February 25, 2025
Aging Members of Congress Refuse to Disclose Details of Their Top Secret Hospital
The Office of the Attending Physician gives politicians nearly unlimited medical care for about $54 a month.
After a presidential election that saw an 82-year-old commander in chief unable to complete sentences in a debate or instill confidence in the public that he could carry out his duties, elected leaders in Congress are faring no better.
In the past two months alone,
82-year-old Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX) was discovered to be living in an assisted-living facility with a dementia ward in her final months in office;
74-year-old Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) won a high-profile leadership position on the House Oversight Committee after revealing he is battling highly terminal esophageal cancer;
82-year-old Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) fell twice on Capitol Hill just months after blacking out during a press conference;
84-year-old former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) fell and broke her hip in Luxembourg;
and 76-year-old Rep. John Larson (D-CT) appeared to suffer a stroke on the House floor. (Larson’s staff has said it was a bad reaction to a new medication.)
What has eluded attention is the highly secretive hospital, housed on Capitol Hill and funded by taxpayers, that provides both emergency and primary care to an aging political class, which some have come to describe as a gerontocracy. It also runs classified programs known only to some members of Congress.
In 2023, Congress designated $4.2 million to the Office of the Attending Physician (OAP), a Navy-staffed hospital with multiple branches spread across Capitol Hill. The current attending physician, Dr. Brian Monahan, who serves as a rear admiral in the Navy, oversees a staff of dozens of Navy doctors, nurses, and technicians whose primary responsibility is providing care to members of Congress and the Supreme Court.
The Bill of Rights was meant to keep Feds out of religion & press.
NGOs grab $30B+ in grants to bypass it: faith-based groups resettle migrants, 'nonprofit' journalism pushes propaganda.
Regan v. Taxation (1983) made it legal. It’s a loophole undermining freedom.
Time to rethink NGOs and this precedent
— Publius (@OcrazioCornPop) February 24, 2025
Bill Prohibits Tennessee Doctors From Asking Patients About Gun Ownership.
A new bill introduced in the Tennessee Legislature will prohibit healthcare providers, if passed, from asking patients whether they own or possess firearms or related items. Not only would HB 0387 defend Tennesseans from being asked an annoying and irrelevant question, but the law would come with some teeth, by way of a $1,000 fine and more if they do choose to pry.
Representative Ed Butler introduced the bill and has previously sponsored measures dealing with education, taxes, and infectious disease. HB 0387 prohibits any inquiry into a patient’s ownership, possession of, or access to firearms, ammunition, or accessories, including the denial of treatment based on knowledge of the aforementioned circumstances. It also forbids entering into the patient’s record any of the information described in the prohibition unless relevant to the patient’s medical care, safety, or the safety of others. Lastly, the bill prohibits the sharing of any such information with an insurer and requires that the healthcare provider disclose all of this to a patient before treatment.
The Hard Part of Armed Defense
I wrote about this story earlier. Now we know a little more after the defender spoke to local reporters. A mom with two kids was attacked in her home at night. She announced to the robbers that she was there. She shouted that she was armed. The robbers shot at her about a half-dozen times and wounded her twice. She was wounded as she held her infant daughter on her hip. She shot back and retreated. She huddled in her bedroom as she was protecting her two small children. The wounded mom begged the robbers to leave. Eventually, they did, but not before they shot at her home 30 times.
One of the robbers was wounded. All three were arrested. This is what we can learn.
Bad guys avoid a fair fight. If they responded to fairness and justice, then they wouldn’t have broken into your home in the first place. Your priority is to be there so you can take care of your children when this is over. You want to avoid being shot, and even being shot at. You definitely want to avoid facing multiple attacker at the same time. The sooner your attackers can’t hurt you the less shot you’ll get.
You don’t have to announce that you are home. You don’t have to announce that you have a gun. You don’t have to say anything to three men who broke into your home in the middle of the night. This isn’t an old-time radio drama. This isn’t a movie where the good guys and bad guys give a monologue before the fight scene. You don’t have to shoot the bad guy from the front or from a position where they can see you at all.
For example, it is hard to get shot if you’re shooting from the back of a dark bedroom and the bad guys are standing in a lighted hallway. Consider that situation for a moment. Some people think that a gunfight is won by the person who draws and shoots the fastest. That tells me you have been watching too many late-night westerns. The person who wins is usually the person with a better plan.
The hard part of self-defense is being ready for a serious but unlikely event.
Notice that the bad guys had to break into this home because the doors and windows were locked. They made noise. That noise alerted the mom and gave her time to react. She called her partner on the phone and then grabbed their gun.
You want to know when you can legally use lethal force to defend yourself. Study that enough so that you recognize a situation rather than having to think it through as it unfolds. Learn if you can shoot a stranger who breaks down your bedroom door in the middle of the night. Knowing what you can and should do makes you faster.
Practice a safety plan with your family. There are good plans and bad plans. Avoid a plan that puts you in a gunfight where bullets are going both ways. Don’t stand in the middle of your hallway and talk to people who broke into your home. Your children will be less frightened if they have rehearsed the family safety plan with you several times.
