Read it.

The superintendent of Iowa’s Des Moines Public Schools, Ian Roberts, resigned Monday after being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last Friday on a federal deportation order.

Roberts, 54, a native of Guyana, was already suspended without pay and said through his attorney that he did not want to distract from the education of the district’s 30,000 students while he fights the case.

Attorney Alfredo Parrish said Roberts’ legal team is seeking to reopen the case and obtain a stay of deportation, but federal officials have noted Roberts lacked authorization to live or work in the U.S.

Read it.

The swamp never wastes time protecting its own, and James Comey is no exception. The disgraced former FBI director, who has finally been indicted for lying to Congress and obstructing a congressional proceeding, is already benefiting from the familiar playbook: put the right judge in place, create an appearance of fairness, and then quietly shield him from any real accountability.

Read it.

On Sunday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth officially deployed the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, to counter far-left groups targeting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and facilities. The state of Oregon immediately filed a lawsuit seeking to block the deployment. This move comes as dark-money-funded leftist NGOs, far-left groups, and radicalized leftist lone wolves resort to violence this year, with some of this mayhem referred to as “civil terrorism” … and attacks have intensified this month.

Hegseth wrote in a memo, “This memorandum further implements the President’s directive. 200 members of the Oregon National Guard will be called into Federal service immediately as part of the previously authorized call.”

Read it.

After back-to-back hurricanes devastated Florida’s Gulf Coast last year, residents of this artsy waterfront city are facing wrenching choices: demolish, rebuild to costly flood-resistant codes, or walk away from homes that defined their community’s charm, The New York Times reported.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which struck within weeks of each other, left a trail of destruction across the state. In Gulfport, a city of about 12,000 near Tampa Bay, nearly 100 homes were deemed “substantially damaged” under federal flood insurance rules. That triggered requirements to either elevate houses to modern standards or tear them down. For many, the cost was overwhelming.

“The locals are disappearing,” said Nancy Poucher, 70, an artist whose mustard-colored bungalow was flooded beyond repair. Unable to afford the six-figure cost of elevating her home, she and her husband sold the property at a loss to a developer.

Navy Matters.

ComNavOps has expressed both hope in SecDef Hegseth and an ominously growing sense of disappointment about the Secretary. Hegseth talked the talk but has, thus far, failed to walk the walk.

He had the opportunity to come in and clean house throughout the services and, with a couple of welcome exceptions, has failed to do so. The same service leadership is still, largely, in place. All the incompetent and politically motivated flag officers are still there and still running things.

Who has he fired over the disastrous Afghan pull out? No one.

Who has he fired over the Chinese spy balloons? No one.

Who has he fired for the military’s multi-year failure to pass an audit? No one.

Who has he fired for allowing the Navy’s fleet to look like a bunch of rusted out garbage scows? No one.

Who has he fired over the lowering of physical fitness and qualification standards? No one.

Who has he fired over the burning of the USS Bonhomme Richard? No one.

Who has he fired over the decades long debacle of the USS Boise (SSN)? No one.

I can pose these questions all night and the answer is the same for all of them: no one! Hegseth is holding no one accountable.

But ComNavOps, you whine say, we can’t afford to fire every flag officer. That would cause insurmountable problems! Bad as they might be, we need flag officer leadership. Really? You’re saying that we’d have problems if we fired all the people who have, over the last several years, hollowed our military, driven readiness into the toilet, allowed maintenance to become an afterthought, and wasted obscene amounts of money on failed programs?

It’s a shame. Based on his pre-nomination public statements, I had high hopes for Mr. Hegseth. Unfortunately, his actions to date, or lack thereof, suggest he’s yet another failed SecDef who lacks the courage to take sweeping and decisive action. All talk, no walk.

Read it.

President Donald Trump’s threat to lay off federal employees during a potential shutdown is deepening divisions among Senate Democrats, who face mounting pressure over whether to hold firm against a House-passed short-term funding bill, The Hill reported.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York has insisted his caucus oppose the measure, signaling he will not back down even as some centrists seek a way out. Schumer, who faces the prospect of a primary challenge from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2028, dismissed Trump’s threat as an overreach that courts would likely strike down.

“This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government. Their unnecessary firings will either be overturned in court or the administration will end up hiring the workers back, just like they did as recently as today,” Schumer said Wednesday.

The traditional kabuki-dance that is played out in these shutdowns is that most ‘essential services’ are exempted, so nobody is going to feel any serious pain from such a shutdown, and government bureaucracies focus on shutting down things like national parks that will provide the worst possible ‘optics’ for whoever the Narrative Media decide is the responsible actor, in this case obviously Trump. And when it’s all over everybody who didn’t get paid gets paid what they would have gotten paid, so no bureaucrat is harmed in the making of this picture.

Trump has signaled that, no, if we can’t pay people, they will lose their jobs. That’s not what the Democrats signed up for. Once again, Trump isn’t following the Deep State playbook, which is why Democrats are feeling a bit of agita.

ATQUE: Shutdown hostage taking (Don Moynihan/Can We Still Govern?)

Read it.

The Census Bureau plans to use U.S. Postal Service workers as census-takers in at least two locations in field tests next year for the 2030 census, which will determine political power and federal funding.

The statistical agency said Friday in a notice to be published next week that it will test and assess the feasibility of using postal carriers to knock on doors and collect information about households for the once-a-decade head count of every U.S. resident.

