Read it.

Federal small business grants intended for national defense technology have gone to create mobile apps for gay men, “transgender” women, and LGBTQ parents, and have funded other diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Senate Small Business Committee Chairwoman Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, has proposed the Investing in National Next-Generation Opportunities for Venture Acceleration and Technological Excellence Act, or the INNOVATE Act, to reform certain grant programs by eliminating DEI considerations or awards. The focus would shift to expand funding to small businesses in rural America.

“Your tax dollars should never be wasted on nonsense, especially when they are supposed to be spent on America’s national security,” Ernst told The Daily Signal in a statement.

The Antiplanner.

The Dallas Area Not-So-Rapid Transit (DART) system is facing “an uncertain future” due to “a suburban funding standoff,” reports Bloomberg. The article begins describing the plight of Bianca Smith, a low-income, transit-dependent person whose commute takes 90 minutes each way and who fears that service cuts will make it impossible to reach her job and leave her homeless because she won’t be able to pay her rent.

Fembot ‘journalism’ – start with a tear-jerking anecdote and then try to make it serve as universal data to support the point you intended to push all along. Women don’t care about facts; they only care about feelings. And male ‘journalists’ have had that attitude beaten into them since childhood.

This sob story is Bloomberg’s introduction to a debate between transit advocates, who claim to care about low-income people, and relatively wealthy suburbanites, who don’t want to keep paying so much for transit services they don’t use. Left unanswered are important questions such as: Why is Dallas’ transit system so crummy that it takes Bianca Smith 90 minutes to get to her job? How many people are there like Bianca Smith? Could there be a more cost-effective way of helping these people other than throwing money at a transit system that seems to be failing?

That’s because DART is a jobs program for Fashionable Minorities, not an actual business. I challenge you to find a white bus driver on any DART bus.

Between 1995 and 2014, Dallas spent $8.4 billion (in today’s dollars) building more than 90 miles of light rail. In doing so, it cut transit’s share of commuting almost in half, from 2.8 percent in 1990 to 1.5 percent in 2019. This is because light rail, which is obsolete in any American city, is particularly unsuited to a low-density, post-war urban area such as Dallas where both jobs and people are finely spread out through the region.

Read it.

An effort to censure Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., over comments about conservative leader Charlie Kirk was defeated Wednesday night when four Republicans joined Democrats to quash the measure.

Republican Reps. Mike Flood of Nebraska, Jeff Hurd of Colorado, Tom McClintock of California, and Cory Mills of Florida joined with Democrats in a 214-213 vote to support a motion to kill a measure by Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., to censure Omar.

I smell a primary in their future.

“Tonight, 210 Democrats and 4 Republicans sold out and chose to protect Ilhan Omar, a woman who mocked the cold-blooded assassination of an innocent American husband and father, who has openly supported ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood, and who has repeatedly incited political violence,” Mace wrote on X. “They didn’t stand with Charlie Kirk. They didn’t stand with the millions of Americans mourning his death. They stood with the one who mocked his legacy. They showed us exactly who they are, and we won’t forget.”

A major difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats never forget which side they’re on.

Navy Matters.

As you know, the F-35 does not yet have its full combat capabilities.  Those were part of the incremental Block software upgrades and should have happened years ago.  Now, the Block 4 upgrade effort has been delayed yet again.

The Pentagon now anticipates the F-35’s Block 4 modernization won’t be complete until 2031 at the earliest, a five-year delay from its original timeline, even as the department rescopes the effort to include fewer capabilities than originally envisioned … [1]Note the phrases,
“at the earliest”
“include fewer capabilities than originally envisioned”
You know, beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt, that the even the much delayed 2031 date will slip further still and the already downgraded capabilities of the Block 4 will be further downgraded.  Honestly, at the rate we’re going, Block 4 isn’t going to deliver much in the way of new capabilities, at all.  Many features have already been deferred to a nebulous, non-existent. Unfunded, future upgrade instead of the Block 4.

Power Line.

Under Article II of the Constitution, the President is the executive branch. But over the years, Congress has tried to limit the power of the President by establishing a number of “independent” agencies–the SEC, the FDIC, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, and so on. In many cases, Congress has purported to limit the President’s ability to fire employees of those “independent” agencies, even though they are part of the executive branch and nominally under his control.

