Read it.

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)

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

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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.

…

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.

…

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.

Read it.

On X, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a new gun buyback event on Long Island for Saturday. The post was heavily ratio’d, with the usual X users in the reply section bashing the progressive politician and arguing how ineffective gun buybacks are at reducing crime. Meanwhile, it seems like James’ office has learned from previous gun buybacks how not to be exploited by the 3D-printed community.

“On Saturday, December 14, we’re hosting a gun buyback event in Bohemia at the True North Community Church from 10AM-1PM,” James’ post read, adding, “No ID is needed, and no questions will be asked.”

However, in small italicized font, James’ office wrote:

“Anyone bringing homemade or 3D-printed guns will be paid a total of $25, regardless of how many are turned in.”

Leftists don’t understand markets and how they work, which is why fiascos like this are supported with taxpayer funds. For example, if a government tries to reduce the number of rats by offering a bounty for them, it will actually increase the number of rats because people will start raising rats for the purpose of claiming the bounty.

Read it.

Last week, the Biden administration passed a rule allowing for the government healthcare programs Medicare and Medicaid coverage of a class of weight-loss drugs that promises to help millions of people lose weight and become healthier. This decision by the White House begs the question: Why wait until after the election to pass a popular proposal that will help millions of working-class Americans afford weight-loss drugs they currently cannot afford to purchase themselves?

A lot of the press analysis portrays this White House decision as a shot by President Biden at the incoming Trump administration, forcing the potential new Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has cast doubt on the benefits of these drugs, to either keep this Biden era provision or take critical medical coverage away from millions of working-class Americans who rely on government subsidized healthcare.

But my clear understanding of the White House decision to cover GLP-1 weight loss and diabetes drugs like Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic/Wegovy and Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro/Zepbound is that this was not a shot at the incoming Trump administration, but rather, a willingness of the president and the vice president to rebuke the progressive wing of the Democratic Party which has vociferously opposed this new policy. Indeed, lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont have waged a personal crusade against the makers of these drugs to reduce their profits.

Read it.

In a shocking video released by Project Veritas, an EPA official appears to confirm what many have long suspected: taxpayer money is being shoveled out the door with reckless abandon, all in the name of climate policy. The official’s words paint a damning picture of an agency prioritizing speed over prudence, all to sidestep political obstacles. His cavalier attitude suggests that the real motive is not saving the planet, but safeguarding their funding from potential Republican oversight.

ZMan lays out how The System really works.

We just went through an election and people are stunned to learn that no one in Washington noticed it. It is business as usual in the imperial capital. The only change is they will have to throw sand in the gears of the Trump transition, but the purpose of which is to make sure it remains business as usual after January. Exactly no one cares that the people have spoken.

The main reason for this is elected office holders have little say in how anything is done, not even in how legislation is passed. This is done by an army of staffers, agency people, lobbyists and the semi-permanent political class. The people in charge are the people you rarely see on television or in the news. They are the people who make up what Sam Francis called the leviathan.

That is the show this week. The stuff we learned in school about how our political system functions has been reduced to nonsense. It sort of worked that way decades ago, but the full flowering of the managerial state has put the system in the control of the army of people who make their living running the leviathan. Elections are just something they now hold to distract us.

Read it.

An explosive new report from Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who chairs the Senate DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) Caucus, notes that fewer than 1 of out every 10 federal employees (6%) work in an office full time, citing an April survey.

“If you exclude security guards & maintenance personnel, the number of government workers who show up in person and do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%!” posted Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur leading DOGE with fellow billionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, in response to the report. “Almost no one.”

Read it.

Although Donald Trump’s election was widely seen as a rebuke to the Left’s obsession with race, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has promised to “Trump-proof” his state, and that likely applies to the Democrat’s ongoing plans to give race-based handouts.

This year alone, Newsom signed a slate of reparations bills into law. And although California won’t be handing out checks, its laws are sure to spark more calls from California liberals to take money from Hispanic, Asian, and white Californians and give it to black Californians.

Time to leave — unless you’re black.

Read it.

American defense industries lack the capacity to supply the missiles and other weapons needed for a war with China and U.S. forces would lose the conflict as a result, members of Congress and private defense experts warned Thursday.

 

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Boeing’s plea deal with federal prosecutors, aimed at resolving the US Justice Department’s investigation into the 737 MAX fatal crashes that claimed 346 lives over a five-month span in 2018 and 2019, was rejected by a federal judge in Texas on Thursday due to an alarming DEI provision.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, US District Judge Reed O’Connor rejected the plea deal, stating that it improperly constrained the court by requiring diversity considerations in the selection of an outside monitor to oversee Boeing’s future legal compliance.

