Lifehacker.

There’s nothing more nerve-wracking than being pulled over by a police car, or answering the door to find the police on your front porch. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong and have never broken a law in your life, interactions with suspicious law enforcement officers are incredibly stressful. You’re supposedly innocent until proven guilty, but in these situations, the cops don’t always act like it.

But that stressful situation can become a real nightmare if the police seize your property. Whether it’s cash you’re bringing to the bank, your car, or other valuables you thought were safe on your person, it’s not uncommon for the police to seize your property during an encounter—even if you’re not ultiamtely charged with a crime. Worse, the cops can often legally keep your property and cash, again, even if you’re never charged with any crime, or are later found to be not guilty.

Jeff Somers is also a well-regarded speculative fiction author. Presumably Lifehacker is his Day Job.

Foreign Affairs, a Voice of the Deep State.

The American foreign policy establishment lives in desperate fear that they won’t be allowed to sit at the Cool Kids Table any more.

Read it.

A Biden administration effort to electrify the U.S. Postal Service has produced just 250 electric mail trucks in over two years—far behind schedule and slammed by Republicans as a multibillion-dollar “boondoggle.”

The nearly $10 billion project aimed to roll out 35,000 battery-powered USPS vehicles by September 2028, with $3 billion funded through President Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), according to the NY Post.

But despite $1.7 billion already spent, only a small portion of the fleet exists, prompting Republicans to push for canceling the remaining $1.3 billion in funding.

Actually, this might be a good idea if handled properly–which the government is incapable of doing.

Read it.

In 1988, Bill Gates purchased a Porsche 959 and had it shipped to the United States. There was just one problem. The 959 had never been crash tested for US regulations, nor did it comply with emissions standards. Porsche was unwilling to sacrifice one of these incredibly expensive cars for the required testing, and so the 959 was not approved for road use in the United States. When Gates’s car arrived at the Port of Seattle, US Customs had no choice but to impound it. Rather than destroy it or send it back to Europe, the car was placed in a Foreign-Trade Zone warehouse.

The problem here is government. Bureaucrats laid down that a certain number of production models of a car had to be crash-tested in order to become ‘street legal’. This is marginally understandable when you are talking about a Ford F-150 or a Honda Civic, but the whole logic of the requirement breaks down when you’re talking about a limited-edition very expensive sports car. But bureaucrats are bureaucrats, and You Must Follow The Rules No Matter How Stupid. No accountability, no reasonableness, just a stubborn cling to irrationality.

The rules of the Foreign-Trade Zone allowed Customs to charge a storage and handling fee for vehicles in limbo. At the time, that fee was $28 per calendar day. Gates, unwilling to part with the car or destroy a technological marvel, simply kept paying the fee. Day after day. Month after month. Year after year. By the time the car was finally released, the meter had run for 13 years. The storage alone had cost him over $133,000. Adjusted for inflation, that would be around $300,000 today. And that’s not even counting the modest annual bond renewal fee of around 500 dollars that had to be paid to keep the car legally bonded.

When you’re the world’s richest man, you can do that. Ordinary people aren’t that lucky.

But the significant part is how the headline is worded by these ‘journalists’. ‘The Lawmakers Finally Bent to His Will’ incorporates the unacknowledge assumption that the ‘lawmakers’ were right and Gates was wrong and he merely got his way because of Rich Privilege or something, not the truth, which is that the ‘lawmakers’ were being dicks and that doesn’t work as well with The World’s Richest Man as it does for Joe Sixpack. When they write, ‘journalists’ are on the side of the Deep State every time, unless and until somebody calls them on it–and sometimes even then.

Government is why we can never have nice things.

CBS News, a Voice of the Crust.

An 80-year-old man pleaded guilty on Tuesday to two felony wildlife crimes connected to his years-long efforts to create giant hybrid sheep using cloning and illegal insemination, federal prosecutors said.

Arthur “Jack” Schubarth was creating the hybrid sheep as a target for hunters at private facilities, officials said. He violated both international and federal law, Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim of the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division said.

“This was an audacious scheme to create massive hybrid sheep species to be sold and hunted as trophies,” Kim said in a statement.