Democrats like this arrangement, since the agencies are staffed overwhelmingly by Democrats. They have served to undermine every Republican president of the last generation. Until now, Republican Presidents have generally put up with the fact that they do not effectively control the executive branch, but President Trump has moved to assert his proper constitutional authority in several ways.

Most notably, in February he issued an executive order which we wrote about here. It asserted, in several ways, his authority over the “independent” agencies. He has also fired a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve for cause, and, more importantly, he has fired other executive branch officials without cause, as should be his prerogative under Article II.

Power Line.

I have written several posts on California Federal District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong’s temporary restraining order more or less preventing ICE from operating in California’s Central District — the district covering the seven counties of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura. The counties’ population of nearly 20 million people is the largest of any federal judicial district in the country. I wrote about Judge Frimpong’s crimping of ICE in posts that are accessible here. It’s crazy, baby. That’s my view.

Heather Mac Donald took up the case and the mysteries of Judge Frimpong herself in the City Journal column “Using a Double Standard on Race to Handicap ICE.” Subhead: “A federal judge ruled that agents impermissibly used race in questioning suspected illegal aliens—but she’s hardly color-blind in her own courtroom.” As one would expect from Ms. Mac Donald, it is an excellent column.

The government appealed Judge Frimpong’s order to the Ninth Circuit. The appeal remains pending, although the government has not received the emergency relief it sought from the court while the appeal is pending. The government therefore took its request for relief to the Supreme Court.

Read it.

The infamous autopen-pardoned Dr. Anthony Fauci lied under oath while testifying before Congress, and Rand Paul just dropped the receipts.

“Emails obtained by the Committee appear to contradict your testimony,” wrote Paul – referring to Fauci declaring under oath that he never ‘engaged in attempts to obstruct the Freedom of Information Act and the release of public documents.’

“In an email dated February 2, 2020, you directed then-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins to “Please delete this e-mail after you read it.”

No wonder he needed a pardon as Biden bailed out the door.

Read it.

The development of the USS Gerald R. Ford was marked by several challenges, including delays and budget overruns. Integrating new technologies, such as weapon elevators and EMALS, proved complex, contributing to these setbacks. The difficulties in certifying these systems highlighted the challenges of pioneering new technologies on such a massive scale.

The budget overruns, exceeding initial estimates by about 30%, sparked debates over defense spending priorities. Critics argue that the funds could have been allocated to other defense needs or social programs. This controversy has fueled discussions about the allocation of military resources and the balance between innovation and cost.

Furthermore, the ship’s advanced automation systems, designed to reduce crew size by 700, have raised questions about the future of naval employment. While automation reduces operational costs and improves crew conditions, it also poses challenges related to job security and the human element in military operations. These debates continue to shape discussions on the future of naval employment and technology integration.

Read it.

Federal employees are used to defying and waiting out reform- or change-minded administrations. That is no longer working. This administration is moving at non-government speeds to make changes. And the learned behavior of entitlement thinking by government employees is now a weakness rather than an effective survival tool. There is a case study in the Department of Agriculture.

The Antiplanner.

By ‘transit’ is meant, of course, ‘mass transit’ or ‘public transit’. Your car is just as much ‘transit’ as a bus or a train, but not being paid for by taxpayers makes it markedly declassé.

More than 70 organizations are asking the Illinois legislature to “reform” transit, by which they mean give it more tax dollars, according to a Chicago non-profit called the Active Transportation Alliance. The group’s list of organizations shows that at least half of them are labor unions or associated with such unions.

This supports my contention that transit today isn’t about moving people; it’s about jobs for union workers and profits for contractors. Some environmental groups are on the list of Chicago transit supporters, but they wouldn’t be if they really looked at the numbers.

Much like railroads in the modern world.

Read it.

A nineteen-year-old college student is suing her former high school for negligence because she graduated despite being unable to read or write.

She probably ought to sue her parents as well, since they were responsible for making sure that the school was doing its job.

The student, Aleysha Ortiz, graduated from Hartford Public Schools in the spring of 2024 with honors.

She earned a scholarship to attend the University of Connecticut, where she’s studying public policy. But while she was in high school, she had to use speech-to-text apps to help her read and write essays, and despite years of advocating for support for her literacy struggles, her school never addressed them.

