Trump announced in a late-night social media post that he would ignore several pardons issued by his predecessor, President Joe Biden, because they were allegedly signed by autopen.
An autopen is a machine that reproduces handwriting. In the case of elected officials, who are expected to sign thousands of official documents on a regular basis, autopens are often used to reproduce their signatures in lieu of them signing each paper by their own hand.
The use of autopens has raised constitutional questions for some after Trump’s accusations of autopen use by Biden. They say that autopen use casts doubt on whether Biden knew the documents were being signed at all, thus implicating their validity.
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22nd March 2025
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One of the seven small federal agencies that President Donald Trump ordered downsized or eliminated on Friday was rife with corruption, with its employees hiring friends and relatives, commissioning paintings of themselves, and using government credit cards to indulge in constant luxuries.
The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) occupied a nine-story office tower on D.C.’s K Street for only 60 employees, many of whom actually worked from home, prior to the pandemic. Its managers had luxury suites with full bathrooms; one manager would often be “in the shower” when she was needed, while another used her bathroom as a cigarette lounge. FMCS recorded its director as being on a years-long business trip to D.C. so he could have all of his meals and living expenses covered by taxpayers, simply for showing up to the office.
FMCS is a 230-employee agency that exists to serve as a voluntary mediator between unions and businesses. As an “independent agency,” its director nominally reports to the president, but the agency is so small that in effect, there is no oversight at all — and it showed, becoming a real-life caricature of all the excesses that the Department of Government Efficiency has alleged take place in government.
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22nd March 2025
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My, what a surprise.
A host of federal government agencies have overseen massive spending for years while greatly expanding their workforces, according to an OpenTheBooks report.
Annual spending across multiple federal government agencies has exploded over the past several years, often outpacing growth of staff and even inflation rates, according to a report from OpenTheBooks first obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The report comes amid President Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to crack down on wasteful spending across the federal government and reduce the federal workforce to save American taxpayers money.
The Department of Commerce’s annual spending grew from roughly $13.1 million in 2021—the year former President Joe Biden took office—to an estimated $20.5 million in 2024, OpenTheBooks’ report found. Meanwhile, the department’s workforce declined from 53,939 in 2020 to 47,650 in 2024.
“Time after time, at agency after agency, we see spending skyrocketing since 2000, even when headcounts grew modestly and stayed flat,” OpenTheBooks wrote in the report. “In this most recent batch of examples, we also saw Biden administration spending priorities reveal themselves through the outlays at key agencies”
Jerry Pournelle was fond of saying that the actual function of government is to hire and pay government em,ployees . These guys have got it down.
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21st March 2025
The New Neo.
These judges apparently consider themselves the firewall against Trump and the troglodytes who elected him.
…
So it’s The Left Strikes Back. Problems at the ballot box? Send in the judiciary. What failed to be accomplished through the kangaroo court lawfare to which Trump was subjected prior to his election – the goal being to prevent him from being elected to a second term at all – could possibly be accomplished by tying his hands whenever he tries to do much of anything as president. These are not unbiased decisions for the most part, but these judges consider it their duty to stop the right from changing things in any big way.
It’s somewhat similar to Russiagate during Trump’s first term, which was an attempt by the intelligence community and the FBI, DOJ, and press to hamstring Trump and if possible remove him from office. That didn’t work, either. Will this? It really depends on SCOTUS, and many people are worried about how Roberts will see his role and that of the Supreme Court.
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21st March 2025
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Craig Iffland, an expert on the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, says the files released Tuesday evening show the CIA went to extraordinary lengths to hide embarrassing details about its operations in the 1960s.
It is Iffland’s expert opinion that “[m]ost of the major documents long sought by researchers can be found in this release, including the identities of a CIA-directed infiltration team of anti-Castro Cuban exiles tasked with the assassination of Fidel Castro; a list of CIA assets operating in New Orleans in the summer of 1963 who may have interacted with [Lee Harvey] Oswald during his stay there; a series of reports on the technical capabilities of the Mexico City CIA station that monitored Oswald during his visit to the Cuban and Soviet [embassies] in late September 1963; as well as previously redacted testimony of CIA officials who were involved in monitoring Oswald from the time of his defection in October 1959 until the assassination.”