Let us imagine a very different encounter than this news story. This defender would have a huge advantage if-
- her children were under her bed,
- she was crouched down behind the bed,
- she had her gun pointed at her locked bedroom door,
- and 911 was on the phone.
How would your safety plan make you and your family safer?
This mom did a lot of things right. She and her child are also lucky to be alive. She was shot twice while she had a child in her arms and either shot was a few inches from being a fatal wound. This was the first time she had held a firearm. Give yourself every advantage so you survive even if you don’t have luck on your side. Practice with your defensive tools before you need them.
As a final aside, the robbers broke into her home looking for drugs and money. Lose your roommates who have a drug problem.. and then change the locks.
The AP’s feelings get hurt; it’s a First Amendment crisis!
The Associated Press (AP) makes its money selling stories to other media outlets. It pays “stringers”—reporters and photographers—around the world to submit stories, which it makes available to its subscriber outlets who can’t afford to send reporters and photographers around the globe.
That’s a good thing for smaller media outlets like local new stations, but it’s also a very bad thing because then the AP makes mistakes, or goes woke, so do its subscribers who have no way of knowing they’re making those mistakes. They do know they’re going woke, but even if they’d rather not, their choice is to play along or drop the AP feed. A good example of the AP’s wokeness and anti-Americanism is this:
Shira Bibas’ sons “died in captivity.” An honest and accurate account would say Bibas and her boys, 4 and 10 months, were savagely strangled by Hamas terrorists, and their bodies were clumsily mutilated so Hamas could claim they died in an Israeli airstrike, a perversely stupid and easily exposed lie.
The AP also uses its style guide to enforce wokeness and media outlets, including the majors, happily go along. It’s an enviable perch atop the media hierarchy and the AP has become used to certain perks, among them, a prominent chair in the White House Press Room.
Until, that is, the AP decided to keep calling the Gulf of America the Gulf of Mexico, and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, surely with the permission of President Trump, banished them, also from Air Force One and other places and events. This is also surely a part of Leavitt’s reshuffling the Press Room deck, booting established outlets replacing them with new media.to give new media a chance.
The horror.
For the moment, Bibi backs off
The genocidal mania of Hamas and its supporters revels in murder and humiliation of the enemy. The ecstatic bloodlust is palpable. The impetus of degradation is manifest. Thus Hamas has staged the release of hostages under the current ceasefire with Israel in a manner that comports with the mania. They have turned each release into a celebratory production that degrades and humiliates hostages captives who have been starved and tortured in captivity. Hamas lets them go, but Hamas gets the last laugh. The silence of “the world” is remarkable.
Last week’s events brought us Hamas’s staging of the production of four corpses. CNN characterized it as a “macabre handover ceremony.” That doesn’t capture the quality of the event, but it’s hard to capture. We need a psychiatric successor to Freud who can give us The Psychopathology of Everyday Islamism.
Following the “ceremony” and the delivery of the corpses, the Israelis discovered Hamas’s alleged mixed-up confusion about the corpse of Shiri Bibas. Hamas had turned over a random Gazan in place of the corpse of Mrs. Bibas. The creative juices of the genocidal psychopathology are flowing.
The corpse production was followed on Saturday by the staging of this week’s release of living hostages. The hostages appeared onstage attired in fake army uniforms, though they were not soldiers when kidnapped. One of the hostages was ordered to kiss two of his masked captors on the head while holding his official Hamas release certificate. Only the Israeli Arab hostage was excused from the onstage production.
And that’s not all. Eve Barlow comments: “In one of the most barbaric acts since October 7, Hamas today brought two hostages, Eviatar David and Guy Gilboa-Dalal[,] to witness the release of the six other hostages onstage and filmed them adjacent in a van pleading to camera for their release before they were returned to the dungeons of Gaza…” She adds: “The people of Gaza are the most depraved people on the planet and the people of the West have allowed them to sink to lower levels of depravity by choice and by complicity.” And this: “We will never forgive you or take your ‘humanitarian’ work seriously ever again.”
Ms. Barlow reflects the intensified anger that this week’s humiliations have aroused in Israel. Early this morning Prime Minister Netanyahu halted the scheduled release of this week’s tranche of 602 convicted terrorists from prison in exchange for the six living hostages.
The Prime Minister’s Office has posted on X: “In light of Hamas’s repeated violations, including the ceremonies that humiliate our hostages and the cynical exploitation of our hostages for propaganda purposes it has been decided to delay the release of terrorists that was planned for yesterday until the release of the next hostages has been assured, and without the humiliating ceremonies.”
The use of the passive voice is unfortunate. One infers that this is Netanyahu’s decision for the moment. The Times of Israel has much more here. If they are not mutually irreconcilable, Israel’s goals of recovering hostages and eradicating Hamas remain difficult to reconcile.
“Friendship is one of the distinguishing glories of man… From this I expect to receive the chief happiness of my future life.”
– John Adams
February 24, 2025
Do tell….