She obviously had the intelligence to do well. The schools just dropped the ball, big-time.

The Washington Poop, paper of record of the Deep State.

People familiar with the Sanctuary Cities Enforcement working group say members were assigned menial busy work, and their impression was that the real goal was to force senior career lawyers to resign.

And it worked! This gets the apparatchiks to delf-delete, and makes room for more Trumpian people.

Trump just keeps on winning..,..

CNN, a Voice of the Crust.

Dr. Susan Monarez, who was sworn in as director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on July 31, has been removed from the position, the White House said Wednesday.

Her departure was quickly followed by the resignation of several high-level veteran agency officials, leaving the CDC leaderless at a perilous time.

Typical Narrative Media fearmongering. “OH MY GOD WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!” No we won’t.

“Susan Monarez is not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement. “Since Susan Monarez refused to resign despite informing HHS leadership of her intent to do so, the White House has terminated Monarez from her position with the CDC.”

The typical passive-aggressive bureaucratic playbook doesn’t work with Trump. Get with the program or hit the road. Eventually the rest of them will get the message or get the boot.

Unlike most career politicians who wind up in the oval office, Trump is an experienced CEO and is going to do what he would do to a company he has taken over. America will be the better for it.

I wish Steve Jobs had run for President. That would have been entertaining.

UPDATE: CDC Chief Says She’s Not Leaving

Read it.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has started an investigation into alleged organized attempts to inject bias into Wikipedia entries and the organization’s responses, The Hill reported Wednesday.

Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., and Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., chair of the panel’s subcommittee on cybersecurity, information technology and government innovation, on Wednesday sent an information request concerning the issue to Maryana Iskander, chief executive officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia.

In a letter containing the request, the legislators wrote that the committee is probing “the efforts of foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion.”

That Wikipedia is biased in a Woke direction is obvious to the most casual observer.

That this is any business of the government is less obvious. I see no reason for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to concern themselves with something that isn’t oversight of a government entity or related to government reform. We have to break these people of sticking their noses into the affairs of private organizations whenever they get the itch, although I suspect that anything short of the public impalement of Senator Lindsey Graham will be effective.

Read it.

Chaos ensued during the arrest of illegal alien influencer Tatiana Martinez while she was live streaming from her car in Los Angeles. Martinez, known for tracking ICE agents and using her TikTok account to alert protesters to the locations of their arrests, is a Colombian citizen who entered the US in 2022 according to DHS. She was released into the country by the Biden Administration along with millions of other illegals.

According to DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, Martinez was arrested for a previous DUI conviction in Los Angeles. This makes her a prime target for deportation under Donald Trump’s crackdown on migrants.

They’re so accustomed to the kid glove treatment from the Deep State, they’ve grown foolish.  Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

The U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon is largely funded with U.S. taxpayer dollars, money it has used to pursue left-wing programs like “gender diversity” training and lessons on “gender mainstreaming in military operations,” as well as therapeutic yoga instruction. Those expenditures are drawing scrutiny as the Trump administration lobbies fellow U.N. Security Council members to vote against a French resolution renewing the agency’s mandate, sources familiar told the Washington Free Beacon.

The U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), composed of thousands of troops from 46 nations, will need U.N. reauthorization at the end of August. Its force costs between $400 million and $500 million each year, with the United States shouldering roughly 30 percent of the burden. Private diplomatic concerns come amid public reports the Trump administration may allow UNIFIL’s mandate to lapse after last month’s rescissions package clawed back about $158 million from the agency.

Read it.

A Washington, D.C., resident has gone viral for saying President Donald Trump’s crime clean-up in the nation’s capital has her “feeling more safe than I ever felt.”

“Finally able to chill at a red light with my windows down, not worried about if one of them young n***as is coming,” TikTok user bigdawglexi said in the video, before letting out a contented sigh.

“Riding through the city, feeling more safe than I ever felt,” she said in the short clip, which was filmed inside her car at night.

The Foundry.

What if I told you that your tax dollars helped prop up a massive left-wing political influence campaign that fed staff and policy ideas into the Biden administration and is now working to oppose President Donald Trump’s policies on immigration and his reforms to the bureaucracy?

My book “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government” lays out the Left’s massive influence campaign that shaped policy in the Biden administration. The research for that book helped inform my reporting as this influence campaign entered political exile, forming an opposition outside the government after it had benefited from federal dollars.

