If DOJ lawyers are threatening to quit over Matt Gaetz’s potential confirmation as Attorney General, that’s exactly the kind of shake-up this country needs. The DOJ has become a symbol of the bloated, politicized bureaucracy that’s been allowed to operate unchecked under Biden… pic.twitter.com/RTvpYX3e93
— Torsten Prochnow (@TorstenProchnow) November 14, 2024
Court Vaporizes 50 Years of Environmental Law Leaving Trump’s EPA to Build on the Ashes
The decision was written by Karen LeCraft Henderson (George H. W. Bush) and A. Raymond Randolph (George H. W. Bush) with Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan (Joe Biden) dissenting, and it found:
As the parties argue the case, it centers on whether the Agencies complied with regulations of the Council on Environmental Quality, an entity within the Executive Office of the President. We will not address these arguments. The CEQ regulations, which purport to govern how all federal agencies must comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, are ultra vires.
Ultra vires means the CEQ was acting “beyond the legal scope of it authority.”
The court goes on to detail the shenanigans by which an advisory body with no regulatory authority was able to write environmental regulations for the entire United States for nearly a half-century just because it decided it could.
Making the case even more awesome is that it was set off by enviro-wackos suing the FAA for allowing sightseeing flights near some national parks. The enviros claimed the FAA used the wrong standard established by the CEQ to permit the flight. They ended up being right in a backhanded kind of way.
This decision throws the entire environmental regulation scheme governing the federal government into chaos. I suspect that many of the CEQs regulations will be reissued by other agencies, but after Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (see The Supreme Court Firebombs the Administrative State and Tells Congress to Get Off Its Butt and Work) that slew the medusa called “Chevron deference,” the survival of those replacement regulations is not assured.
The silver lining is that Trump’s EPA, under Lee Zeldin (see We Have Another Trump Cabinet Pick: Lee Zeldin Gets the Nod), will get the first crack at reworking useless and expensive regulations.
Marin Audobon Society vs. FAA by streiff on Scribd
The answer is “Hubris”
This Autumn has been rough for the Southeast. First, Hurricane Helene ripped up Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, and then Hurricane Milton hit a different part of Florida and tore it up.
And the season isn’t over yet.
After publication of this story, a FEMA spokesperson told The Daily Wire it was “deeply disturbed” and “horrified” by the employee’s actions, and that it has “taken extreme actions to correct this situation.”
“While we believe this is an isolated incident, we have taken measures to remove the employee from their role and are investigating the matter to prevent this from happening ever again,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “The employee who issued this guidance had no authority and was given no direction to tell teams to avoid these homes and we are reaching out to the people who may have not been reached as a result of this incident.”
“This is a matter that we take extremely seriously and we are doing everything we can to make sure all survivors receive support from FEMA. To date, we have helped over 365,000 households impacted by both Hurricanes Helene and Milton in the state of Florida and have provided over $898 million in direct assistance to survivors.”
“We are horrified that this took place and therefore have taken extreme actions to correct this situation and have ensured that the matter was addressed at all levels. Helping people is what we do best and our workforce across the agency will continue to serve survivors for as long as it takes.”
That’s all fine and well.
Plus, the individual responsible for that, Marn’i Washington, has been fired from her position and the case has been referred to the Office of Special Counsel. That means she faces potential prosecution for her actions, which should most definitely happen.
However, while people are focusing on what happened—and for understandable reasons—I can’t help but ask the question no one else seems to be asking. Why did she think she could get away with it?
FEMA outrage reveals weaponized government — and points Trump toward reform.
One of President-elect Donald Trump’s first orders of business must be to de-weaponize the federal government. One episode from Florida illustrates why.
Not long ago you might have charged me with paranoid conspiracy theorizing if I had told you that federal disaster relief workers were deliberately keeping Trump supporters from receiving government assistance.
But they were, and a FEMA supervisor has been fired for it.
“Avoid homes advertising Trump,” she wrote in a “best practices” memo to employees, a copy of which was obtained by Daily Wire, reportedly reinforcing this with a verbal order.
Er, except that it was true. And The New York Times, as of this writing, had not corrected its false reporting, which itself constitutes disinformation.
So does that mean the conspiracy theorists are right? Well, yes and no.
If the “conspiracy” would involve a handful of big-shots in a smoke-filled room sending out orders to their minions, not really.
That happens in government sometimes — as with the federal campaign to quash dissent on social media over COVID policy and the disputed 2020 election — but usually it doesn’t work that way.
Because it doesn’t have to.
When you have a federal workforce that overwhelmingly favors the Democratic Party, coupled with nonstop media (and social media) accounts of how awful Republicans are and how it’s fair to do pretty much anything to stop them because they’re basically Hitler, you don’t need to issue orders.