It is expected to take weeks for researchers such as Iffland to comb through the approximately 64,000 pages of material that were released Tuesday evening. So far, however, the 1960s-era CIA has not come away looking particularly ethical.
My, what a surprise.
I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning….
UPDATE: JFK files biggest bombshells from CIA’s chilling claim to UK’s attempts to save him (UK Daily Record)
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21st March 2025
The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.
Food banks across the country are scrambling to make up a $500 million budget shortfall after the Trump administration froze funds for hundreds of shipments of produce, poultry and other items that states had planned to distribute to needy residents.
And, as we all know, if the Federal government doesn’t do something, it will Never Get Done. (Funding! We need Funding!)
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21st March 2025
Axios, a Voice of the Crust.
President Trump signed an executive order to close down the Department of Education on Thursday — an unprecedented move that presents big questions for student loan borrowers.
Why it matters: The department plays a key role in managing some $1.5 trillion in student debt for more than 40 million borrowers, and a vast majority of its budget is allocated to the agency that oversees the federal student loan system.
And there you have it. The virtue of the Department of Education, in the eyes of the Deep State and its minions, is not that it actually did any ‘educating’ but as a source of funds for what might be called the Education Establishment, from teachers’ unions to those who have PhDs but no chance of gainful employment and depend on government ‘funding’ in the form of research grants. That’s why the cost of higher education has risen at many timers the rate of inflation–such institutions know that the taxpayer will pick up the tab, whether they want to or not.
This $1.5 trillion in student debt didn’t just rise from the swamp like Godzilla, but came about because of the proglodyte conviction that every child is from Lake Woebegone and therefore Above Average, and so deserves to go to college. Hence the government (without which Nothing Will Be Done) must pay for it, disregarding the fact that (by definition) half of the population is Below Average and can’t cope with college-level work (which, research shows, requires an IQ of at least 110).
As with housing, the government makes it possible for people to do something that, in reality, they have no business doing. All of these situations arise because politicians and government employees set the table with cheap pies and cakes and donuts and then wring their hands because we are undergoing an Obesity Epidemic that came from nobody knows where but which will require more Government Money (‘funding’), taken from the taxpayers, to fix.
As here, the purpose of loyal Minions of the Crust, especially in the Narrative Media, is to wrap this hand-wringing in appropriate tender-hearted clichés so that Low Information Voters will acquiesce in signing off on this great redistribution of ‘funding’ from those who work for a living to those who merely Study and Think Deep Thoughts.
That’s the basis for all of the hate and discontent toward Elon Musk (and, behind him, to Trump): He is threatening the gravy train of taxpayer ‘funding’ upon which al of these drones depend for their BMWs and houses in Chevy Chase.
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20th March 2025
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Why are eggs cheaper in Canada and Mexico than in America?
One reason is that Mexico and Canada have culled chickens on a smaller scale than we have. Mexico began vaccinating its chickens in the 90s and doesn’t cull chickens unless the outbreak is severe, while the Biden administration wiped out huge numbers of chickens with little pretext.
“The Biden administration and the Department of Agriculture directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country, therefore lack of egg supply, which is leading to the shortage,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said back in January.
The actual number is now over 150 million when including ducks, turkeys and other birds.
The mass cullings haven’t stopped the spread of bird flu. Ever since the Biden administration launched that policy in 2022, the virus is now present in every state and the cullings actually helped infect human workers who handled the disposal of millions of dead chickens.
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20th March 2025
Scott Johnson at Power Line.
Attorneys in the Feeding Our Future trial of Aimee Bock and Salim Said made their closing arguments to the jury yesterday. This is the second trial of defendants charged in the massive $250 million fraud, the biggest Covid fraud discovered in the United States. Of the 70 defendants indicted, 37 have pleaded guilty. Trials of other defendants are scheduled through the rest of this year.
This trial is of particular interest because Aimee Bock was the executive director of the Feeding Our Future nonprofit that sponsored the admitted liars and cheats who operated the “sites” participating in the federal child nutrition program they defrauded. Salim Said ran the Safari restaurant at which the business model of the fraud seems to have been pioneered starting in April 2020.
In its totality, the fraud committed in these cases is gross, disgusting, despicable. What did the lawyers have to say? Their arguments ran over four hours. Here are highlights.
