Read it.

Once again, RINO Mitch demonstrates that he’s fully imbedded in the Deep State.

Read it.

Five unions sued the Trump administration on Wednesday, seeking to block what they called the possible mass firing of hundreds of thousands of federal employees who resist pressure to accept buyouts.

In a complaint filed in Washington, D.C. federal court, the unions accused the White House and others in the Executive Branch of undermining Congress’ role in creating and funding a federal workforce, violating separation of powers principles.

The plaintiffs include the United Auto Workers, the National Treasury Employees Union, the National Federation of Federal Employees, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers.

Labor unions add tremendous amounts of friction to economic activity, making innovation and economic corrections at times almost impossible, leading to the sort of sclerosis that eventually destroys companies, institutions, and ever communities.

Read it.

The US Department of Justice on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the state of New York and key officials over the state’s 2019 “Green Light” law, which has allowed thousands of illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, while blocking federal immigration and border enforcement agencies from accessing the state’s motor vehicle database.

The lawsuit, filed in US district Court in Albany, was announced by Attorney General Pam Bondi during a Wednesday press conference.

Aside from the state of NY, Governor Kathy Hochul, state Attorney General Letita James, and DMV Commissioner Mark Schroeder were named as defendants.

Babylon Bee.

BOYERS, PA — The Iron Mountain Federal Records Center has reportedly lost access to all federal retirement files after miners dug too deep and awakened an ancient Balrog.

Cato Institute.

America traditionally had few immigration restrictions, but since the 1920s, the law has banned most aspiring immigrants. Today, fewer than 1 percent of people who want to move permanently to the United States can do so legally. Immigrants cannot simply get an exception to immigrate any more than restaurateurs in the 1920s could simply get an exception to sell alcohol. Instead, just as Prohibition granted only a few exemptions for religious, industrial, or medical uses of alcohol, people seeking an exception to immigration prohibition must also fit into preexisting carve-outs for a select few.

Many Americans have the false impression that these carve-outs are realistic options for potential immigrants to join American society, but the government’s restrictive criteria render the legal paths available only in the most extreme cases. Even when someone qualifies, annual immigration caps greatly delay and, more frequently, eliminate the immigrant’s chance to come to the United States. Legal immigration is less like waiting in line and more like winning the lottery: it happens, but it is so rare that it is irrational to expect it in any individual case.

This study provides a uniquely comprehensive, jargon-free explanation of U.S. rules for legal permanent immigration. Some steps are simple and reasonable, but most steps serve only as unjustified obstacles to immigrating legally. For some immigrants, this restrictive system sends them into the black market of illegal immigration. For others, it sends them to other countries, where they contribute to the quality of life in their new homes. And for still others, it requires them to remain in their homeland, often underemployed and sometimes in danger. Whatever the outcome, the system punishes both the prospective immigrants and Americans who would associate, contract, and trade with them. Congress and the administration can do better, and this paper explains how.

Read it.

The seven NGOs in the chart below, in my view, represent the Uniparty. Each of these organizations receives substantial financial support from USAID or the Department of State.

Around 2019, the phrase “democracy in danger” began to dominate public discourse, amplified by the media. This was odd—after all, the U.S. is a democracy (or more precisely, a constitutional republic). But as I traced the influence of these NGOs, a pattern emerged: they are controlled by establishment politicians, they play a major role in shaping political narratives worldwide, and their core mission is always framed as “protecting democracy.”

Originally, these NGOs were created to support U.S. democratic efforts abroad—many of them emerging during the Cold War to combat the spread of communism. But with the fall of the Soviet Union, their original purpose faded. Instead of dissolving, they redefined their mission. Now, they have positioned themselves as the guardians of democracy itself.

This shift explains why Trump’s re-election was framed as a “threat to democracy.” To these NGOs, “democracy” means themselves. Their survival depends on maintaining that role, and any challenge to their authority is perceived as a direct attack on democracy itself.

New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The Trump administration said on Tuesday that it had fired four employees from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, including the agency’s chief financial officer, over their roles in disbursing federal funds to house migrants in New York City hotels.

