The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

An executive order signed by the president would cancel collective bargaining for hundreds of thousands of workers, the largest federal employees union said. The union was preparing legal action.

Of course it is. I don’t recall when unions became allowed for government workers–when I was younger, that was illegal–but I suspect that the growth of sclerotic government was greatly accelerated by unionization, as has been its effect on business that a chock full o’ unions. Unions have always been one of the pillars of the Dramacrat party, teachers’ unions and government worker unions (which overlap a great deal) being notable stalwarts.

The inherent bias of the NYT is evident by the way they refer to ‘union protections’, as if unions were the only thing keeeping government workers from being kept in peonage.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal workers union, estimated that the order would strip labor protections from hundreds of thousands of civil servants, and said it was preparing legal action.

There were extensive civil service protections in place for government workers before unions, and probably will remain after unions are dust.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The intelligence breach was bad enough, current and former fighter pilots said. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s refusal to acknowledge that he should not have disclosed sensitive information about when American fighter pilots would attack sites in Yemen, they said, was even worse.

On air bases, in aircraft carrier “ready rooms” and in communities near military bases this week, the news that senior officials in the Trump administration discussed plans for an impending attack on Signal, a commercial messaging app, angered and bewildered men and women who have taken to the air on behalf of the United States.

The mistaken inclusion of the editor in chief of The Atlantic in the chat and Mr. Hegseth’s insistence that he did nothing wrong by disclosing the secret plans upend decades of military doctrine about operational security, a dozen Air Force and Navy fighter pilots said.

Note that they were endangered, not by anyone in the Trump administration, but by the ‘journalist’ that this writer for the NYT seems to admit was a probable traitor who would publish any information that he found out, however classified. Of course, the Time has to spin this as a problem with the administration, whereas the real problem is the apparatchiks of the Narrartive Media who can be depended upon to blab any classified information they come across to the four winds–and America’s enemies.

Read it.

Remember in 2006 when Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth and made lots of frightening claims about climate change, none of which came true?

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

“Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”  – 118 USC Ch 115.

This looks to be treason. straight up.

UPDATE: ‘It is highly classified’: Hegseth leaked sensitive attack details, former officials say (Politico)

If true, this merely underscores the treasonable nature of publicizing this information.

Read it.

Tonight’s NBC Nightly News reporting on the Senate hearing to confirm business executive Frank Bisignano as head of the Social Security Administration had a familiar sound to it. If you listen closely enough, you’ll hear the kind of fearmongering that was a staple of a bygone era.

If you listen closely enough, you’ll get taken back to the late ‘aughts and early teens, when Democrat messaging centered around scaring seniors into believing that evil Republicans were out to gut Social Security. One widely mocked ad featured a Paul Ryan lookalike wheeling an elderly woman to a cliff and throwing her right off.

This is, basically, the tone of Ryan Nobles’ item on Bisignano’s confirmation hearing. Nobles found a willing senior to play the role of frightened grandma as he advocated on behalf of the program, casting President Donald Trump and Tesla/SpaceX founder Elon Musk as the proverbial Paul Ryans holding Grandma’s wheelchair at the cliff’s edge.

In order to be credible, this report relies both on a willing suspension of disbelief and on a major omission: President Trump’s own commitment to preserve Social Security and Medicare. None of this gets mentioned at any point in the report. Instead, Nobles interchanges efficiency cuts with cuts to the program itself. Deceptive stuff intent on scaring seniors into voting Democrat. The Resistance Media is in high gear.

The Narrative Media have never shown any reluctance to lie if it would help advance the proglodyte agenda. It’s what they do.

UK Daily Record.

The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added to the group in the highly-encrypted messaging app, where he became privy to top-secret war plans.

And apparently just couldn’t wait to make these ‘top secret war plans’ public. That’s modern ‘journalism’ for you.

UPDATE: Atlantic editor suggests he’s open to sharing Hegseth’s full war plans texts publicly (The Hill) Which is treason.

Newsbusters.

The “legacy media” network newscasts continue their shameful reporting on the campaign of violence currently unfolding against Tesla, in protest of founder Elon Musk’s role in the Trump administration. Today’s stories included the rehashing of a familiar trope.

First comes the worst: the new and unimproved CBS Evening News, with anchor John Dickerson seemingly having a problem with saying the attacks are directly linked to The Dogefather. Dickerson, instead, hiding behind the weasel word “apparently”.

Read it.

If the second richest man in the world doesn’t even control the paper he bought, who does?

The answer is right in front of us. Much like the corporate world, the C-suite isn’t really in charge, and neither are the owners, and certainly not the shareholders. When even a man wealthy enough to drop a quarter of a billion on a paper has struggled to enforce his will, the average CEO is much less likely to have sway over what goes on in the real centers of power.

The struggle sessions within the New York Times, the ousting of CNN’s CEO, and a smaller scale struggle between the owner of the LA Times and the staff show that while the formal power may be with owners and CEOs, the actual centers of power lie in leftist networks within the media that are able to defy owners, executives and anyone who tries to moderate them.

The media always had its biases and clubbiness, but during the Bush and Obama administrations the centers of gravity shifted away from an older formal leadership, which became all but irrelevant, to a younger internet-savvy club of activists, which closely coordinated on their political agendas behind the scenes while creating a new covert media cartel.

Read it.

“In 1997, Jeanette Vizguerra left Mexico City for Colorado, where she became a janitor and immigration reform advocate,” the Wednesday article in Time read. “Twenty years later, she was one of the most influential people in the world.” Celebrities often write these tribute articles. Vizguerra was championed by actress America Ferrera, who starred in the TV shows Ugly Betty and Superstore and the dreadful Barbie movie.