UPDATE: Feeding Our Fraud: Guilty
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20th March 2025
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Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D., Texas) declared in February that the government is “not in the business of giving out money” to taxpayers. But when it comes to the simple luxuries in her own life, the firebrand lawmaker is happy to let the public foot the bill.
That includes her taxpayer-funded car. Crockett has billed the public $999.96 every month since she assumed office in January 2023 to pay for a “vehicle lease,” according to House disbursement records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. It’s unclear the make and model of Crockett’s publicly financed whip—lawmakers are not required to disclose that information and her office did not return a request for comment—but it’s enough to pay for a Tesla Model S, Elon Musk’s luxury sports sedan, which leases for $998 per month.
Crockett obtained her taxpayer-funded vehicle through a little-known fringe benefit that allows representatives to bill the public for a fresh set of EPA-approved wheels to traverse their congressional districts. Some 42 lawmakers participated in the program in 2024, including 15 Republican participants who represent geographically expansive districts that average 18,100 square miles each. The Republican participants primarily leased economy vehicles from American manufacturers, with several of their offices telling the Free Beacon that leasing a vehicle is a far more cost-effective way for the lawmakers to traverse their massive districts as opposed to paying for airfare or using their personal vehicle at the IRS reimbursement rate of 67 cents per mile.
My, what a surprise. I doubt that Republicans are significantly better.
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20th March 2025
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The first of what is expected to be many deportation flights has landed in the crisis worn country of Haiti this week, carrying 46 aliens including 25 convicted felons expelled from the US.
The Trump Administration has revoked protections established during the Biden Administration that shielded roughly half a million Haitians from deportation. They will lose their work permits and could be subject to removal from the country in the near term. Many of the Haitians deported Tuesday had crossed into the United States illegally or were waiting for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) approval, which grants individuals legal authority to remain in the country but does not offer a long-term pathway to citizenship
Apparently the era of America as the Dumpster of the World is over.
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19th March 2025
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A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit recently determined that the efforts of a Florida middle school to help a minor child socially transition to a different gender behind her parents’ backs were not sufficiently egregious to “shock the conscience” and allow the parents’ claim to proceed. But in granting the school officials’ motion to dismiss the case, the panel’s ruling in Littlejohn v. Leon County wasn’t just bad policy, it was bad legal analysis as well.
In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the nation, and most children were relegated to virtual school, January and Jeffrey Littlejohn’s 13-year-old daughter told January that “she no longer felt like a girl.”
This revelation appeared at the same time that three of their daughter’s friends at her local middle school had also suddenly declared a transgender identity, and while their daughter was struggling with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder that made online learning challenging.
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19th March 2025
ZMan says the quiet part out loud.
One way to look at the last ten years is as the struggle of the United States to finally close the books on the Cold War and the 20th century. The reason Trump exists, and the managerial system has reacted in such a violent way toward him, is that he represents the end of the conditions that made it all possible. The return of a strong executive and the normal functioning of government is the end of the managerial system and everything around it.
The comparisons to the late Soviet times are compelling because the Russians went through a similarly violent process to escape their own managerial system and the ideology that controlled it. Like the Soviets, America is now run by old people trapped in the past, lacking the talent to adjust to new realities. Like the Soviet system, the American system barely performs basic functions. Like the Soviets, American political actors can only break things.
That last part is important. Reform by its very nature calls into question the legitimacy of current processes. The reason for reform is that the system is not working to the satisfaction of the users, so it must be changed. Good reformers, however, do not attack the core logic of the system, but focus instead on the parts of it that implement that core logic to maintain the legitimacy of the whole. Maybe it means new people or possibly changes to parts of the system.
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18th March 2025
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“During the Biden administration, federal agencies spent millions bargaining sweetheart collective-bargaining agreements that imposed significant costs on the American taxpayer while impeding effective and efficient agency operations,” acting OPM Director Charles Ezell wrote in the memo. “Agencies paid for both the costs of their and their unions’ bargaining teams.”
While the federal government has previously tracked “official time”—the time government employees spend working for the union but for which they get paid by the taxpayer—Ezell noted that the government has not systematically tracked the specific cost of federal collective bargaining negotiations.
Collective bargaining negotiations may cost a great deal. “The Social Security Administration, for example, reported that it cost the agency over $1.8 million to negotiate [collective bargaining agreements] with two of its bargaining units,” Ezell noted. This number did not include the cost of another round of bargaining in the middle of the time covered by the agreement.