Okay, somebody tell me why this is any business of any level of government, much less both ‘international and Federal law’.

Government is the reason why we can’t have nice things. Or even breathe freely.sd

The Foundry.

Following a years-long surge in illegal immigration, the President Donald Trump administration is poised to challenge a longstanding but legally fraught practice: counting illegal aliens in the U.S. census.

Trump tried to end the practice during his first term, but President Joe Biden overturned his predecessor’s policy before it was implemented. Now, buoyed by red state attorneys general and Republican legislators, the second Trump administration is determined “to clean up the census and make sure that illegal aliens are not counted,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller said last month.

What Miller didn’t mention are the political implications of the administration’s move. It could have significant political implications because the census count is used to apportion House seats, determine the number of votes each state gets in the Electoral College for selecting the president, and drive the flow of trillions of dollars in government funds.

The Foundry.

Jeff Baran, a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, failed to secure enough support in the Senate to keep his job when his term expired in June 2023, but he found another job in the federal bureaucracy and stuck around long enough to take the buyout offer under the Trump administration.

While presidents appoint more than 3,000 people for political positions, the federal government directly employs roughly 2.3 million people, most of whom serve in purportedly nonpolitical, career positions. The Office of Personnel Management tracks when political appointees transition to career positions—a process often referred to as “burrowing in” to the bureaucracy—and Baran did so last year.

OPM approved on Sept. 8, 2024, Baran’s transition from a commissioner on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to become deputy assistant secretary for waste and minerals management at the Department of Energy. He went from making $165,300 annually to $193,819 annually.

Baran took President Donald Trump’s offer of “deferred resignation,” which allows bureaucrats to receive their paychecks through Sept. 30 without doing any work, as an incentive to leave the government early. Exchange Monitor reported on Feb. 20 that Baran accepted the offer.

Baran is likely to receive his paycheck for about 7 months without doing work, costing the taxpayer approximately $113,061.08.

To quote John Derbyshire: “Get a government job!”

Read it.

Ten Republican U.S. senators wrote a letter to President Donald Trump’s administration on Wednesday urging it to reverse its decision to withhold $6.8 billion in congressionally approved federal funding for K-12 schools.

One of the primary ways politicians (Democrat and Republican) get re-elected is by touting all of the “Federal money” they’ve managed to squeeze out wetting their beaks from the profits of rhe IRS protection racket. (Apparently voters are too stupid to figure out that the money came out of their pockets in the first place.)

The 10 Republicans who signed the letter included Sens. Shelley Moore Capito, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitch McConnell.

RINOs and inhabitants of the Swamp figure prominently, as one might expect.

Power Line.

It’s Groundhog Day, again. From the Associated Press,

Judge won’t rule this week on releasing Kilmar Abrego Garcia from jail.

Our man just can’t catch a break. And by limbo, I mean exactly that. I have seen no claim whatsoever that he is a legal resident of the United States. The claim rests on the idea that, despite his illegal status, he cannot be deported.

And the fact that he has not been deported, despite the obvious fact that he is in this country illegally and thefore a criminal, tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the competence of the government in the U.S.

Government is why we can never have nice things.

Limbo always sounds to me like a Caribbean dance move. He ought to feel right at home.

Read it.

The Trump White House and the State Department celebrated Tuesday the end of government grants that directed tax dollars to the Left’s dark money network.

“President [Donald] Trump has done more than anyone to root out waste, fraud, and abuse across the federal government, and has exposed billions of dollars doled out by unelected bureaucrats that is out-of-step with what the American people voted for,” the White House told The Daily Signal.

“Thanks to this president, Americans finally have transparency over what their tax dollars are funding, and accountability has been restored to stop the blank checks to fringe-left priorities,” the White House added.

Read it.

Did you know that millions of your tax dollars go to fund leftist activist groups, who then lobby the government for policies you may disagree with?

The funding comes in at least three ways: directly through contracts and grants, indirectly through unions taking federal employees’ dues and sending a portion to activist groups, and then obliquely, through taxpayer-funded union time.

Examples of direct funding are legion.