People act on their own.
I very much doubt that any FEMA higher-up told Marn’i Washington to skip over houses with Trump signs.
She just knew that she hated President Trump and wanted to punish his supporters. Then she took action.
Democrats like to see themselves as vital soldiers, defending democracy — and, coincidentally, their party’s power — from opponents who are not merely different, but outright evil.
This sense of self-importance is coupled with a self-esteem-boosting snobbery: They tell themselves they deserve to be in charge because they’re so much smarter and better and more moral than the hoi polloi.
And the allegedly high stakes justify even the most immoral actions because they’re in service of a higher cause — stopping Hitler! (An excuse that’s always available: Democrats characterize just about all of their GOP opponents as the next Hitler, going all the way back to Tom Dewey in 1948.)
Trump has said he will fire bureaucrats who get in the way of his reforms, and plans to vastly thin the civil service in general. This will help.
Sedition, Insubordination, Conduct Unbecoming. In a time of war; Treason.
This sort of thing must be rooted out and the bureaucraps fired, those on active duty who took part relieved, and those who may not have been on active duty (retired), recalled and face courts martial. The military must be completely subordinate to the elected constitutional national command authority and follow their legal orders or what we’ll wind up with is a military hunta akin to the praetorian guard of the roman empire who decided who the next emperor would be after disposing of the last one.
Sorry, We Can Only View This Secret Pentagon Meeting as a Plot to Foment an Insurrection
John Frankenheimer directed a movie called Seven Days in May in the 1960s, starring Kirk Douglas as a military officer who uncovers a coup against the president of the United States by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who signed a deeply unpopular nuclear disarmament treaty. That’s a movie. In 2024, the Pentagon brass plotted to countermand President-elect Donald J. Trump’s orders. If we’re going by the Left’s rules here, this is an insurrection. It’s a military coup. What’s worse is that these anti-Trump meetings were held in secret and then got leaked to the media (via CNN):
Pentagon officials are holding informal discussions about how the Department of Defense would respond if Donald Trump issues orders to deploy active-duty troops domestically and fire large swaths of apolitical staffers, defense officials told CNN.
Trump has suggested he would be open to using active-duty forces for domestic law enforcement and mass deportations and has indicated he wants to stack the federal government with loyalists and “clean out corrupt actors” in the US national security establishment.
[…]
“We are all preparing and planning for the worst-case scenario, but the reality is that we don’t know how this is going to play out yet,” one defense official said.
Trump’s election has also raised questions inside the Pentagon about what would happen if the president issued an unlawful order, particularly if his political appointees inside the department don’t push back.
“Troops are compelled by law to disobey unlawful orders,” said another defense official. “But the question is what happens then – do we see resignations from senior military leaders? Or would they view that as abandoning their people?”
CNN’s Scott Jennings tore apart these unelected bureaucrats yesterday. We’re back to the same Deep State games, but this time, Trump, with no re-election ahead of him, can go hard and fast to rid the Pentagon and any agency of troublesome government workers who think they’re above the law and not accountable to the will of the people. The illegal orders narrative is also ridiculous, soaked in the anti-Trump hysterics that have engulfed the Left.
#BREAKING: Pentagon officials are already discussing how they can countermand an order from President Donald Trump if they disagree with it.
Scott Jennings absolutely ripped them to pieces.
“[They’re] already having discussions to countermand the commander-in-chief! […] I… pic.twitter.com/CyyGD1aE4N
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) November 9, 2024
“The unelected bureaucracy of this government answers to the civilian and duly elected leadership.”@ScottJenningsKY excoriates Pentagon officials over reports of secret meetings about how to “thwart or countermand the Commander-In-Chief.”
The plotting against Trump has… pic.twitter.com/Glptqqvw5q
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) November 9, 2024
Secret meetings on thwarting a duly elected president are not a good look.
Never forget what they did to us.
Never forget what they meant to do to us.
Never.
Don’t give them the benefit of the doubt next time.
And did they forget we have guns?
CDC Planned Quarantine Camps, Nationwide
No matter how bad you think Covid policies were, they were intended to be worse.
Consider the vaccine passports alone. Six cities were locked down to include only the vaccinated in public indoor places. They were New York City, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Seattle. The plan was to enforce this with a vaccine passport. It broke. Once the news leaked that the shot didn’t stop infection or transmission, the planners lost public support and the scheme collapsed.
It was undoubtedly planned to be permanent and nationwide if not worldwide. Instead, the scheme had to be dialed back.