The firings capped a startling chain of events that began on Monday with an early-morning social media post by Elon Musk who claimed, misleadingly, that FEMA had recently sent $59 million meant for disaster relief to New York City to pay for “high end hotels” for migrants, and who called the expenditure unlawful.

New York City officials raced to clarify that the federal money had been properly allocated by FEMA under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. last year, adding that it was not a disaster relief grant and had not been spent on luxury hotels.

Nonetheless, just two hours after Mr. Musk’s post, FEMA’s acting director, Cameron Hamilton, announced that the payments in question “have all been suspended” — even though most of the money had already been disbursed — and that “personnel will be held accountable.”

Read it.

So what will change?

Read it.

Here is the crazy part. Civilian supersonic aircraft have been banned in the United States for over 50 years! In case that wasn’t clear, we didn’t ban noisy aircraft we banned supersonicaircraft. Thus, even quiet supersonic aircraft are banned today. This was a serious mistake. Aside from the fact that the noise was exaggerated, technological development is endogenous.

We have the same problem with local housing (and other) codes: They don’t mandate desired performance, they mandate the technology that supposedly produces the desired performance. So when new technology comes along that also produces the desired performance, it has to overcome the curb of the interests (commercial and political) that are invested in the existing technology. And government winds up the fly in the ointment once again.

Sarah Hoyt.

I had no clue what USAID was. Like perhaps most people, I thought it was a way for the US to do “charity” abroad.

I had a ton of philosophical problems with it, obviously. For one, I don’t know what the purpose of a government, which takes money from is own people via taxes, but foreign charity is not it. I mean, there’s nothing in our constitution that says the Federal government has the right to take our money and do stuff they consider good abroad, for any purpose, including because they think it someone obscurely benefits us.

For another, because I have noticed for a long time now, that everything the left does abroad is something that will benefit someone else, and preferably is bad for us. Everything including war, the left does for the benefit of someone else. And they like it better if it’s bad for us.

So, on those principles, I disapproved of USAID. But even I was shocked when the full can of worms was open, and they all came crawling out. First because I didn’t know the amounts of money they’d spent in the US and there are things like the fact they funded the Tides Foundation which in turn funded BLM — meaning in essence we paid in taxes to have our own cities burned — which just stick in my craw. But then…. then i found out how it was founded, and why.

Read it.

If you thought that we were going to start with jobs data, you are mistaken. Today, “inflation expectations” deserve some attention. Right around 10am ET Friday, the stock market started to decline. Until that moment, it had done fairly well even as yields increased on the back of the jobs report. Then out came the University of Michigan CONsumer CONfidence data, showing 1-year inflation expectations jumping from 3.3% to 4.3%! This was lucky for us, as we had pointed out in our NFP Instant Reaction – What to Do With Data You Don’t Trust that we were moderately bearish risk assets. Consumer inflation expectations were not on my bingo card of what could turn stocks, so I guess that we can classify that under “better lucky than smart.” We should just run with it, but we cannot help ourselves.

…

In physics, what we consider rules are termed laws. But for most people, rules are a set of “things” that need to be followed. Whether they are laws or axioms, they are things that are clear and explicitly define and control actions. On the other hand, conjectures, educated guesses, and “rules of thumb” are general guidelines that often work or point you in the right direction. But by no means are they immutable rules that must be followed.

So why do economists insist on terming certain things rules that are really conjectures? Probably because it sounds better, especially if you want people to believe that they work. Or maybe it just makes it easier to win prestigious economic awards?

But we revisit this subject today, not to focus on how inaccurate it is to call many of these things rules, but to highlight that the so-called rules definitively don’t work when they are based on inaccurate data!

Read it.

NOAA’s year 2024 updated Relative Sea Level Trend data measurements continue to demonstrate that climate alarmists claim of hugely growing rates of sea level rise acceleration are completely out of touch with NOAA’s overwhelming data reflecting measured rates of relative sea level rise.

Read it.

If the Senate confirms Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health and human services secretary, he has his work cut out for him. His quest to make America healthy again won’t be easy, but it should include tackling Big Sugar, an industry that has substantially increased Americans’ grocery prices—and significantly decreased their health.