Power Line.

We are still doing this? From the Wall Street Journal (WSJ),

Congo Braces for HIV Surge After U.S. Funding Stops.

Just so we are clear on which Congo, the article is about the Democratic Republic, the former Belgian colony, rather than the neighboring Republic of the Congo, a far more functional, former French colony.

The WSJ reports about the expected HIV surge,

For years, Congolese women relied on U.S.-supplied antiretrovirals such as post-exposure prophylaxis kits, to prevent infection after an assault. But the funds for those programs dried up after President Trump and his then-right-hand man, Elon Musk, cut funding for most of America’s foreign-assistance programs, including many anti-HIV initiatives.

So, it’s all Trump/Musk/America’s fault. There are some 200 other nations on Earth, give or take, besides the USA and the DR Congo. But not a single one, or any private-sector entity (<cough> Bill Gates <cough>), is able to step up and solve this problem. Only U.S. taxpayer dollars can do the work.

As we all know,  no problem in the world is ever solved except at the expense of the U.S. government–and the U.S. taxpayer.

Read it.

In 1883, when the Pendleton Act was passed, creating the US civil service, it must have seemed like no big deal. The forgotten Chester A. Arthur was the president. The fear of being assassinated like his predecessor James Garfield convinced him to back the legislation. The case for passage: government needs professionals with institutional knowledge. Technicians were changing the world, so why not government too?

Science and engineering were the rage – electricity, steel bridges, telegraphic communications, internal combustion, photography – so surely public affairs needed the same level of expertise. Who could deny that civil service could do a better job than the cousins and business partners of professional politicians?

That’s how it started. What was once called government of, by, and for the people was derided as the hopelessly corrupt “spoils system,” a phrase that reflected genius marketing. So it was overthrown in favor of “merit-based” hiring in the executive, a staff not yet permanent or huge, but the proverbial camel now had its nose under the tent.

Through two world wars and the Great Depression, and then the Cold War, what landed on the other side was something the Constitution’s Framers never imagined. We had huge governing systems in giant bureaucracies staffed by employees who could not be fired. It was left to them to implement, but really create the operational framework for the whole of civil society.

It was a state within a state, one with many layers, including that which was and is classified.

The Foundry.

Former CIA Director John Brennan is one of the most contemptible and shady people in public life. Few people have abused their position, power, and access with such impunity and hubris.

So, it was a pleasure to read a Fox News report that the FBI has launched a criminal investigation into Brennan, along with former FBI Director James Comey, for possible wrongdoing related to the Trump campaign-Russia collusion probe, including making false statements to Congress.

No, I’m not under the impression Brennan will end up in prison, where he likely belongs, or even see an indictment. The statute of limitations has largely sunset. And even if they hadn’t, the notion there will be any reckoning is remote.

My modest hope is that perhaps a better accounting of his corruption for the historical record will destroy Brennan’s reputation forever, which shouldn’t be a heavy lift.

Power Line.

Biden appointee — issued a temporary restraining order yesterday preventing the government from using certain characteristics (like race, ethnicity, language, or location) as the sole basis for reasonable suspicion to stop individuals in immigration enforcement actions. The order also includes requirements for record-keeping, developing official guidance on reasonable suspicion, and implementing mandatory training for agents.

Back to the Turd World where they belong.

Read it.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) shipped 1000s of virus samples to a biolab in Wuhan, China despite having no formal approval or safety protocols, the Daily Caller first reported on Tuesday.

Newly released documents reviewed by the outlet show that USAID facilitated the delivery of nearly 11,000 virus samples from Yunnan Province to a biolab in Wuhan, the epicenter of the COVID-19 global pandemic. The Wuhan lab has become infamous for its substandard safety protocols and ties to the People’s Liberation Army.

The shipments were made with no effort to ensure the samples were not used in bioweapons or remained accessible to U.S. government. The virus samples were derived from humans, bats, and rodents and were collected over the course of a 10-year period.

And this is why Fauci was given a going-away pardon from the Biden Bitches.

Power Line.

From The Hill newspaper,

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced Monday that it would rescind protections from deportation for Nicaragua and Honduras.

