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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Read it.

 … 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.

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Now with just weeks to go before the Trump administration takes over the White House, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has issued some interesting and surprising admissions. He told an audience of the Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday that Biden’s policy on Iran hasn’t been more muscular because Washington’s regime change efforts in the region over the past two decades have basically been failures.

It’s rare for a top official who is still in office to so bluntly describe that regime change efforts have been doomed. Blinken had been asked specifically of the US supporting Iranian opposition groups to overthrow the government in Tehran.

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It’s always hilarious when people want government to do stuff. Because not only is government awful at everything, it is excruciatingly slow at being awful at everything.

People want government to continue wasting hundreds of billions of dollars connecting us to the internet when the government already acknowledged a decade ago that everyone was already connected to the internet. The Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration has wasted yet another three years and $42 billion on yet another new government program that has connected zero people to the internet.

How are more and more people actually connecting to the internet these days? Via the private sector, obviously. And via wireless connections, of course. Via the networks built in the air rather than in the ground. And as ever more people connect wirelessly, ever more cut their grounded cords. All by its onesies, wired king Comcast is losing nearly 400,000 subscribers this year.

I’ll bet Comcast noticed that. I’ll bet their fellow wired internet providers noticed. I know China noticed. But our government didn’t. Because our government remains dishonest and steadfastly impervious to reality.

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Each EO is presented to the president in a separate blue leather binder with the Seal of the President of the United States stamped in gold on the cover. Joe Biden signed about 50 EOs on the day he was sworn in (January 20, 2021), mostly reversing Trump’s policies.

You may notice that Biden has a rack of pens in front of him. Each EO is signed with a different pen and then the pens are handed out to supporters of the President as gifts. Now you can visualize Trump (without the mask) sitting at the same desk in the Oval Office with perhaps an even taller pile of binders signing away on EOs to reinstate Trump policies, establish new policies and abolish as many of Biden’s policies as possible. The best quick guide to Trump’s first 100 days is to consider the EOs he will sign on day one of his second term.

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California’s zero emission regulations are causing truck shortages and rising costs, according to the trucking and heavy-duty vehicle industry.

State officials plan to end traditional combustion truck sales by 2036.

Time to leave.

Read it.

I guess we all better PANIC!

UPDATE: US confirms first severe human case of bird flu (Reuters)

UPDATE: CDC confirms first case of severe bird flu (Nathaniel Weixel/The Hill)

UPDATE: California Declares an Emergency Over Bird Flu in Cattle (Apoorva Mandavilli/New York Times)

UPDATE : Public Trust in Health Agencies Gone, Former CDC Director Says  Gee, I wonder why>=?

UPDATE: Nancy Pelosi Profited As Luxury Napa Resort Won COVID-19 Bailout

UPDATE: California Gov. Gavin Newsom declares state of emergency over bird flu, calling it a “proactive action” (Cecilio Padilla/CBS News)

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Everyone’s blaming health insurance company greed for the soaring claims denials and roadblocks to care. That’s naive. Follow the money to find the real culprits: lying politicians.

In 2013, before Affordable Care Act regulations kicked in, insurers denied roughly 1.5% of claims, according to the American Medical Association. But under ACA rules, denials increased tenfold. Now nearly 15% of claims are denied, reports Premier, an insurance consultant firm. Some insurers deny a third or more of claims, according to Kaiser Family Foundation research.

Insurers are also demanding preauthorizations for a wide range of treatments and medications, tying your doctor’s hands and dangerously delaying your care.

Your doctor has to call the insurer before beginning treatment or ordering a medication. Seldom is the person on the other end of the phone a specialist in the disease or treatment in question. It could be an OB-GYN overriding what your neurosurgeon recommends, warns the AMA.

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Oh,  ya think?

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ny day now, President-elect Donald Trump will nominate a new director of the U.S. Census Bureau, replacing President Joe Biden’s man, Robert L. Santos. Whoever Trump’s nominee will be needs to grasp how vital the job is for the long-term unity of the United States and for the need to free people from the Left’s balkanizing mission.

