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Trump joined in the battle immediately upon returning to office, signing an executive order on Monday that rescinded a Biden administration order and signaled the possibility of a push by his new administration to change the 2030 census.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

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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.

Read it.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Read it.

All prices in the US are directly linked to the Medicare pricing of healthcare services. All private insurers pay based on a fractional increase in Medicare-allowed reimbursement, for not just Medicare Advantage products but all insurance products. Medicare produces prices (and price adjustments annually), with variations for regional costs, but all reimbursement is directly tied to Medicare payment policies. That a discussion of healthcare in America can ensue without an acknowledgment of this circumstance is beyond ridiculous, and indicates that our thought leaders are idiots and we do not have a serious country.

How did this come about? Most directly when RBRVS (Resource-based Relative Value Scale) was enshrined. This was a way to “calculate” the value of medical services. Imagine that! A centralized authority can CALCULATE the value of all medical services. Who would have ever guessed? In this case, it was Dr. Hsaio, a public health expert at the Harvard School of Public Health, along with his “team.” Oh, the arrogance! Oh, the abuse! But in this case, he was working at the behest of the…you guessed it, a Conservative Republican administration under Reagan (in 1988), soon to be a little less conservative under GHW Bush. Those RBRVS calculations included a factor for training, for equipment and infrastructure, for time and effort, for ancillary costs, for regional cost of living factors, even a factor for malpractice, etc.

The formula was long, but everyone in the GHW Bush administration had full confidence in the ability of Harvard experts to CALCULATE the value of medical care. There was no factor for outcomes, of course. Or severity of illness. This was a significantly distorted, but nonetheless, Labor Theory of Value on steroids! And of course, for all who heard it, there was the unforgettable testimony of the esteemed Marxist economist, Gail Wilensky, head of the HCFA (now CMS) to Congress in the Reagan administration, in which she excoriated the “…perverse incentives inherent in a fee-for-service system.” She sounded like a member of the Soviet Politburo in the final years of the Cold War. (Did the Soviets win that?). Of course, what she meant was the perverse incentives in a fee-for-service system paid for by the deep pockets of the federal government with no questions asked. Which is how Medicare operated up to that point.

Read it.

When the Obama Administration first suggested the Affordable Care Act following the Financial Crisis, we argued that the outcome would be substantially higher, not lower, healthcare costs. It is interesting today that economists and the media complain about surging healthcare costs with each inflation report but fail to identify the root cause of that escalation.

The chart below tells you almost everything you need to know, but in this blog, we will revisit why the Affordable Care Act failed to make healthcare affordable and some solutions to fix the problem.

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Information in a federal report that pointed to the COVID-19 virus being leaked from a Chinese laboratory rather than coming from nature was “silenced” from being included in discussions with President Joe Biden and in a final report in May 2021, according to sources close to the situation.

As a result, the report concluded that the virus that caused the pandemic likely was not genetically engineered at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but had come from nature, reports the New York Post on Friday.

The “zoonotic origin” theory on the virus had been backed by several people in the public health establishment including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Biden’s chief medical adviser.

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Brownstone Institute has been tracking a little-known federal agency for years. It is part of the Department of Homeland Security created after 9-11. It is called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA. It was created in 2018 out of a 2017 executive order that seemed to make sense. It was a mandate to secure American digital infrastructure against foreign attack and infiltration.

And yet during the Covid year, it assumed three huge jobs. It was the agency responsible for dividing the workforce between essential and nonessential. It led the way on censorship efforts. And it handled election security for 2020 and 2022, which, if you understand the implications of that, should make you spit out your coffee upon learning.

More than any other agency, it became the operationally relevant government during this period. It was the agency that worked through third parties and packet-switching networking to take down your Facebook group. It worked through all kinds of intermediaries to keep a lid on Twitter. It managed LinkedIn, Instagram, and most of the other mainstream platforms in a way that made you feel like your opinions were too crazy to see the light of day.

Read it.

At the end of every year, as we make our way through the holidays, you’ll hear no shortage of complaints about the rampant hyper-consumerism at the heart of modern American society. And these complaints aren’t without merit. Flip on the TV or walk through any city’s commercial district before Christmas, and it’s easy to get the impression that the entire American concept of familial love rests on how much stuff we buy for each other.

…

But before condemning that as a “moral failure” of the American people, it’s important to understand that this is the sought-after result of our government’s policies.

…

Today, with full control over the supply and value of money, the United States government has settled on a policy that aims to bring about permanent price inflation. They do this by printing money and injecting it into the economy through the credit markets. Doing so transfers a lot of wealth to the political class and creates the recurring nightmarish cycle of economic booms and recessions. But it also has profound effects on the public’s behavior.

Because permanent price inflation punishes people for saving. Money loses its value over time, meaning—in a reversal of how it’s worked for almost all of human history—money saved today will not be able to purchase as much in the future.