The move ends temporary protected status (TPS) for citizens of those countries living in the U.S., which were both established after the same deadly hurricane and in place for more than 25 years.

25 years? You read that correctly. The TPS status dates from 1999 and Hurricane Mitch, which struck Central America in late October 1998. The move impacts some 55,000 refugees, mostly from Honduras, the nation hardest hit from the storm.

Two things are remarkable about the story. First, an extremely powerful hurricane (180 MPH winds,75 inches of rain) occurred in a previous century. Second, this “temporary status” has lingered on for more than a quarter century.

I’m sure some district judge somewhere will try to block the move, but how long is temporary?

Read it.

Planned Parenthood sued the Trump administration on Monday over a provision in President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill that would strip funding from health centers operated by the reproductive healthcare and abortion provider.

In a complaint filed in Boston federal court, Planned Parenthood said the provision is unconstitutional, and its clear purpose is to prevent its nearly 600 health centers from receiving Medicaid reimbursements.

Because, as we all know, once anyone has received money from the Federal government–and the Federal taxpayer–they are entitled to that much (or more) forever after.

Read it.

Abstract
Governments originally meant for civil asset forfeiture laws to take the profit out of crime and show that crime literally does not pay. Since governments keep the seized assets for themselves, however, these laws lead to perverse incentives. Instead of police using resources to fight crime that has actual victims, police go after drug buyers to find assets to seize to increase the police budget. This paper attempts to show that police are ordinary, rational people who attempt to maximize their welfare. Police unions lobby to block regulations that limit forfeiture laws; seized assets and drug arrests have gone up while drug usage has not. Instead of trying to reduce crime, the police become the criminals by taking honest people’s belongings. This paper also shows the effect of forfeiture on drug prices and how law enforcement has no incentive to reduce arrests for victimless crimes.

Give people an excuse to take your stuff, and they will take your stuff.

Read it.

A Kenyan national convicted of sexually assaulting a sleeping woman in Minnesota wasn’t deported after his prison sentence — he was promoted.

Wilson Tindi holds a director position at the Minnesota Department of Education, where he audits taxpayer spending and oversees internal accountability.

Court records show Tindi was convicted in 2016 of fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct after breaking into a woman’s home and assaulting her in bed where she slept. He pleaded guilty to the sex assault charge in exchange for prosecutors dropping a first-degree burglary charge.

Tindi was sentenced to two years in prison and ordered to register as a predatory offender. His sentence was stayed for five years, but he was also sentenced to 210 days in the workhouse, records show.

However, despite the felony conviction and offender status, Tindi serves as Director of Internal Audit and Advisory Services at MDE, according to public records and his LinkedIn profile.

UPDATE: Tim Walz Admin Promoted Sexual Assault Convict To Top Agency Role (Hudson Crozier/The Daily Caller)

Read it.

While tax rates are at historic highs, the complexity of the Tax Code itself presents enough problems to be worthy of a complete renewal.

• The first problem with the Tax Code complexity is that enforcement has become such a nightmare that even the well-funded IRS cannot begin to properly enforce it.
• The next problem is that the tax code’s complexity unfairly benefits those with time, resources, and ironically, money, to spend avoiding taxation, allowing the richest and most unethical to benefit from the web of confusion.
• The last problem with the tax code is that it creates a fundamental rift between the American people and the government through providing a realistic view into the complexity and self-contradictory nature of the state.

Newsbusters.

Here’s how it’s so easy to identify the national media as liberal Democrats: They hate “moderate” Democrats. They love moderate Republicans. They despise disunity in their party, and love to fester disunity in the Other Party.

This week, we’ve witnessed an outpouring of love for Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, whom the Institute for Legislative Analysis evaluated as voting for limited government just 37 percent of the time in 2024. These journalists loathed “centrist” Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin or even Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.

Murkowski is selling a new book titled Far from Home: An Alaskan Senator Faces the Extreme Climate of Washington, D.C. The liberal networks haven’t offered a welcome wagon to books by conservative senators like Tom Cotton, Mike Lee, and especially, Rand Paul, whose last book put Anthony Fauci on the cover and was titled Deception: The Great Covid-19 Coverup.