O’Connor wrote that DoJ prosecutors gave him “shifting and contradictory explanations” of the role DEI would play in shaping the selection of a monitor:

“In a case of this magnitude, it is in the utmost interest of justice that the public is confident this monitor selection is done based solely on competency.”

Read it.

The Biden administration is racing to disburse financing from the government’s biggest clean energy bank to get ahead of possible cuts once President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

On Monday the US Department of Energy agreed to lend a project backed by automaker Stellantis up to $7.5 billion for two electric-vehicle battery factories in Indiana. The deal follows nearly $12 billion in other clean energy loans and guarantees announced in the last week, adding up to $41 billion in conditional commitments to about 20 projects the office is now racing to finalize before Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.

Realistically, most of those deals won’t close before Trump takes office, creating a risk that the new administration could pause or rescind them. Current and former DOE staff told Semafor they worry that the Loan Programs Office (LPO), a bastion of outgoing President Joe Biden’s climate agenda, could be drastically scaled back under Trump. They fear the incoming president may decide to leave roughly $340 billion in remaining loan authority either untouched or directed to projects favored by the fossil fuel industry.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

Why not? If he can pardon Hunter, he can pardon anybody.

UPDATE: Fauci, Schiff, And Cheney May Receive ‘Preemptive Pardons’  We now have a list of the people who ought to be brought to justice.

Read it.

As many Americans shopped for Black Friday deals, the Biden-Harris administration released annual data on improper payments showing that the federal government spent at least $161 billion of taxpayers’ money sending payments to the wrong people and in the wrong amounts in fiscal year 2024.

Read it.

The Biden-Harris administration has granted millions of dollars in funding for a virtual treatment that aims to help cure eating disorders by “affirming” LGBTQIA+ patients’ sexual orientation and gender claims.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health awarded Auburn University assistant professor of psychological sciences Tiffany Brown and San Diego State University professor of psychology Aaron Blashill up to $5 million in grants to “develop and provide” the Promoting Resilience to Improve Disordered Eating (PRIDE) treatment—a virtual “identity-affirming eating disorder treatment for LGBTQIA+ patients,” the Auburn University College of Liberal Arts website states.

The PRIDE initiative is undergirded by the idea that “identity-related stress” is an “underlying motivator of disordered eating,” and thus that “affirm[ing] and support[ing]” patients’ beliefs that they are LGBTQIA+ can help cure eating disorders.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees.

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There are over 660,000 illegal migrants already convicted of felonies or facing charges who have come across the southern border and been released into the U.S., according to newly released federal data provided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Some are in jail — on the taxpayers’ tab, of course — having been nabbed for committing more crimes once they got here, but many are walking free, spreading their criminality across the nation.

Over 58,000 of these known criminals have come to New York City alone, including 1,000 known members of South American gangs, like Tren de Aragua, that are making city-operated shelters into their headquarters.

Local sanctuary city rules protect these criminals from being deported. It’s time to end the sanctuary-for-migrants madness and start offering safety and sanctuary to the country’s legal residents.

Jonathan Turley.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) is widely known to be angling to be the next Democratic presidential nominee after the implosion of Vice President Kamala Harris. This week, Newsom positioned not just his campaign but also his state as part of the “resistance” for the next four years against the Trump Administration. Newsom pushed a special session to secure a $25 million war chest to take the Trump Administration to court, even before the inauguration and release of policies by the incoming administration.

Read it.

In March, Chicago’s Progressive Caucus made a painful observation: voters believe that city government just isn’t functioning. Following the defeat of the Bring Chicago Home campaign, which would’ve raised real estate transfer taxes to combat homelessness, the caucus observed that “[v]oters who opposed the referendum told us that their vote represented their current distrust, frustration, and disappointment with government… Chicagoans deserve and transparent and responsive government that gets things done.”

It’s hard to argue with them. On issue after issue, it feels like government is either performing worse than it has in the past, or we’re spending a lot more for the same results.

Jerry Pournelle was fond of saying that the purpose of government is to hire and pay government workers.

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vented his displeasure Monday after two Democratic-appointed federal judges reversed their decisions to retire in what appear to be efforts to stop President-elect Trump from nominating their successors.

