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.

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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’.

Read it.

Republican efforts to exclude people in the U.S. illegally from numbers used to divvy up congressional seats among states have begun anew, with four Republican state attorneys general suing to alter the once-a-decade head count even before President Donald Trump’s second term in office began Monday.

Trump joined in the battle immediately upon returning to office, signing an executive order on Monday that rescinded a Biden administration order and signaled the possibility of a push by his new administration to change the 2030 census.

Those efforts may get a boost from the GOP-controlled Congress, where Republican U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards from North Carolina earlier this month re-introduced legislation that would put a citizenship question on the census form.

Read it.

The EV world has gotten more and more competitive over the last few years. It’s become saturated with competition and demand is starting to hit its limits, all while at the same time major Chinese names are dominating the industry.

That’s why it’s not surprising to see another name in the space, Canoo, file for bankruptcy.

The seven-year-old electric vehicle startup has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in Delaware, announcing it will “cease operations immediately.” The company is liquidating its assets, citing failed attempts to secure foreign capital and funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office, according to TechCrunch.

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President Biden’s pardon of Dr. Anthony Fauci may protect the former National Institutes of Health official from immediate criminal prosecution, but some critics say he is not completely out of legal jeopardy and that public sentiment might still condemn the man who became known during the COVID-19 pandemic as “Mr. Science.”

In the days before Biden offered the pardon to Fauci, along with other critics of Donald Trump, some experts who have followed Fauci’s career and handling of the pandemic, as well as members of the Trump transition team, reiterated their assertion that Fauci perjured himself on several occasions during the pandemic – especially regarding his agency’s links to the lab in Wuhan, China, that might have created the virus that causes COVID-19.

The pardon addresses any COVID-related offenses, and is backdated to 2014—the year a U.S. ban on so-called “gain of function” virus research took effect — research Fauci is accused of outsourcing to China.

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In contemporary political discourse, the term “deep state” frequently arises as a catch-all phrase to describe the entrenched bureaucracy and unseen forces that shape U.S. governance. Washington, D.C., is often portrayed as the epicenter of this so-called deep state, where power dynamics operate independently of electoral outcomes. Some also refer to it as the “blob.”

While it is true that U.S. governance is steered by unelected and unaccountable entities, such as the military and intelligence complexes, the concept of the “deep state” can oversimplify the complexities of governance in Washington, D.C. It can also serve to deflect accountability from those most responsible for the damage inflicted on our country.

The deep state may appear to be a monolithic entity. However, it is, in reality, a complex web of human actors with genuine agency. Among these individuals, Barack Obama stands out as a pivotal figure whose influence and legacy have significantly shaped the political landscape over the past 17 years.

In this concluding piece of our series on Barack Obama, we explore his instrumental role in shaping U.S. policy, not just during his own presidency but also during Trump’s first term and the Biden presidency – sometimes referred to as Obama’s third and fourth terms – and how this unfortunate era may now be approaching its end.

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Avoid the whole problem. Don’t send your kid to a government school.

Naval Gazing.

2024 is behind us, which means it is time for that most prestigious of awards given out by Naval Gazing, the William D Brown Memorial Award for the biggest naval screwup that didn’t kill anybody.

As the Brown Award’s prestige increases, more and more navies go to greater lengths to take home the trophy:

• Military Sealift Command ran the oiler Big Horn aground off Oman
• The People’s Liberation Army Navy sank a new nuclear submarine pierside.
• The Baltic Navies allowed vital cables to be repeatedly disrupted.
• And the Iranian Navy, seeking a second award, flipped a frigate in drydock, then sank it completely while attempting to salvage it.

But none of these commendable efforts were enough to secure the award, or even runner-up status. The latter falls to the Royal New Zealand Navy, who were willing to follow in the footsteps of America and Iran and set one of their own ships on fire. Unfortunately, while hydrographic ship HMNZS Manawanui was the largest proportion of any navy yet sacrificed this way at 11%, it wasn’t enough to claim the prize.

Because, in the closing days of the year, the USN, seeking an unprecedented third award, shot down one of its own F/A-18F Super Hornets over the Red Sea with a missile from the cruiser Gettysburg. Fortunately, both crew members ejected before the missile hit, preserving their eligibility and earning themselves a special tie. BZ to the USN for winning a second year in a row, and to the crew of Gettysburg for triumphing over such stiff competition. I reached out to Gettysburg’s PAO for comment on their victory, but did not hear back by press time.