…

Team Biden’s administration allowed illegal immigrants to stay in churches or schools to avoid arrest, and when Team Trump revoked that on January 21, liberal journalists had a cow over how ICE agents would be able to go into public or sacred spaces and arrest people.

…

For added unintentional comedy, DelGuidice reported that Denver Mayor Mike Johnston (D) is hopping mad at this “controversial” detention. He called it “Putin-style persecution of political dissidents.” As opposed to the audacity of illegal immigrants publicly advocating illegal immigration. Democrats — including Time magazine editors and reporters — love that bold, risky “underdog” radicalism.

Read it.

Let’s clarify one important issue up front: Progressives do not believe in democracy. They use the term frequently as a Pavlovian bell to whip useful idiot activists into a frothing frenzy, but there is no measure by which they have proven they care about Democracy or even know what it is. And since this is the case, we have to ask – What do they really mean when they use the word?

If we consider the traditional definition of “majority rule”, then this is clearly not what leftists support. That is to say, they only support majority rule when they represent the majority. In the case of the 2024 election Donald Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, which means he does in fact represent the majority. Yet, Democrats and their ilk continue to accuse him of being a “threat to democracy”, and they have openly and actively refused to accept the will of the people.

Therefore, one can only conclude that leftists want something other than democracy. And, given their track record over the last four years in which they attempted mass online censorship and a global authoritarian coup using pandemic hysteria as a weapon, there is little doubt who the true autocrats really are.

They also love to attach the tag ‘watchdog’ to their busybody organizations set up to make sure that everybody is getting with their program. Whenever you see the word ‘watchdog’ in a headline, it refers to an organization set up by proglodytes to bitch and moan about people who aren’t being Woke enough for them.

NBC News, a Voice of the Crust.

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s sweeping federal layoffs aren’t just wreaking havoc on tens of thousands of employees across the country.

Lawmakers in both parties are warning the cuts will harm the government’s ability to recruit young people out of college — as well as highly skilled candidates from the private sector — causing a ripple effect that could be felt for years or even decades.

“The recruiting challenge they’re creating for themselves is enormous,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., whose state is home to hundreds of thousands of federal workers, said of the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts. “I don’t think that’s an accidental byproduct. I think that’s a known consequence — and they don’t care.”

That’s not a bug,  it’s a feature. The last thing we need is another generation where getting a government job is the height of their ambtion.

The Bulwark, a Sock Puppet of the Crust.

If you’re lucky….

The Hill, a Voice of the Crust.

In an era of global instability when fake news is the norm, America needs a reliable platform to control its own narrative internationally.

After all, it’s all about the Narrative. I am a patient reader of foreign news, and Voice of America has been singularly inept at ‘controlling’ how other people see the U.S. Inept organizations deserve to be shut down.

By ‘our story’, I’m sure she means the Wokerati Narrative espoused by Democrat administrations. No,  I don’t want my money going toward spreading that narrative.

(Note the proglodyte assumption that, if the government doesn’t do a thing, that thing Will Not Get Done. A natural thought for those who feed on ‘funding’.)

Pro Publica, a Voice of the Crust.

On a frigid winter morning in 2022, a stranger knocked on the door of a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, during Shabbat service.

Soon after he was invited in for tea, the visitor pulled out a pistol and demanded the release of an al-Qaida-linked detainee from a nearby federal prison, seizing as hostages a rabbi and three worshipers. The standoff lasted 10 hours until the rabbi, drawing on extensive security training, hurled a chair at the assailant. The hostages escaped.

‘Extensive security training’ means you throw a chair? This is Texas–where was his gun?

“We are alive today because of that education,” Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker said after the attack.

If he’d been carrying, he’d be alive today and the bad guys would know not to mess with him. He sounds like a Democrat, at best.

The averted tragedy at Congregation Beth Israel is cited as a success story for the largely unseen prevention work federal authorities have relied on for years in the fight to stop terrorist attacks and mass shootings. The government weaves together partnerships with academic researchers and community groups across the country as part of a strategy for addressing violent extremism as a public health concern.

In other words, the government funnels taxpayer money to left-wing hand-wringers who refuse to adopt the surest cure for terrorist incidents: A trained, armed citizenry. Sorry, apparatchiks, the gravy train is stopping.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

President Trump’s angry call on Tuesday for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against his administration on deportation flights has set off a string of near-instant social media taunts and threats, including images of judges being marched off in handcuffs.

Compare Chuck Schumer’s threats against Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

The call came against an ominous backdrop. Nine days earlier, police officers in Charleston, S.C., had been dispatched to the home of one of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s sisters because of a threat that there was a pipe bomb in her mailbox. “The device’s detonation will be triggered as soon as the mailbox is next opened,” the emailed threat read.

The pipe bomb proved to be a hoax, but the threats and intimidation faced by judges and their families in recent weeks are real, judges say. At a moment when the judiciary is weighing pivotal decisions on the legality of Trump administration policies, the potential for violence against judges seems to be rising.

Trump is merely talking about impeachment, a legitimate mechanism under the Constitution; Woke mobs pick violence first, and don’t even bother with legal remedies. (Note that the Justice in question is nominally conservative, and how the NYT cleverly casts a situation involving left-wing judges as if it were a universal problem.

Wall Street Journal, a Voice of the Crust.

President Trump has adopted Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” theme to echo the Gipper’s successful foreign-policy realism. But what Mr. Trump ignores is the idealism that was the other half of Reagan’s message: the promotion of human freedom that undermined dictatorships from within.

Not our government’s job. Trump is not an idealist. Idealism costs money … and lives. Idealism is what gets us into neo-con Forever Wars.