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A U.S. appeals court has halted enforcement of an anti-money laundering law that requires corporate entities to disclose the identities of their real beneficial owners to the U.S. Treasury Department ahead of a deadline for most companies to do so.

The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals late Thursday reinstated a nationwide injunction that had been issued earlier this month by a federal judge in Texas who had concluded the Corporate Transparency Act was unconstitutional.

The order marked a change of course for the court. On Monday, a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit at the urging of the U.S. Department of Justice put the injunction on hold while the government appealed the Texas judge’s decision.

Where in the Constitution does it say the Federal government can do that?

The American Mind.

Under the best of circumstances, it is difficult for any intelligence service to collect, analyze, and produce actionable, predictive data for a nation’s leadership. This task is made considerably harder when lockstep adherence to a fringe political ideology is imposed upon the workforce tasked with carrying out this challenging mission. Unfortunately, this is the situation the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies of the U.S. Intelligence Community are in: to America’s detriment, their leadership enthusiastically imposed Diversity, Equity and Inclusion ideology upon their employees.

To underscore how deeply DEI has metastasized inside the host, in a recent enlightening and publicly available statement, the CIA’s Chief DEI officer said there are three criteria by which an intelligence officer can be promoted at America’s most important foreign intelligence service. Only one of them is related to mission impact. The others are a rather vague “corporate mindset”—and DEI.

Of the three, adherence to the cant of DEI is the most important; those who do not vocally and unreservedly support it are denied promotions and meaningful assignments. Like rallies held by authoritarian regimes, you do not want to be the first to stop clapping at the approved, serial pronouncements.

Read it.

It’s easy to grow desensitized to the threat of gender ideology in schools. It seems every day there is a fresh new outrage about kindergarteners getting indoctrinated into “trans joy” and school clinics offering transgender “medicine” for minors.

President-elect Donald Trump’s historic reelection victory represented a loud rebuke to the transgender movement—after all, one of his most effective ads slammed Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats’ presidential nominee, as being “for they/them,” while Trump is “for you.” But this noxious ideology still has a stranglehold in many institutions, backed up in some cases by official state policy.

In fact, no fewer than 16 U.S. states have curriculum standards that force teachers’ hands on the issue, according to an important new report from The Heritage Foundation.

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One of the wonderful features of Christmas is how different cultures have different ways of celebrating the holiday. If you are Irish, for example, you might go to Midnight Mass or take a plunge for a Christmas Swim. Italians traditionally celebrate Christmas Eve with the insanely delicious Feast of the Seven Fishes (La Vigilia in Italian). Germans are generally recognized as the culture that first brought us advent calendars and the Tannenbaum or Christmas tree (thank you, Martin Luther), but they also brought Krampus Nacht for the naughty children.

If you are an American small government conservative, however, one Christmas tradition you always look forward to is the annual Festivus airing of grievances from Senator Rand Paul. Each year, Paul publishes a report of some of the worst examples of federal government waste … and calls out his colleagues on both sides of the aisle while doing so.

But Senator Paul may have outdone himself this year. For the first time ever, his Festivus list contains over $1 TRILLION in government waste.

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A Fraternal Order of Police chapter expressed “outrage” at President Joe Biden’ death row commutation of a cop killer on Monday, with the fallen officer’s widow calling it “distressing.”

FOP Capital City Lodge #9, which represents Columbus, Ohio, called the reprieve given to convicted cop killer Daryl Lawrence an “inexcusable affront to the memory” of Officer Bryan Hurst, shot and killed in the line of duty by Lawrence in 2005.

Biden’s commutation of Lawrence was one of 37 that Biden handed out to federal death row inmates on Monday, including at least five child killers and several mass murderers.

UPDATE: Fla. Sheriff: Biden’s ‘Woke Ideology’ Behind Commutations

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Whenever the first Trump administration made noises about defunding public media (in its 2017 and 2018 budget proposals, for instance), including National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the congressionally founded tax-funded entity ostensibly in charge, would respond by emphasizing how PBS benefits kids.

But must PBS’s educational support for children also include transgender and gender-identity propaganda?

PBS has run plenty of stories on its evening broadcast encouraging transgender treatments and surgery and standing for “transgender rights,” not only for adults but even impressionable minors who are not ready to make such irrevocable decisions about their body.

The controversial Trevor Project, which bills itself as “the leading suicide prevention and crisis intervention nonprofit organization for LGBTQ+ young people” and aggressively pushes so-called “gender-affirming” surgeries (like “cross-sex hormones, castration, and breast removal”) onto kids, has not only figured heavily in PBS coverage, which regularly promotes its slanted surveys on so-called suicidal ideation among LGBTQ youth. Trevor’s presence has also seeped into its coverage aimed at children themselves.

