Category: Bureaucraps

Comment O’ The Day
“The ‘noble lie’. These clowns are undermining faith in the health care system for a generation…… Idiots.”

‘The right to self defense has just been reaffirmed’: Case dismissed in Staten Island Christmas Day death

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — A grand jury Thursday dismissed the case against a man accused in a fatal Christmas Day encounter in Concord.

The jury chose not to indict Emmanuel “E.J.” Diaz, 32, in the death of 36-year-old Rafael Ramos on charges that included second-degree murder, first-degree strangulation and criminal obstruction of breathing.

Diaz’s lawyer, Mark Fonte, said Sunday after his client’s arraignment that Diaz acted in self defense when Ramos came to his Clove Road apartment armed with a box cutter.

On Thursday, Fonte credited the office of District Attorney Michael McMahon for its professionalism and for presenting the facts of the case to the grand jury.

“The right to self defense has just been reaffirmed on Staten Island. An armed intruder entered my client’s residence Christmas morning and slashed my client’s face,” Fonte said. “He had every right to protect his wife, two small kids and himself. If self defense isn’t warranted here it would be a travesty.”

McMahon concurred.

“Following a thorough investigation of all of the facts and evidence in this case, my office presented that evidence fairly and impartially to the grand jury, as is our obligation and duty to the People of Staten Island,” he said.

“We regret the tragic circumstances that led to this incident culminating in the death of Mr. Ramos, and extend our deepest condolences to his family, who have suffered the loss of a loved one during this holiday season.”

In the moments surrounding the violence, multiple tenants in the Elbee Gardens Apartments in Concord called 911, stating a man armed with a sharp instrument — who turned out to be Ramos — was banging on apartment doors, an NYPD spokesman said Monday.

Some of Ramos’ family members said he would bounce between the apartment of his longtime girlfriend and their children in the same Concord apartment building, and a family member’s house in Dongan Hills.

Ramos’ mother said Monday her son was under the impression Diaz and his girlfriend were romantically involved.

She recalled that Diaz — who she described as a loving father, and her right-hand — recently had attended a child’s birthday party at Ramos’ apartment.

She added that her son had a contentious past with his girlfriend’s mother, including an altercation that had to be resolved in the court system. She noted that her son was known to have a temper.

Police said the altercation on Christmas Day between Ramos and Diaz occurred on the second floor of the building.

Diaz was slashed in the face while struggling with Ramos, but ultimately applied a choke hold that resulted in Ramos’ death, Richmond County prosecutors wrote in the criminal complaint. Ramos’ family said he was struck in the head with a nebulizer during the altercation.

Jalissa Carrasco, Diaz’s spouse, was there the day of the incident and outside the courthouse Thursday waiting to greet her husband. Diaz’s parents — Yamel Diaz and Mark Diaz — along with his friends and family —Tricia Jaccoma, Austin Willard, Angel Pagan, and Eddie Martinez — joined Carrasco outside the courthouse.

Diaz’s mother said that she was glad her son was coming home, but expressed remorse for the man who lost his life and his family.

Internal watchdog freaking over 3D-printed guns at the ATF

For a while now, the media has been freaking out over so-called “ghost guns,” as has the ATF. Basically, any gun without a serial number that can’t be traced is a “ghost gun.” However, not all such weapons are created equally.

To be sure, I understand some of the concerns. However, I’ve long felt the fears are overblown. Yes, there’s difficulty tracking these weapons, which means bad people may get their hands on these guns, but having come of age in the ’90s, I’m used to the idea of bad people getting guns. They’ve been doing it since long before “ghost guns” were a thing.

The technology to make 3D-printed guns that can evade metal detectors is improving, but the nation’s gun crime-fighting agency is not making such weapons a priority for monitoring, the U.S. Justice Department’s internal watchdog warns.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz wrote in a report earlier this month that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ (ATF) has only encountered about dozen 3D-printed weapons in cases over the last four years.