On Saturday Mr. Trump ordered the termination of grants for Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Voice of America, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (Radio and Television Marti), the Open Technology Fund and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks are also being dismantled. This is a retreat in the global war of ideas.

This ‘global war of ideas’ is also not the job of our government. As Thomas Jefferson famously said: We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but the guarantors only of our own.

The news agencies were created to counter communism and spread the truth in countries where media are controlled by governments that lie about the world. As Natan Sharansky and other former prisoners of communism attest, Radio Free Europe was a source of inspiration as it broadcast throughout countries like Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and the Soviet Union. It’s the same in China, Cuba and other dictatorships today.

The fall of Soviet Communism, which represented an existential threat to the U.S., made this sort of propaganda obsolete–not to mention the fact that Democrat administrations used it to propagate Wokeness around the world. America has no difficulty getting its message across; the Internet allows people around the world to see what America is truly like, the good and the bad. It doesn’t need taxpayer subsidies.

OffGuardian.

This is only the digitized ones, the undigitized ones are all available as well, you just have to go to the national archives in Maryland to see them. They’ll put those on the internet too, just as soon as they’re done digitizing them. Honest.

Of course, the process of “digitizing the records” and the weeks it’s expected to take “historians and experts” to go over the files keeps the narrative open. They can add new files as they see fit to steer the conversation.

So far the media coverage has been exactly as you’d expect, with a quasi-religious repetition of the Official Story best exemplified by the pathetically predictable New York Times, where Adam Nagourney headlines simply:

Here’s what to know. (Oswald still did it.)

Propaganda so laughable you wonder if they’re really trying…and perhaps they’re not.

Read it.

Dr. Leana Wen, a former CNN medical analyst who famously stated that “the unvaccinated should not be allowed to leave their homes,” is now admitting that Covid dissenters should have been allowed to ask questions.

Read it.

Leftist corporate media outlets have been running news headlines suggesting that Elon Musk’s DOGE “broke” into the U.S. Institute of Peace. In reality, however, fired and unhinged President and CEO George Moose denied access to Acting President Kenneth Jackson, a State Department official involved in neutering rogue U.S. Agency for International Development.

The DOGE team wrote on X, “Mr. Moose denied lawful access to Kenneth Jackson, the Acting USIP President (as approved by the USIP Board). @DCPoliceDept arrived onsite and escorted Mr. Jackson into the building. The only unlawful individual was Mr. Moose, who refused to comply, and even tried to fire USIP’s private security team when said security team went to give access to Mr. Jackson.”

That’s certainly a stark contrast to the conspiracy-driven narratives pushed by leftist corporate news networks.

Slate, a Voice of the Crust.

The Trump administration pushed forward into a new phase of the rolling national constitutional crisis over the weekend, reportedly defying two different federal court orders imposing limits on its deportation of immigrants without due process. First, immigrant authorities deported Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist at Brown University, despite a judge’s Friday order halting her removal. Second, authorities deported about 250 Venezuelan migrants, flouting another judge’s explicit directive to turn around American planes that hadn’t yet landed in El Salvador, where the migrants were being sent. The Justice Department claimed that it could not comply with the order barring Alawieh’s removal because it arrived too late. But the White House defended its defiance of the order prohibiting deportations of Venezuelans, insisting that the judge had no jurisdiction over the migrants—and that Trump holds absolute, unreviewable constitutional authority to expel noncitizens.

Taken on their own, these claims would be chilling enough. But they were coupled with another novel late-night claim of presidential power: On Monday, Donald Trump purported to reverse President Joe Biden’s pardons of Jan. 6 committee members. In a Truth Social post that came just after midnight, Trump claimed the pardons are now “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT,” asserting the power to undo their clemency because Biden allegedly signed it “by Autopen.” (It is the official position of the executive branch, unchallenged by the courts, that autopen qualifies as a valid presidential signature.)

Taken together, these actions and declarations amount to a significant escalation in Trump’s transformation of his own presidency into an autocracy or, perhaps more accurately, a monarchy. His Justice Department has taken vague claims of “Article II authority” to new extremes, ascribing to him an unchecked right to expel immigrants with no semblance of due process—and as his defenders have asserted all weekend, to ignore lawful court orders that stand in his way. Meanwhile, Trump himself has made it clear that this extreme and dangerous new vision of executive power does not apply to the presidency, but only his presidency: It is not a set of neutral principles, but an ever-evolving pretext for his own personal whims and cruelties, dressed up in legalese concocted by the conservative legal movement for precisely this purpose.

So, We can see here the fully developed Narrative that the proglodyte media will be pushing until Trump leaves office four years from now. None of what Trump is doing differs at all from what Biden or Obama did as President, except that their judges didn’t pretend to have the power to interfere with their activities (because why would they?). Tossing around terms like ‘autocracy’ and ‘monarchy’ are merely attempts to stir up the mob, and have no significance other than to demonstrate that the writer doesn’t know what those terms actually mean. The ‘neutral principles’ espoused by Trump are quite clear to those who don’t have their Progressive Goggles on: (a) the President has plenary power in foreign affairs and doesn’t answer to the judiciary in that area, which has a long and consistent history in the law (vide the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, which the courts allowed), and (b) employees in the Executive branch work for the President and can be taken on or dumped as he sees fit, so long as he follows the Constitutional and statutory requirements, which so far he has. Every time he makes a move, he states clearly the authority on which that move is based, which the Narrative Media invariably ignore and don’t address, being too busy mouthing things like ‘autocracy’ and ‘monarchy’ for their NPC followers.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, also asserted that the federal courts “have no jurisdiction” over President Trump’s conduct of foreign affairs or his power to expel foreign enemies.