Conservatives’ eyes often glaze over when one brings up the periodic enumeration of people mandated by the Constitution. But here’s a reason for conservatives to sit up and start taking notice: The Left really cares about the census.

The Left sees us not as a unified nation with common purposes and aspirations but as a federation of different groups. Some of these groups are dominant, and others are subordinate. This fits neatly into the Marxian “oppressor v. oppressed” template that today’s Left promotes so heavily.

The main problem with the Census is that it doesn’t just count people, which is all that the Constitution requires — it also collects tons of personal information that is used to justify intrusive government policies. The second-to-main problem is that it counts everybody, not just citizens, and that distorts the allocation of Congressional seats among the several states.

Read it.

As Margaret Thatches once famously said, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

Time to leave.

Wall Street Journal.

In the land of big trucks, a tiny pickup is stealing drivers’ hearts. Now owners of the little haulers from Japan say they’re being driven off the road.

Kei trucks are smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle and powered by an engine commonly found in motorcycles, but they have beds as large as a full-size pickup from Detroit. The combination of size and utility are virtues in their home country, where both land and natural resources are scarce.

Lately they have taken off in the U.S., where owners say they do nearly everything that bigger pickups can do and come with additional features—like being super sweet and making other drivers jealous. Even in states like Texas, where bigger is almost always better, kei trucks are flying off lots.

But,  as usual, government regulation is the locust swarm in the ointment.

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A new report highlights a disparity in the Department of Education toward both Christian and career colleges through its Office of Enforcement, an “obscure agency” created during the Obama administration and revived under President Joe Biden.

The American Principles Project’s report reveals that “nearly 70% of penalties imposed by the Office of Enforcement have been against Christian institutions and career colleges, even though these schools represent less than 10% of college students.”

When reached for comment, the Department of Education didn’t respond.

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The Chinese government in recent weeks expanded its ban on exports of a handful of minerals found in critical military and energy technologies in America. The move puts a spotlight on America’s domestic mineral supplies, many of which are locked in years-long federal permitting and regulatory reviews.

One such case is a project located at an abandoned gold mine in the heart of Idaho. That mine contains some of the nation’s largest known deposits of the rare mineral antimony, which is among those affected by China’s export restrictions. But after a staggering 14 years, the federal government has yet to give the Idaho project a green light to begin production.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

Resumes are flying around Washington as President JOE BIDEN’s national security team frantically searches for jobs once they’re kicked out of office next month.

Washington’s (in)famous revolving door as political parties trade power is nothing new. But this time around, the job market seems particularly brutal, according to eight people familiar with the job search frenzy, including Biden appointees, State Department and Pentagon officials and congressional aides.

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They’d already be there except for The Mouse and the fact that Money Talks.

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It is estimated that fewer than 23% of Americans between 17 and 22 are qualified to serve in the U.S. military. The reasons range from obesity and drug use to mental health issues. Today, less than 1% of our nation has served in the armed forces, making the U.S. military an exclusive organization.

Yet last week, federal district judge Richard Bennett ruled that the U.S. Naval Academy’s race-conscious admissions policy did not violate the Supreme Court’s recent decision to curtail affirmative action. Judge Bennett argued that the Naval Academy has a “compelling national security interest in a diverse officer corps.” He is only partially correct.

Never once while in combat or performing special missions underwater have I, nor any of my Special Operations brothers and sisters, ever wondered about the skin color of our battle buddy or dive buddy. We only cared that the person next to us had our backs. The diversity we need in our military lies in our backgrounds and what we bring to the fight, not whether we are black or white or anything in between. I served alongside men and women who didn’t care about my skin color; they cared that I was trained, prepared, and able to lead them. The diversity I brought to the table was in my life experiences – growing up in sub-Saharan West Africa and Southeast Asia, understanding cultures, and speaking three languages fluently.