“ATF officials told us that they have not identified 3D printing of firearms as a priority area to monitor,” Horowitz said.

The watchdog said he is concerned the agency has a security blindspot since “3D-printed firearms are comprised almost entirely of polymer materials that are undetectable by metal detectors.

“Moreover, 3D printing technology has seen advances in quality and decreases in cost and has become much more accessible to individuals, including prohibited persons,” he added, warning the agency currently doesn’t even track 3D-printed weapons in its eTrace computer database used by local police.

“ATF lacks a method to facilitate collecting 3-D printed firearms data, either in eTrace or outside of eTrace,” Horowitz noted. “Consequently, law enforcement cannot report and ATF cannot collect information regarding the material composition of a firearm or whether a firearm was possibly derived from 3-D printing.”

So, let me get this straight. In a nation of around 330 million people, the agency tasked with policing guns has only seen a dozen cases of 3D-printed guns over four years – meaning just three per year – and as such has decided this isn’t a major concern, and we’re supposed to be alarmed by this?

First, let’s understand that if these guns aren’t being used significantly in crimes, there’s no reason for the ATF to be alarmed in the first place. After all, it’s already illegal to make your own guns if you’re prohibited from buying a firearm. Otherwise, it’s perfectly legal under federal law to make your own guns via whatever means you have available to you.

Frankly, I don’t get where Horowitz is coming from. Other than that he clearly has bought into the mass hysteria surrounding these kinds of guns.

If the ATF isn’t seeing them show up in cases, then maybe that is the more telling thing. After all, if the fear is that criminals will use this technology, and they’re not using this tech, that should be heralded as good news.

And really, these guns are still detectable. You’d think the internal watchdog for the ATF would be aware of this fact.

So really, this particular flavor of hysteria is nothing more than a way to gin up outrage to call for the banning of something that is actually impossible to prevent people from doing. Absolutely brilliant.

This is where we are right now.

Frankly, I’m relieved the ATF isn’t freaking out over these guns. My hope is they continue to not consider it a priority, and for all the obvious reasons.

Covid’s Three Blind Mice.

A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America, by Scott W. Atlas (Bombardier Books, 328 pp., $28)

How could public officials vowing to “follow the science” on Covid-19 persist in promoting ineffective strategies with terrible consequences? In a memoir of his time on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Scott W. Atlas provides an answer: because the nation’s governance was hijacked by three bureaucrats with scant interest in scientific research or debate—and no concern for the calamitous effects of their edicts.

Atlas’s book, A Plague Upon Our House, is an astonishing read, even for those who have been closely following this disaster. A veteran medical researcher and health-policy analyst at the Hoover Institution, Atlas, a radiologist, joined the Task Force six months into the pandemic, after he had published estimates that lockdowns could ultimately prove more deadly than Covid.

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SloJoe’s bureaucraps get stopped…again.

Judge strikes down Biden’s vaccine mandate for health care workers

A federal court halted President Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health care workers in 10 states.

“The scale falls clearly in favor of healthcare facilities operating with some unvaccinated employees, staff, trainees, students, volunteers and contractors, rather than the swift, irremediable impact of requiring healthcare facilities to choose between two undesirable choices — providing substandard care or providing no healthcare at all,” wrote U.S. District Judge Matthew Schelp in a 32-page order Monday.

The 10 states impacted by the ruling are those that sued the Biden administration over the rule: Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming.

Biden’s Nov. 5 order applied to health workers in hospitals that receive federal funding through Medicaid or Medicare, with Biden arguing that the rule was needed to help slow the spread of COVID-19 among the nation’s health care workers.

But Schelp ruled the order likely exceeded Biden’s authority, giving the ten states a temporary victory as the case continues to wind its way through the system.

“Congress did not clearly authorize CMS to enact this politically and economically vast, federalism-altering, and boundary-pushing mandate, which Supreme Court precedent requires,” Schelp wrote.

The 10 states sued the administration shortly after the order was issued, arguing it encroached on states’ rights and would worsen health care worker shortages.