So. The lines are drawn.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

The story broke in December, shortly before Granger’s long-planned retirement, and was confirmed several days later by Granger’s son, who acknowledged “dementia issues” in a Dallas Morning News interview. As the news ricocheted around the political world, a Texas website with an editorial staff of 10 was credited with a massive scoop — while the Capitol Hill press corps was pilloried for supposedly taking its eye off the ball.

Given that the U.S. Capitol is one of the few buildings in America where the reporting corps hasn’t been totally devastated, it was a confounding miss. Granger wasn’t a nobody. She’d been in office for over a quarter-century, and had been the top Republican on the Appropriations committee until last April. Her face was familiar both to her colleagues and the reporters who roam outside the House chamber. Curiosity might also have been triggered by the fact that she’d voluntarily stepped aside from a plum position that most members of Congress would have to have pried from their hands.

Now Biden doesn’t seem so exceptiona.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The moment I realized something had gone terribly, maybe irreversibly, wrong in higher ed came in 2015, when Nicholas Christakis, a distinguished sociobiologist at Yale, was surrounded, hounded, lectured and yelled at by students furious that his wife, Erika, had suggested in an email that perhaps students could be entrusted to make their own Halloween costume decisions. The incident seemed to encapsulate the entitlement, the arrogance and the unbearably petty grievances of a generation who seemed to find their voice and power in the taking of offense. I was left asking: Who admitted these students? Who taught them to think this way? And why weren’t they immediately suspended or expelled?

All good questions to which people like those who write for the NYT don’t want the true answers.

Read it.

A new global pandemic has taken hold with mass cases of Elon Derangement Syndrome breaking out all over the globe.

Newsbusters.

From watching the White House wrapup that aired on ABC World News Tonight, reasonable individuals can arrive at the conclusion that ABC is attempting to incite violence or some other adverse action against Tesla/SpaceX founder Elon Musk. An inflammatory intro from anchor David Muir led to an even more inflammatory report from former Chief Biden White House apple polisher Mary Bruce.

After spending years foisting electric cars upon the American public and gleefully promoting related mandates as enacted by the Biden administration, the media are now referring to them as “luxury cars.” What a difference an Elon derangement makes.

Newsbusters.

The networks had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into coverage of the virulent antisemitic protests at major universities across the United States, beginning with those at Columbia University in New York. The protesters’ worst excesses were often left off of reporting, lest people get the idea that they were materially supportive both of Hamas and of the atrocities they committed on October 7th, 2023. But there is, at long last, an angle worthy of thorough media coverage.

Read it.

… Except that it isn’t Sussex, it’s Mountbatten-Windsor, and has been every since she married Prince Harry (unless she’s officially changed it, which of course she can do, but of which there is no credible evidence). If she wants to go around calling herself Megan Sussex, she’s certainly entitled to do that, at least in the U.S., but that’s not her legal name. (She still “shares a last name with Harry and her two kids”, but it’s Montbatten-Windsor, not Sussex.)

If she were an ordinary (non-Royal) duchess, her legal signature in Britain (and by courtesy everywhere else) would be “Megan Sussex” to indicate that she is the wife of a peer whose peerage title was “Sussex”, just as Harry’s legal signature (if he were a non-Royal Duke) would be simply his title, “Sussex”.

But Harry (and Megan, legally) come within the ambit of the Letters Patent issued by King George V, under which Harry, as the son of  the sovereign (and Megan, as his wife) are “His/Her Royal Highness” and their legal signatures are just their Christian names, “Harry” and “Megan”. Charles can change that, if he wants to, but every indication is that he doesn’t want to (and hasn’t, at least so far).

I wish these scribblers would do some research….

Read it.

I guess that doesn’t happen on Planet Proglodyte.

Read it.

The anti-Trump media have certainly pushed the angle that Trump’s attempts to cut the federal work force are horrible and chaotic. The poll by the taxpayer-funded networks found 56% agreed Trump has rushed it without considering everything, while 43% said he’s doing what’s needed.

PBS reporter Lisa Desjardins pushed this finding: “So we did ask, do you think checks and balances, that system, is working now? Right, today, 56% in the last week or so believe, no, our checks and balances system is not working.” They were secretly cheering because this is the message they are pushing. There’s no checks of balances for these taxpayer-funded networks.

NPR touted the poll under the headline “Majorities say state of the union is not strong, and Trump is rushing change.” NPR political analyst Domenico Montanaro pushed other negative poll findings for Trump: “Most said the cuts to the federal government are doing more harm than good (55%), and 60% said federal employees are essential, including two-thirds of independents.”

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

So secret that it came to the attention of so incompetent a rag as Politico.

Trump, unlike the Democrats, isn’t locked into supporting Zelensky, so this ought to come as no surprise.

The American Mind.

The grotesque banalization of Hitler and Hitlerism proceeds apace. The American Left’s discourse is replete with comparisons of President Donald J. Trump to Adolf Hitler and constant evocations of a dangerous “fascist” threat to democracy supposedly coming from an altogether illiberal Right. Kamala Harris labeled Trump a fascist and Nazi sympathizer in a CNN town hall meeting in October, and she and the mainstream media continued to pile on until the November election.

When Trump held a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on October 27, a little over a week before the election, many Democrats, and the increasingly hysterical talking heads on CNN and MSNBC, compared that rally to a meeting of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund in that same venue in 1939. Completely disregarding the impressively multiracial character of the MAGA supporters gathered to hear Trump, as well as the large contingent of Orthodox and Hassidic Jews also in attendance, the media incessantly identified Trump with Hitler and “fascism.” Not only was the deep-seated evil that was National Socialism trivialized beyond recognition, and not only was fascism crudely (and absurdly) identified with any opposition to a hard Left agenda, but crucial distinctions between fascism, National Socialism, and democratic conservatism were elided in a deeply misleading manner.