My series “Your Money, Their Agenda: The Left’s Taxpayer-Funded War on Trump” outlines the perverse ways your tax dollars have propped up this influence campaign. I testified before Congress on this research twice, and my book has drawn increased attention to the infrastructure of the Left.

The Foundry.

On Aug. 11, President Donald Trump, invoking Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act passed by the United States Congress, declared a “crime emergency in the District of Columbia” and ordered the deployment of 800 National Guard troops, 200 of whom are earmarked to assist Washington law enforcement, to the city. The president named Attorney General Pam Bondi and Drug Enforcement Agency Administrator Terry Cole to work with the Metropolitan Police Department.

The Washington Police Union is cheering. It cited major management and staffing shortages, including over 800 vacancies in the 3,100-officer department. Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, an unapologetic law-and-order mayor, questioned the move as “unsettling and unprecedented,” underscoring her support for Washington statehood.

Read it.

The scrutiny and criticism from the left over President Donald Trump’s decision to federalize the Washington, D.C., police department was accompanied by data that purportedly showed violent crime was at a 30-year low in the nation’s capital.

“We can’t tell people that!” — every government employee everywhere throughout history.

Government is why we can never have nice things.

Read it.

I usually see little point in commenting on the monthly jobs reports—unless something truly remarkable or outrageous happens.

Well, recently it did.

To say the numbers were disappointing would be a massive understatement. The whole thing was a statistical catastrophe—one that exposed just how broken the government’s data machine really is.

It started with the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reporting just 73,000 jobs added in July—well below the 110,000 to 140,000 range economists were expecting. Meager, to say the least.

But the real bombshell came buried in the revisions.

Back in May, the government had claimed 147,000 jobs were created. June’s number was reported at 144,000.

Turns out the actual figures were 19,000 for May and just 14,000 for June.

In other words, the BLS had “miscalculated” job creation by a staggering 258,000 positions—in just two months.

Needless to say, Trump was livid. This wasn’t just a bad print—it struck directly at the credibility of the system he’s now in charge of.

Power Line.

As I have said many times, I think the Russia Collusion Hoax is by far the worst political scandal in American history. However, as I wrote here, I also think it is far from clear that any of the perpetrators of that hoax will be, or should be, criminally prosecuted.

That’s the way the Deep State works: Nobody gets fired, nobody goes to jail.

Read it.

The official designation of a recession comes from a committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private, nonprofit research organization.

The committee considers a wide range of economy-wide, monthly data points, but the NBER views GDP as “the single best measure.”

The committee calls a recession once there is a significant decline across these measures for more than a few months.

The NBER’s official designation of a recession, then, doesn’t happen until there are several months of data, allowing it to be sure both that a recession happened and when exactly it started.

In other words, as Voronoi notes, the NBER looks backward, not at the present moment.

“Oh, yeah, looks like you’ve been shot. Sure sucks to be you.”

Read it.

A police officer is dead after a surgical-mask-wearing gunman riddled the Atlanta headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with bullets. His parents think it was an act of revenge, saying their son believed he had an illness caused by the controversial Covid-19 vaccine. The attack ended with the shooter’s own death, but it’s unclear at this point if his mortal wound was self-inflicted.

Read it.

Taxpayers spent $207 million to pay federal government employees not for their official government jobs but for hours worked for unions in the 2024 fiscal year, President Joe Biden’s final year in office.

According to data exclusively provided first to The Daily Signal, federal employees worked 3.2 million hours for unions in 2024, about 11.25% of their overall work time.

Federal employees can bill the taxpayer for working with unions by negotiating contracts, resolving disputes, or doing other work for the union. The Office of Personnel Management tracks how many hours employees bill the taxpayer for union work, and the OPM under President Donald Trump issued a March memo demanding the data.

“During the Biden administration, federal agencies spent millions bargaining sweetheart collective-bargaining agreements that imposed significant costs on the American taxpayer while impeding effective and efficient agency operations,” acting OPM Director Charles Ezell wrote in the memo. “Agencies paid for both the costs of their and their unions’ bargaining teams.”

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Grand juror: “We were never allowed to see the photo evidence from the cameras on the Murrah Building that would have shown the truck being parked and the people who got out of the truck. That’s all on tape, and we were authorized to see all of that, but we weren’t allowed to see it … and in fact, nobody has been allowed to see it.”