In the U.S., sugar costs 40 cents per pound, double the global price of 20 cents. These high prices are the result of Big Sugar’s monopoly on the sugar market, a monopoly that receives vital support from government intervention.

Federal government subsidies for domestic sugar production have existed since the 1980s and consistently contribute to these high sugar prices. Annually, sugar companies receive around $4 billion in increased revenues from subsidies and tariffs. This allows for noncompetitive practices and contributes to a system of cronyism instead of capitalism.

Read it.

The scandal of the week might be called Subscription-gate. It was unveiled that the currently shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development was spending millions of dollars in lavishly priced subscriptions to “Politico Pro,” one of those government-insider news products no one outside the bureaucracy reads.

Over there at The New York Post, Real Clear Investigations contributor Benjamin Weingarten snagged attention with this headline:

Obscene $8M Politico payout just one way feds reward their lapdog media

Read it.

Flight tracking data from Flightradar24 shows a US Air Force RC-135V/W Rivet Joint reconnaissance aircraft conducted its second signals intelligence (SIGINT) operation near cartel-controlled territories within Mexico this past week. The SIGINT mission coincides with remarks from US Border Czar Tom Homan, who warned on Thursday that he “expects” a hot confrontation between the US military and drug cartels.

Flightradar24 data shows the USAF RC-135V/W Rivet Joint taking off from Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha on Friday evening. The Spy plane arrived at the heavily fortified southern border hours later and flew a SIGINT mission in US airspace from El Paso, Texas, to the Big Bend Ranch State Park, located in west Texas.

The spy plane flew the west Texas route twice, following a figure-8 pattern around the Big Bend Ranch State Park, before returning to Omaha. The SIGINT mission appeared focused on gathering intelligence on drug cartels in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, which borders Texas.

Read it.

Despite my advanced age (almost 69 years), during much of which I have paid at least some attention to politics and government policy, I continue to be baffled by how differently government workers and “private sector” workers view their jobs.

A recent befuddlement is the objection by the (national) government workers to even the offer of a “buyout” incentive to quit in anticipation of possible layoffs to reduce the size of the government workforce.

Befuddled because employee buyout offers are common in private industry, especially when the employer seeks to reduce the size of its workforce. Yet the government workers seem offended by even the offer to an employee buyout as a tool to reduce workforce size.

Read it.

If the Biden administration’s green energy agenda were a bus, it would have no wheels, a dead battery, and a $160 million price tag. Enter Lion Electric, a Canadian electric school bus company that was handed nearly $160 million in taxpayer-funded subsidies—only to collapse into bankruptcy, leaving school districts across America high and dry?.

Now, watchdogs like EPA administrator Lee Zeldin are demanding answers, exposing yet another mismanaged, wasteful, and completely avoidable green energy failure.

As part of Biden’s $5 billion Clean School Bus program, Lion Electric was awarded $159 million to produce 435 electric buses. The administration touted it as a hallmark of its climate agenda, with Kamala Harris herself front and center, gushing over the initiative?.

The Other McCain.

Wow, what a week it’s been, huh? Elon Musk’s young wizards at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have applied their superpowers — weaponized autism — to the simple question: Exactly who has the federal government been giving our tax dollars to? The resulting revelations, especially at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), have been shocking — the biggest scandal of my lifetime, and perhaps the biggest since Teapot Dome.

Read it.

During the odious Senate reign of Harry Reid (D-NV), the normal processes for budgeting and appropriations were effectively terminated. Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND), then chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, once opened hearings on the next federal budget, apparently out of some weird, archaic adherence to law, process and procedure. His Majority Leader promptly ordered it shut down.

Continuing resolutions, omnibus bills and absurdly disparate collections of provisions (recall Nancy Pelosi’s infamous remark that her health care bill had to be passed before we could see what was in it) seem to be the norm. The dung beetle paradigm of rolling many things into one big ball is how we are governed. It takes a lot for a single issue or event to get meaningful attention.

I would mind less about funds going to Peruvian LGBTQ comic books or to travelling non-binary street puppet climate theater troupes if such expenditures were actually expressly listed in the authorizing legislation and we could see who actually voted for it.

