Republican News

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Who will blink first? And more to the point, who will voters back — even in Maine?

Donald Trump kicked off this sparring by noting today that the state of Maine still allowed makes to compete in school programs for girls’ sports. Trump had issued an EO directing the Department of Education to force states receiving federal support for their schools to comply with biology-based restrictions on access, and most states have at least offered some compliance. If Maine didn’t comply, Trump warned, he would order their federal funding suspended, as well as the potential political consequences of defiance.

All of this happened with Trump and Maine governor Janet Mills in the same room:

OWNED! pic.twitter.com/BXt32185Ac

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) February 21, 2025

At the gathering in Washington Thursday, Trump said he “heard men are still playing in Maine” and asked if anyone in the crowd was from the state.

“I hate to tell you this, but we’re not going to give them any federal money. They’re still saying they want men to play in women’s sports, and I cannot believe they’re doing that,” he said. “So we’re not going to give them any money, none whatsoever, until they clean that up.”

Mills and state AG Aaron Frey didn’t take too kindly to that ‘advice.’ They issued a statement vowing to take Trump to federal court to get their federal dollars, on which Maine relies more than most states for education:

“If the President attempts to unilaterally deprive Maine school children of the benefit of federal funding, my Administration and the Attorney General will take all appropriate and necessary legal action to restore that funding and the academic opportunity it provides,” Mills said. “The State of Maine will not be intimidated by the President’s threats.”

The president’s comments at a gathering for Republican governors in Washington D.C. came days after a Maine lawmaker made a widely circulated social media post that included photos of a high school athlete and criticized the state’s policy allowing transgender athletes to compete in school sports.

Pardon me for a moment while I digest the argument that federal subsidies to states should come with no strings attached. That’s not how I recall the Joe Biden administration’s Department of Education operating, especially when it came to issues like transgender policy, pronouns, and the like. The same administration tried to force states to use a new definition of “sex” in Title IX to include “gender identities,” and threatened to put funding at risk and used the potential for enforcement for compliance.

Of course, they also lost that battle in court, although not over the use of funding as a potential stick. The federal courts decided that Congress had meant “sex” as biological sex, and Congress would have to act to expand Title IX to cover “gender identity.” Those cases are now moot with the new administration’s policies. Mills and Frey could take Trump to court to force the Department of Education to produce the subsidies regardless of whether they comply with those new policies, and perhaps a court would temporarily restore funding while awaiting a full hearing. However, it seems like a stretch to claim that states can spend federal dollars even while defying federal policies, as it would essentially remove any enforcement of such policies anywhere and everywhere. Besides, Title IX expressly protects women on the basis of biological sex (as the courts recognized in this go-around), which means that males encroaching in such spaces removes the balance required to qualify for federal spending.

The real question, though, is why Mills and Frey want to have this fight at all. The reason other states are backing down from allowing males to compete and occupy spaces for girls and women is that the public overwhelmingly opposes that policy. The Biden administration tried to pretend that radical transgender activism was the mainstream and that biology didn’t matter, but it didn’t work. In fact, those policies got less popular as they were put into practice, and polling this year shows that this is actually one of Trump’s strongest issues.

Trump may not be terribly popular in Maine, but I’d bet his policy restoring biological norms will be. A poll from Marquette Law School last week showed just how popular the biological approach is:

The federal government’s recognizing only two sexes, male and female, is supported by 63% and opposed by 37%. … More than 90% of Republicans favor Trump’s most popular actions: those on recognizing two sexes, deporting immigrants in the United States illegally, expanding oil and gas production, and declaring an emergency on the border. A substantial majority of independents, 66%, favor recognizing two sexes[.]

Trump lost Maine by seven points in November, but that doesn’t mean Mills and Frey are going to get a lot of support for letting males into female spaces. This is cutting back towards the push by Democrats to make themselves the Weirdo Party rather than a party interested in the concerns of the vast majority of voters. This issue isn’t quite 80/20, but Mills and Frey are staking out the distinctly unpopular side of this game of chicken. 

Hence, even disregarding Trump’s general refusal to blink in these circumstances, bet on Mills and Frey to throw in the towel eventually. But if not, it will make for a fun popcorn-passing show, as Maine Democrats self-immolate. 

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Back in August 2023 the Biden Department of Justice announced it was filing a lawsuit against Space X for discriminating against refugees in hiring. In essence the DOJ said Space X was giving American citizens preferential treatment.