The ruling comes days after OSHA announced that it was suspending its enforcement of Biden’s vaccine mandate for private employers with more than 100 employees after it too was blocked by a federal court, which ruled the agency should “take no steps to implement or enforce” the regulation.

“OSHA is complying with the 5th Circuit’s stay,” a Department of Labor official said. “OSHA is not enforcing or implementing the [regulation] — so they are not engaging or offering compliance assistance.”

This is momentum. A massive object will keep moving for a long time after what was pushing it has stopped.

Despite Internal Turmoil, NRA Looks Like It’s Winning The Long Game

No observer of contemporary gun politics could fail to notice a jarring disconnect between the two very different trajectories of the gun rights movement today.

On the one hand, more states are allowing Americans to carry weapons in public without permits, and the gun-rights movement could be on the verge of a major Supreme Court victory. On the other, the National Rifle Association, which advocates on behalf of gun owners, faces an existential crisis that’s mostly due to the NRA’s own missteps.

As a political scientist who has studied gun politics and policy for over 30 years, I’m confident that there is no precedent for this contradictory situation. Moreover, there’s no reason to believe that the NRA’s problems will influence how the courts treat gun-rights cases.

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‘Despite’? ‘DESPITE?’
It’s BECAUSE…………

Biden Wants To Empower the IRS Despite Its Track Record of Trampling Rights and Undermining Privacy

President Joe Biden’s plan to beef up IRS enforcement and snoop on Americans’ bank accounts will require hiring more than 80,000 additional tax cops—expanding a federal bureaucracy with a long track record of flouting due process and undermining privacy.

As part of Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan, the IRS would get $80 billion in additional funding over the next 10 years. The bulk of those new funds, nearly $45 billion, would be directed toward enforcement actions with the goal of doubling the number of annual audits of small businesses. By comparison, the bill spends a relatively meager $1.93 billion on improving taxpayer services, including education and filing assistance.

In short, for every new dollar the IRS will spend helping Americans understand the endlessly complicated federal tax code, the agency will spend roughly $23 new dollars on enforcing those same rules.

Everyone should pay the taxes they owe, of course, but the IRS’ track record suggests that more enforcement will also mean more trampling of Americans’ due process rights.

“It’s a systematic practice at the IRS to violate due process and to abuse taxpayers,” says Isabelle Morales, a policy specialist for Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative nonprofit that opposes tax increases. Biden is proposing to boost funding “for an agency that needs reform,” Morales tells Reason, “and that will only lead to us fueling their bad practices.”

In 2017, for example, an inspector general report found that IRS agents investigating so-called “structuring”—legal cash deposits that the agency believes to have been part of an attempt to skirt tax obligations—routinely failed to follow well-established procedures meant to protect the rights of individuals being investigated. Among other things, targets of IRS investigations are supposed to be told of the reason for the investigation and read their Miranda rights before an interview with an IRS agent. Of the 229 interviews reviewed by auditors, however, there were “only five” cases where targets were informed of their rights before speaking to investigators.

“Individuals and businesses who are not engaged in unlawful conduct may be less guarded in speaking with law enforcement about their banking transactions, and the absence of information about what their rights are might lead them to make statements that are later used against them,” auditors wrote in the report.

Morales points out that the 2017 audit report is just one data point in a long line of similar behavior. The most well-known example of the IRS abusing its power, of course, is the 2012 scandal in which the agency was caught applying stricter scrutiny to conservative nonprofits.

But even when the IRS isn’t engaging in outright political favoritism, there are reasons to worry about what expanding enforcement capabilities might mean for individuals and businesses. A 2016 inspector general report found that the IRS had lost track of more than 1,000 computers that might contain sensitive taxpayer information. A year later, an audit found that the IRS had recently rehired at least 200 employees who were previously fired for conduct or performance issues.

Biden is pitching his plan for enhanced IRS enforcement by promising that it’s all about ensuring billionaires pay what they owe.