Features of the CDC’s edicts did incredible damage. It imposed the rent moratorium. It decreed the ridiculous “six feet of distance” and mask mandates. It forced Plexiglas as the interface for commercial transactions. It implied that mail-in balloting must be the norm, which probably flipped the election. It delayed the reopening as long as possible. It was sadistic.
Even with all that, worse was planned. On July 26, 2020, with the George Floyd riots having finally settled down, the CDC issued a plan for establishing nationwide quarantine camps. People were to be isolated, given only food and some cleaning supplies. They would be banned from participating in any religious services. The plan included contingencies for preventing suicide. There were no provisions made for any legal appeals or even the right to legal counsel.
The plan’s authors were unnamed but included 26 footnotes. It was completely official. The document was only removed on about March 26, 2023. During the entire intervening time, the plan survived on the CDC’s public site with little to no public notice or controversy.
It was called “Interim Operational Considerations for Implementing the Shielding Approach to Prevent COVID-19 Infections in Humanitarian Settings.”
“This document presents considerations from the perspective of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) for implementing the shielding approach in humanitarian settings as outlined in guidance documents focused on camps, displaced populations and low-resource settings.
This approach has never been documented and has raised questions and concerns among humanitarian partners who support response activities in these settings. The purpose of this document is to highlight potential implementation challenges of the shielding approach from CDC’s perspective and guide thinking around implementation in the absence of empirical data.
Considerations are based on current evidence known about the transmission and severity of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and may need to be revised as more information becomes available.”
By absence of empirical data, the meaning is: nothing like this has ever been tried. The point of the document was to map out how it could be possible and alert authorities to possible pitfalls to be avoided.
EXCLUSIVE: FEMA Official Ordered Relief Workers To Skip Houses With Trump Signs
Whistleblower: ‘It’s almost unbelievable to think that somebody in the federal government would think that’s okay’
A federal disaster relief official ordered workers to bypass the homes of Donald Trump’s supporters as they surveyed damage caused by Hurricane Milton in Florida, according to internal correspondence obtained by The Daily Wire and confirmed by multiple federal employees.
A FEMA supervisor told workers in a message to “avoid homes advertising Trump” as they canvassed Lake Placid, Florida to identify residents who could qualify for federal aid, internal messages viewed by The Daily Wire reveal. The supervisor, Marn’i Washington, relayed this message both verbally and in a group chat used by the relief team, multiple government employees told The Daily Wire.
The government employees told The Daily Wire that at least 20 homes with Trump signs or flags were skipped from the end of October and into November due to the guidance, meaning they were not given the opportunity to qualify for FEMA assistance. Images shared with The Daily Wire show that houses were skipped over by the workers, who wrote in the government system messages such as: “Trump sign no entry per leadership.”
It is unclear whether the same guidance was issued elsewhere in the country. The employees were part of a Department of Homeland Security surge capacity force team, meaning they volunteered from other DHS agencies to help an understaffed FEMA as it dealt with a second major hurricane in a span of just a few weeks.
Microsoft Teams chat used by FEMA workers.
The employee said it felt wrong to discriminate against Trump supporters when they were at their “most vulnerable.”
“I volunteered to help disaster victims, not discriminate against them,” the employee said. “It didn’t matter if people were black, white, Hispanic, for Trump, for Harris. Everyone deserves the same amount of help.”
The guidance came as the Biden administration was criticized over its sluggish response to Hurricane Helene in rural areas across the country. In Roan Mountain, Tennessee, for example, locals told The Daily Wire it took nearly two weeks for FEMA to show up. The town is located in Carter County, which voted 81% for Trump on Tuesday.
They were only brought to keep him out of office, and they failed.
Word is trickling out that the DOJ will fire Special Counsel Jack Smith and drop both of the federal cases against Trump soon.
MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian said “What’s interesting here is that the DOJ is moving to end them even before he takes office, citing the longstanding DOJ policy that sitting presidents can’t be prosecuted. And there were some thought that maybe special counsel Jack Smith was going to sprint through the finish line, was going to work up until the last day, force Trump to fire him, wait till a new Attorney General was appointed. But that does not appear to be the thinking inside the department. The thinking is that these cases can’t go forward.”
CNN’s Paula Reid said that Smith is in talks with the Biden Justice Dept’s Office of Legal Counsel to figure out how to “wind down” the cases.
FoxNews also reported that Jack Smith is on the way out, and the cases will be dropped soon, and ABC announced the same.
So far, this news only applies to the two federal cases, the classified documents case in Florida and the J6 case in DC. However, former AG Bill Barr has urged all of the state prosecutors to also “respect the people’s decision and dismiss the cases against President Trump now.”