In job postings and public statements over several years, SpaceX wrongly claimed that under federal regulations known as “export control laws,” SpaceX could hire only U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, sometimes referred to as “green card holders.” Export control laws impose no such hiring restrictions. Moreover, asylees’ and refugees’ permission to live and work in the United States does not expire, and they stand on equal footing with U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents under export control laws. Under these laws, companies like SpaceX can hire asylees and refugees for the same positions they would hire U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents.

And for this alleged violation, the DOJ was seeking back pay for people who weren’t hired as well as civil penalties. That will become important in a moment.

The United States seeks fair consideration and back pay for asylees and refugees who were deterred or denied employment at SpaceX due to the alleged discrimination. The United States also seeks civil penalties in an amount to be determined by the court and policy changes to ensure it complies with the INA’s nondiscrimination mandate going forward.

Elon Musk objected at the time, saying Space X had been warned not to hire anyone but permanent US residents to avoid violating arms trafficking laws.

Exactly.

SpaceX was told repeatedly that hiring anyone who was not a permanent resident of the United States would violate international arms trafficking law, which would be a criminal offense.

We couldn’t even hire Canadian citizens, despite Canada being part of NORAD!

This…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 25, 2023

About a month later, Space X filed a lawsuit claiming that the entire procedure was constitutionally flawed because the DOJ planned to adjudicate the case using an in-house Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) as opposed to a federal court:

SpaceX has not engaged in any practice or pattern of discriminating against anyone, including asylees or refugees. To the contrary, SpaceX wants to hire the very best candidates for every job regardless of their citizenship status, and in fact has hired hundreds ofnoncitizens.

But aside from being factually and legally insupportable, the government’s proceedings are unconstitutional for at least four reasons: (1) the administrative law judge (ALJ) adjudicating the government’s complaint was unconstitutionally appointed; (2) the ALJ is unconstitutionally insulated from Presidential authority because she is protected by two layers of for-cause removal protections; (3) the ALJ is unconstitutionally purporting to adjudicate SpaceX’s rights in an administrative proceeding rather than in federal court; and (4) the ALJ is unconstitutionally denying SpaceX its Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial.

As mentioned above, one thing the DOJ was seeking here was penalties and back pay. Space X argued that under the Constitution, judgments of penalties that involve taking private property (from Space X in this case) can only be made by courts established by Article III of the Constitution, not by ALJs.

In case you aren’t familiar with them, lots of federal agencies use ALJs to process cases, so Space X was objecting to the constitutionality of a common practice in the federal government. The implications of the case were significant well beyond the Department of Justice. 

And at that point, in November 2023, a judge paused the DOJ case against Space X in order to consider the claims made in the company’s lawsuit. 

U.S. District Judge Rolando Olvera in Brownsville, Texas said in a written order late Wednesday that administrative judges at the Justice Department who hear cases involving anti-immigrant bias were not properly appointed.

Olvera blocked the department’s case, which was filed in August, from moving forward pending the outcome of SpaceX’s September lawsuit claiming the administrative case violates the U.S. Constitution.

As of this week, however, the underlying case is being dropped by the Trump DOJ.

In a Thursday court filing in Brownsville, Texas, government lawyers asked a judge to end a pause in proceedings so they could file a notice of dismissal of the case. The Justice Department said it would dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning it could not be brought again.

You really have to step back to appreciate this. Biden’s DOJ sued Space X accusing it of failing to hire an unspecified number of refugees as cooks or welders or something similar (the DOJ press release mentions cooks, welders, dishwashers, etc.). Space X responded by claiming the entire DOJ system of adjudication for such cases was unconstitutional and got it shut down for 15 months.

Frankly, I hope companies subject to this kind of in-house justice continue to raise these constitutional problems. Taking more power away from the federal bureaucracy seems like a good idea.

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MAGA, prepare to be pissed off at me again…

I am as amused by some of Trump’s and other MAGA-types’ trolling of the left, but I also think that too much of it is only playing to the insiders and is alienating others unnecessarily. 

Example #5343

Steve Bannon, after calling for Trump to be President for life, did a Nazi salute on stage at CPAC.

Nazism has officially taken over the GOP.

The few remaining conservatives have a choice: either leave the party and obstruct it—or choose to be complicit.pic.twitter.com/94o5Kj69Le

— Joshua Reed Eakle 🗽 (@JoshEakle) February 21, 2025

Why did Steve Bannon have to make a gesture that–quite intentionally–looks like a Nazi salute? 