As our leaders continue to focus on inclusivity instead of exclusivity, the military missed its 2023 recruiting goals by 41,000 recruits. The U.S. Navy circumvented that deficit by bringing forward delayed-entry recruits. These recruits would normally be counted in the following fiscal year; however, the Navy could mask their low 2023 numbers by robbing Peter to pay Paul and leaving a larger gap for 2024. Faced with this initial deficit for 2024, Navy leaders looked at medical conditions where 85% or more recruits eventually receive medical waivers after a thorough medical review process. In April 2024, the chief of Navy recruiting released a two-page list of conditions that would be automatically waived, bypassing even a cursory physician’s review.

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Democratic lawmakers are seeking to hinder a federal watchdog investigation into misconduct within the Biden administration’s $400 billion green energy loan program—a sign Democrats could be growing concerned about what the long-running probe has uncovered.

The inspector general for the Department of Energy has spent over a year investigating the Loan Programs Office, which has been accused of dishing out billions in government loans to politically connected recipients, including companies teetering on bankruptcy and entities linked to foreign adversaries.

Now Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee have taken the unusual step of launching an investigation into the investigators. In a letter last week, Democrats accused DOE inspector general Teri Donaldson of “bypass[ing] competition requirements that exist to ensure taxpayer dollars are not wasted” when she hired an outside law firm, Rabalais & Associates, to assist in her probe.

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Permitting reform has swiftly risen to the forefront in Washington as a pressing national security priority. The United States is grappling with the dual challenges of escalating energy demand and mounting global competition, particularly from China. Despite the critical role of our nation’s energy infrastructure, the U.S. is ensnared in a permitting process that can prolong vital projects by several years—or even decades. SAFE’s Center for Grid Security underscores that overhauling the procedures for approving and constructing energy infrastructure is not just a matter of efficiency—it is a matter of national urgency in the face of escalating global power competition.

The dead hand of Government Present destroys our prospect of having a future.

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Government excels at NOT getting things done. But politicians promise more things anyway.

Kamala Harris declared that our government would “build thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable!” This “broadband connectivity agenda” was supported by “every House Republican on Energy and Commerce,” write Republican representatives.

Three years later, not a single person has been connected.

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Nor ever has been. (Who didn’t know that? How is this news?)

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A federal magistrate judge moved to release a Chinese national accused of taking covert drone shots of a military base in central California on cashless bail. That same judge once held former Trump administration education secretary Betsy DeVos in contempt of court, fined her $100,000, and threatened to send her to jail.

Sallie Kim, a former Stanford administrator, issued the ruling on Tuesday, court filings show. She determined that Chinese national Yinpiao Zhou should walk free on his own personal recognizance as federal prosecutors pursue charges against him for flying a hacked drone over Vandenberg Space Force Base. Federal agents arrested Zhou as he attempted to board a China-bound flight in San Francisco.

The decision appears to have raised eyebrows at the Department of Justice, which is appealing Kim’s order.

“Mr. Zhou made his initial appearance yesterday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco,” a department spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon in a statement provided late Wednesday. “United States Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim ordered him released on personal recognizance. Our office is appealing that ruling. Zhou remains in federal custody.”

The court declined to comment.

Fortune, a Voice of the Crust.

In the early 19404s, having so much of the U.S. population in military service caused a severe labor shortage, and in order to entice the remaining eligible population to join the workforce, employers began hiking wages. Fearing a wave of inflation as a result of the hiring push, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Office of Esconomic Stabilization and authorized wage controls through the Stabilization Act of 1942. The move forced employers to instead use increased health insurance benefits as an incentive. To accommodate the growing number of Americans receiving health care through employee-provided insurance, Congress passed the Hill-Burton Act in 1946 to build and expand U.S. hospitals.

So, as is traditional, the problem was caused by the government meddling in the economy. And it still continues to do so — one of the big problems with ‘Obamacare’ is the government mandating coverage that they think everybody ought to have, like abortion and contraceptive coverage for nuns, rather than letting people do what suits them best. The ‘problem’ is not employer-sponsored insurance; the problem is government meddling.