This drumbeat continues to this day. The Trump/fascism/Nazism elision is commonplace in leftist discourse. An article in the Harvard Political Review from January attempts to give scholarly cover to this type of defamation: “Trump Rhetoric Echoes Hitler.” The author takes it for granted that Trump is a racist anti-Semite, and that he hates immigrants tout court. The fact he has built a large and varied multiracial political coalition is passed over in silence, as is his warm relationship with Israel. Trump, it is said, “is unfit to serve as the president of a nation founded upon the celebration of racial, ethnic, and cultural heterogeneity.” While it is true that the Founders loathed chattel slavery and declared that “all men are created equal,” dogmatic multiculturalism was not their vision of American self-government.

UPDATE: Hitler Defeated After Opposition Party Holds Up Tiny Signs On Paddles (Babylon Bee)

Newsbusters.

We thought we had seen it all with the astronomically stupid media takes surrounding Elon Musk and DOGE cutting up the federal government’s credit cards, but lefty magazine The New Republic just potentially one-upped them all.

“Elon Musk’s DOGE Cuts Could Kill Your Dog,” TNR staff writer Kate Aronoff grumbled in an insane March 5 screed.

Aronoff took aim at Musk’s reported cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which Aronoff railed “could have unexpectedly deadly consequences for your pets—not to mention your own health.” Aronoff was adamant that the cuts would hinder NOAA’s ability to pass information “about harmful algal growth and toxicity on to municipal water treatment plants in time for them to protect people, pets, and businesses from being poisoned.”

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Would you ever expect to see a piece in the NYT saying ‘Here’s How Republicans Are Protesting [insert Democrat President’s name here] Speech to Congress’?

No, of course not.

UPDATE: Democratic Rep. Al Green removed after disrupting Trump’s speech (Henry J. Gomez/NBC News)

UPDATE: House Speaker Johnson Orders Democratic Congressman Removed From Trump Speech

Bloomberg, a Voice of the Crust.

Bullshit. Trump doesn’t want Canada, and would refuse it if offered. All we need is another hundred million socialists ruining our country.

What Trump wants is trade concessions and for the Canadian government to stop acting like a bunch of prodlodyte dicks.

The New York Time, a Voice of the Crust.

The Supreme Court sided with San Francisco on Tuesday in a challenge to water quality regulations issued by the Environmental Protection Agency in a ruling that could have sweeping implications for the agency’s ability to limit offshore pollution.
The 5-to-4 decision dealt another blow to the agency, which has recently sustained several losses before the court over its efforts to protect the environment.

The case was notable because it created unusual alliances. Liberal San Francisco found itself on the same side as mining and petroleum trade groups like the National Mining Association, American Farm Bureau Federation, and American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers in opposing the E.P.A.

The dispute fundamentally focused on human waste and how San Francisco disposes of it. The question before the court was whether the Clean Water Act of 1972 allowed the E.P.A. to impose prohibitions on wastewater released into the Pacific Ocean and to penalize the city for violating them.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the majority, said the E.P.A. was entitled to impose specific requirements to prevent pollution but not to make polluters responsible whenever water quality generally falls below the agency’s standards.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Nobody knows exactly how long ago a marbled and tender boneless short-loin steak came to be known across the United States as a New York strip. Everybody agrees, though, that the nomenclature wasn’t the least bit controversial until last Friday, when Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas proposed a new name: the Texas strip.

Which will go the way of other political fads like ‘freedom fries’ and ‘liberty steak’.

Noting that Texas leads the nation in heads of cattle, Mr. Patrick announced in a post on X that he was working with the State Senate on a resolution that would officially rebrand the cut.

What business is it of the fucking state government what a cut of meat is called? Talk about unclear on the concept….

Mr. Patrick was clear in his post that he hoped the Texas-centric name would give a boost to his state’s cattle ranchers. At the same time, the way he framed the issue carried more than a whiff of red-meat politics.

Say rather stink, to be accurate.

“Liberal New York shouldn’t get the credit for our hard-working ranchers,” he wrote.

Dan Patrick, despite his nominal political affiliation, is by temperament a Democrat, since hs spends most of his time doing performative political posturing rather than any actual work for the people who elected him. (To be fair, a Lieutenant Governor’s main job is waiting around for the Governor to die, so one can’t blame him for spending time with his hobbies.)

The only thing more ridiculous than the Lieutenant Governor of Texas spending time on this bullshit is the New York Times spending time writing about it. Seriously, guys, don’t you have anything more important to cover? Are you tired of bashing Trump 24/7 already?

The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust,

A natalist conference featuring speakers including self-described eugenicists and promoters of race science, apparently including the man behind a previously pseudonymous race-science influencer account, and the founder of a startup offering IQ screening for IVF embryos, will be held at a hotel and conference venue operated by the public University of Texas, Austin.

Details of the conference have emerged as a prominent supporter of pro-natalist positions, the tech billionaire Elon Musk, lays waste US government agencies under the banner of his “Doge” initiative, with the blessing of Donald Trump.

Natalism in its current often rightwing iteration encourages high birth rates, and Musk has been a vocal proponent. He also maintains a large compound home near Austin, where reportedly he plans to house some of his children and two of their mothers.

The implication, of course, is that ‘natalists’, ‘race-science promoters’, and ‘eugenecists’ are part of the Axis Of Evil that all politicaily correct people disdain. Proglodytes have always been disgusted by people having children, from the ‘population crisis’ that was going to bring us to  Malthusian hellscape (before the numbers showed that, actually, the population was stabilizing) to the Wokerati who ‘refuse to bring a child into this world’ in order to Save The Planet.