When Elon Musk was criticized–wrongly–for making a Nazi salute, I thought it was outrageous and said so, both because it WASN’T a Nazi salute–it was a guy on “the spectrum” clearly “throwing his heart out to people,” as he clearly said. Elon is, if anything, a philosemite and is as Nazi as any random rabbi. 

Donald Trump isn’t a Nazi. MAGA folks are not Nazis. The whole Nazi thing is slander and a hoax being perpetrated by a desperate left and Pravda Media in order to create a “vibe” that MAGA is outside the Overton window. 

Steve Bannon also, is not a Nazi, but he deliberately made what could be interpreted as a Nazi salute to troll the left. He thinks it is funny, and to insiders, it is because they get the joke. It is a slap at Pravda and the propagandists. 

It is also profoundly unhelpful to the MAGA cause. MAGA may be at war with the transnational elite and all the people who see us as an existential threat, but we shouldn’t be doing things that, for no good reason, make ordinary people who just want the government cleaned up and the grift to end shudder at being associated with us. 

You may think it is stupid, but most people just want their lives to get back to some semblance of normal and don’t want to have to defend their support for what the Trump administration is doing every damn second of their lives. I am getting bombarded–as I am sure many of you are–with some of my friends and family who feel unnecessarily offended by all this. 

If it accomplished some long-term good, I would be happy to defend it, but the opposite is true. No policy gains are made. No inroads against the left are made. It doesn’t undermine our enemies, who smile when they see Bannon do this. It just offends center-right people and makes MAGA insiders chuckle for a second. 

It’s stupid. An unforced error. 

Trump is doing so much right, and DOGE is exposing a ton of indefensible spending, but the controversies are dragging him down. That was inevitable and a necessary price to pay, but we need to be mindful that all the criticism is and will have an effect. Picking unnecessary fights undermines the efforts with the necessary fights. 

The last day has been the worst polling day for Trump during his entire 2nd term.

-4 polls show his net approval rating underwater like The Little Mermaid.
-The 3 polls with a trend line show his ratings going down.
-His one time strength (the economy) is now a weakness. pic.twitter.com/l9IQOhXS9K

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) February 20, 2025

On the issues that matter, Trump is on a winning streak. Spending the political capital is smart and necessary to achieve our long-term goals. 

Owning the libs is not a long-term goal worth wasting any political capital on. 

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I was out of town last weekend when the NY Times published this story about Planned Parenthood so I missed seeing it. But despite being a few days old it’s definitely worth a mention here on the site. It’s titled “Botched Care and Tired Staff: Planned Parenthood in Crisis” which gives you a pretty good idea that this is not an upbeat story about America’s top abortion provider. 

In fact, the story opens with a botched abortion. Three months after the “abortion” supposedly took place, the woman went to an emergency room and gave birth to a baby which “quickly died.” A botched abortion at Planned Parenthood is probably brand new territory for the NY Times but they have their limits. In this case we don’t get any explanation for why she went into labor at 5 months or about 20 weeks. The implication is that the labor was brought on by something done by Planned Parenthood, but again we don’t get those details. As far as the Times is concerned, the victim here is the woman, not the baby.

It turns out this is just one out of “scores” of cases of substandard care at Planned Parenthood which the Times attributes to “aging equipment and poorly trained staff.”

In a case settled in California last year, a woman accused the organization of improperly implanting a birth control device in her arm and causing nerve damage.

A Nebraska clinician in 2022 did not realize that a woman was four months pregnant when she inserted an IUD. Several hours later, the patient was rushed to an emergency room and gave birth to a stillborn fetus…

In Omaha last year, sewage from a backed-up toilet seeped into the abortion recovery room for two days, according to interviews with staff members and photographs and text messages shared with The Times…

Salaries are so low that it is not unusual for staff members to qualify for Medicaid and federal food assistance.

Turnover is hovering at around 50 percent a year in many parts of the country, and clinic workers complained that they were learning from inexperienced peers.

The underlying problem behind all these problems is money. Planned Parenthood has fewer clinics and many fewer patients than it did in the past. Plus federal funding continues to dry up.

Patient counts have shrunk from a high of five million and 900 clinics in the 1990s to 2.1 million patients and 600 clinics today…

Clinics are primarily funded by Medicaid payments for non-abortion procedures and donors who give directly to the affiliates. But there have been sharp reductions in government reimbursements. Arkansas, Missouri and Texas have blocked Planned Parenthood clinics from receiving Medicaid payments, an essential source of revenue, and a pending Supreme Court case could allow other states to follow suit. As he did during his first term, President Trump could deny abortion providers Title X federal family planning funds — costing Planned Parenthood clinics about $60 million.