That’s disingenuous. As the details of his proposal make clear, enhanced tax enforcement will mean hoovering up more data from crypto wallets, bank accounts, and third-party payment providers such as PayPal and Venmo. And that comes after Biden already ordered the IRS to give greater scrutiny to transactions in the so-called sharing economy. In total, Biden’s plan envisions the IRS carrying out 1.2 million more audits each year, according to the House Ways and Means Committee’s analysis of the Build Back Better plan. About half of those audits would target households making less than $75,000 annually.

Combined with a separate effort that makes it more difficult to shift assets overseas, Biden’s plan amounts to total financial surveillance, as Reason’s Matt Welch has written.

That surveillance would be carried out by an agency that has a long history of disregarding the guardrails placed on its power. What could go wrong?

The last covid strain was called “Nu.” Going down the Greek alphabet, the gutless bureaucraps at W.H.O. named today’s new variant “Omicron.”

They wouldn’t want to upset the Chinese Communist in Chief Xi Jinping now, would they?

 

The Supply Chain and Border Security

There is another threat to the trucking industry, the supply chain and our national security. It is NOT reported in the mainstream media: Foreign truckers — cleared for expedited commercial crossings between Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. — include at least half a dozen drivers who had deep connections to terrorism and drug-smuggling operations. And those are just the ones we know about.

Even when the criminal history of a candidate is available from another U.S. federal law enforcement agency, CBP apparently cannot access it. Instead of rejecting the foreign driver in question out of an abundance of caution, the agency simply rubber-stamps the candidate without additional screening.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says that national supply chain problems are caused by a lack of affordable childcare. While major U.S. ports such as Los Angeles and Baltimore have ships in the harbor waiting to offload cargo, a trucking shortage is delaying offloads and hauling. “Some of those issues,” Buttigieg stated, “may have to do with the availability of truckers, a thousand miles inland. There are a lot of things contributing to this. One of them is childcare, of course, which is why the president’s Build Back Better vision is going to be good for the labor market.”

Over at MSNBC, host Tiffany Cross offered a different analysis of the trucking/supply chain problem. “This is an industry populated by a lot of white men over the age of 55,” she stated. “This group of people overwhelmingly voted for Trump. Some people have talked about aggressive truck drivers cutting them off or not being helpful.”

The trucking shortages in the United States are real. Buttigieg and Cross are entitled to their opinions, of course, but their analyses seem off the mark. There is another threat to the trucking industry, the supply chain and our national security. It is NOT reported in the mainstream media: Foreign truckers — cleared for expedited commercial crossings between Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. — include at least half a dozen drivers who had deep connections to terrorism and drug-smuggling operations.

The disturbing details are outlined in a 34-page report, issued by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General with redactions to protect information in the original “law enforcement sensitive” version.

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15 States Vow to Protect Oil, Gas Industry From ‘Woke’ Banks

A coalition of 15 states announced a commitment to scrutinize future business with banks that divest from the fossil fuel industry.

The coalition of top state financial officers, formed by West Virginia State Treasurer Riley Moore, collectively represents more than $600 billion in public assets under management, according to the announcement. The officials wrote a letter to banking industry leaders Monday, warning that they would begin considering institutions’ boycotts of fossil fuel companies before awarding state contracts.

“Reckless attacks on law-abiding energy companies cut off paychecks for workers and take food off the tables of hard-working families,” Moore and the other officials wrote. “The Biden Administration has resumed these attacks by attempting to ban energy exploration on public lands and reportedly pressuring U.S. banks and financial institutions to limit, encumber, or outright refuse financing for traditional energy production companies.”

“These misguided political schemes have impeded economic growth, driven up consumer costs, and regressed our country to foreign energy dependence,” the letter continued. (RELATED: America Is Becoming More Dependent On Foreign Oil Under Biden)

The fossil fuel industry provides jobs, health insurance, infrastructure and quality of life to Americans nationwide, they added.