The field tests will be conducted next year in western Texas; tribal areas in Arizona; Colorado Springs, Colorado; western North Carolina; Spartanburg, South Carolina; and Huntsville, Alabama.

Yeah, that’ll make everybody trust the census even more….

Read it.

President Reagan famously said that the closest thing to eternal life on this earth is a government agency. Surely that aphorism applies to the Federal RESERVE. And most especially when you put a Trumpian ALL CAPS focus on the “reserve” part of its title.

That is to say, the purpose of the 1913 act had nothing to do with the Fed’s present-day “goals” with respect to inflation, unemployment, economic growth, housing starts, business capex, or any other aspect of the ebb and flow of commerce on Main Street. Instead, the Federal Reserve Act’s far more modest remit was to fix the badly flawed “reserve” arrangements of the National Banking Act that good old Abe Lincoln and his Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase had put into place to finance the civil war.

What the latter actually did was to nearly tax out of existence the honest free enterprise state banks that had prevailed during America’s growth explosion prior to the Civil War in favor of a system of federally regulated “national banks”. But the latter were just thinly disguised servants of the US Treasury. In that capacity, they were required to hold US Treasury bonds as collateral to back the issuance of their own bank notes—the latter being the essence of the 19th-century banking business.

Read it.

Documents declassified by FBI Director Kash Patel directly link former FBI chief James Comey to false statements he made before Congress, independent journalist Catherine Herridge reported Thursday.

Further, Herridge reported that the indictment against Comey had been “ready to go,” but that former U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert had been “blocking” or “slow-walking” the charges.

Lindsey Halligan, whom President Donald Trump named interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, removed the blocks.

Read it.

This week I landed myself smack dab in the middle of a real-life example of just how piss-poor of a capital allocator the government is compared to the free, for-profit market.

Usually, when I want to mail something, I walk a block or two to either the UPS Store or the FedEx store. Both are pretty similar: fairly busy (especially around the holidays), offering print and copy services, and staffed with employees who—while not saints—are at least competent enough to get your package labeled, shipped, and tracked with as little fuss or bullshit as possible.

The price is slightly costly, but at least the service gets the job done.

Cut to this week, however, when I had to mail something to a PO Box. Turns out you can’t do that through UPS or FedEx, which meant I was grudgingly forced to venture into the local post office. Always crowded. Always understaffed. Always a line out the door.

Within minutes of going in, I was reminded exactly why I avoid the place.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

House centrists are discussing the outlines of a possible compromise to extend Affordable Care Act insurance subsidies in hopes of jump-starting stalled talks over the soon-to-expire tax credits that have also emerged as a key fault line in the brewing government shutdown battle.

The bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus has privately broached whether an income cap should be imposed on who can benefit from the subsidies. Several Republicans in the group have floated a $200,000 cap, according to three people granted anonymity to describe the talks.

More than 20 million Americans currently benefit from the enhanced subsidies, which were enacted by Democrats under President Joe Biden in 2021. Some Republicans are now open to extending them, though many are pushing for new curbs to bring down the cost. The income cap is a bare minimum demand for many Republicans.

Democrats, meanwhile, are pushing for a permanent extension as part of government funding talks ahead of the Sept. 30 shutdown deadline. Some centrist Democrats have been willing to discuss concessions, though they are wary of publicly supporting any new limitations at this point.

Apparently subsidized compulsory government-directed health insurance is now ‘centrist’. The attempts by the Narrative Media to drag the Overton Window hard left sometimes has comical effect.

The Antiplanner.

Andrew Thomas, an assistant professor at Helena’s Carroll College, asked the Montana Department of Commerce, which distributes affordable housing credits and grants to developers, for all of the successful applications for low-income housing tax credits since 2000. The department graciously responded by providing information about nearly 190 housing projects.

Thomas had some of his students transcribe the data from the applications into a spreadsheet that he gave me to analyze. The applications tell how many units and how many livable square feet would be built in each project and break down costs into such categories as property acquisition, construction, professional fees, developer fees, and project reserves. The applications don’t say how tall each project would be but Thomas also asked his student to look up each project on Google street view to determine how many stories tall they were.

…

Comparing costs from projects built in 2000 through 2004 with those of projects built in 2019 through 2023 revealed that the cost per square foot had risen by 83 percent or $154 (in 2023 dollars) per square foot. The costs of just “construction” (including such things as relocation expenses, contractor overhead and profits, and permits as well as construction itself) grew by 44 percent or $49 per square foot, so other costs were responsible for most of the $154 increase.

Read it.

The UN has announced it will need to cut $500m from their 2026 budget and will lay off 20% of its staff as it struggles to cope with a massive reduction in funding by the Trump administration. Trump has eliminated at least $1 billion in total funding from the UN.

The plan is likely to involve an initial minimum 3,000 job cuts out of a 35,000-strong main workforce, with eventual job losses at around 7,000. The overall UN core or regular budget would be cut from $3.7bn to about $3.2bn next year. It means reductions of 15.1% in resources and 18.8% in posts in the regular budget compared with the 2025 budget.

Despite the funding losses, UN Secretary General António Guterres continues to press ahead with his new “pact for the future” focusing on artificial intelligence and policies for sustainable development. The UN is now looking for alternative funding for their operations, though, it is unlikely they will be able to fill the void left by US cuts. Most countries have no interest in paying more; the reliance has been entirely on Americans for generations.

The U.N. has been a mechanism for sucking U.S. taxpayer dollars to Turd World bureaucrats for at least sixty years.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.