The Times published a story about this last year noting that it’s not just PP clinics that are going broke.

Amy Hagstrom Miller, the C.E.O. of Whole Woman’s Health, which operates six clinics in four states as well as one virtual clinic, said only two of them were currently profitable. “Whenever I talk to people about my margins,” she said, “they’re like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”

Procedure rates — which can run from $600 to many thousands for the rare abortions that take place late in a pregnancy — certainly haven’t kept pace with medical inflation, even though everything else about running a health care business, from insurance to equipment to payroll, has become more expensive.

Because the cost of late term abortions are so high, PP of New York had to stop offering them despite New York having the most liberal abortion laws in the country.

The move was the latest sign of financial struggles for Planned Parenthood’s New York chapter, which also plans to close four clinics around the state, including its sole clinic on Staten Island, Ms. Stark said. The chapter has already instituted executive pay cuts and consolidated job functions.

Ms. Stark confirmed that the Manhattan clinic plans to stop providing abortions past 20 weeks of pregnancy on Sept. 3, a change that was first reported by The City. Abortion is legal in New York State through the 24th week of pregnancy, and later in cases where a fetus is not viable or a woman’s life or health is at risk.

Despite being broke and providing crappy care, PP still manages to give millions in political donations which go exclusively (99.85%) to Democrats. This is apparently how the organization is structured. It’s a Democratic fundraiser first and a health provider second.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Planned Parenthood has enjoyed a fund-raising boom, with $498 million in donations that year. But little of it goes to the state affiliates to provide health care at clinics. Instead, under the national bylaws, the majority of the money is spent on the legal and political fight to maintain abortion rights…

Over the last five years, the national office has distributed more than $899 million to affiliates to help them deliver care, but none of it went directly to medical services. By charter, the mission of Planned Parenthood Federation of America is to “provide leadership, advocacy and education in the field of reproductive health care.”

Much of the national funding to affiliates went to legal support, public campaigns to expand abortion access and subsidies for patient navigators who help patients access abortions.

So there you have it. Planned Parenthood is going broke even as it continues to spend lavishly on lobbying and propaganda. They used to have 5 million patients and now they are bragging about having 2 million.

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Remember this moment of sheer journalistic idiocy? Well, thanks to historian Andrew Roberts, it has a new name. And it doesn’t just apply to Margaret Brennan and CBS News.

But it does apply oh so well to them both:

Utterly bizarre assertion from Margaret Brennan. She claims the Nazi Holocaust occurred because “free speech was weaponized” in Germany, thus making Vance’s comments all the more worrisome. Recasting the Holocaust as a consequence of excessive free speech is just totally bonkers pic.twitter.com/2vefGlzT6s

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) February 16, 2025

MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, he was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide. And he met with the head of a political party that has far right views and some historic ties to extreme groups. The context of that was changing the tone of it. And you know that, that the censorship was specifically about the right.

SECRETARY MARCO RUBIO: Well, I have to disagree with you. No, I have – I have to disagree with you. Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide. The genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime that happened to also be genocidal because they hated Jews and they hated minorities and they hated those that they – they had a list of people they hated, but primarily the Jews. There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none. There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany. They were a sole and only party that governed that country. So that’s not an accurate reflection of history.

David wrote a sharp response the next day to this absolute ignorance. Now we get to hear from Roberts, who lashes the Protection Racket Media for not bothering to study history, let alone learn from it. As Rubio and Michael Tracey pointed out more gently, the idea that the Nazis succeeded through weaponizing ‘free speech’ is so bizarrely wrong that one has to be a dunce to even conjure it up.

And Roberts has a great term for it, too:

There seems to be an outbreak of historical ignorance among TV talking heads. MSNBC’s Ali Velshi denounced Queen Elizabeth II for the British practice of slavery, even though the British Empire abolished it a century before her birth. Tucker Carlson sarcastically asked Piers Morgan whether Adolf Hitler had plans to invade Britain, which, of course, the Nazi dictator did.

