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.

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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.

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.

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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.