Read it.

ZMan casts aspersions.

One of the things that is becoming clear to everyone as the USAID scandal unfolds is that much of what has been presented to us over the last several decades, as far as politics, has been an illusion created by the blob. The media was part of the blob, underwritten by the government and cultivated with government access, so they presented a version of political reality that favored the blob. Even the debates over policy were staged by the blob.

That is what is clear in the release of the CBS tapes of the 60 Minutes interview of then candidate Kamala Harris. Calling it an interview is an assault on the language because it was nothing like an interview. It was one part screen test, one part coaching and one part editing to produce what was presented as an interview. Everyone involved knew it was fraud and said nothing. In other words, what we have been seeing is not media bias, but an orchestrated fraud on the public.

As an aside, the corruption was so deep and so normalized that it appears that most people in these media companies were unaware of much of it. The staff at Politico only became aware of who was actually paying their salaries when the USAID money was halted, and Politico could not make payroll. How many people at the BBC knew that USAID was the second largest source of funding to the BBC? Did anyone at the Financial Times know that management were on the pad?

Read it.

Old hands Carville and Axelrod have warned Democrats not to make USAID a hill to die on for the simple reasons that (a) voters do not love foreign aid programs and (b) the USAID funds distribution looks like an elite inside scam.

Read it.

A climate rule issued during the Biden administration is officially dead after judges on Feb. 3 granted the new administration’s request to drop an appeal.

Three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, acting on a recent request from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), dismissed the government’s appeal of a ruling that found the FHWA administrator overstepped his authority in issuing the rule, which forced states to take steps to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles.

The judges cited a court rule that lets appealing parties dismiss appeals voluntarily if doing so would not create injustice or unfairness. The states that sued over the rule did not oppose the dismissal.

U.S. District Judge Benjamin J. Beaton ruled in 2024 that the rule went beyond the authority that lawmakers had given the FHWA administrator.

Read it.

Oh, the humanity! The wine and cheese set over at Bloomberg has been thrown into full-blown hysteria because—brace yourselves—President Trump turned off the spigot of taxpayer cash that funds their sacred climate cult. Their headline reads like a lost script from The Handmaid’s Tale: “It’s Surreal: Trump’s Freeze on Climate Money Sows Fear and Confusion”?.

“Surreal”? What’s surreal is that these people think they have some divine right to an endless fountain of taxpayer money to fund their political activism disguised as “science.” Imagine a world where these people actually had to produce something of value rather than leech off the federal government. Terrifying, right?

Read it.

By pausing foreign funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, President Donald Trump has dealt a major blow to the ecosystem of nonprofits that promote woke ideology against America’s interests.

It is no accident that USAID’s funding has dovetailed with the grantmaking of leftist billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations—and the foreign funding pause will undermine his efforts.

Trump placed a 90-day freeze on foreign assistance on his first day in office. This weekend, agents of the Department of Government Efficiency entered the USAID facility and the USAID website shut down. On Sunday, Trump named Secretary of State Marco Rubio acting head of the agency.

Read it.

The Los Angeles wildfires estimates have hit $40 billion and may continue to rise. These are four times the losses of the most recent destructive fires and that is likely to convince even more insurance companies to leave the state and make homeowners even more uninsurable.

The exodus of insurance companies led to a 123% increase in the number of California homeowners relying on the state’s FAIR Plan. The FAIR Plan, a government gimmick that seemed good at the time, has $458 billion in total exposure and $4.8 billion in exposure from the current fires, but only has $377 million to cover claims. Once that’s exhausted, the state is likely to hit up insurance companies and homeowners to make up the difference. With mudslides expected to arrive after the rains, the chain of disasters may just be getting underway.

While the state’s worst insurance crisis was going on, Sen. Susan Rubio, the former chair of the Senate Insurance Committee, was fighting for illegal aliens while under suspicion of bribery.

Illegal aliens like her.

“We do not let Trump harass, intimidate, and push our immigrant community,” Sen. Susan Rubio threatened at a ‘healing circle’ convened by the state legislative building to protest Trump.