And then CBS’s Margaret Brennan outdid them while interviewing secretary of state Marco Rubio during the February 16 edition of Face the Nation. She claimed that Vice President J.D. Vance had delivered a critique of European censorship in Munich while “standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”

The point, presumably, was that the Nazis had exploited freedom of speech to gather more adherents and destroy democracy under the Weimar Republic. There ought to be a word for a remark like this, which managed to be both sophomoric, in its attempt to play gotcha with Rubio, and moronic in its historical ignorance: sophomoronic, perhaps?

Works for me, on multiple levels. But it’s not just ignorance, either. Roberts goes on in his Free Press essay to attempt to educate everyone on the Nazi approach to speech, which they modeled on Stalin’s USSR, but don’t expect the media to learn much from actual facts. As Aristophenes once wrote, in a quote featured in the film The Emperors Club with the caveat “roughly translated”: Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown. Ignorance can be educated and drunkenness sobered, but stupid … lasts forever.

And more to the point, malice lasts forever, too. That’s precisely what we have seen from the Protection Racket Media towards debate and dissent over the last several years. The American news media went all-in on policing speech in America for “misinformation,” and have barely acknowledged that the government-influenced censorship cracked down on arguments that turned out to be true. 

The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story as “Russian disinformation” by almost the entire American media industry and their self-serving “fact check” operations is one obvious example, but there are plenty of others. Remember when media painted as ‘racist’ anyone suggested that a viral outbreak near the Wuhan Institute of Virology resulted from a lab leak? Or when the media treated the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration that dissented from COVID policies were “anti-science” extremists? How about the industry-wide effort to paint Anthony Fauci as an unchallenged prophet, even while he contradicted himself on masking, shutdowns, and the like?

Stupid lasts forever. Malice lasts just as long with American media orgs that resent the use of free speech by anyone other than themselves. Sophomoronic is an excellent term, but let’s not pretend that it’s just idiocy at play here. This is outright malice in pursuit of ideological and political objectives, and it’s those impulses that put a ‘sophomoronic’ figure like Margaret Brennan on the air in the first place. 

To offer another quote that applies here from the same film, one of my favorites: Not to know what happened before you were born is to be forever a child. The Protection Racket Media puts intellectual children on the air to offer ignorance as fact and malice packaged as a product. ‘Sophomoronic’ may give them too much credit. 

Addendum: This is why we push so hard to ensure our independence from the Big Tech platforms that capitulated to censorship, and buffer ourselves from the outcome of advertiser boycotts from corrupt “misinformation” services. As David wrote last week, we aren’t getting gold bars at taxpayer expense to keep our operations afloat like the Protection Racket Media does, nor do we want it. We keep fighting to keep independent voices and dissent alive in the face of enormous pressure, and our members are right there on the front lines with us. 

Please join the fight! Become a HotAir VIP member today and use the code GOLDBARS for 50% off and get the media deal of a lifetime!

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I support Trump’s efforts to end the Ukraine war. 

I supported the initial efforts to defend Ukraine against the Russian invasion, although I never bought the “democracy vs tyranny” argument. I agree that the war was unnecessary, at least partly caused by a failure of the West to understand that Ukraine membership in NATO was a red line and that our commitment to Ukrainian sovereignty should have remained softly spoken and not loudly proclaimed, but I thought the Russian invasion crossed a red line.

My view was simple: preventing a Russian takeover of Ukraine was in our interests, but a forever war or even a return to the status quo ante 2014 was unrealistic. A fantasy stoked by a transnational elite that was using the war–and the deaths of over a million people–to conduct a massive money laundering operation. 

In other words, the war was not black and white but lighter and darker gray. 

Trump is right to push for an end to the war, but the extremity of his rhetoric about Zelenskyy–who I also don’t think is pure as the driven snow and who has been stumbling in his diplomacy over the past year–is driving away political allies and harming his image with people who have helped Trump achieve some others of his goals. 

The article struck me as similar to a previous article on why Trump’s tariffs are bad economic policy and then seeing it was really political strategy, not economic. Trump sees the Ukrainians as resisting peace so he’ll go so far as to toss them aside because the peace will come…

— Tim Conrad (@TimConradB623) February 20, 2025

People like Niall Ferguson and Douglas Murray–intellectuals who broke with the liberal consensus and helped pave the way for moderates giving Trump a lot of running room in his second term–are furious over Trump’s rhetoric about Ukraine and seeming embrace of Putin. 