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18th March 2025
Newsbusters.
CBC Chairperson Rep. Yvette Clarke, noting Black Caucus support for Green, then went into the usual refrain about refusing to accept spending cuts in “programs like Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security while giving tax cuts to billionaires like Elon Musk.”
But there have been no discussions about cuts in Medicare and Social Security, nor are there tax cuts targeted to billionaires.
Regarding Medicaid, this is the usual Democrat distortion, calling reducing proposed increases in spending a cut.
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18th March 2025
The Antiplanner.
The Baltimore Peninsula was supposed to be a $5.5 billion walkable city of residences, shops, and offices built on a former industrial site. Promoters convinced the city of Baltimore to put up well over $600 million in subsidies for the project. Now, most of the construction is done and it looks like one of China’s many ghost cities.
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17th March 2025
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Imagine my surprise when, Sunday, I read a New York Times editorial admitting that “We Were Badly Misled” about Covid as it was happening.
The op-ed matter of factly concluded what we’ve all known for years — that despite being the overwhelmingly most “common sense” place to look, the Covid-19 lab leak theory was dismissed by scientists and public health officials, who suppressed discussions and misled the public to maintain the appearance of consensus.
Influential studies downplayed the lab leak theory, while private communications among scientists revealed they actually considered it likely, with key figures, including a senior adviser to Fauci, attempting to erase records.
It admits EcoHealth Alliance, which collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, withheld critical information about its research, and only after persistent investigations was it finally banned from receiving federal funding.
It also stipulates that after Covid-19, controversial virus research, including experiments on bat coronaviruses, continues under inadequate biosafety conditions, raising concerns about future accidental outbreaks.
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17th March 2025
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Ten days or so after the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project disclosed that nearly every document bearing former President Biden’s signature during his first term had been signed by an autopen—except for one—questions arose over whether executive orders and pardons could be deemed invalid, as we noted that Biden’s staff likely leveraged his rapid cognitive deterioration to sign those documents via autopen.
This raises some very fundamental questions that I’m afraid will have to be answered by the courts.
Overnight, President Trump declared that the 11th-hour pardons, including those given to members of Congress who investigated the January 6 insurrection, were “void, vacant, and of no further force or effect, because of the fact that they were done by autopen.” Some of those last-minute pardons include Deep Staters, such as former Representative Liz Cheney, retired General Mark Milley, and government scientist Anthony Fauci.
I’m not sure that’s correct. All that needs to happen is for Biden to testify, in open court or by affidavit, that the signature in question is, in fact, his signature for it to be valid, same as with ‘electronically signed’ documents.
Now, if it can be shown that at the time they were ‘autosigned’ he was non compos mentis, and there appears to be a good chance that such can be shown, then that calls the whole shebang into question. Again, the courts are going to have to break some new ground here.
Interesting times….
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17th March 2025
Civil Discourse, a Voice of the Crust.
On March 12, there was reporting that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was preparing to lay off more than 1,000 workers as part of the Trump administration’s “reductions in force” directive to federal agencies. Cuts like that call into question whether NOAA will continue to provide the early warnings and predictive modeling that help people prepare for weather emergencies in advance. People who live in hurricane and tornado country keep their “NOAA weather radios” handy, and they are especially important for events that occur, as they frequently do, when most of us are asleep.
In theory, it sounds like one more bad thing to worry about. In practice, it’s much worse. We’ve just had a demonstration of precisely how effective NOAA is and what we stand to lose without it.
Beginning on Friday, violent, long-track tornadoes with damaging winds of up to 80 mph and large hail materialized across the Midwest and South. This was the news Friday night. NOAA’s early warning system, transmitted on social media, radio, television, and by word of mouth, kept it from being much worse.
NOAA? The same guys that are making and faking the models and ‘data’ that pros up the WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE FROM CLIMATE CHANGE Narrative?
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17th March 2025
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Johns Hopkins University said on Thursday that it will lay off over 2,000 workers worldwide following the Trump administration’s termination of $800 million in federal funding for the institution.
In the coming year or two it will astonish all of the people who haven’t been paying attention just how much of their money is being spent on toys for the Crust and their minions.