Read it.

In a sweeping signal that Americans are waking up to the dangers of coerced medicine and captured regulation, a new KFF (formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation) poll reveals that the majority of Americans do not intend to get the COVID-19 vaccine this fall, and less than half trust the CDC or FDA to ensure vaccine safety.

Gee, I wonder why?

Read it.

The genius of contemporary slavery isn’t the whip, it’s the W-2. It’s not the chain, it’s the mortgage payment. It’s not the overseer with a gun, it’s the IRS agent with a lien.

Think I’m being dramatic? Let’s examine the mechanics.

You surrender 30-50% of your labor before you ever see it. If you refuse, men with guns will eventually arrive at your door. The extraction is comprehensive and inescapable: earn money, pay income tax; own property, pay property tax; spend money, pay sales tax; save money, lose to inflation tax; invest successfully, pay capital gains tax; start a business, pay for licenses; run a profitable business, pay corporate tax; give money away, pay gift tax; die with assets, pay inheritance tax. Every economic action becomes a revenue opportunity for the system that owns your labor.

You can’t opt out of funding wars you oppose, surveillance systems that monitor you, or bureaucracies that regulate your choices. Your ‘property’ can be seized for unpaid taxes, even if you own it outright.

Historical slaves at least knew they were enslaved. The violence was visible, the coercion obvious, the enemy identifiable. Today’s slaves are convinced they’re consumers.

But here’s the real masterpiece: you’ve been convinced this is freedom.

Read it.

On Friday, August 1st, UN Secretary-General António Guterres presented a report from his UN80 reform initiative, which examined how UN staff carry out the thousands of mandates assigned to them by bodies such as the General Assembly and the Security Council. He highlighted that last year the UN system supported approximately 27,000 meetings across 240 entities and produced 1,100 reports—a 20% increase since 1990.

Guterres warned, “The sheer volume of meetings and reports is pushing the system—and all of us—to the breaking point.” He added that many reports receive limited attention: the top 5% are downloaded more than 5,500 times, yet one in five reports sees fewer than 1,000 downloads. Furthermore, a download does not guarantee the report was actually read.

As part of his recommendations, Guterres called for “Fewer meetings. Fewer reports, but ones that are able to fully meet the requirements of all mandates.”

No surprises here. Mandates, meetings, and reports–the heart of a bureaucrat’s day.

Read it.

When asked how far the US government has plunged into the red, many fiscally-conscious Americans will tell you the national debt has reached $37 trillion. As distressing as that official number is, America’s true fiscal situation is even worse — far worse. According to a barely-publicized Treasury report, the actual grand total of Uncle Sam’s obligations is more than $151 trillion.

That huge discrepancy springs from the fact that the federal government doesn’t hold itself to the same accounting standards it imposes on businesses. Rather than using accrual accounting — which recognizes expenses when they’re incurred — our Washington overlords self-servingly use simple cash accounting, only recognizing expenses when they’re paid. As a result, discourse on federal obligations solely focuses on the national debt, comprising Treasury bills, notes and bonds.

Once a year, however, an obscure report delivers a more accurate version of Uncle Sam’s balance sheet. While it receives almost no attention from journalists or public officials, the Treasury Department is required to submit an annual report to Congress detailing the government’s financial condition. Critically, the 1994 law compelling this report mandates that it reflect “unfunded liabilities” — that is, commitments made without any dedicated assets or income streams to ensure they’ll be kept.

Read it.

This is the same Bureau of Labor Statistics that overstated the Jobs Growth in March 2024 by approximately 818,000 and, then again, right before the 2024 Presidential Election, in August and September, by 112,000.

It is a trued and true Deep State trick to releases optimistic number and then ‘revise’ them downward later on when people have stopped paying attention.

Check it out.

Intelligence by the Slice.

Read it.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just took aim at a system that has failed Americans for nearly 40 years, the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP).

This program was created under the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which shielded vaccine manufacturers from lawsuits over injury claims.

It was to gain the shield of this program that the COVID vaccine companies were pushing so hard for it to be officially recommended for children, one of the program’s prerequisites.

Before becoming HHS Secretary, Kennedy exposed how vaccine manufacturers were being hammered with lawsuits due to injuries.

