The HPA and SHORT seem to have officially survived the Byrd rule. This is the Parliamentarian’s ruling on the Finance Committee’s portion of the bill, in which the HPA and SHORT are included. Neither were struck, nor are they listed under the “still under review section”:
Byrd Rule Violations Continue to Mount on the Republicans’ “One Big, Beautiful Bill”
Prichard store manager shoots and kills suspected robber
PRICHARD, Ala. (WKRG) — A store manager shot and killed a suspected robber Saturday in Prichard, News 5 has learned.
According to a Mobile County Sheriff’s Office news release, at about 3:35 a.m. Saturday, deputies were called to the Lucky 7 gas station at 702 St. Stephens Road in Prichard in reference to a shooting.
The store manager told deputies he had shot a teenager who was trying to rob him, according to the release.
The 17-year-old ran from the scene, ending up at the 700 block of La Fargue Street, where he died from a gunshot wound on the right side of his chest, the release said.
He was found wearing a hoodie, a mask and orange gloves, and a 9-mm. Taurus pistol was found next to his body, the release said.
According to the release, that same store was robbed on June 9 at about 4:07 a.m. by a person wearing orange gloves and a black hoodie and using the same type of gun.
Officers are looking at video footage from that prior incident, the release said.
The case has been turned over to the District Attorney’s Office, and no arrest had been made at the time of the shooting, the release said.
Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority.
There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.
-Daniel Webster.
June 26, 2025
You should not live in fear, but you should live with the understanding that there are bad people out there who want you either enslaved or dead. Donald Trump’s courageous strike against the scumbag Iranian mullahs only highlighted the fact that we may very well have hundreds, if not thousands, of sleeper agents within the United States who can act on command to unleash a wave of murder the likes of which we’ve never seen. I wrote a best-selling novel about it. But that’s only one threat. Another threat is homegrown nuts, terrorists, and criminals, to the extent that they differ. And then there is the threat posed by leftists who want to rule over you forever, no matter the cost. You might be out at church, in the mall, or at your own house when it happens, and you better be prepared to deal with it all.
What I’m trying to say is you need to buy guns and ammunition.
The fact is that things are getting uglier. Our opponents are getting uglier, and not just aesthetically (although a lot of them are really unattractive). As Donald Trump racks up win after win, his enemies, both foreign and domestic, are going to get more and more desperate. Obviously, the Iranians, who have killed well into four figures of Americans over the last 50 years, will be looking for payback if their own people don’t hang them from the nearest construction crane first.
Hopefully, by the time you read this, they won’t have struck. We’ve also got, among other disaffected bands of jerks, Hamas, the Houthis, and probably the Hottentots gunning for Americans. For four years under President Biden, the border was wide open with a big flashing “Welcome” sign inviting every Third World psychopath and communist cadre into America. Some of them are sleeping in their sleeper cells. Some of them are running around our college campuses, protected by credulous district court judges who think that the Constitution requires us to put out the welcome mat for people who want us dead.
Here at home, criminals who Soros prosecutors won’t prosecute are walking the streets because these poor, justice-involved persons deserve pity for us making them into criminals with our capitalism and structural racism. Of course, were you even to smudge the line between legal and illegal, they would come down on you like Trump came down on Fordow. There are still plenty of legal aliens out there who kill Americans through drunk driving and murder. And then there are the lunatics, like the guy who thought Tim Walz commanded him to kill because Jazz Hands would be a good senator; anyone who thinks that has already won on his insanity defense.
But the people we should be more concerned about are the leftists enraged at our challenge to their political, social, and cultural supremacy and who would happily shed blood to keep it. We have an entire ruling class that is facing the prospect of losing power for good. It has never been effectively challenged like this since it came into being after World War II, except for short periods, and never so radically. The worst it has ever experienced until now is a temporary slowing of America’s decline into a socialist miasma rather than a complete reversal of the whoosh down that slippery slope. But a reversal is what it’s getting now, and they are frantic to stop us.
Look at the things they’re trying to impose on us and look at how they are not just being stopped but are being turned around. Last week, there was a major Supreme Court case that basically said, “No, there is no constitutional right to mutilate children, dummies.” They really thought they had it. If Kamala Harris had won, they would have. You would have seen the Constitution interpreted to create an affirmative right to cut your children’s bodies apart to conform to the delusions of mentally ill kids or their Munchausen mommies. But because of Trump and his appointments, that didn’t happen. And you saw the Democrats react. Every single one of them was mad about it. Why, not letting young ‘uns be mutilated was the worst thing in the history of ever. Move over, Dred Scott, because not being able to carve up the kiddies is like the Fugitive Slave Act on steroids.