Read it.

The carmaker hemorrhaged cash in 2024 amid a widespread slackening in demand for EVs, losing roughly $4 billion in the first three quarters of 2024 alone. Now, lame duck President Joe Biden’s Department of Energy (DOE) has tossed the struggling company a $6.57 billion loan to finance the construction of a manufacturing plant in Stanton Springs North, Georgia, according to a DOE press release. (RELATED: Biden’s Green Loan Office Offers Up A Staggering $22 Billion In Admin’s Final Hours)

“This loan will help us accelerate the launch of our Georgia plant for R2 [SUV] and R3 [crossover], providing thousands of jobs in the state,” Rivian Founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said in a Thursday statement announcing the loan’s finalization. “People are incredibly excited to get behind the wheel of our new models, and this additional capacity for our mass market products is key to U.S. leadership in the electric vehicle industry.”

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With conservatives back in power, public media is getting back to what it really excels at. No, not objective, impartial reporting. If NPR and PBS focused on that, they wouldn’t need to be so good at their side hustle: desperately lobbying Congress not to defund them.

Now that they’re good at. The lobbying efforts have worked every time conservatives have had power, going back to when President Lyndon Johnson created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the late 1960s.

Every Republican president after Johnson has tried to defund, dissolve, or reform public broadcasting. Yet the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is still standing, and NPR and PBS remain unreformed.

Read it.

The U.S. Constitution gives presidents the power to grant pardons and commutations for federal crimes. This unique, unchecked power was meant to be used sparingly, as a last resort to correct injustices in the system. Pardons shouldn’t be gifts for friends, donors, and relatives who happen to be lawbreakers. It’s intended to right wrongs, not cause new ones.

Not all presidents have misused the pardon power, but some have. How you see it often depends upon your politics. To paraphrase an old saw: One man’s shady pardon is another man’s pursuit of justice.

President Gerald Ford’s pardon of predecessor Richard Nixon was roundly criticized at the time, and may have cost Ford the 1976 election. Nixon had picked Ford to be vice president, which led to Ford’s accession to the presidency when Nixon resigned.

President Jimmy Carter granted amnesty to Vietnam War draft evaders – keeping a promise he made during his campaign. He wanted to move the nation beyond a grim moment in history, similar to what Ford did with Nixon’s pardon.

Read it.

The now-long-defunct Jan. 6 House select committee’s members are reportedly privately talking potential pardons with President Joe Biden in the final hours of his administration, hoping to protect themselves from legal accountability from the incoming administration under President-elect Donald Trump.

Former Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., is among the leading House members fearing accountability from Trump, who has been talking about criminal destruction of evidence, including that which would exonerate Trump against former special counsel Jack Smith’s ceased cases, Punchbowl News reported Tuesday morning.

“I believe Donald Trump when he says he’s going to inflict retribution on this,” Thompson said on Monday night. “I believe when he says my name and Liz Cheney and the others. I believe him.”

Mess with the bull, and you get the horns every time.

Read it.

A raging war in Ukraine and a smoldering Middle East did not stop outgoing president Joe Biden from touting his foreign policy successes in a farewell State Department speech on Monday. His administration, Biden said, successfully averted major conflicts across the globe and left the United States “more capable” and “better prepared” than ever before.

“Our adversaries are weaker than they were when we came into the job four years ago,” the octogenarian said before a crowd of diplomats at the State Department. “America is more capable and, I would argue, better prepared than we’ve been in a long, long time.”

Biden touted his support for Israel in its war against Hamas and Hezbollah, though the one-term president did not mention his administration’s efforts to handicap the Jewish state by withholding critical arms shipments, forbidding it from entering Hamas-run areas in Gaza, and pressing it to ink a preemptive ceasefire with both terror groups.

Read it.

Months after President-elect Donald Trump drew attention to an illegal immigrant gang that has taken over apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado, the city is working to immediately shutter one of those complexes as gang crime reaches its “breaking point.”

City officials in Aurora have filed a petition for injunctive relief and emergency closure of The Edge at Lowry Apartments as gang violence persists at the complex, 9News reported. While the city and the property owner, CBZ Management, already reached an agreement last month to shut the complex down, the filing may fast-track the closure.

You may ask, how did they get control of it in the first place? And why did it take until now?