Rubio, who varyingly claims to have been deported when she was 4 or 6 years old, has made that her claim to fame. That and also having her sister serve in the assembly. And being caught up in the wave of FBI corruption investigations hollowing out the California Democratic Party.

Over the last decade, 576 California officials were convicted on federal corruption charges.

ZMan does a deep dive.

The most surprising and most consequential event of the President Trump sequel has been the USAID scandal. No one thought that part of his revenge tour would be a direct assault on one of the main centers of the foreign policy hive. Until now, few people had any knowledge of this entity. Now it is in the center of the news because Trump has shut it down and put Musk and his whiz kids to the task of auditing the organization while the staff paces outside in the streets.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was sort of created by Congress in 1961 as a way to regulate foreign aid. Congress did not actually create an organization to do this. It directed the White House to create an organization, which is how the independent, not-for-profit entity called USAID came into existence and how it has operated ever since. It gets money through the State Department for its various programs, but it also raises money on its own.

To this point, there has been no oversight of USAID. It has been free, for example, to give money to George Soros organizations that do things like back candidates for state prosecutor in the United States. That seems like an odd use of foreign aid, but it really is the tip of the iceberg, which is why Trump is closing it down. That lack of oversight plus decades of existence created an organization that was operating like a government outside the government that financed it.

Read it.

World Health Organization member states will discuss cutting part of its budget by $400 million in light of President Trump’s move to withdraw the United States, its biggest government funder, from the agency, a document released on Monday showed.

Opening the agency’s annual executive board meeting, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also defended the agency’s work and recent reforms and reiterated a call for the U.S. to reconsider its exit and enter into dialog with the WHO about further change.

“We would welcome suggestions from the United States, and all member states, for how we can serve you and the people of the world better,” he said.

And especially how we can get better access to your taxpayers’ money.

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

“Indigenous knowledge,” a pseudoscience that posits Native Americans possess an innate understanding of how the world works, is thriving in California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D.) administration has contended that “Western science” must embrace “the generations of knowledge held by Indigenous communities,” according to a Washington Free Beacon review of state documents.

Since Newsom entered office six years ago, the California state government has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars on programs promoting the idea, which the state also refers to as “traditional ecological knowledge,” and has leveraged it across several government functions, including wildfire mitigation, energy development, wildlife recovery, and land conservation, the documents show. The Newsom administration has made indigenous knowledge a central pillar of its climate agenda in particular.

The extensive taxpayer-funded indigenous knowledge efforts in California, which are detailed in an intricate web of state initiatives, reports, programs, and laws, highlight just how far a fringe academic theory has proliferated throughout Democratic Party-controlled governments. While scientists describe it as “dangerous” and a rejection of the scientific method, the Biden administration forced indigenous knowledge into agencies across the federal government, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the Department of Defense.

Jonathan Turley.

For Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the weaponization of the criminal justice system has always followed a certain Casablanca pattern. Like Claude Rains as the venerable Captain Louis Renault, it is simply a matter of “rounding up the usual suspects.”

Grassley released FBI whistleblower records on Thursday showing that an anti-Trump figure, former FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy Thibault, previously found to have violated the Hatch Act was a key factor in pushing the election charges brought by former Special Counsel Jack Smith.

Grassley suggested that Thibault violated protocol in opening and advancing the FBI’s initial probe into the 2020 election without sufficient predication. The investigation, called Operation Arctic Frost, was opened on April 13, 2022.

Read it.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) on Saturday said it will stop e-mailing news organizations and reporters with updates about two plane crashes that occurred earlier this week.

Moving forward, the federal agency tasked with investigating transportation-related accidents and disasters said news organizations and reporters will have to follow the agency’s official account on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, where “all NTSB updates about news conferences or other investigative information” will be posted moving forward.

The NTSB did not say why it was choosing to post information about public safety matters exclusively on X, a private social media platform owned by technology mogul Elon Musk, who has curried favor with President Donald Trump in recent weeks. The Desk has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the government agency to learn more about the NTSB’s decision-making process in moving updates to the news media exclusively to X.d

Read it.

“Follow the science” is a common chorus among progressives. But often they, not those they moralize against, are the real science deniers.