Trump won in Pennsylvania, which made it impossible for Harris to win the election.
Why did he win?
The Amish vote that the Republicans went out for.
Overzealous state bureaucraps, mostly demoncraps, went and did it to themselves.
Amish turn out for Pennsylvania vote in ‘unprecedented numbers’
Republicans could see a boost in Pennsylvania from a demographic rarely seen at the polls: the Amish.
The state’s famed “Pennsylvania Dutch” registered to vote in “unprecedented numbers” in response to a January federal raid on a local raw milk farm in Bird in Hand, Pa., a source familiar with the situation told The Post.
The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture stormed Amos Miller’s farm Jan. 4 after reports of illnesses in children linked to raw dairy products purchased there, according to the local media outlet Lancaster Farming.
The Amish community saw the move as an overzealous reach by the government and was planning to vote for GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, whose party favors less government intervention.
“That was the impetus for them to say, ‘We need to participate,’ ” the source said of local Amish voters. “This is about neighbors helping neighbors.”
The Amish community rallied around Miller, who cited his religious beliefs as a reason for not adhering to Food and Drug Administration guidelines.
“If you think about Amish people and their connection to nature, I mean, some of these people work in the fields barefoot to be closer to the earth,” the source told The Post.
Actual numbers of Amish voters were unclear as of Tuesday night, though horse-and-buggy rigs were seen at polling locations in photographs from the region.
Thank you to the Amish for delivering Pennsylvania for Trump & saving our country.
We’ll never, ever forget your contribution to American history.
CC: @Yodertoter40 pic.twitter.com/nazM9UptgR
— ThePersistence (@ScottPresler) November 6, 2024
Physicists in 1900 basically accepted the Newtonian model of the universe. The only troubling anomaly was that Mercury, as it came into view in its journey around the sun, appeared to be in the “wrong” place. How was this possible? After much discussion brilliant scientists concluded that it “appeared” to be closer to the sun because the sun’s gravity was bending light rays reflecting off of Mercury on their way to earth.
This defied all the “settled science” embraced by classical physicists. It was to them heresy essentially, because by implication it would mean that energy and matter were interchangeable. Indeed a young physicist named Albert Einstein created the most famous equation in history, formulating that exact relationship: e=mc(squared).
The longwinded point I’m trying to make is that throughout history the most minor anomalies are often windows into a completely different understanding of the world.
Which brings me to my point.
This event where armed officers took a pet squirrel from an individual in New York opens a Pandora’s box of the horrors of leftist tyranny. The facts of the incident are disturbing enough: an anonymous instigator over 1000 miles away reported a humble man who had rescued a wounded squirrel and made a pet of him for years.
The informer’s motives in doing so can only be guessed, but the owner of the pet had made the horrific mistake in today’s America of supporting conservative thought. A cadre of armed officials got a search warrant, rummaged through the man’s property for five hours, illegally questioned his wife about her immigrant status, ultimately seizing the pet and killing it without giving the owner any recourse to save its life.
Now let’s take a look at the universe in which this macabre horrid little leftist “comedy” took place. In a nation overrun by tens of millions of illegal aliens, crushed by rampant crime and gang warfare, enduring a $35 trillion deficit, soul-crushing inflation, a culture of infanticide and child mutilation, sexual dysphoria, and insanity, and waging illegal lawfare against candidates of another party, New York State spent a full day killing a squirrel, that had been a harmless pet cherished by its owner for literally years.
The event in and of itself was just an act of petty cruelty. As a window into a larger universe, however, it is a fissure in the mantle of our world, signaling a cataclysmic eruption that may well end this nation. The tsunami of rage coming from ordinary and loving individuals was quite frankly astonishing.
Has America in the hands of the lunatic left become a powder keg about to explode? Will the power-hungry Democrats and their media minions spew enough hatred that even the most gentile among us will finally say ENOUGH? Does 87,000 newly minted and armed IRS agents offer you comfort or fill you with terror?
Are you sick of this yet?
Has J. Edgar Hoover’s Spy Program Been Resurrected?
The Bureau Apparently Now Targets MAGA Activists
Although the legacy media has buried the story, it turns out that over the last several years the Federal Bureau of Investigation has resurrected a hated and unconstitutional spying program once directed by the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. His program, called the COINTELPRO program, targeted Americans who committed no crime, but simply sought to express their political views.
Former President Richard Nixon directed Hoover to aggressively infiltrate and disrupt many political movements in the late ‘60’s and ‘70’s. This included the Vietnam War activists, the Rev. Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders. They even spied on environmentalists, women’s rights groups and animal rights activists.