Since taking office, President Joe Biden has blocked major pipelines, ditched oil drilling projects, introduced sweeping regulations and banned new oil and gas leases on federal lands. His administration is also pushing the Build Back Better Act, the budget bill passed by the House last week that includes several green energy handouts and a tax on methane emissions.

In August, the Treasury Department issued guidance saying the U.S. would oppose multilateral development banks’ involvement in future fossil fuel projects, a move applauded by environmental activists. Moore and the other financial officers said the move would cede future development “Chinese interests.”

“Woke capitalists and globalist actors have been using the guise of climate change to press for anti-American reforms that reduce our country’s competitiveness against hostile nations like Russia and China,” Moore said in a statement.

“As a result, in less than a year our country has gone from energy independence to having a President who is begging OPEC and Russia to pump more oil,” he continued. “It’s time we fight back to protect our economies, jobs, tax revenue and energy independence from these increasing attacks on our critical industries.”

Major financial institutions, including JPMorgan Chase, Citi Bank and Bank of America, have committed to environmental and sustainability goals that involve divestment from fossil fuel companies.

Top financial officers in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Wyoming signed the letter.

Comment O’ The Day

Tacked on the end: China’s July test of a globe-circling hypersonic vehicle that was able to launch a separate missile while traveling at more than five times the speed of sound alerted Washington that Beijing might have technologies the United States has yet to develop.

But we’re getting pretty good at pronouns.

Inexplicable Phenomena Spur Pentagon to Launch New UFO Investigation Force.

The Pentagon is creating a new office to investigate unidentified flying objects (UFOs) amid concerns that after broad probes it cannot explain mysterious sightings near highly sensitive military areas.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, working with the US director of national intelligence, ordered the new investigatory body to be established in the US Defense Department’s intelligence and security office, the Pentagon said late Tuesday.

The order came five months after a classified US intelligence report on possible alien UFOs came up inconclusive: it could explain some reported incidents but was unable to account for other phenomena, some filmed by pilots near military testing areas.

The new office will focus on incidents in, or near, designated “special use airspace” (SUA) areas strictly controlled and blocked from general aviation due to security sensitivities.

The US military is worried some of the unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) spotted by military pilots in the past may represent technologies of strategic rivals unknown to US scientists.

“Incursions by any airborne object into our SUA pose safety of flight and operations security concerns, and may pose national security challenges,” the Pentagon said in a statement.

The Defense Department “takes reports of incursions – by any airborne object, identified or unidentified – very seriously, and investigates each one,” it added.

The new office was dubbed the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG), the successor to the US Navy’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.

It will be overseen by a panel of experts from the military and intelligence community.

A mostly classified official review of UFO reports released in June determined that most of around 120 incidents over the past 20 years could be explained and had nothing to do with unknown or secret US or foreign technology.

But it could not explain some beguiling reports and videos made by military personnel.

Last year, the Pentagon released a still inexplicable video taken by navy pilots of objects moving at incredible speeds, spinning and mysteriously disappearing.

China’s July test of a globe-circling hypersonic vehicle that was able to launch a separate missile while traveling at more than five times the speed of sound alerted Washington that Beijing might have technologies the United States has yet to develop.

I recall someone on a BBS  joking about eventually having booster shots be a perpetual thing. Comedy; Daily becoming reality.

Fauci Prepares to Move the Goalposts—AGAIN

The only consistency there has been in the pronouncements of Dr. Antony Fauci, the public face of the pandemic since Donald Trump was president, is their inconsistency. Fauci is now saying that being “fully vaccinated” may mean getting a booster shot as well. Previously, Fauci said that being “fully vaccinated” meant receiving two shots of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines or a single shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

Fauci says this is how you follow the science.

Fox News:

“People should not be put off by the fact that as time goes by and we learn more and more about the protection that we might modify the guidelines,” he explained. “That’s what we’ve been saying all along by follow the science, things change and you have to follow the data.”

But that booster shot still may not be enough. We may need boosters every six months or every year, according to “Follow the science” Fauci.