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The Department of Education under President Joe Biden spent more than $1 billion on DEI-driven grants to public school districts, universities, and nonprofits since 2021, according to a report released by watchdog group Parents Defending Education (PDE).

The 162 grants funding DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives were aimed at hiring, educational programming, and mental health training, according to PDE. Total price tag: $1,002,522,304.81. PDE said that’s a conservative estimate.

“These numbers are based on available data and not exact. The number of districts and students is likely much higher. Some districts, such as Miami-Dade County Public Schools, is connected to multiple grants and is therefore only counted once in the numbers,” PDE wrote in its report.

Read it.

Origin of COVID: Almost since COVID first appeared, a debate has raged about whether the virus’s emergence was zoonotic (transferred from an animal to a human) or whether it was the result of a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The subcommittee concluded that “the weight of the evidence increasingly supports the lab leak hypothesis.” If anything, I would say that is an understatement. The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where the zoonotic emergence supposedly occurred, is about seven miles from the WIV. For a coronavirus to have naturally evolved within seven miles of a lab working on gain-of-function (GOF) research on coronaviruses would be one of the most remarkable coincidences of all time.

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Suppression Tactics: The report argues that most of the non-medical suppression efforts, principally masks, social distancing, and lockdowns, had, at best, a limited impact on the spread of the virus and probably did more harm than good. It also suggests that public health officials had little scientific data to back up their guidance concerning their non-medical suppression efforts.

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Vaccines: The subcommittee lauded the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed for the unprecedented speed in spurring COVID vaccine development. However, it pushed back against vaccine mandates, citing that the data never showed the vaccines would suppress transmission. It noted the toll the mandates took on the military and healthcare workforces at a critical time.

UPDATE: Bill forcing hospitals to administer ivermectin, other requested treatments nears finish line

Daily Signal.

“Washington is still operating as if it’s March 2020. The headquarters of most agencies remain largely abandoned,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, wrote in a report released Thursday that paints a dystopian picture of the federal workforce inside the vaunted beltway.

It’s been nearly five years since COVID-19 knocked on America’s door. Most schools and businesses opened up years ago. But federal government operations in Washington, D.C., are behind the flyover states.

Because of COVID-19, President Joe Biden campaigned from home in 2020. But after American classrooms and businesses reopened, Biden has been a frequently absent executive since he took the oath of office. Ernst figured Biden “was out of office 532 days over the last three-and-a-half years, about 40% of the time he was expected to be in the Oval Office.”

Democrats don’t get elected to office to work for the people. Democrats get elected to office to collect government pay and perks.

The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.

The senator Elizabeth Warren will introduce a bill in Congress on Wednesday aimed at shifting corporations away from “maximizing shareholder value” and towards giving more support to workers and other stakeholders.

The Accountable Capitalism Act proposes a series of reforms to increase corporate responsibility, strengthen the voices of workers and others in corporate decisions and shift companies away from their focus on shareholders.

In the 1980s, the largest corporations in the US dedicated less than half of profits to shareholders, reinvesting the rest into the company, according to a fact sheet on the bill provided by Warren’s office to the Guardian.

Apparently an attempt to codify into law the progressive notion that businesses don’t exist to make money for their owners but rather to provide jobs and assist in social engineering by the government.

Daily Signal.

New job numbers are out and—hilariously—payrolls jumped 227,000, yet persons employed dropped 355,000. Are they just making it up?

The numbers are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which—thanks to the power of imagination—reports that jobs are booming, yet the unemployment rate is … worse, rising to 4.2%. It’s actually 7.3%, using the wider U-6 unemployment number that the legacy media only report when the president is a Republican.

Read it.

A decade of misery Americans experienced did not stem from an angry God. A careful reading of the facts of the period suggests they stemmed from bad economic policies, ones initially passed by President Hoover that grew worse under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In a highly readable Explainer, Shlaes illustrates the economic mistakes of the Great Depression – which famously included government slaughtering and burying 6.5 million pigs to keep prices high while millions of Americans were going hungry – were even more nonsensical than you realized.