Proglodytes are congenitally seething with arrogance. They are conviced that, of anything bad happens in the world, it is because of Bad People (other than themselves of course; you know, Other People, Ignorant People), and that if anything good will ever happen it will happen it will depend on the efforts of Good People (like themselves). They forget that the natural world is HUGE and people just don’t count for all that much — we’re just another species, and reality has been dealing with species for billions of years and really doesn’t need our help ,,, but thanks for playing.

(FOLLOW THE SCIENCE! except when it’s race science….)

Read it.

MSNBC didn’t fire Ayman Mohyeldin, the Hamas-aligned host of a poorly rated weekend show—they just demoted him. The left-wing network announced last week it was canceling Ayman, which aired Saturdays and Sundays at 7 p.m., as part of its ongoing restructuring in the face of financial difficulties. But the controversial host isn’t going anywhere.

“I’m not leaving the network, in fact, quite the opposite,” a defiant Mohyeldin told a handful of viewers over the weekend. “Despite the challenging and fearless ways we have covered stories on this show for more than two years, MSNBC has offered to extend my tenure at the company.” Mohyeldin will cohost a new weekend program, launching in April, alongside two other personalities that have yet to be announced.

“Soon, this show, the name, the format will change, and I will be joined by two new incredible hosts who will be announced soon enough,” Mohyeldin said. “But one thing that won’t change is my promise to you, the viewers, that I won’t stop talking about the difficult stories and challenging topics that others don’t cover.” Mohyeldin acknowledged how “saddened” he was by the firing of his “dear friend, ally, and colleague, the fearless Joy Reid,” but declined to echo star host Rachel Maddow, who accused MSNBC of deliberately suppressing non-white voices.

The demoted host’s comment about “challenging topics that others don’t cover” was presumably in reference to his long history of antagonism toward Israel. Mohyeldin has been the foremost Hamas cheerleader on MSNBC since the departure of fellow anti-Israel activist Mehdi Hasan in 2023. Otherwise his show is relatively standard fare for MSNBC, examining topics such as “how Democrats should resist Trump’s agenda” and how the “GOP’s attack on DEI” has gone too far.

Read it.

For a time when millennials were coming of political age, the Harry Potter comparisons were repeated ad nauseum. The eventual response to Harry Potter analogies eventually just became, “read another book” and eventually the comparisons died down.

And that’s what I’m saying now. Pick another event in history besides World War II, please.

It isn’t always Munich in 1938. Not every politician you don’t like is Hitler. Not every aggressive foreign power is the Third Reich. And not every attempt at peace is Neville Chamberlain-like “appeasement.”

And if you are going to go with a World War II history analogy, at least get the facts straight.

Read it.

It’s so secret that it’s in the news!

Washington Poop.

A plan SO SECRET that only the Washington Poop knew about it.

Read it.

CNN host Jake Tapper is preparing to sell a book he wrote about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and the “desperate efforts to hide the extent of that deterioration.” Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again comes out in May. That’s 6 months after the election, 11 months after Biden bragged about finally beating Medicare in a debate moderated by Jake Tapper, 15 months after Special Counsel Robert Hur was widely denounced for describing Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” 34 months after the Washington Free Beacon published volume one of “Joe Biden’s Senior Moment of the Week,” and 55 months after Tapper attacked Lara Trump for suggested Biden was experiencing “cognitive decline.”

To most observers who aren’t journalists or professional Democrats, the extent of Biden’s deterioration did not seem like something that was especially well hidden. It was obvious to anyone who watched Biden attempt to speak coherently in public. In August 2023, the Associated Press released a poll that found 69 percent of Democrats thought Biden was too old to “effectively serve” another four years. Nevertheless, most journalists either refused to cover the issue or embarrassed themselves by insisting Biden was sharp as a tack. “I think he’s better than he’s ever been,” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said of Biden in March 2024. “I’m about to tell you the truth, and F you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden—intellectually, analytically—is the best Biden ever.” Critics of Biden’s decision to run again on account of his age were assailed for promoting misinformation and right-wing conspiracy theories.

Timing is everything, and this is hardly the first time journalists have waited until after a hotly contested presidential election to publish damning information about prominent Democrats. Trump’s election in 2016, for example, didn’t just end Hillary Clinton’s career in politics. It also precipitated the downfall of two Clinton-affiliated Democrats widely regarded as criminal sex pests: Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein.

Elon Musk Is South African. It Explains a Lot. (William Shoki/New York Times)

Trump is ‘no longer an ally,’ former French President Hollande says (Victor Goury-Laffont/Politico)

How Elon Musk Executed His Takeover of the Federal Bureaucracy (New York Times)

After Insults and False Claims, Trump to Host Zelensky for Minerals Deal (Peter Baker/New York Times)

Tesla investors furious at stock’s plunge turn tables on CEO Elon Musk (Christiaan Hetzner/Fortune)

How Trump’s Cabinet Scrambled to Respond to Musk’s DOGE Email (New York Times)

Trump’s proposed ‘gold card’ visa comes with a hidden tax break for the wealthy (Robert Frank/CNBC)

The MAGA War on Speech (New York Times)  MAGA is the New Nigger.

Federal workers could get a second email Saturday. It might require a response. (Washington Post)

Trump tried to extort Zelenskyy and was impeached – now he may succeed (David Smith/The Guardian)

Trump’s Assault on Social Security (Pamela Herd/Can We Still Govern?)