Today, they’re losing across the board. Abortion. DEI. Illegal aliens. We’re not just slowing their roll; we’re rolling them back. Do you think they’ll sit still for it? Do you think they’re just going to allow everything that they’ve built, every mile they’ve trekked in their Gramscian march through the institutions, come to naught?
No, they’ll fight – and I write about it in my upcoming novel, America Apocalypse: The Second American Civil War (you can pre-order now). But the trouble is not going to start with big movements of troops across the battlefields. It’s going to be smaller, more directed actions against particular people – people like you. We had a small-scale insurgency from the late-60s to the mid-70s in this country in which hundreds of people died, and thousands of bombs were detonated by leftist, urban terrorists, mostly spoiled college brats who decided that since the working class wasn’t going to rise up, they would just start killing. Two people already tried to kill Trump. We’ve all seen the statistics that over half of Democrats are open to the idea of murdering their political opponents. At some point, somebody’s going to pick up a gun and start trying to make that happen on a larger scale.
You don’t want to be caught short. You don’t want to be caught unprepared. It’s not fair that we have to go through our lives taking into account the fact that there are other Americans who would hurt us because we refuse to live under their boot heel, but life isn’t fair. That’s the way it is. Nothing is free, especially freedom. It isn’t going to guard itself, and you’re not always going to be able to rely on the government to protect you either logistically – when seconds count, the police are minutes away – or intentionally, like when the FBI and other law-enforcement organizations under President Eggplant made the conscious choice to allow leftist terrorists to flourish while focusing on such crimes as conservatives’ premeditated petitioning of school boards and Catholics intentionally praying. Even today, blue city cops will do nothing about illegal aliens, including ones who are even more criminal than they all are by virtue of being illegal aliens.
So, prepare. Get the equipment you need. Get the training you need, and not only about shooting guns but about understanding the legal aspects of lawful deadly force. You also need an understanding of basic emergency medical aid, like how to stop the bleeding. Talk to your family about what to do in bad situations. Talk to your neighbors about sticking together if things get ugly. You are your own first responder.
You understand why they want you to be afraid. You understand why they want you disarmed. It’s because when you are not afraid and when you are prepared to defend yourself, your family, your community, and your Constitution, they can never intimidate you. They can never take what is yours from you. And they can never rule over you.
Why are there so many marxists and socialists in the United States?
Because no one listened to Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Right after 9/11, while the dust of Ground Zero was still settling, a proposal emerged to build an Islamic mosque and community center just steps away from where nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered by jihadists.
It was called Park51. It was a test to see if the West would tolerate symbolic victory on the site of its own defeat. It was about watching how far Islam could push.
Now, nearly 25 years later, a candidate, shaped by the same worldview that killed 3000 Americans that day, just won a Democratic primary in New York.
This is the consequence of a society that has become so obsessed with appearing color-blind that it has gone morally blind.
Islamic jihad is not like you. It does not apologize when caught, it doubles down. The moment you give it room, it plants a flag.
Park51 was not the last attempt. It was one of many. Today, the battleground is no longer symbolic, it’s political. And New York just opened the door.
Anybody who thinks Iran not having nuclear weapons benefits only Israel is a rat-brained lobotomite devoid of reasoning skills. – Cynical Publius
June 25, 2025
Record-Sized Comet Seen Belching Jets From Surface as It Heads Our Way
An absolutely gigantic comet is currently barreling into the inner Solar System at full steam. And we mean that almost literally – astronomers have now detected big outbursts of carbon monoxide belching from its surface.
It’s a little unsettling that something that big is currently hurtling in our direction, but thankfully it won’t come any closer than the orbit of Saturn, when it reaches its closest approach on 29 January 2031.
I just saved a dog that was locked in a car. The car was running and the AC was on but Taylor Swift was playing on the radio
— 🇺🇸🙏Chris White🙏🇺🇸 (@PISDI94_96) June 24, 2025
Lurch is at it again.
“You cannot bomb away the memory of how to make a bomb,” says former Secretary of State John Kerry
Um, actually, you can—by ‘bombing away’ those who know how to make a bomb. When you do that, the memory of how to make a bomb goes into eternity with them.
— Darrell B. Harrison (@D_B_Harrison) June 24, 2025
Plus the physical plant needed too
After breaking the ceasefire, Iran has a way to go before reaching #5.
The Trump Doctrine (aka the Businessman’s Way of War).
As the dust and smoke settle over Iran’s devastated nuclear weapons program, President Donald Trump’s method of waging war is coming into focus. We had hints of what I call the “Trump Doctrine” in his first term as he annihilated ISIS in Syria, but the two-decade war in Afghanistan that he had inherited initially obscured what has now become a coherent doctrine.