In national elections, Aurora leans to the left and the Democratic Party, though not as much as neighboring Denver but more than other suburbs in the Denver metro area. Northern and Central Aurora, due to an extremely racially and culturally diverse voter base and high density for a suburban city, are some of the most Democratic areas in Colorado and vote similarly to Denver and Boulder; southern Aurora, similar to neighboring Centennial, used to lean Republican but has swung Democratic entering the 2020s. — Wikipedia.

Wirepoints.

In defense of the everyday Chicagoans that continue to be pummeled by higher taxes, fees and fines – and a city that’s increasingly at risk of some form of insolvency – Chicago Public Schools should reject the Chicago Teachers Union’s four-year contract demand for 9% yearly raises (6% raises plus step increases of around 3%). Instead, the board should implement a salary freeze immediately.

We can hear the long list of objections now. Don’t you get it – the school board that’s negotiating with the CTU was hand-picked by CTU-activist-turned-mayor Brandon Johnson? The union would never go for it. They’d go on strike anyway.

We get all that, but we’re still going to make four arguments for a freeze anyway. Because at some point, cuts have to happen. It’s just a matter of when.

Naval Gazing.

Buying something as expensive as a modern warship is inherently going to involve politics, which limits engineering options.

…

Unfortunately, the practice of abstracting away a lot of detail seems to be spreading to the Pentagon, in particular with the adoption of the Navy’s new Distributed Maritime Operations concept. The problem is that while a lot of the buzzwords involved sound fine when you’re looking at a powerpoint, it doesn’t work quite as well when you sit down and start to ask what ships are carrying which missiles and how they’re getting targeting data. Despite this, the Navy appears to be investing heavily in the concept, presumably because former SecDef Mattis finally met an enemy he couldn’t defeat: PowerPoint.

This discusses (in greater detail than I have patience for) what I call the Aggregation Fallacy, which underlays most political and military decisions these days. “Follow The Science!” doesn’t work when you have several to pick from and you pick the wrong one because it’s less effort.

Read it.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered two respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine manufacturers to include a potentially paralytic side effect warning related to nerve damage on product labels.

The manufacturers, GSK and Pfizer, manufacturing Arexvy and Abrysvo vaccines respectively, must now include a warning stating a risk of Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) following vaccination, according to a Jan. 7 statement from the agency.

GBS is a rare disorder in which the immune system ends up damaging nerve cells, which leads to weakness in the muscles and potential near-total paralysis, depending on severity.

RSV is a common respiratory virus that infects the throat, nose, and lungs, and typically spreads during fall and winter seasons. Infected people can experience symptoms similar to that of a common cold such as a runny nose, congestion, sneezing, and coughing.

Read it.

The Biden White House and Senate Democrats have touted their funding for an anti-terrorism initiative they say “has been critical to the security of Jewish institutions.” But the program has given hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent months to mosques whose clerics have preached anti-Semitic hate, cheered Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, and been accused of raising money for terrorist groups.

The Department of Homeland Security has awarded $150,000 in grants since November to Masjid Jamaat al Mumineen, the Islamic Society of Akron and Kent, and the Islamic Center of Bothell as part of its “Nonprofit Security Grant Program,” according to federal records. The program gives taxpayer funds to nonprofits and religious groups deemed “at high risk of terrorist attack” to help enhance security.

President Joe Biden touted the program last year as an example of the administration’s “aggressive” actions to counter anti-Semitism and “protect Jewish institutions.”

We are well rid of this doofus.

U.S. National Science Foundation.

In less time than it will take you to read this article, an artificial intelligence-driven system was able to autonomously learn about certain Nobel Prize-winning chemical reactions and design a successful laboratory procedure to make them. The AI did all that in just a few minutes — and nailed it on the first try.

“This is the first time that a non-organic intelligence planned, designed and executed this complex reaction that was invented by humans,” says Carnegie Mellon University chemist and chemical engineer Gabe Gomes, who led the research team that assembled and tested the AI-based system. They dubbed their creation “Coscientist.”

The most complex reactions Coscientist pulled off are known in organic chemistry as palladium-catalyzed cross couplings, which earned its human inventors the 2010 Nobel Prize for chemistry in recognition of the outsize role those reactions came to play in the pharmaceutical development process and other industries that use finicky, carbon-based molecules.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Read it.