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Are you a parent wanting to know what exactly the local school is teaching your child? Looking for official documentation of those lessons or the policies that motivated them? Better have millions of dollars in the piggy bank because that’s what these taxpayer funded institutions are demanding parents pay for access to public records through FOIA request.

The impetus for the sudden interest from parents in school activities is obvious. Attempts by educators to indoctrinate children with covid propaganda, including lessons on “anti-vaxxers” and even giving children vaccines without parental consent led to a wave of parental participation in how their local schools operate.

Multiple state supreme courts have blocked parental lawsuits and set a precedent giving schools immunity from litigation, specifically concerning health related policies. The only other option for citizens with children was to force their way into school board meetings and watch every move of the people involved.

FOIA requests have become frequent because schools refused to offer lesson transparency. In other words, school officials and teachers unions assert that they are not required to tell parents what their children are being taught, so the only way to know is to press the issue through access to public records.

Moral: Don’t send your kids to a government school.

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After a week of predictable drama, President Joe Biden signed a government funding bill on Saturday, averting yet another government shutdown because of our government’s terminal addiction to spending money we don’t have.

As we noted earlier, the package limps the government along to March 14, when this is Trump’s problem, and includes $100 billion in disaster aid and a one-year farm bill. It notably did not include a debt limit extension demanded by Trump.

After passing through the house on the third try, the funding bill passed overnight in the Senate on Saturday by a vote of 85-11, while the House vote was 366-34.

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A parental rights group published a report showing that the Department of Education has spent enormous sums to promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Parents Defending Education works to “reclaim our schools from activists imposing harmful agendas.”

It published its report on Dec. 12 demonstrating that, since 2021, the Department of Education has spent $1,002,522,304.81 to promote DEI at “universities, school districts, and nonprofits.”

That sum includes $489,883,797.81 for “DEI Hiring,” $343,337,286 for “DEI Programming,” and $169,301,221 for “Based Mental health/Social Emotional Learning.”

Washington Poop.

The original plan negotiated between House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and Democrats in both chambers ran more than 1,500 pages, while the legislation the House approved on Friday was just over 100 pages and dropped some policies unrelated to government spending.

Still too many, but it appears as if the incipient Trump admin is starting to do its job.

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 … crucial services will continue without interruption. That includes all services essential for national security and public safety—such as the military and law enforcement—as well as mandatory government payments such as Social Security and veterans’ benefits.

The key fact, as the U.S. Department of Justice itself has said, is that when there is a short-term lapse in appropriations, “the federal government will not be truly ‘shut down’ … because Congress has itself provided that some activities of government should continue.” In fact, any claims that not passing a CR will result in a “shutting down” of the government “is an entirely inaccurate description,” according to the DOJ.

Such a lapse in funding would be neither catastrophic nor unprecedented, but it would pare down government services to those most essential for “the safety of human life or the protection of property.” That would not include the hundreds of billions of dollars in the federal budget that are constantly squandered and wasted on frivolous, unnecessary, and unneeded programs.

Bloomberg.

To be clear: Biden didn’t ‘cancel’ the debt–he merely ordered that the debtors didn’t have to repay it, thereby making the taxpayers liable for it. Debt’s still there, and coming out of YOUR pocket.

Public workers, of course, are a key part of the Democrats’ power base, so the partisan corruption is strong in this one.

UPDATE: Biden Gives Last-Minute Student Loan Handout as He Abandons Broader Initiative

The Antiplanner.

Something called the Oliver Wyman Forum has worked with the University of California, Berkeley to publish an annual “urban mobility readiness index.” This is supposed to be a measure of how ready cities are for the coming “mobility revolution.” Unfortunately, it is more a measure of how ready cities are for the nineteenth-century’s mobility revolution.

The latest index ranks San Francisco as the best in the world when in fact it is one of the least mobile cities and urban areas in the nation. Dallas and Houston, two of the most mobile urban areas in America, are ranked 34 and 35 out of 70 major cities. Considering that Moscow, one of the most mobility-repressed cities in the world, is ranked not far below Houston, this index isn’t providing much help regarding urban mobility.

The problem is that the authors of the report have already decided what will constitute the coming “mobility revolution”: electric cars, bicycles, mass transit, and autonomous vehicles. While I agree about autonomous vehicles, the electric car revolution has stuttered to a near-stop and bicycles and mass transit were revolutionary in the 1890s but today are insignificant on an urban scale except, maybe, in extremely poor places such as Nairobi and Lagos.

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The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released their final report earlier this month, concluding that the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Tony Fauci funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where a lab accident likely started the initial outbreak.

Multiple U.S. agencies aided by virologist sought to cover-up this evidence, the Select Subcommittee charged, and several people broke the law by misleading congressional staff including Peter Daszak of EcoHealth, who funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab; NIH employee David Morens who served as Tony Fauci’s advisor; and former New York Governor Cuomo who lied about nursing home fatalities in his state.