Take progressive prosecutors. Many, like George Gascon in Los Angeles, tout their soft-on-crime policies as “data driven” or “scientifically backed.”

Yet this is a complete hoax. These prosecutors cite studies that are misleading, non-replicable, non-peer-reviewed, or entirely disproven.

Read it.

Amanda Lefton, the former director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), went to work for a major offshore wind company after the agency boosted the industry and worked to limit offshore fossil fuel development on her watch.

Lefton spearheaded the Biden administration’s effort to build out 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity along America’s coasts by 2030 in her capacity as the leader of BOEM, playing a key role in the administration’s all-of-government offshore wind push from February 2021 to February 2023, according to her LinkedIn profile. She then went to work on green energy-related issues for Foley Hoag LLC — a major D.C. law firm — for approximately six months and then joined RWE, a major player in the offshore wind space, as the head of development for the east coast in July 2023.

This is hardly surprising given the incestuous relations between the Biden BOEM and the wind industry. On Ms. Lefton’s watch the agency helped rush the so-far disastrous Vineyard Wind project through. BOEM even waived the financial assurance requirements intended to protect the taxpayers from the costs of decommissioning the project when complete (while, in the Gulf, it was modifying those same requirements in an attempt to drive small oil and gas companies out of business),” Michael Chamberlain, director of Protect the Public’s Trust, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Former Deputy Secretary of the Interior Tommy Beaudreau, her boss during most of her tenure at BOEM, had previously represented Vineyard Wind. This revolving door has been spinning everywhere the Biden administration and the climate sector meet. The players remain the same, the only thing that changes is who signs the paychecks.”

“And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.” — Luke 16:9.

Read it.

Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass’s (D.) wildfire recovery czar, Steve Soboroff, advised Hollywood talent executives on a private Zoom call to wait to sell their properties. City investments in the Palisades neighborhood, he said, will allow them to “triple” the low-ball offers they’re currently receiving.

“Whether you’re broke or you’re old, don’t sell now, because in one year we’re going to be putting billions of dollars in your neighborhood of improvements,” Soboroff said Thursday. “You’ll get triple what these guys are offering you for now.”

It appeared at least some of the call’s attendees had their homes damaged or destroyed entirely in this month’s wildfires, while others were looking for ways to help.

Read it.

The U.S. government has been wasting money in some of the most bizarre ways imaginable. Some of the examples that I am about to share with you are likely to make you feel sick. Wasting colossal piles of our tax dollars would be bad enough if we were running a balanced budget, but that is certainly not the case. We have been adding trillions of dollars to the national debt each year, and our federal government is now more than 36 trillion dollars in debt.

So the truth is that we have had to borrow the money that we have been recklessly wasting.

Read it.

The DOJ had authorized the DEA to confiscate the assets of travelers who “consented” to be searched. The only criterion was suspicion of criminal activity.

The agents would take cash without proof of wrongdoing, and might never charge their victims of any crime. The confiscated money would go into the DEA’s Asset Forfeiture Fund, and could then be spent by federal law enforcement.

Informants providing intelligence to the DEA would often share a portion of the “take.” The intelligence could be based on suspicious activity such as last-minute bookings, or one-way tickets.

I’ve been hearing about this nefarious activity for years, but the program was suspended without any headlines that I’ve seen.

Associated Press, a Voice of the Crust.

What was once the world’s largest solar power plant of its type appears headed for closure just 11 years after opening, under pressure from cheaper green energy sources. Meanwhile, environmentalists continue to blame the Mojave Desert plant for killing thousands of birds and tortoises.

The Ivanpah solar power plant formally opened in 2014 on roughly 5 square miles of federal land near the California-Nevada border. Though it was hailed at the time as a breakthrough moment for clean energy, its power has been struggling to compete with cheaper solar technologies.

Pacific Gas & Electric said in a statement it had agreed with owners — including NRG Energy Inc. — to terminate its contracts with the Ivanpah plant. If approved by regulators, the deal would lead to closing two of the plant’s three units starting in 2026. The contracts were expected to run through 2039.

Reuters, a Voice of the Crust.