In his second term, the freedom of navigation attacks against Yemen’s Houthis were once again a hint of Trump’s way of war, but Saturday’s attack on Iran—and the events leading up to it—tell us much about the deliberate and precise manner in which Trump seeks to conduct American wars.
Similar to (but different from) the famous “Powell Doctrine” promulgated by former Secretary of State Colin Powell (more on that later), the Trump Doctrine is the doctrine of a businessman serving his stockholders. Explained another way, the Trump Doctrine is the “Businessman’s Way of War.”
To preview succinctly, the Trump Doctrine consists of a series of business-like, iterative steps for all uses of American military force, and it performs as follows:
1. Identify America’s national interest.
2. Bargain with the prospective enemy.
3. If/when negotiations fail, conceal & misdirect.
4. Strike with precision and overwhelming force.
5. Achieve submission.
6. Bargain again (from a position of complete strength) with the defeated enemy.
I’ll now examine each of these escalating steps in detail. Continue reading “”
Bondi Not Backing Down From Merging ATF With DEA
The proposal to merge the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives with the Drug Enforcement Agency has been almost universally panned by both Second Amendment organizations and gun control, groups, as well as the firearms industry. Attorney General Pam Bondi, though, gave her full support to the idea on Monday during an appearance before a House Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations subcommittee hearing.
While gun control groups worry that the move would hollow out the ATF, Second Amendment organizations like Gun Owners of America are concerned that the opposite would happen; a supercharged federal agency that would treat the firearms industry and gun owners with suspicion.
Bondi told lawmakers that “guns and drugs go together” and the merger would be a “great marriage between those two agencies.”
“They’re working hand-in-hand on task forces already. Now, they will be working under one umbrella, and it’s going to be great for our country,” Bondi said.
That comment is a prime example of why 2A groups are so alarmed by the proposal. Guns and drugs do not go together, in either recreational and regulatory functions. Lumping “guns and drugs” together makes guns seem taboo and shady, instead of the constitutionally protected items that are lawfully possessed and used by tens of millions of Americans that they are.
“Bureaucracy has been around for a very long time, and just because things have been done one way for decades and decades doesn’t mean that is the most efficient way to do them in the future,” she said.
The House and Senate have not released their fiscal 2026 spending bills that includes DOJ funding, although the House is expected to do so in early July.
The proposed language was part of a broader budget proposal from the Trump administration that would cut salaries and expenses funding for key law enforcement agencies and make overhaul changes to the department.
It’s not efficiency that has groups like the National Shooting Sports Foundation so worried about the effects of a merger. As NSSF senior vice president and general counsel Lawrence Keane recently told Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co, the DEA doesn’t have a great working relationship with the drug companies and pharmacies that they police.
After living through the Biden administration’s weaponization of the ATF, the gun industry was looking forward to resetting its relationship with the agency, and have had mostly high praise for Acting ATF Director Dan Driscoll and Deputy ATF Director Robert Cekada over the previous months as the pair have sought to treat gun makers and sellers as partners, not adversaries, in the fight against illegal gun trafficking and violent crime.
Bondi said the department is reorganizing the ATF. “We will not be having ATF agents go to the doors of gun owners in the middle of the night, asking them about their guns — period. They will be out on the streets with [the] DEA,” Bondi said.
I’m all in favor of not having ATF agents show up at the homes of gun owners, either in the dark of night or broad daylight, but it’s possible to curb those abuses without creating a superagency that could be used to target us the next time a hostile administration is in power.
“We would rather deal with an ATF that we understand and have a working relationship with on the regulatory side to achieve compliance than to deal with a behemoth that has no culture of regulating the industry or working with the industry,” said Lawrence Keane, senior vice president for government and public affairs and general counsel at the NSSF.
“We don’t think it’s in the best interest of gun owners,” he said.
The Firearms Policy Coalition said in a statement it “strongly opposes any plan to merge the ATF with any other federal law enforcement agency.”Luis Valdes, national spokesman for the Gun Owners of America, said merging the AFT with another agency would increase the available budget while providing reduced oversight and accountability.
In its current form, he said, the ATF is under a microscope.
“Everything they do is watched, and it’s far easier to control their budget and make sure that they don’t grow in scope, budget and manpower to violate [Americans’] Second Amendment rights,” Valdes said.
I don’t think the DOJ has any nefarious intent with the proposed merger, but even good intentions can result in bad policies and practices. I hope that Bondi, other DOJ officials, and House and Senate members will listen to the chorus of voices in the 2A community who are urging them to drop this idea and stick with reforming the agency instead of creating a monster that could easily be used to attack the firearms industry and gun owners alike.