One of the largest manufacturers at the time, Wyeth (now part of Pfizer), reportedly told President Reagan: give us legal protection or we’ll stop making vaccines.

Reagan’s response? Why not just make safer vaccines?

Wyeth’s answer: Vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe.”

That phrase—“unavoidably unsafe”—would later appear in a Supreme Court decision and reflects the legal premise that some vaccine injuries are inevitable.

“And so, anybody who tells you vaccines are safe and effective, the industry itself got immunity from liability by convincing the President and Congress that vaccines are unavoidably unsafe,” Kennedy previously stated.

TheWarZone.

Before Russia launched its full-on invasion, Ukraine’s military-industrial complex was almost entirely directed by the government and large defense contractors. However, in the ensuing years, Ukraine has become a massive innovator in defense technology, especially when it comes to air, sea and ground drones, with small startups pushing the technological envelope alongside larger firms. This change, along with massive alterations to how weapons are procured, has come as a necessity as Ukraine fights for its life. The need to innovate and iterate at breakneck speed in order to survive is a critical lesson, among many others, that is lost on the West.

Deborah Fairlamb has had a front row seat to Ukraine’s rapid defense technology growth. An American who has lived in Kyiv for years, she worked in several roles as a leader in the technology investment space. Fairlamb opted to stay in Ukraine after Russia’s full-on invasion and co-founded Green Flag Ventures. The mission is to fund companies producing early-stage commercial products with military applications. To date, Green Flag has invested in companies developing swarming, counter-drone, navigation and communications technology.

In an exclusive hour-long interview with The War Zone, Fairlamb suggests that while these innovations have been a huge help to Ukraine’s fight against Russia, the lessons of success are being lost on or ignored by the U.S. and NATO allies.

Read it.

Say what you will about Democrats, they sure can spend some money.

The Foundry.

For decades, American education reformers have promised that technocratic accountability systems would transform our schools. We’ve spent billions implementing standardized tests, creating elaborate school-rating systems, and demanding “data-driven” improvements. Yet two new reports reveal an uncomfortable truth: These government accountability systems aren’t just ineffective—they’re actively misleading parents and policymakers while failing the students they claim to serve.

Read it.

Trump withheld $6B of Department of Education funding starting on July 1. Squishes on both sides of the aisle screamed bloody murder, so eventually Trump relented and disbursed $1.3B for summer programs. How did kids survive the summer in the past without government money?

At the risk of sounding like an old fogey, I’ll tell you how. During summer my mom had my brother and me busy hoeing the garden, watering the trees and the lawn, picking and canning cherries and peaches, sweeping the garage floor, and mowing the lawn. When I was old enough to mow without supervision, she had me mowing neighbors’ lawns for pay. By the time I was done with all my chores, I was glad to have time to read a book, play in our dirt pile, or ride my bike. And I learned quickly not to say that I was bored because my mom immediately had a task for me to do.

Between 7th and 8th grades, I worked for my uncle in his boot and tack shop. When I was in high school, I worked a summer for a neighbor’s paving company, filling cracks on roads and runways with hot asphalt – the worst job I ever had. Another summer I helped my dad scrape and paint a neighbor’s wooden corral. And I helped my dad fix the fence on my grandpa’s ranch many summers.

I can’t say I enjoyed most of the tasks at home or the jobs I got away from home. But I learned a lot of skills from them, and I learned to work. Looking back, I’m glad that my parents made me do them and do them well. They taught me skills much better than any government program could. And they taught me to be a contributing member of the family at an early age.

Too bad that Trump disbursed the $1.3B for summer and youth programs.

The New York Times, paper of record for the Deep State.

Why this is any business of the United States is nowhere explained–because, as we all know, people starving anywhere in the world are TOTALLY the responsibility of the U.S. government–and the U.S. taxpayer.

All they had to do was refrain from murdering, raping, and maiming Jews. That’s all. And it was beyond them. The Jews in question are tired of it and have decided to remove the problem by removing the people who are causing the problem, and I can’t say that I blame them, or that I would do any differently were I in their place.

“If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” — Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, Portion 72, verse 1.

The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.

This coming weekend’s summer meeting of the National Governors Association has been planned as a postcard-perfect celebration of bipartisan policy making. At the base of the Rocky Mountains, 20 governors from both parties will gather at the Broadmoor resort, in Colorado Springs, for golf, meals, and panels featuring Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the investor Mark Cuban, and the former Obama-administration economist Jason Furman.