A decades-old U.S. government ban on federally licensed firearms dealers selling handguns to adults under the age of 21 is unconstitutional, a U.S. appeals court held on Thursday, citing recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings expanding gun rights

The ruling, opens new tab by the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals marked the first time a federal appeals court has held that the prohibition violated the right to keep and bear arms enshrined in the U.S. Csonstitution’s Second Amendment.

The appeals court had previously upheld that same ban in 2012. But that was before the 6-3 conservative majority U.S. Supreme Court handed down a landmark ruling in 2022 that established a new test for assessing modern firearms laws.

In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Supreme Court held that modern gun restrictions were required to be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

The federal ban on sales to people under 21 was first adopted by Congress in 1968 as part of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act.

Read it.

If you’re counting up the advantages of the Green New Deal, don’t forget this one.

UPDATE: Burning Eyes, Breathing Problems, And Rashes: Residents Claim California’s Lithium Battery Fire Made Them Sick. Officials Deny the Health Risks.

“We can’t tell people that!” — every government employee, every day

Read it.

Democrats in Congress like Representatives Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Maxine Waters, D-Calif., are criticizing President Donald Trump’s firing of 17 inspectors general, including in the departments of State, Transportation, Labor, Interior, Energy, and Commerce, claiming that doing so “without due cause is antithetical to good government.”

There is a very strong argument to be made that those inspectors general failed to do their jobs during the past four years. Their failures provide Trump with all of the “due cause” he needs.

Just two examples suffice: their failure to investigate the misbehavior of their departments in attempting to interfere in the 2022 and 2024 federal elections and in using government resources to violate the First Amendment rights of American citizens and censor their opinions and social media accounts.

Read it.

When the Trump administration unveiled a 90-day freeze of foreign aid aimed at ensuring the funding is “consistent with U.S. foreign policy under the America First agenda,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio allowed career staffers to submit waivers for projects they felt were aligned with that agenda. Those staffers went on to submit some 200 waivers for programs that would have cost taxpayers $1.2 billion this week alone, including some that pertained to “environmental justice” and “LGBTQI+ Inclusive Development.”

The Rubio-led State Department rejected all of them, sources familiar with the process told the Washington Free Beacon.

The situation reflects the severe disconnect between career and political staffers at the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which the State Department oversees. It also previews the implications of the ongoing legal fight surrounding the Trump administration’s plans to freeze scores of federal grants.

Read it.

The Navy’s surface fleet has spent the past 15 months taking down hundreds of missiles and drones fired by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels at U.S. and allied Navies’ ships, as well as commercial vessels in and around the Red Sea. While it has become the most intense sustained combat the sea service’s warships have seen since World War II, the Navy continues to prioritize preparing for a conflict in the Pacific. This begs the question: What lessons does the Red Sea fight offer the Navy when it comes to preparing for conflict with its top pacing threat, China?

TWZ reached out to a range of active-duty and retired military officers to answer this question. They said the Red Sea was a prime stress test for a fleet preparing for war with China, even as it drained finite munitions and further exposed shortfalls in the defense industrial base.

“A lot of these lessons and everything that we are taking from the Red Sea are an incredibly valuable warm-up for us in the high-end fight,” an active-duty surface warfare officer (SWO) who spoke with TWZ on the condition of anonymity said.

Mainly, it’s teaching them that they don’t know as much as they thought they did about what it will take to survive in, much less win, a modern war.

New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Of course they are. So much for the Green Agenda,.

Read it.

In the latest indication that President Trump’s new administration is dead-serious about securing the border and sweeping up those who already waltzed across it, federal agents raided a Sunday morning party in Denver on and nabbed nearly 50 illegal aliens, including members of the notorious Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang.

The congregation of gang-related revelers made for an inviting target — rather than picking up two or three border-violators at a time, the party at an abandoned warehouse served up dozens of suspects on a single platter. Officials described the site as a “makeshift nightclub” and said the event was only open to invited guests. Around 3 am on a frigid Denver night, armed agents crashed the party, including members of the DEA, ATF, Homeland Security, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Follow the money!

Read it.

The biggest scientific con of the century is finally being exposed. But will any politicians or government officials ever be held responsible for the carnage they unleashed on Americans?