Dan Bongino named next Deputy Director of the FBI pic.twitter.com/eaExSTlkmg
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) February 24, 2025
CENTCOM Forces Kill an Al Qaeda Affiliate, Hurras al-Din, Leader in Northwest Syria
On Feb. 21, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) forces conducted a precision airstrike in Northwest Syria, killing Wasim Tahsin Bayraqdar, a senior leadership facilitator of the terrorist organization Hurras al-Din (HaD), an Al-Qaeda affiliate.
The airstrike is part of CENTCOM’s ongoing commitment, along with partners in the region, to disrupt and degrade efforts by terrorists to plan, organize, and conduct attacks against civilians and military personnel from the U.S., our allies, and our partners throughout the region and beyond.
“We will relentlessly pursue and destroy terrorist threats, no matter their location, in order to protect our homeland and our allies and partners,” said Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, commander, U.S. Central Command.
So states should go with Constitutional Carry and relax their gun laws, like the large majority of safest states?
Agree. pic.twitter.com/mcJcPUiUd1
— 2A History (@2aHistory) February 23, 2025
And here’s Mark Smith’s take on it
Don’t hold your breath as we’ll have to see what we’ve got here both with the ATF and FBI.
Now, if he appoints Brian Herrera, Blake Masters, Mark Smith or Larry Keane as his Deputy director…….
Looking at the statistics, it’s reconfirmation that being around Police -Any Law Enforcement- is very dangerous for those who have decided to defend themselves as they’re likely to shoot anyone who’s armed, simply ‘because’. Being aware of that should be taken in consideration and plans made on how to deal with it.
UPDATED: A Deep Dive into Cases Where Civilians Stopped Active Shooters. Did they accidentally shoot bystanders, get in the way of police, get their gun taken away, or create other problems? How does it compare to police who stopped these attacks?
We have previously put out our study on the FBI’s active shooting reports. If you watch entertainment television police shows, you would think something always seems to go wrong when guns are used defensively (including shooting bystanders to getting in the way of police to failing to protect the permit holder to continually having the gun stolen and use in a crime to it being used in an accidental shooting).
During the ten years from 2014 to 2023, there were 180 active shooting cases (as defined by the FBI) where a concealed handgun permit holder stopped an active shooting attack.
We decided to do a deep dive to see how many cases there were out of those 180 cases where a concealed handgun permit holder accidentally shot a bystander (one case, 0.56%), got in the way of police (zero cases, 0.0%), had the handgun taken away (one case, 0.56%), and got themselves killed (two cases, 1.1%). What was more common were cases where the permit holder was injured in saving the lives of others (44 cases, 24%). Fifty-eight of those cases were instances where a mass public shooting was likely prevented. An Excel file with the data for civilians and police is available here.
1 Timothy 5:8
KJV
But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.
“You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” – VPOTUS J.D. Vance.
Watching the meetings and town halls in Los Angeles featuring the nitwits in charge getting yelled at by enraged homeowners as the city burned was enlightening. Again and again, the ridiculous Mayor Karen Bass, an openly communist revolutionary, brought up a persistent theme: the cult of safety.
The term “safetyism” became popularized in The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. It refers to the way modern society is overprotective and overbearing, the ultimate helicopter state, which has led to excessive and even destructive regulations that don’t actually keep you safe, and which in fact may endanger you.
During President Trump’s visit to Pacific Palisades and the round table meeting he held with California’s worst supervillains, Karen Bass repeatedly admonished the angry, devastated Palisades homeowners that “the most important thing is your safety.” The homeowners were angry about the timeline they had been given by L.A. County officials. According to the bureaucrats, it would take 18 months to clear the burned-out lots. Bass insisted they would be able to start rebuilding “immediately.” When pressed on the 18-month clean-up the city was planning, she hedged with, “Well, you know that you will be able to soon. The most important thing is keeping you safe.”
President Trump countered: “Safe? They’re not safe now.”
The “safety” that Bass was fighting for was the mandatory EPA Phase 1 clean-up of their lots. A doctor named Muntu Davis with the L.A. County of Public Health issued an order forcing all homeowners to wait for the EPA to complete their hazardous waste removal before anything else can happen to the destroyed lots. This, as Mayor Bass keeps reminding everyone, is for “your safety.”
God forbid a piece of “highly toxic ash” touches your skin! God forbid a hazardous particle enters your body! Karen Bass is here to keep you safe as you sit in a cramped hotel room with your children and your dog, or on your friend’s couch.
This overreach by the L.A. County Department of Health is the same playbook they ran during the pandemic. Schools were closed, toddlers were forced to wear masks outside, and you had to show a vaccine pass to get into a restaurant for your safety. Everyone in L.A. started ending conversations with admonitions to “be safe!”
At the same time, violent riots and looting were permitted to take place. LAPD officers often stood around and watched helplessly as unmasked hordes smashed plate glass windows and cleaned out retail stores. Targets were picked clean and then set on fire. But if you tried to walk into a grocery store, you would be hounded out by angry women who screamed that you were putting their “safety” at risk.
It was all fake. A mirage. A real culture of safety would have made sure that fire departments in fire-prone areas were not short staffed. They would pre-position fire trucks in the spots of highest risk. And most importantly, they would have working fire hydrants. Across the Palisades and Altadena, where some 9,000 homes burned to the ground in the span of 12 hours, there were few working hydrants.