But trouble is stirring beyond the open bars and talks about “reigniting the American dream.” Some Democratic members of the group have privately been fuming in recent months over the organization’s tepid reaction to President Donald Trump’s federal incursions into state matters. They complain that the group did not respond forcefully enough when Trump’s Office of Management and Budget briefly ordered a disruptive pause on the disbursement of all federal funds in January; when Maine Governor Janet Mills and her staff clashed with the White House the following month, over transgender sports; and in June, when Trump deployed the California National Guard to the streets of Los Angeles over the objections of local authorities.

The National Governor’s Association is a cornerstone of the Deep State, founded on the assumption that state governments have a bipartisan interest in raising taxes and spending taxpayer money no matter what the political label is pasted on it. Traditionally this has meant Deep State Democrats pursuing their usual tax-and-spend regimes, with Deep State Republicans making mewling noises as they trail meekly behind. Trump has upset their applecart, and Deep State Democrats are Not Happy.

Read it.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security sent more than $25 million to extremist groups with ties to Islamist terror groups between 2013 and 2023, according to a new report from the Middle East Forum.

Gregg Roman, executive director of the think tank, told JNS that the forum pored over publicly accessible government spending data.

“We matched these grants with extremist groups found in our research archives to identify the misuse of taxpayer dollars on a grand scale,” he said.

Read it.

The Biden administration’s $7.5 billion program to install electric-vehicle charging stations across the United States has delivered fewer than 400 charging ports since November 2021, according to a Tuesday report by the Government Accountability Office.

The EV charging initiative, part of former president Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, has built just 384 charging ports at 68 stations in 16 states as of April 2025, Reuters reported after reviewing the GAO’s report. The figure amounts to less than 0.2 percent of the roughly 219,000 public EV charging ports operating nationwide.

“Wider adoption of [electric] vehicles may be slowed because there aren’t enough chargers available across the country,” the GAO wrote in its summary of the report, noting that the program’s oversight office “has not defined performance goals with measurable targets and time frames for its activities.”

Say what you will about Democrats, they can sure spend money. (Not their own, of course….)

Read it.

The Department of Justice removed the newly appointed U.S. attorney for New Jersey on July 22, accusing a panel of federal judges in the state of refusing, for political motives, to permanently appoint President Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Alina Habba, as the top federal prosecutor.

Judges on the U.S. District Court in New Jersey named Desiree Leigh Grace, the second-highest-ranking official in the U.S. attorney’s office, to replace Habba on July 22 after her 120-day interim term ended.

Just hours later, in a statement on X, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Grace had been removed from the position.

People in the Deep State need to wake up and smell the smoke: You mess with the bull, you get the horns every time.

Read it.

Say what you will about Democrats, they can certainly spend money.

Read it.

They were hoping for tenure but had to get a Real Job (well, a Government Job) instead.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday called for a “fundamental reset” of financial regulations to ensure they are aligned with the nation’s domestic and international priorities.

reforms” in bank regulation, noting that the system has been marked by “regulation by reflex,” where bank regulators tend to introduce new rules after issues have already occurred.

“Rather than preempting crises, regulators all too often react to them after the fact. They play the role of a hazmat cleanup team instead of preventing dangerous spillovers in the first place,” Bessent said.

“Rather than reflexively regulate anything that hits the headlines, we need to instead be more explicit about our vision for the financial system,” he added.

As Aldgra Fredly reports for The Epoch Times, Bessent said the Treasury will reinforce reform efforts by working to “break through policy inertia, settle turf battles, drive consensus, and motivate action to ensure no single regulator holds up reform.”

Government has a tendency to ignore a situation until it blows up, and then run around in circles and jump up and down in order to look like they’re Doing Something (even if it’s wrong). This was FDR’s entire political program.

Read it.

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

Read it.

A New York Democrat, running to be Nassau County’s district attorney of all things, is making a call out for convicts to join her campaign as communications director.

“People with a criminal record are encouraged to apply,” the Indeed.com job posting for District Attorney candidate Nicole Aloise’s campaign read, as the New York Post first reported Sunday.

It is a well-paying job with a salary range of $6,000-$7,000 per month.