McConnell called the unusual decisions to forgo retirement following Trump’s sweeping victory last month a “partisan” gambit that would undermine the integrity of federal courts.

“They rolled the dice that a Democrat could replace them and now that he won’t, they’re changing their plans to keep a Republican from doing it,” McConnell said on the Senate floor.

Quod abit circum venit circum.

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A panel of three judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of Texas in a lawsuit filed over its concertina wire barriers.

The court ruled 2-1 on Monday in a case that may set the tone for two other cases before the court related to Texas’ border security operations.

Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan wrote for the majority, with Judge Don Willett joining him. Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez dissented, arguing Texas did not meet “its burden to show a waiver of sovereign immunity or a likelihood of success on the merits.” (Duncan and Willett are appointees of then-President Donald Trump. Ramirez is an appointee of President Joe Biden.)

The ruling was issued 13 months after Texas sued the Biden administration after it destroyed concertina wire barriers it erected on state land.

Read it.

America and Russia are now at war. Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed as much in September when he commented on the news about President Biden mulling over a decision to grant Ukraine authorization to strike deep inside Russia with U.S.-supplied missiles.

Navy Matters.

The starting point in this discussion is the recognition that the entire transgender issue in the military is predicated on a faulty basis as demonstrated with this statement:

Service members with a diagnosis from a military medical provider indicating that gender transition is medically necessary will be provided medical care and treatment for the diagnosed medical condition … 

This statement pre-supposes that gender transition is a medical necessity rather than a choice. A medical necessity is, by definition, a procedure or treatment that, if not administered, will threaten the life of the patient. A desire to change gender is not a medical necessity. Failure to do so does not threaten the life of the patient. Thus, again by definition, it is a choice and the military should not be in the business of providing elective procedures that are not medically necessary.

Politico.

It’s the most sweeping presidential pardon since Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, a grant of clemency so broad that even Democrats were openly criticizing the president today. Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter drew criticism from all corners the day after he issued it, underscoring for posterity an unflattering aspect of his presidency: For all Biden’s insistence that the rule of law was of paramount importance and his talk about restoring democracy, in the end he made it much harder for his own party to hold President-elect Donald Trump to account.

In the most recent instance, Biden and his aides repeated the same line over and over when it came to Hunter Biden’s legal troubles: He’s not considering a pardon for his son. Even if the charges seemed harsher because Hunter was the president’s son, the president’s commitment to the justice system was such that he’d allow the process to continue.

Now, we’ve learned none of it was true. And it’s created a thorny political problem for the Democrats who are still in Washington and are charged with cleaning up Biden’s mess.

Already, Trump has signaled he’ll use Biden’s pardon of his son as justification for his own desire to pardon Jan. 6 rioters. Trump had been largely silent on the Jan. 6 issue since his victory, which had loyalists worrying about his commitment to the pardons. But on Sunday evening, he posted on Truth Social, “Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years?”

Joe Biden: “Screw the party, screw the country, I’m doing what’s best for me.”
Donald Trump: “What he said.”

Read it.

Civil asset forfeiture is an affront to anyone who’s sincerely committed to the American justice system’s cornerstone presumption of innocence. With law enforcement typically keeping some or all of the assets that are seized, the practice has rightly been called “policing for profit.”

I’ve previously examined the raw tyranny of civil asset forfeiture, spotlighting the story of a Mississippi man who took $42,300 in cash to Houston with the intent of buying a second semi truck for his fledgling trucking business, only to have it seized — or, in legal jargon, “forfeited” — by Harris County police, who pulled him over for allegedly following the vehicle in front of him too closely.

Now I’m compelled to share a new example of this legalized theft — the most brazenly unjust and opportunistic one I’ve encountered yet: In an ongoing, multi-million-dollar racket in Indianapolis, police are routinely seizing cash they find in FedEx packages that happen to be routed through that company’s second-largest hub.

Read it.

President-Elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services is cause for celebration for anyone who cares about the pharmaceutical industry’s influence over regulatory agencies, and the deleterious effect it has had on the health of Americans.

Read it.

There are only two issues that Democrats might care more about than the national legalization of abortion: Blocking the passage of voter ID laws, and, blocking the mass deportation of illegal immigrants.

The reason should be relatively obvious – Keeping the border open and illegal immigrants flowing into the US is the key to election victory for progressives in the long run. If leftists are going to exterminate millions of future voters in the womb, then their only other option to fill ballot boxes is to import people from the third world and give them as much free stuff as possible so they’re sure to vote blue.