California Judge Finds Mass-Firings Of Probationary Federal Employees Likely Unlawful

Trump’s new world order: Strongmen make the rules (Zachary Basu/Axios)

Republicans consider major budget change to obscure deficit impact of extending Trump’s tax cuts (Sahil Kapur/NBC News)

Musk Makes Big Mistake While Trying to Smear CNN Legal Analyst Norm Eisen (William Vaillancourt/The Daily Beast)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells NPR: ‘Everything feels increasingly like a scam’ (Steve Inskeep/NPR)

Andrew Tate, Accused Sex Trafficker, Is Trump’s Kind of Guy (Michelle Goldberg/New York Times)

Patel, Ratcliffe Set Up U.S. for a National Catastrophe (Garrett M. Graff/Doomsday Scenario)

Sanders steps back into role as anti-oligarch crusader (Hanna Trudo/The Hill)  “Oligarch” = Rich Person Progs Don’t Like

Republicans Want to Gut Medicaid. They Might Regret It. (Michael Kinnucan/New York Times)

Boycott tomorrow! – Join in tomorrow’s economic blackout – A grassroots movement … (Robert Reich)

Services to millions of people collapse as USAID cuts contracts worldwide (Reuters)

Trump fires hundreds working on weather forecasts, satellite data and radar systems (Scott Dance/Washington Post)

Trump revives Monroe Doctrine in U.S. relations with Western Hemisphere (Karen DeYoung/Washington Post)  The swine!

Trump to Sign Executive Order Making English Official U.S. Language (Meridith McGraw/Wall Street Journal)

Speaker Mike Johnson Is Living in a D.C. House That Is the Center of a Pastor’s Secretive Influence Campaign (ProPublica)

Daily Show Pretends Ditching DEI Means Ditching History

Donald Trump branded ‘racist climate denier’ as opposition grows to US President’s Scotland trip

Here’s the real threat to ‘personal liberties and free markets’ (Dana Milbank/Washington Post)

Apple to fix iPhone dictation bug that replaces word ‘racist’ with ‘Trump’

Techno-Fascism Comes to America

US Forest Service firings decimate: entire generation of talent and passion lost

MAGA’s Orwellian notion of “free speech” (Stephen Robinson/Public Notice)  MAGA is the New Nigger.

Why Aren’t We in the Streets? – On Trump the Almighty and his so-far quiescent capital. (Susan B. Glasser/New Yorker)

Democrats Need A Battle Plan–And A War Room (Murshed Zaheed/Off Message)

Lies, Cuts, Closures: Trump and Musk Ravage Social Security Administration (Justin Glawe/Rolling Stone)

Democrats Are About to Eat Their Own (Andrew Egger/The Bulwark)

Emperor Newsom podcasts while California burns (Tiana Lowe Doescher/Washington Examiner)

The Putinization of America – Trump’s deference to the Russian dictator has become full-blown imitation. (Garry Kasparov/The Atlantic)

US Attorney Ed Martin Demotes Jan. 6 Case Supervisors (Bloomberg Law)

Mississippi Judge Orders Newspaper To Remove Editorial Criticizing City Council

Trump eases rules on military raids and airstrikes, expanding range of who can be targeted (James Laporta/CBS News)

Judge Says Trump Administration Memos Directing Mass Firings Were Illegal (Zach Montague/New York Times)

Trump, Departmentalism, and the Judiciary

President Shares Disgusting Vision in AI ‘Trump Gaza’ Video (Margaret Hartmann/New York Magazine)

Donald Trump’s Extraordinary Act Of Weakness (Whitney Snyder/HuffPost)

ABC Claims Trump Sold US to Musk and Will Sell Access to Jihadi Terrorists

Trump prepares to use controversial 1798 ‘Alien Enemies’ law to speed deportations (CNN)

White House bars AP, Reuters and other media from covering Trump cabinet meeting (James Oliphant/Reuters)

They voted for Trump, but now they’re losing their U.S. government jobs (James Rainey/Los Angeles Times)

Justice Dept. Nominees Suggest Some Court Orders Can Be Ignored (Devlin Barrett/New York Times)

Skirting Judicial Scrutiny by Mooting and Scooting (Richard Salgado/Default)

RFK Jr. Has Horrific Response to Measles Death (Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling/New Republic)

HUD Hacker Who Played AI Video of Trump, Musk, Identified

Musk dominates, disparages federal workers at first Trump Cabinet meeting (Alex Gangitano/The Hill)

Study: Less Than 4% of Network Coverage of Angry GOP Town Halls Mentioned Leftist Ties

This animal is on the edge of extinction. Trump just fired the people trying to save it. (Benji Jones/Vox)

DOGE Staffers at HUD Are From an AI Real Estate Firm and a Mobile Home Operator (Wired)

Economists are starting to worry about a serious Trump recession (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard/Telegraph)

Jeff Bezos is muzzling the Washington Post’s opinion section. That’s a death knell (Margaret Sullivan/The Guardian)

Wire Services Decry ‘Any Steps’ to ‘Limit’ WH Access

Today I am ending my professional association with The Washington Post. Since my decision to step down as senior managing editor in 2023 … (Cameron Barr/Cameron Barr on LinkedIn)

MSNBC Pushes Baseless Corruption Smears of ‘Trump/Musk Administration’

Posts share old video, falsely claiming Obama’s birth certificate is fake | Fact check (Katie Smith/USA Today)

Musk’s Empire Is Reaping $2 Million Per Day From Trump (Veronica Riccobene/The Lever)

Trump scraps Biden-era fair housing rule (Katy O’Donnell/Politico)

RFK Dismisses Measles Outbreak That Killed Kid as No Biggie (Josh Fiallo/The Daily Beast)

Musk claims DOGE ‘restored’ Ebola prevention effort. Officials disagree. (Washington Post)

Judge Extends Halt on Trump Firing of Whistleblower Agency Head

DNC Operation To ‘Combat Online Misinformation’ Spreads Fabricated Audio of Donald Trump Jr. Calling To Arm Russia (Chuck Ross/The Washington Free Beacon)

RFK Jr. Dismisses Measles Outbreak As ‘Not Unusual’ After Child’s Death (Nina Golgowski/HuffPost)

In Trump’s Washington, a Moscow-Like Chill Takes Hold (Peter Baker/New York Times)

Is Trump lying about cutting Medicaid – or is Congress? (Patrick Reis/Vox)

White House Correspondents’ Association cedes control of pool reports to Trump administration (Ben Johansen/Politico)  The swine.