According to an exclusive Newsweek expose that was published three weeks ago, it now appears the ghosts of Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover were resurrected by the Biden administration with a new expanded government spying and infiltration program based on political views. The FBI apparently redefined extremism to include those whom the administration determined hold unacceptable political views.
We now learn that during the Biden administration, the Bureau changed its domestic violence definitions from the “furtherance of ideological agendas” to “furtherance of political and/or social agendas.” They report that it was a “gigantic departure for the Bureau.”
As Newsweek explained, “For the first time extremist groups worthy of surveillance and even infiltration could be so labeled because of their politics.” The FBI’s main target: Trump MAGA activists.
A review by its investigative reporters of previously unpublished FBI documents shows, “nearly two-thirds of the FBI’s current investigations are focused on Trump supporters and others suspected of violating what the FBI calls “anti-riot” laws.”
Although I’m not a MAGA activist, I personally abhor any government spying program against its citizens. In fact, I was a plaintiff in a 1970’s leftwing legal lawsuit against the COINTELPRO program. The United States Supreme Court ruled in the case, called Hobson vs. Wilson, that the federal government’s political surveillance program was unconstitutional.
Metaphor Alert™
A few days ago, Janet Yellen was answering: "How concerned are you about the long term status of the dollar?"
The US Treasury Department sign fell off. pic.twitter.com/S9tDjqyXAb
— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) October 28, 2024
FPC Pushes Forward In Post Office Gun Ban Challenge
The Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) has filed a motion for summary judgment in its case pending before a U.S. District Court in Texas challenging the Post Office gun ban.
The lawsuit FPC v. Garland challenges federal gun control laws prohibiting firearm possession, storage and carry at United States Post Offices and related properties, including post office parking lots. The plaintiffs are two law-abiding citizens licensed to carry in Texas and two non-profit membership associations—FPC and the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF).
Brandon Combs, FPC president, said the lawsuit is one in a long line of challenges designed to restore Second Amendment rights.
“Your right to carry weapons for armed self-defense does not end at the Post Office,” Combs said in a release announcing the action. “We look forward to eliminating this immoral ban and further restoring the People’s right and ability to protect themselves in public.”
In its motion for summary judgment, plaintiffs argue that the post office gun ban fails both of the standards set by the Supreme Court in New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen
Continue reading “”
I’ve had a number of people ask me what I think happened that caused our senior military leadership to go from being the most respected institution in America to being a bunch of banana republic narcissistic self-serving politicos.
There are so many ways to answer that, but I think the answer lies in some cultural shifts that have taken place over the past 30 years that made officers think they are woke politicians instead of steely-eyed warriors (and what happened to the senior officers drifted into the senior NCO ranks like an infection).
To wit:
1. The promotion of the concept of “interagency.”
After 9/11, a huge amount of emphasis was placed on better coordination between the DoD and other federal departments like State and the CIA. The idea was simply to produce better coordination across domains. But instead of the State Department becoming more like the DoD, the DoD started thinking like the State Department.
Historically (pre-1990s) there was a healthy tension between State and the DoD. Turning our senior officers into wannabe State Department grandees who get invited to Georgetown cocktail parties destroyed that tension and wrecked the warrior ethos of the military. (Although not “high ranking,” Alexander “Chow Thief” Vindman is a stellar example of this phenomenon.)
2. We sent our promising O-5s and O-6s to advanced degree-producing programs at Ivy League universities and made advanced degrees a key promotion criteria.
Think Dave Petraeus. The idea of the “warrior scholar” is nice in the abstract, but in reality what we did was infect our senior leaders with the woke mind virus.
3. The service academies and War Colleges tried to be like Ivy League universities and built a civilian cadre of professors who think and act like a Harvard scholar.
The result is the same as #2, except because the service academies are involved the woke mind virus starts at the very most junior officer levels with cadets at West Point, the Air Force Academy and Annapolis.
——————————————-
How to fix these cultural issues?
Tomorrow, I will tell the story of how SpaceX was forced by the government to kidnap seals, put earphones on them and play sonic boom sounds to see if they seemed upset https://t.co/e8VsQpTOOa
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 20, 2024
Elon talking about it pic.twitter.com/Px6g6vyY03
— Jacob Vega (@JacobtheVega) October 20, 2024
30 uniformed officers passing a log instead of loading them into a wheelbarrow and dumping them.
The US Goverment everyone! https://t.co/FcPzWuOnhd
— Louis vil LeGun 🍌 Notorious T.A.C.O. (@LouisvilleGun) October 18, 2024
The government school system has become more of a jobs program for adults than an education initiative for kids.
Abolish the Department of Education. pic.twitter.com/988vP81ieD
— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) October 17, 2024