Read it.

Didn’t know it was possible to ‘smuggle’ frog embryos.

Don’t know why they’re wasting time and YOUR MONEY on this bullshit.

Read it.

My, what a surprise. The U.S. has been doing this forever. In order to renounce one’s U.S. citizenship, they charge an exit tax calculated as if you’d sold every property you own. Your money is actually the government’s money, and they will charge you for taking their money away.

Affluent residents across the continent are now facing exit levies before they make the move to tax havens such as Monaco, Dubai, and Switzerland. This is a result of some nations’ efforts to slow down—or even halt—the departure of these ultrahigh-net-worth individuals, Bloomberg reported.

With the exit tax, countries are aiming to collect a portion of the profits that a person has generated while using that nation’s infrastructure to build their assets. The implementation has faced criticism, since individuals are required to pay levies on unsold assets. Even so, exit taxes have become more prevalent in the past year: Recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, among other expenses for the public, and slower growth overall has left European governments searching for ways to increase funds, according to Bloomberg.

“A lot of countries are bringing in exit taxes,” David Lesperance, founder of wealth management company Lesperance & Associates, told Bloomberg. “Clients who have illiquid assets and mortgages are then hesitant to trigger [them] because they just don’t have the money to pay the bill.”

And some people think it is worth it, just to escape the Gulag.

Read it.

It seems many still harbor, or want to perpetuate, the illusion that our Social Security system is not in trouble.

Let me quote here from a press release from the Social Security Administration released March 31, 2023:

“The Social Security Board of Trustees today released its annual report on the financial status of the Social Security Trust Funds. The combined asset reserves of the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance (OASI and DI) Trust Funds are projected to become depleted in 2034, one year earlier than projected last year, with 80% of benefits payable at that time.”

In 2034, per the report, “if Congress does not act before then … there would be sufficient income coming in to pay 80% of scheduled benefits.”

It couldn’t be clearer. In 10 years, with no action from Congress, everyone will begin receiving 80% of what they are currently receiving, or promised, under the existing Social Security system.

Can anyone imagine getting a notice from a private retirement provider saying that in 10 years all beneficiaries will begin receiving 80% of what they were promised?

How did we get into this situation? It’s the wonders of government planning, of socialism.

Every entitlement program eventually leads to insolvency, because resources are limited but demand is unlimited. The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Read it.

A federally funded left-wing nonprofit that provides legal services for detained illegal immigrants has launched a bond fund that frees them from ICE custody.

Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef) partnered with Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE Justice) to establish the Detained Immigrant Bond Fund on June 7, one day after violent anti-ICE protests broke out in Los Angeles. The fund provides “detained immigrants in Los Angeles and Orange Counties with the bond money that allows them to get out of detention, and return back to their lives and families while they build a case to gain status,” the announcement page reads.

Through the partnership, ImmDef identifies detained immigrants eligible for release and CLUE Justice, another federally funded nonprofit, pays their bonds through donations. ImmDef then provides them with free legal services, the group wrote in an Instagram post promoting the project.

Why are illegal immigrants allowed bond in the first place? If anybody is a ‘flight risk’, it’s an illegal immigrant.

Read it.

Already ravaged by wildfires earlier this year, the city is now dealing with violence toward law enforcement, incendiary devices, arson and more. And all of that is on the heels of years of seemingly endless, rolling Covid lockdowns under Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass. The latter had the effect of shrinking revenues and thus staffing levels across the city, putting Los Angeles – America’s second-most populous city – in a unique financial and logistical position as it faces a summer of more disorder.

A record-breaking era of overtime pay is likely to keep costs high as police, fire and other first responders carry out their duties.

The cost to taxpayers isn’t limited to California or Los Angeles, though. City officials have alternately declared the protests peaceful and claimed they had them well in hand, and then also admitted they were “out of control” and that the LAPD was “overwhelmed.” Regardless of the varying protestations and the outright legal and political battle being waged by Newsom, President Trump has taken control of the state’s National Guard to defend federal property and officers. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has allowed that it’s likely a 60-day investment with an accompanying $134 million price tag for federal taxpayers.