Your Daily Media Musk-DOGE Meltdown: Cabinet Meeting Edition

‘People Are Very Scared’: Trump Administration Purge of JAG Officers Raises Legal, Ethical Fears

Some European Allies Fear Trump Is Out to Destroy Them (Steven Erlanger/New York Times)

GOP Gambles on Budget Plan That Helps the Rich and Cuts Aid to the Poor (Andrew Duehren/New York Times)

She hoped Trump’s victory would change her life, but not like this (Emily Davies/Washington Post)

The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.

An obvious attempt to (a) gin up anxiety over a New Pandemic and (b) take a dig as the straw RFK who Hate Vaccines.

JOIN THE CHORUS: Texas measles outbreak marks first fatality as more cases reported (Helen Branswell/STAT)

JOIN THE CHORUS: Unvaccinated Child Dies of Measles in Texas, Officials Say (Michael Levenson/New York Times)

JOIN THE CHORUS: Surge in highly contagious virus prompts outbreak warning for 57 countries – including UK

JOIN THE CHORUS: Measles death of unvaccinated child in Texas outbreak is 1st fatality in US in a decade (Mary Kekatos/ABC News)

Read it.

The natural conclusion is that those who write for the Washington Poop don’t particularly favor personal liberty or free markets.

Something we’ve all known for a long time. But it’s good to have it out in the open.

An Obituary for the FBI – America’s dream of a politically independent bureau is officially dead (Garrett M. Graff/Doomsday Scenario)  The FBI was never intended to be an ‘independent’ agency. It works for the President, by law and in fact, and it’s about time they were brought up short.

A new document undercuts Trump admin’s denials about $400 million Tesla deal (Bobby Allyn/NPR)

Tesla Is More Vulnerable Than You Think – How to cost Elon Musk $100 billion. (Hamilton Nolan/How Things Work)

New Chinese Bat Coronavirus Raises Pandemic Fears  Among the Usual Suspects.

Federal workers sue over Elon Musk’s threat to fire them if they don’t explain their accomplishments (Associated Press)

Trump Stripped All $103 Million of Legal Assistance from Storm and Disaster Victims (Drop Site News)

No, University Endowments Can’t Replace Federal Science Funding (Elizabeth Popp Berman/Can We Still …)

One Word Describes Trump (Jonathan Rauch/The Atlantic)  Yup: Winning.

Judge Blocks Education Department, OPM From Sharing Data With DOGE  A Biden appointee who grew up in a D.C. suburb and has been living inside the Beltway ever since. Oh, and she is Palestinian on her mother’s side.

Democrats Are MIA–Just When the Country Needs Them to Counter the Trump-Musk Blitzkrieg (David Corn/Mother Jones)

Fake Trump, Musk Foot-Sucking Video Appears on HUD Monitors

The Trump Administration Cannot Use Award Terms and Conditions to Impound Funds (Daniel Jacobson/Just Security)

Preparing Trump’s Military Purge: What MAGA Did Not Want the U.S. Naval Academy to Hear (Ruth Ben-Ghiat/Lucid)

Farmers Sue Over Deletion of Climate Data From Government Websites (Karen Zraick/New York Times)

DOGE Is Inside the National Institutes of Health’s Finance System (Matt Reynolds/Wired)

Sunny Hostin: Opposing Wokeness ‘Is Ungodly’ and ‘Not Christian!’  Sunny Hostin wouldn’t know Christian if it bit her on the foot.

Oversight agency finds Trump’s federal worker firings unlawful, asks for some employees to be reinstated (Eric Katz/GovExec.com)  Guess who’s getting fired next.

Start the 2026 Campaigns *Right Now* (Jill Lawrence/The Bulwark)

7 Former IRS Heads Say Trump Mass Firings a Mistake  But of course they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Dem Who Suggested Using “Actual Weapons” On Elon Says He’s The One Being Threatened

Winner Take All (Jonathan Last/The Bulwark)

AI video of Trump kissing Musk’s feet plays on TVs in HUD building (Brett Samuels/The Hill)

Disarray and Defiance – From Ukraine to Maine, leaders are standing up to authoritarians and the people stand with them. (Jay Kuo/The Status Kuo)

Warner, Who Said CIA Stole Election, Now Leads DOJ Civil Rights (Ben Penn/Bloomberg Law)

LGBTQ Federal Workers Brace for a McCarthyist Purge (Madison Pauly/Mother Jones)

Federal workers and agencies push back against Elon Musk’s email ultimatum (NBC News)

House Dem in Charge of Caucus-Wide Messaging Praises Activist Who Pledged To ‘Take’ Jews ‘Back to Poland’

Nearly 200K sign petition to revoke Musk’s Canadian citizenship (Ailia Zehra/The Hill)

NOBODY LIKES YOU: NYT Finds 7 Grouchy Former IRS Chiefs to Kvetch Over DOGE Cuts

More than 100 House Democrats Push Federal Agencies to Regain Order, Renounce Musk Chaos (The Committee on Oversight …)

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

You mess with the bull, you get the horns every time.

The D.C. establishment has gotten away with shit for decades because those who actually hold power in Washington haven’t been willing to exercise it. Well, that stops now — for which, if nothing else, Trump deserves kudos.