Fauci later said on ABC’s “This Week” that he hopes the booster shot will not wane the same way the initial regimens did, which would allow Americans to avoid more regular booster shots at either six months or even a year.

“We would hope, and this is something that we’re looking at very carefully, that that third shot with the mRNA not only boosts you way up, but increases the durability so that you will not necessarily need it every six months or a year,” Fauci said. “We’re hoping it pushes it out more.”

“If it doesn’t, and the data shows we need to do it more often, then we’ll do it, but we want to make sure we get the population optimally protected and you do whatever you need to do.”

The reason some of us need new flu shots every flu season is that the virus that causes the flu changes significantly from year to year. However, the coronavirus hasn’t changed significantly — not even the “variants” that have arisen in some areas. It’s basically the same animal with different disguises.

Fauci isn’t wrong when he says science means learning more about the virus, and the more we learn, the more it may become necessary to adjust our strategies to deal with it. What makes Fauci the absolute worst choice to continue to be the spokesman for any administration COVID policies is his inability to articulate the state of the knowledge we have regarding the coronavirus and what the government is doing about it.

It’s not just a matter of Fauci not knowing when to keep his mouth shut or when to stop talking. His failures have killed people and will continue to kill people, because few Americans trust what he says.

That’s a singular failure for which Joe Biden bears equal responsibility.

Federal Reserve Encourages Americans to Replace Thanksgiving Turkeys With Soybean Products

The Federal Reserve is encouraging Americans to combat soaring meat price inflation by swapping turkeys for soybean products this Thanksgiving.

Yes, really.

“Between 1990 and the time of this writing, the average global price of poultry has been 6 times higher than the price of soybeans,” reports the St. Louis Fed.

“As of the third quarter of 2021, a hearty Thanksgiving dinner serving of turkey costs $1.42. A tofurkey (soybean) dinner serving with the same amount of calories costs $0.66 and provides almost twice as much protein. Keep in mind that this plant-based meal would be almost 3 times larger by weight than the poultry-based meal and may either keep you at the dinner table longer or provide you with more leftovers.”

The very company the administration touts and the Peter Pan look-a-like Secretary of Energy cashes in on a stock sale of. And it’s ‘legal’  because she is exempt by law.

Granholm’s Green Energy Millions

Biden energy secretary nets $1.6 million after offloading admin-backed electric bus company

Energy secretary Jennifer Granholm has finally sold hundreds of thousands of shares in a green energy company that has received the backing of the Biden administration.

On Wednesday, Granholm confirmed she earned a $1.6 million profit on her shares of Proterra amid a firestorm over her financial ties to an electric vehicle company repeatedly promoted by the Biden administration. In selling off her shares, Granholm was able to defer paying capital gains taxes on the $1.6 million sale because cabinet officials are not penalized with the tax on assets they are required to sell as a condition of joining the administration. The Biden administration is seeking to raise the capital gains tax on America’s wealthiest families.

On May 11, Granholm filed an Office of Government Ethics divestiture certificate. She confirmed the sale Wednesday. The former Michigan governor reported selling more than 240,000 shares in the electric bus manufacturer to an unnamed buyer. She valued the stake at up to $5 million in a January financial disclosure.

The Department of Energy did not return to requests for comment.

While Proterra is slated to go public within the next few weeks, Granholm’s sale of the shares of the yet-to-be publicly traded company likely occurred in an off-market private sale. The Washington Free Beacon reported that major Democratic donors are invested in the company taking Proterra public, including at least one member of the megadonor Pritzker family who stands to own up to 7 percent of the company when it finally becomes public.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Granholm’s divestment comes weeks after President Joe Biden toured Proterra, prompting ethics concerns from federal lawmakers. Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) compared the Biden administration’s ongoing promotion of the company to the Obama administration’s pouring millions of taxpayer dollars into Solyndra, a failed solar panel company. Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.) wrote to the Department of Energy’s inspector general demanding a review of Granholm’s stake in the company.