The U.S. Navy’s Flight III Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) class destroyers are facing cost increases and delays, jumping from an average of $2.1 billion per ship to $2.5 billion per hull, with even steeper cost increases coming in the future, according to a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report. The report analyzes the Navy’s 2025 shipbuilding plan, which calls for a 390-battle force ship fleet by 2054, and includes nine more vessels than in last year’s plan.

Beyond destroyers, the versatile workhorses of the Navy’s combat fleet, the CBO’s assessment notes cost hikes among other platforms, as well as systemic American shipbuilding industry shortfalls that could impede the service’s fleet size goal. All this long-term planning comes as the sea service races to prepare for a near-term war with China if Beijing invades Taiwan in the coming years. These destroyers and their anti-air, anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare capabilities would be crucial to such a future fight.

Read it.

Aspiring public school teachers in New Jersey are no longer required to pass the state’s basic skills exam in order to be certified.

New Jersey Democratic Governor Phil Murphy passed Act 1669 as part of the state’s 2025 budget in June to address a teacher shortage, Read Lion reports. The law went into effect on Jan. 1, 2025. Individuals seeking an instructional certificate will no longer need to pass the Praxis Core Test, a basic skills test for reading, writing, and math that is administered by the state’s Commissioner of Education. Candidates still do, however, need to pass the Praxis Subject Tests that are specific to their degree.

“We need more teachers,” Democratic Sen. Jim Beach, who sponsored the bill, said in May 2024 when the chamber cleared the bill in a 34-2 vote. “This is the best way to get them.”

Lifehacker.

[I hate people who use ‘if’ when the correct word is ‘whether’.]

There are a lot of great uses for GPS tracking technology. But tracking technology gets dark fast when someone plants one on your stuff without your knowledge—like the police, who are increasingly using these devices to monitor the movements of people involved in investigations (the cops can even shoot one onto a car during a high-speed chase!). If you’re now paranoid about the cops tracking your car’s movements, here’s what you need to know.

It is 100% legal for the cops to place a tracking device on your car without your knowledge—but they must have a warrant giving them permission to do so. This was settled by the Supreme Court in United States v. Jones in 2012, which found that a warrantless GPS device violated the Fourth Amendment prohibition against illegal search.

However, attorney Andrew Flusche notes that it’s often very easy for police to get these warrants, and they can even get them issued by magistrates (who aren’t judges, and sometimes aren’t even lawyers) in some states. That means that the police can probably legally place a GPS tracker on your car even if you’ve done nothing wrong, as long as they’re willing to file the paperwork.

Of course, these trackers are easy to buy and to place by anyone, not just the police. But if you find one, you should be careful about your response.

Apparently, finding the guy who placed it there and shoving it up his (or her) ass is not encouraged.

The Other McCain.

One of the hallmarks of any totalitarian regime is that the leaders proclaim obvious falsehoods — kulaks and saboteurs are to blame for the famine! — and compel everyone to repeat these lies, with punishment aimed at dissenting truth-tellers. The purpose is “not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate,” and once you understand this function of totalitarian propaganda, you are less surprised by the ability of someone like Christopher Wray to speak blatant lies with apparent sincerity. Only skilled liars could flourish in the Biden regime.

Read it.

President Joe Biden’s Department of Education reached an agreement Thursday with Rutgers University to settle civil rights complaints alleging that Jewish students faced discrimination on campus since October 2023. The school didn’t admit wrongdoing and agreed only to underwhelming measures, such as reviewing its nondiscrimination policies.

In the resolution, Rutgers agreed to “provide training” to campus police officers and “employees responsible for investigating complaints and other reports of discrimination.” The school also agreed to conduct “listening sessions” and “develop a climate assessment” meant to evaluate “the extent to which students and/or employees are subjected to, or witness discrimination, including harassment, based on national origin, including shared Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, and/or Muslim ancestry.”

“Rutgers has reached a voluntary agreement with the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights to continue to take steps to clarify, communicate, and review its policies and procedures related to discrimination and harassment, especially around national origin,” a university spokeswoman told the Washington Free Beacon. “The Rutgers community stands firmly against discrimination and harassment in all its forms, and the university will always strive to strengthen the policies and practices that protect our students, faculty, and staff. Rutgers is grateful to the Office of Civil Rights for its guidance.”