That’s all before we factor in the cost of duking it out in federal court as Newsom seeks to stop the President from utilizing the Guard.

Read it.

Fossil fuel advocate Alex Epstein delivered a hard-hitting briefing to nearly all Senate Republicans on Wednesday, emphasizing that the Inflation Reduction Act’s “toxic subsidies” for the green energy industry—totaling billions—must be “terminated.”

“Today I got the opportunity to speak to almost all Republican Senators about the IRA subsidies at their Wednesday lunch,” Epstein wrote on X late Thursday.

He said, “The discussion was private, so I won’t tell you what the Senators said. But you better believe I told them the subsidies are toxic and need to be terminated!”

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, commented on Epstein’s post by saying, “I was there. As always, Alex Epstein was full of deep and helpful insights.”

Read it.

Dozens of US military aircraft are no longer on the tarmac at a major US base in Qatar, satellite images show – a possible move to shield them from eventual Iranian air strikes, as Washington weighs whether to intervene in Tehran’s conflict with Israel.

Between June 5 and 19, nearly all of the aircraft visible at the Al Udeid base are no longer anywhere in plain sight, according to images published by Planet Labs PBC and analyzed by AFP.

Nearly 40 military aircraft – including transport planes like the Hercules C-130 and reconnaissance aircraft – were parked on the tarmac on June 5. In an image taken on June 19, only three aircraft are visible.

Read it.

Over the weekend, thousands of anti-Trump advocates gathered for “No Kings” protests across the country, but their aims were not directed at constitutional norms; instead, they are engaged in a protest against the President’s authority over the Executive Branch.

The chief issue in Washington since the second Trump inauguration is whether the commander-in-chief is empowered to control the Executive Branch, which houses nearly all federal agencies.

The Vesting Clause answers that question with absolute certainty: The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

In response to the Trump administration’s efforts to abolish the government’s vast censorship apparatus, however, Democrats and judicial activists offer an anti-constitutional alternative for the country: The power to fire taxpayer-funded bureaucrats or reduce their funding shall be vested in no person.

Read it.

Topline: Massachusetts’ Emergency Assistance Family Shelter Program recently funded what might just be history’s most expensive car trip: $140 for a taxi ride of 223 feet. For those quick with a calculator, that’s a rate of $3,314 per mile.

It’s just one example of taxpayer funds spent on “improper and unlawful emergency procurements” while the agency was using $325 million in state funds last year to help address the state’s migrant crisis, according to a recent report from the state auditor.

Key facts: The emergency housing program was originally created to carry out Massachusetts’ “right to shelter” law from 1983, which guarantees housing for families with children or pregnant mothers.

The program has been overwhelmed with immigrant families in the last few years. There were 3,883 families in shelters in January 2023 but 7,463 families by December 2024.

The influx forced the state to sign emergency, no-bid contracts with companies that were charging up to $31 per meal to feed migrants on the taxpayers’ dime. One company, Spinelli Ravioli, billed the state 9.6% more than their contract allowed for 493 food deliveries, according to the new audit.

Your guess is as good as mine why Humana is on this list.

The Antiplanner.

The federal government owns about 640 million acres of land — some 28 percent of the land area of the United States — but according to some press reports, members of the U.S. Senate are proposing to sell 250 million of those acres. The press reports are wrong, but even if they weren’t, I can’t help but feel schadenfreude at environment groups that are going ballistic at the proposal.

Federal land aficionados all agree that the lands are enormously valuable. Yet Congress has given away most of the resources produced by those lands, including minerals, forage for domestic livestock, recreation, and water, to various special interest groups for nothing or well below their true value. As result, federal taxpayers lose roughly $10 billion per year managing the federal lands.

The 1980s saw a movement to privatize national forests (about 193 million acres) and Bureau of Land Management (about 247 million acres) lands, but it never got very far. However, I examined the arguments made by the privatizers and realized they were hard to refute. The lands were poorly managed, they said, and almost any environmentalist would agree. The politicization of federal lands meant that people fought over them rather than cooperated with one another to see that they were used for their highest values. Federal land mismanagement had bad influences on adjacent private lands. Privatization could have solved many of these problems.