“Energy Secretary Granholm held millions of dollars of investments in an electric bus company. During her nomination hearing, she committed to the Senate that she would avoid the appearance of any conflicts of interest,” Barrasso told the Free Beacon. “Even though Secretary Granholm has now sold these stocks, her actions appear to be a significant conflict of interest.”

Rep. Ralph Norman (R., S.C.) wrote directly to Granholm requesting key documents about any Department of Energy promotion of Proterra. Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.) called for Granholm to offload her Proterra shares on May 5.

Granholm played a leading role in shaping the administration’s infrastructure package. Biden tasked her specifically with “identifying risks in the supply chain for high-capacity batteries, including electric-vehicle batteries, and policy recommendations to address these risks.” The legislation includes a $174 billion investment in the electric vehicle market and creates a Clean Buses for Kids program in order to “electrify” at least 20 percent of the nation’s school buses. Proterra opened a battery manufacturing plant in California just weeks after Biden’s election.

In addition to Biden’s virtual tour of Proterra’s South Carolina factory, the president in May hosted company CEO Jack Allen at the White House’s Leaders Summit on Climate. National climate adviser Gina McCarthy praised Proterra for its “amazing” work at the summit and asked Allen “what role” the federal government can play in “spurring the demand for zero emission electric vehicles, including school buses.”

Granholm and Allen spoke at the conference, with Allen thanking Biden for his “longstanding support of electric transit buses and zero emission transportation.” While Granholm has denied any involvement of planning Proterra-related events, the White House has yet to say who was involved in planning them.

“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.”

Bureaucraps, inspiring confidence

FDA Says It Needs Until Year 2076 To Reveal Data Pertaining To Pfizer Vaccine Approval.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requested Monday for the courts to give them until 2076 to review and fully release the documents pertaining to the approval of the Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

The FDA denied Sept. 9 a request for an expedited release of the vaccine’s approval records from a group of doctors and scientists, the Public Health Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT). The PHMPT has since filed a lawsuit against the FDA for failure to complete their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

The agency had determined that there were a total of 329,000 pages that needed to be reviewed in order to fulfill the plaintiff’s FOIA request, and proposed that they would be able to “process and produce the non-exempt portions of responsive records at a rate of 500 pages per month.” The FDA said they would provide the plaintiff with prioritized documents and release the non-exempt portions of the records on a “rolling basis.” This rate of review places the FDA’s release of the documents at nearly 55 years.

“This rate is consistent with processing schedules entered by courts across the country in FOIA cases,” said the FDA, explaining that the plaintiff’s request for documentation within a 4-month timeframe would force the FDA to have to work through 80,000 pages per month.

Due to an inability to reach an agreement on a set disclosure schedule, the plaintiffs have called for a hearing to argue their case before a judge, according to The Epoch Times.

It must have really really hurt to write this and acknowledge he was a dupe that believed lies merely because they fit his politics.