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16th March 2025
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When the Biden administration announced $27 billion in environmental grants last April, it set the clock ticking on a predicament: how to get the unprecedented sums for the President’s envisioned NetZero future out the door before the fiscal year ended on Sept. 30?
The task was complicated by the fact most of the money – $20 billion – would go to just eight nonprofits that, like the Environmental Protection Agency itself, had never handled such gargantuan grants.
In hindsight, it’s easy to suspect that corners were cut, or laws were broken, or, at the very least, extraordinary measures were taken.
And it makes you wonder how the laundered the ‘10% for the Big Guy’….
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15th March 2025
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President Donald Trump on Friday issued an executive order revoking the security clearances of employees of New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Warton & Garrison (Paul Weiss) “pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest,” according to the White House.
Paul Weiss is an old-line Wall Street firm.
The law firm has been a close ally to Democrats coming after Trump over his conduct, including the Russiagate collusion investigation that found no collusion, while a partner of the firm and a former leading prosecutor in Mueller’s office brought a pro bono suit on behalf of the DC Attorney General against individuals alleged to have taken part in the Jan. 6, 2021 protest at the US Capitol.
Trump singled out Paull Weiss’s hiring of attorney Mark Pomerantz – who left the firm to work in the Manhattan DA’s office to draft a prosecution against Trump regarding Trump’s personal and business affairs. Then, Pomerantz rejoined Paul Weiss after leaving the DA’s office.
Actions have consequences.
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15th March 2025
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Five years ago, politicians and bureaucrats went berserk and pointlessly ravaged Americans’ freedom. The Covid-19 pandemic provided the pretext to destroy hundreds of thousands of businesses, padlock churches, close down schools, and effectively place hundreds of millions of Americans under house arrest. Despite all the forced sacrifices, most Americans contracted covid and more than a million were listed as dying from the virus.
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14th March 2025
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom is seeking a $3.4 billion loan from the general fund to help a shortfall in the state’s Medi-Cal healthcare program. The shortfall problem comes only a year after Newsom expanded Medi-Cal coverage to include millions of illegal immigrants. California’s continuing deficits and mounting debts have some officials concerned that the additional subsidies to illegals will cause a fiscal emergency in the near future.
There are at least 2.6 million illegal immigrants in the state according to recent estimates. However, California has operated on sanctuary laws since 2013 and does not track the migrant status of its citizens. Because of this, there is no way for officials to estimate potential costs associated with welfare programs and medical programs which illegals commonly tap into. Around 60% of all illegal migrants exploit welfare programs upon arrival to the US and access is generally dependent on which state they settle in.
In 2024, California expanded the state’s Medicaid program (also known as Medi-Cal) in two major ways. First, the state opened up Medicaid coverage to illegal immigrants between the ages of 26 and 49. While the state had previously granted Medicaid eligibility to illegal immigrants in other age groups, the 26 to 49 age bracket is by far the largest in California (and nationally), comprising about 75% of individuals who are in the country illegally.
The state’s general fund is, technically, separate from the ample federal funding that California receives, and federal dollars are not legally allowed to go towards migrants. But the way in which the government cycles those dollars through its programs is deceptive and California is far more dependent on federal money than it claims.
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13th March 2025
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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.
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12th March 2025
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In news that we’re certain will have Adam Schiff laying out a multi-national, multi-planetary conspiracy that can only be stopped by impeaching Donald Trump tomorrow, a new report from Bloomberg found that from 2017 to 2019, employees at Evraz North America Inc., a Russian-owned steel manufacturer, falsified quality control tests on armor plating used in the JLTV, according to an internal report and company officials.
The Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), the U.S. Army’s successor to the Humvee, is designed to protect troops from bullets, mines, and explosives. At its Portland, Oregon facility, workers skipped mandatory hardness tests and fabricated results for about 12,800 armor plates, which were falsely labeled as approved. Some of these plates later developed cracks, raising concerns about their reliability in combat.
Oshkosh Defense LLC, a major military vehicle manufacturer, was a key customer for Evraz’s armor plates. The company produces the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), marketed as a “go-anywhere, do-anything” light tactical vehicle. Primarily used by the U.S. military, the JLTV has also been provided to Ukraine, Israel, Brazil, and Lithuania. As of last year, over 22,000 JLTVs had been built, each expected to last around 20 years, the report says.