Read it.

Topline: Nashville spent $1.2 million to buy 108 quarantine housing pods in 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic, but the shelters were never used. Now the city plans to give 25 of them away to local nonprofits to be used as homeless shelters while covering the cost of renovating them.

Key facts: The combined municipality of Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County bought the pods using federal funds from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Part of the $1.2 million price tag was for certified nursing assistants and 24-hour security at the pods — which was obviously unnecessary because the pods were never used, Nashville Scene reported.

Nashville started installing 25 of the quarantine pods in 2021 but could not use them until the Tennessee Fire Marshall’s Office gave its approval. The fire marshal told Nashville Scene they required a letter signed by an engineer declaring the pods were safe, but Nashville did not send the letter for almost a year.

sd

Read it.

Solar and renewable energy stocks crashed in premarket trading after Senate Republicans unveiled a draft of a bill that would end wind and solar tax credits by 2028, while providing incentives for other energy sources like nuclear, hydropower, and geothermal (which would extend to 2036).

According to Reuters, the draft tax bill released by Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) proposes an accelerated phaseout of clean energy subsidies established under the Biden-Harris regime’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Specifically, the legislation would significantly dial back solar and wind tax credits to 60% of their original value starting in 2026, with complete elimination by 2028. Under current law, these credits are scheduled to begin phasing out in 2032, meaning the proposal would effectively shorten the incentive window.

An illustration of the fact that ‘green energy’ is merely a scheme to get leech off of the taxpayers pursuant to a political agenda.

The Foundry.

The government spent decades trying to make fathers unnecessary. The failure of that experiment put society on the long-term path to collapse.

Father’s Day is Sunday. It’s much less popular than Mother’s Day for a sad reason. Fewer fathers are involved in their children’s lives. That’s caused by two main factors, the first being children born to single moms. In 2022, almost 40% of births were to unmarried women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The second reason is the prevalence of divorce.

Statistically, children raised without a father face a bleak future. Homes led by a single mother are more than four times as likely to live in poverty compared to married couples. Poverty is associated with a host of problems, including lower academic achievement. Children without fathers around are more likely to go to prison. They’re less likely to attend college. Children without dads are more likely to act out and have substance abuse problems. Tragically, teenage girls without a father present are seven times more likely to become pregnant. And thus, the cycle repeats itself.

Read it.

The program office has emphasized that USS Ford was a first-in-class hull, with the inherent issues that come with a first-of-a-kind vessel, and that the teething problems with her new technology were being worked out for the follow-on carriers. But in its annual assessment of defense procurement programs, GAO reports that the Navy expects significant additional delays to future hulls in the series.

Continued issues with the weapons elevators aboard second-in-class CVN 79 could put the planned July 2025 delivery date for the vessel at risk, the program office reported. And the delivery date for CVN 80, the third Ford-class, has been pushed back to May 2030 – more than two years later than the Navy expected.

The problem, according to GAO, is in the availability of materials and skilled labor. HII Newport News has “persistent shipyard workforce issues” that the program office is trying to fix by revising schedules and creating incentives for workers, GAO said.

Buy them from Hyundai, which has excellent shipyards.

Read it.

The U.S. Navy’s future Constellation class frigates are set to be at least 759 metric tons (close to 867 U.S. tons) heavier than expected, a 13 percent increase over earlier estimates. Concerns have previously been raised about how weight growth with the Constellation class design, which was still being finalized as of April, could negatively impact the ships’ top speed and other capabilities. Overall, the frigate program, the entire point of which was to leverage an existing in-production design to help reduce risk and speed up delivery, remains years behind schedule and at risk of ballooning costs.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), a Congressional watchdog, included the new details about the Constellation class design’s weight growth and other updates about the program in an annual assessment of major procurement efforts across the U.S. military released today. The U.S. Navy chose Marinette Marine in Wisconsin, a wholly owned subsidiary of Italy’s Fincantieri, to build the new frigates in 2020. The ship’s core design is derived from the Franco-Italian Fregata Europea Multi-Missione (FREMM).