The Federal Bureau of Dirty Tricks

[New York Times] Opinion Columnist
This month’s bombshell indictment of Igor Danchenko, the Russian national who is charged with lying to the F.B.I. and whose work turns out to have been the main source for Christopher Steele’s notorious dossier, is being treated as a major embarrassment for much of the news media — and, if the charges stick, that’s exactly what it is.
Put media criticism aside for a bit. What this indictment further exposes is that James Comey’s F.B.I. became a Bureau of Dirty Tricks, mitigated only by its own incompetence — like a mash-up of Inspector Javert and Inspector Clouseau. Donald Trump’s best move as president (about which I was dead wrong at the time) may have been to fire him.
If you haven’t followed the drip-drip-drip of revelations, late in 2019 Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, published a damning report detailing “many basic and fundamental errors” by the F.B.I. in seeking Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants to surveil Carter Page, the American businessman fingered in the dossier as a potential link between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
Shortly afterward, Rosemary Collyer, the court’s presiding judge, issued her own stinging rebuke of the bureau: “The frequency with which representations made by F.B.I. personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other F.B.I. applications is reliable,” she wrote.
Here a question emerged: Were the F.B.I.’s errors a matter of general incompetence or of bias? There appears to be a broad pattern of F.B.I. agents overstating evidence that corroborates their suspicions. That led to travesties such as the bureau hounding the wrong man in the 2001 anthrax attacks.
But it turns out the bureau can be both incompetent and biased. When the F.B.I. applied for warrants to continue wiretapping Page, it already knew Page was helping the C.I.A., not the Russians. We know this because in August 2020 a former F.B.I. lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty to rewriting an email to hide Page’s C.I.A. ties.
And why would Clinesmith do that? It certainly helped the bureau renew its wiretap warrants on Page, and, as Clinesmith once put it in a text message to a colleague, “viva la resistance.” When the purpose of government service is to stop “the crazies” (one of Clinesmith’s descriptions of the elected administration) then the ends soon find a way of justifying the means.
Which brings us to the grand jury indictment of Danchenko in the investigation being conducted by the special counsel John Durham. Danchenko was Steele’s main source for the most attention-grabbing claims in the dossier, including the existence of a likely mythical “pee tape.” Steele, in turn, wrote his report for Fusion GPS, an opposition-research outfit that had been hired by a Washington law firm close to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Translation: The Steele dossier was Democratic Party-funded opposition research that had been sub-sub-sub-sub contracted to Danchenko, who now stands accused of repeatedly lying to the F.B.I. about his own sources while also having been investigated a decade ago for possible ties to Russian intelligence. Danchenko has pleaded not guilty and adamantly denies Russian intelligence ties, and he deserves his day in court. He describes the raw intelligence he collected for Steele as little more than a collection of rumors and innuendo and alleges that Steele dressed them up for Fusion GPS.
Of such dross was spun years of high-level federal investigations, ponderous congressional hearings, pompous Adam Schiff soliloquies, and nonstop public furor. But none of that would likely have happened if the F.B.I. had treated the dossier as the garbage that it was, while stressing the ways in which Russia had sought to influence the election on Trump’s behalf, or the ways in which the Trump campaign (particularly through its onetime manager, Paul Manafort) was vulnerable to Russian blackmail.
Instead, Comey used it as a political weapon by privately briefing President-elect Trump about it, despite ample warnings about the dossier’s credibility. In doing so, Comey made the existence of the “salacious and unverified” dossier news in its own right. And, as the University of Chicago’s Charles Lipson astutely notes, Comey’s briefing “could be seen as a kind of blackmail threat, the kind that marked J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure.”
If you are a certain kind of reader — probably conservative — who has closely followed the Durham investigation, none of the above will come as news. But I’m writing this column for those who haven’t followed it closely, or who may have taken a keener interest in tales about Trump being Russia’s puppet than in evidence that, for all of his many and grave sins, he was the victim of a gigantic slander abetted by the F.B.I.
Democrats who don’t want the vast power wielded by the bureau ever used against one of their own — as, after all, it was against Hillary Clinton — ought to use the Durham investigation as an opportunity to clean up, or clean out, the F.B.I. once and for all.

OSHA Suspends the Implementation and Enforcement of Biden’s Vaccine Mandate

After a series of court rulings halting President Joe Biden’s vaccination mandate for private companies, OSHA has officially suspended the implementation and enforcement of the requirement. The mandate was scheduled to go into effect January 4, 2022.

“On November 12, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit granted a motion to stay OSHA’s COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing Emergency Temporary Standard, published on November 5, 2021 (86 Fed. Reg. 61402) (“ETS”). The court ordered that OSHA ‘take no steps to implement or enforce’ the ETS ‘until further court order,'” the OSHA website states. “While OSHA remains confident in its authority to protect workers in emergencies, OSHA has suspended activities related to the implementation and enforcement of the ETS pending future developments in the litigation.”

After a lawsuit was filed by a number of state Attorneys General, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary stay on November 6, 2021, and said the mandate has “grave statutory and constitutional issues.”

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