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11th March 2025
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The Environmental Protection Agency canceled two $20 million environmental justice grants that the Biden administration awarded to its own advisers, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.
On Monday, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced the agency’s latest round of grant cancellations and cost-cutting measures. Included among the more than 400 canceled grants are 2 that the Biden administration awarded in December to Tennessee-based nonprofit Young, Gifted & Green and North Carolina-based nonprofit Democracy Green, a source familiar told the Free Beacon. Both groups had connections to the Biden White House and EPA—and neither had handled such a substantial amount of money before securing the taxpayer funds.
Young, Gifted & Green received its $20 million environmental justice grant after its CEO—LaTricea Adams—personally applied for the funding while simultaneously serving as a member of a top White House environmental justice council, the Free Beacon reported last month. The group has reported just $2.7 million in revenue—about 14 percent the size of the grant—since it registered as a nonprofit in 2020, tax filings show.
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11th March 2025
The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.
A senior official at the main U.S. aid agency, which is being dismantled by the Trump administration, told employees to clear safes holding classified documents and personnel files by shredding the papers or putting them into bags for burning, according to an email sent to the staff.
The email sent by Erica Y. Carr, the acting executive secretary, told employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development to empty out the classified safe and personnel document files on Tuesday. “Shred as many documents first, and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break,” Ms. Carr wrote, according to a copy of the email obtained by The New York Times.
…
It is unclear if Ms. Carr or any other official at U.S.A.I.D. got permission from the National Archives and Records Administration to destroy the documents. The Federal Records Act of 1950 requires U.S. government officials to ask the records administration for approval before destroying documents.
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11th March 2025
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House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was able to convince most Republicans to vote for the bill, with the exception of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), while one Democrat – Jared Golden (D-ME) joined the Republicans in passing the measure which increases security spending by $4.4 billion, contains a $440 million boost for immigration enforcement, and cuts the IRS budget by $20 billion.
It also prevents Washington DC from spending $1 billion of its own tax dollars, and allows the Pentagon flexibility to buy new weapons – an odd provision in a stopgap bill that was demanded by GOP defense hawks.
The bill also has no new limits on DOGE, and does not prevent agency heads from firing federal workers or canceling federal grants and contracts – actions which are currently being challenged in the courts in what critics argue amount to illegal impoundments of money approved by Congress.
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11th March 2025
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American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten is known primarily for two things: screaming into microphones at political rallies and making the teacher’s union an extension of the Democratic Party. However, Weingarten had an unintended substantive moment when she changed her earlier position on the elimination of the Education Department. Weingarten previously shrugged off the elimination of the department as not a big deal for education. Recently, she returned to her irate default in denouncing the elimination. The reason, however, was telling.
After Trump was reelected in November, Weingarten said that the elimination was not a big deal and that teachers had originally opposed the creation of the department: “I mean, my members don’t really care about whether they have a bureaucracy of the Department of Education or not. In fact, Al Shanker and the [American Federation of Teachers] in the 1970s were opposed to its creation.”
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11th March 2025
Read it … if you can….
A Connecticut college student is suing the Hartford Board of Education and the city of Hartford for negligence.
Nineteen-year-old Aleysha Ortiz says she graduated from high school with honors and earned a college scholarship, but she can’t read or write.
In some ways, Ortiz is living an American dream.
The 19-year-old began her freshman year at the University of Connecticut in Hartford this past fall.
U.Conn. has never been known as an educational powerhouse. At least she’s got her DEI to keep her warm.
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9th March 2025
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Dr. Peter McCullough told The HighWire’s Del Bigtree that the current strain of bird flu likely resulted from gain-of-function research conducted at the USDA Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Georgia.
“This strain of bird flu is different. This looks like it actually came from serial passage research done at the USDA Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Georgia … We’re so sure of it that we’ve published this in a peer-reviewed paper … and it hasn’t been disputed by any of the public health officials. We cite the USDA research.” McCullough told Bigtree.
McCullough continued, “Serial passage is when a blend of viral strains is intentionally put in a mallard duck. They were trying to see which strain would pass to other mallard ducks. The mallard duck is studied because its gullet is where the virus attaches and doesn’t go into the lungs. And indeed, they found CLADE 23446 that looked like it transmitted … and sure enough, Athens was where the first cases were found.”