The Navy currently expects to take delivery of the first-in-class USS Constellation in 2029, three years behind schedule. The service has, to date, awarded Marinette Marine contracts to build six Constellation class frigates.

The Navy procurement system is so screwed up that they would be better off just getting rid of it and starting fresh. Steve Jobs would have fired all of these people by now.

Read it.

Senior officials inside the NIH are working to shut down a Tony Fauci initiative launched in 2020 called the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases or “CREID.” Meanwhile, attorneys inside the Justice Department have launched initial inquiries into one of the CREID grants awarded to Scripps Research Institute researcher Kristian Andersen, who is now in the process of fleeing the United States for a position being created for him at the University of Oslo.

Read it.

Topline: An annex to California’s Capitol Building was supposed to cost $543 million, but the price has doubled to $1.1 billion and now includes hallways designed to hide lawmakers from journalists.

Tell the truth: Who could blame them?

Key facts: KCRA 3 reported that the annex will include a new parking garage and visitor’s center and office space for 120 state lawmakers. The news station pointed out it is almost as expensive as the $1.3 billion spent on Levi’s Stadium, the San Francisco 49ers’ football stadium that seats 68,500 people.

KCRA 3’s sources revealed the annex will include private hallways. The building’s current layout means lawmakers must walk through a public “swing space” to get from hearing rooms to the elevators, where journalists can ask them questions about the day’s proceedings. The new layout will allow lawmakers to avoid the swing space.

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The taxpayer subsidized “journalists” at NPR are propping up Rachel Accurso, a viral children’s “educator,” as the “modern-day” Mr. Rogers.

Except “Ms. Rachel,” his woke re-incarnation, is a sheltered middle aged woman who turned what seems to be a histrionic personality disorder into a $10 million internet grift.

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FBI Director Kash Patel sat down with Joe Rogan in Austin, Texas, where he dropped a series of revelations about the Bureau’s ongoing investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, including a promise to release jail cell surveillance footage and newly uncovered evidence that could implicate Anthony Fauci.

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During Trump’s first term, Patel was in charge of counterterrorism for the White House and National Security Council. In that role, he helped lead one of the administration’s most overlooked achievements.

“Hostages, we can talk about that forever too,” Patel said. “Counterterrorism was a big portfolio, I ran it for the White House and National Security Council in the first Trump administration.”

Then he dropped the number: “We brought home—people don’t know this—President Trump in his first term, brought home and rescued over 50 hostages and detainees from around the world.” He added, “That’s more than every president before him combined.”

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FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino appeared on Hannity Wednesday night to outline the Bureau’s current priorities and address concerns around national security, immigration, and public health transparency.

The interview offered a detailed look into how the FBI, under the direction of Bongino and Director Kash Patel, is approaching both domestic and international threats during the early stages of a second Trump administration.

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Trump is doing the jobs that Democrats won’t do.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to review the names of vessels honoring prominent civil rights leaders, including Harvey Milk, who was one of the country’s first openly gay elected officials and a Navy veteran.

News of Mr. Hegseth’s decision, reported earlier by Military.com, comes just days into Pride Month, which celebrates the contributions of luminaries in the L.G.B.T.Q. community.

Instead, Mr. Hegseth’s order was intended as a rebuke of Pride Month, keeping with the Trump administration’s drive to expunge diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across the federal government, according to a senior defense official familiar with the decision.

In principle I don’t have a problem with it. Harvy Milk’s only claim to fame is that he was the first homosexual politician in a significant office to own up to it; he never had any connection with the Navy or national defense, and the ship was named after him only to pander to the LBGTQRSTUVWXYZ+ crowd.

From a practical standpoint, I don’t like it. It sets a bad precedent when the government starts renaming ships after a change of administration. Where would it stop? It smacks of Stalin’s trick of erasing people from photographs. If a Republican administration starts doing this sort of thing, what’s to prevent a future Democrat administration from renaming the destroyer USS John McCain the USS Greta Thunberg? I don’t think that’s a road we want to start down.