In early 2020, when the Covid pandemic was starting to ravage America, federal bureaucrats and politicians rushed to suppress any suggestion that the pandemic originated from a Chinese government lab bankrolled by US government agencies. Key Biden administration officials effectively exonerated the Chinese government even though the Chinese completely stonewalled any outside investigation into the origin of the Covid virus, as the Wall Street Journal recently revealed in a front-page scoop.

The FBI’s top expert concluded that the virus leaked from the lab but he was derailed by the Biden administration, blocked from presenting his evidence at a key White House meeting in August 2021. Three scientists at the National Center for Medical Intelligence, part of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, concluded that Covid leaked from a lab but they were muzzled. The Inspector General is conducting an investigation to determine why those experts were silenced. The Department of Energy also concluded that Covid originated in a lab. In September 2023, a senior CIA analyst told a Congressional committee that six key CIA analysts had been bribed by the agency to abandon their conclusion that Covid originated in a lab leak.

Read it.

A man who entered the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021, and was later arrested said President Donald Trump’s pardon this week was “a glorious moment.”

Siaka Massaquoi, a conservative actor and former first vice chair of the Republican Party of Los Angeles County, spoke to The Daily Signal about his experiences with law enforcement and Trump’s decision to pardon 1,500 individuals on his first day in office.

Like others who entered the Capitol building on that fateful day in 2021, Massaquoi recalls being interviewed, recording video, and leaving at the request of a police officer.

When describing the events of Jan. 6, he called the situation a “honeypot” and “entrapment.”

“I’ve seen videos where Capitol Police removed fencing and the signs that said that it was a restricted area. … We were entrapped by the Biden administration,” he told The Daily Signal.

Massaquoi was not contacted by law enforcement regarding his presence at the Capitol until FBI officers raided his home on June 10, 2021.

“It was a raid to my house, and 15 agents, and guns drawn,” Massaquoi said during an interview Thursday. “When I heard, ‘FBI! FBI!’ the first thought that came to mind was, ‘You have got to be kidding me.’”

New York Times.

Gov. Gavin Newsom came into office in 2018 confronting one of the deadliest and most destructive fires in the state’s history: the Camp fire. Even before he was sworn in, Mr. Newsom accompanied Donald Trump, then the president, and Jerry Brown, then the governor, in inspecting a blaze that killed 85 people and consumed over 153,000 acres around the Butte County town of Paradise.

On Friday, more than six years later, Mr. Newsom will once again greet Mr. Trump as the president comes to Los Angeles to view the aftermath of the latest devastating wildfires that have swept California.

These new fires — in the Pacific Palisades section of Los Angeles and in Altadena — serve as a reminder that Mr. Newsom’s tenure as governor has been defined by catastrophe and crisis, whether natural or man-made: fires, mudslides, atmospheric rivers, the Covid pandemic, the at-times violent protests against police brutality after the murder of George Floyd.

“It’s mind-boggling the number of natural disasters and otherwise he has to deal with,” said Anthony Rendon, who served as speaker of the California Assembly from 2016 to 2023. “It is something that has bracketed — and maybe even defined — his time in office as governor.”

Progressive chickens coming home to roost. Incompetence will out.

UPDATE: Group Launches New Recall Effort To Remove California Governor

UPDATE:  Gavin Newsom Shut Down a Volunteer Wildfire Response Force, Leaving LA Firefighters Shorthanded for 10 Days

From Short Circuit, a newsletter of the Institute for Justice:

Two married Indian nationals have lawfully lived in the United States on employment-based nonimmigrant visas since 2012. After waiting in line almost eight years for a green card, they thought they had reached the front, only to be told two years later that their applications were on hold indefinitely until more immigrant visas became available. The last time this happened, applicants waited eight to nine years for final adjudication. Fed up with the delays, they sue. Third Circuit: Federal law gives USCIS unreviewable discretion on how to manage green card applications and the visa backlog. Whether this particular policy is sound is not for courts to say.

Perhaps if we made the immigration process a bit more user-friendly and less GOVERNMENT-STUPID, we wouldn’t have so much of a problem. Just sayin’.