“The mallard ducks could spread it all over and in migratory waterfowl. It quickly spread into mammals, and now up to 40 different species of mammals,” McCullough said.
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9th March 2025
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The audit was commissioned by federal U.S. District Judge David O. Carter and completed by Alvarez & Marsal Public Sector Services, LLC. (A&M).
The report noted that A&M found it challenging to completely quantify how Los Angeles officials spent approximately $2.3 billion in funding meant to shelter, feed, and serve homeless people due to the incomplete and inaccurate manner the city’s homelessness program recorded and collected data.
The report painted a grim picture of Los Angeles’ homeless program managed by Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), which was established in 1993.
My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised….
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7th March 2025
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According to the report, The TSA has more people doing “full-time union work” vs. performing actual screening functions at 86% of US airports. Put another way, 374 out of 432 federalized airports have fewer than 200 TSA Officers to perform screening functions, while the rest are paid by the government but work “full-time on union matters” and do not retain certification to perform screening.
What’s more, DHS cited a recent TSA employee survey which found that over 60% of “poor performers” are allowed to stay employed and “not surprisingly, continue to not perform.”
(Also, maybe get rid of the nut-grabbers in the TSA patdown area when we don’t want to submit to those Total Recall scanners made by Leidos – formerly SAIC).
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7th March 2025
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It’s an absolute disgrace: the Climate United Fund, a shady nonprofit slapped together in November 2022, somehow wangled a jaw-dropping $7 billion grant from the Biden administration’s climate slush fund in April 2024—the largest nonprofit grant in U.S. history. This money, ripped from taxpayers’ pockets, was supposed to fuel clean energy projects under the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) of the Inflation Reduction Act. Instead, it’s become a glaring symbol of political cronyism, grift, and utter mismanagement, leaving Americans furious and demanding answers.
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7th March 2025
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The Biden presidency might have been the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the American people. A shocking investigation by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project has revealed that virtually every document bearing Joe Biden’s signature during his presidency was signed by an autopen — except for one.
What makes this revelation particularly damning is that the only document confirmed to have Biden’s actual signature was his letter announcing his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race. Let that sink in for a moment.
Remember when House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) revealed his discussion with Biden when Biden couldn’t recall signing the executive order halting LNG exports? Now we know why — he probably didn’t. The real question is: Who did? Who was running the country while Biden was not all there?
I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.
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7th March 2025
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The U.S. remains puzzled about how many weapons the Houthis have or where they get them all, a senior U.S. defense official told The War Zone, adding that the militants are highly innovative when it comes to developing their arsenal. Meanwhile, numerous airstrikes by the U.S. and its allies on Houthi targets in Yemen have not halted the rebel group’s ability to produce the weapons and use them at will, the official said.
“There’s some debate as to what’s in their magazine,” the official told The War Zone during a media engagement at the Air and Space Forces Association Air Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado. “There’s a good bit right now we don’t know about the Houthis.”
Your tax dollars at work.
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6th March 2025
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President Donald Trump pushed border encounters to historical lows, and did so without signing into law a bipartisan border deal relentlessly lauded by his Democratic opponents.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem confirmed that there were a mere 200 migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border on Feb. 22, marking the lowest single-day apprehension number in over 15 years. This milestone was followed up by Trump’s announcement that there were only 8,326 migrant apprehensions at the border during his first full month in office, a figure dwarfed by the regular monthly averages seen during the previous administration.
The southern border is becoming so quiet that Tom Homan, who is leading the Trump administration’s deportation operation, says he doesn’t recall activity this calm in his entire career in federal immigration enforcement. The border czar first began working for the Border Patrol in 1984.
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6th March 2025
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Organic food production is heavily regulated—forbidding genetically modified organisms as well as approximately 700 chemicals that are used in non-organic agriculture—and certification is required.
To achieve organic certification, farmers spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars annually to comply with record keeping requirements and prepare for regular document and facility inspections.
Non-organic farms do not have such overhead costs and thus have fewer expenses priced into the cost of goods sold.
Throughout the growing seasons, organic farms cost more to operate for a variety of reasons, and subsidies that disproportionately benefit chemically intensive agriculture exacerbate the price discrepancies, according to advocates for the organic industry.
As usual, when the question is “Why is [something] more expensive?”, the answer is almost invariably “the government”.
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