The agreement settled three civil rights complaints but involved nearly 400 reports of discrimination against Jewish students. In one instance, an anti-Israel protester identified where a Jewish student lived and called for him to be killed. In another, a swastika was drawn on a Jewish student’s dorm room door.

The AntiPlanner.

The news from California this week is that Michael Hursh, the CEO of the Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District (AC Transit), is resigning, but the agency will continue to pay him through September as a “senior advisor.” The real news is how much he was paid: according to Transparent California, in 2022 he collected $556,045.

The Foundry.

Are you aware that in our democracy the people least able to pay their debts are the ones who acquired expensive degrees to improve their earning potential? If you weren’t before, your ignorance has surely been remedied after no less than five rounds of Department of Education rulemaking aimed at relieving the distress of student-loan borrowers who found that—after years devoted to filing petty complaints over their professors’ verbal miscues—they were less upwardly mobile than they expected.

Under the Biden administration, the department worked with beaver-like diligence to appease this constituency, or at least its self-appointed representatives. Few priorities received more attention from the executive branch. Disinclined to the political exercise of negotiating with Congress, the Biden administrative preferred instead the esoteric, quasi-mystical exercises of combing statutes to uncover magical debt-nuking powers undiscovered by previous, less enterprising administrations. Whenever the fruits of their labors came under legal attack, as they often did, the Education Department deployed battalions of the executive branch’s lawyerly army to convince federal judges that the government had not taken leave of its senses.

Except that now, after all that trouble and effort, the Department of Education is withdrawing these regulations. Specifically, on Dec. 20, the department announced it was withdrawing the two most recent rules (one already enjoined by a federal court). Had student borrowers suddenly found their financial footing? Not exactly. The Associated Press reports that this is merely one part of “an administration-wide plan to jettison pending regulations to prevent President-elect Donald Trump from retooling them to achieve his own aims.” The department’s notice of withdrawal more or less confirms that cynical reading when it closes in an “oh, by the way” sort of tone, that the incoming administration would have to repeat the laborious negotiated rulemaking process to implement any new policy in this area.

Read it.

a few pancakes on your gas stove. When they’ve finished eating, you want to pop those dirty dishes in the dishwasher. Sounds simple, and now it is. But thanks to President Joe Biden, your gas stove and your dishwasher (as well as your gas-fired boiler and water heater) might go the way of the dinosaur.

Just as former President Barack Obama took away your light bulbs, the Biden administration wants to take away your favorite appliances. One of President-elect Donald Trump’s first actions should be to get the government out of our kitchens in the same way that he gave us back our light bulbs in his first term.

This year, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Transportation have announced proposed rules that would take away your choice of appliances—and cars.

And it’s going to cost you. The DOE’s dishwasher rule would increase wash times and result in millions of dollars per year in increased product costs. Households would save less than $20 a year for some dishwasher models, and other models would result in no savings.

Read it.

The Global Engagement Center, an office housed within the State Department and aiming to thwart disinformation and misinformation, has been forced by Congress to close up shop. It’s no mystery why; the taxpayer-backed GEC violated its mandate to work only overseas and devolved into a partisan enabler of speech suppression in the United States.

Founded in 2016 and technically the product of an Obama-era executive order on counterterrorism, the GEC lapsed in December and lost congressional funding. Over the last two years, my investigative reporting in the Washington Examiner as well as that of Racket News journalist Matt Taibbi pulled back the curtain of the GEC’s ties to foreign and domestic NGOs trying to defund news outlets they say peddle disinformation – including RealClearPolitics. My reporting showed that the GEC and the State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy combined granted almost $1 million to the British Global Disinformation Index, which created a blacklist of U.S.-based websites that published content it determined to push “adversarial narratives” and then pressured advertisers to shut them down (think the Hunter Biden laptop story and COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis).

The GEC, moreover, was involved with the Election Integrity Partnership, a consortium of left-wing nonprofit groups, universities, and federal agencies that pressured Twitter and Facebook to remove GOP-aligned content in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. The GEC also bankrolled New York-based company NewsGuard, a “misinformation” tracker that, along with the Global Disinformation Index, has found itself at the center of a lawsuit brought by the Federalist, the Daily Wire, and the State of Texas against the GEC for allegedly funding an unconstitutional “censorship scheme” that suppressed voices on the right.

And there was much rejoicing.

Read it.

The University of Iowa announced that it would close its Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies department as public universities in the state continue to respond to a changing DEI landscape.

I’ll just bet.