And it was actually Zelenskyy’s idea to begin with. But what is Ukraine getting going forward for giving that away? Zelenskyy has expressed “deep gratitude” before, so Trump suggesting otherwise is just a lie. https://t.co/RiUjjk8aSA

— dʒeɪ 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@UKFellas) February 21, 2025

All this may be a negotiating strategy for Trump–I think it is–but I think it is suboptimal. Many in the semi-realist/semi-idealist camp who had supported the war were coming to terms with the failure to kick Putin out of Ukraine and the need to end the war, but Trump’s insistence that Zelenskyy caused the war, that the Ukrainian leader is the real dictator, and that Zelenskyy has a 4% popularity rating in Ukraine serve no good purpose that I can see. 

‘Putin is THE dictator and 10 Ukraine-Russia war truths we ignore at our peril.’ My column in today’s ⁦@nypost⁩ https://t.co/DTgRuRcpnF

— Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray) February 21, 2025

Mostly because they are clearly false, there may be a reason to throw these provocations out there–mostly to give Putin some breathing room to make concessions and to bully Zelenskyy to make necessary concessions to reality–but the domestic cost in support for Trump is, in my judgment, too high a price to pay. He could achieve these goals without burning so much political capital. 

Yes, there are reasons for Trump to be angry at Zelenskyy. We don’t have to treat him like Churchill–better than Churchill, actually–but we can deal with him in ways that don’t harm Trump here at home. 

OK, this is interesting.

Douglas Murray is a superstar for the US right.

Here he is directly contradicting Trump/Musk. https://t.co/pvknV1YR45

— Christian JB (@christianjbdev) February 21, 2025

The Ukraine war is, in the end, a side issue for MAGA. We want the war to end, and the grift ended, but the reform and remaking of our government and culture are far more important. The Free Press wing of the political spectrum has been a small but vital element to Trump’s success in moving forward on these vital issues, and a slight moderation of Trump’s rhetoric would do wonders to mollify this faction. 

I, too, am cheering Trump on for his assault on the administrative state. It is my top priority, in fact. So count me among the people who think that Trump could tone it down on his attacks on Zelenskyy. He can achieve his ends without descending to calling Zelenskyy a dictator, so why do it?

On this matter, I dissent. Not because I think the war is a fight for democracy but because I think the real fight for democracy is right here at home and Trump is wasting political capital unnecessarily. 

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They still might be a little New England weird, but the state of New Hampshire hasn’t completely lost that ‘live free or die’ feeling of old.

Their legislature was well on the way to proving it again yesterday when the House approved a bill updating the state’s energy policy. 

While it warmed the cockles of my heart reading it, I know chills ran down the spine of ardent climate cultists all through the region, and the offshore wind industry felt the cold touch of fate’s finger as the inevitability of their demise gets telegraphed for all to see.

The House approved a bill updating the state’s energy policy to emphasize market driven, affordable and efficient sources such as fossil fuels over renewable sources.

The House also eliminated several offshore wind energy related offices from the Department of Energy in its session Thursday.

 OH, NOES! THAR SHE BLOWS AWAY!

…House Bill 682 would remove the Office of Wind Energy from the Department of Energy, repeals the offshore wind industry workforce training center committee and the offshore and port development commission, and moves the grid modernization advisory council and the hydrogen advisory council to the office of energy innovation.

The changes are designed to align with President Trump’s recent executive order to eliminate offshore wind and turbine development, according to Rep. James Summers, R-Newton, to avoid the destruction of nearby fisheries, lobster, shellfish, and whales.

“Offshore wind is more expensive and destructive than any other renewable energy source,” he told the House.

Predictably, the cult members wailed in protest that wind was ‘eventually’ going to be affordable, and darn it – this action would knock NH out of the running for chunks of the Gulf of Maine to destroy in Gaia’s name. One enthusiastic climate change believer asserted there was no evidence to prove turbines killed whales, citing a study not named in the article, and she insisted that offshore wind would always be better than ‘burning fossil fuels.’

‘This bill,’ she warned, ‘Hobbles us.’

There’s nothing worse than whiny hobbits.

‘Besides – why would NH do anything to appease an unconstitutional fascist?’

That was not a winning message.

…Thomas also noted many of Trump’s executive orders have been challenged as unconstitutional, exceed presidential authority and infringe on constitutional rights, which brought a point of order that House Speaker Sherman Packard, R-Londonderry, dismissed.

The bill passed on a 206-163 vote.

A second bill focused the state energy policy on essential factors that never really come into consideration during any pro-renewable energy argument and never could because they really aren’t applicable.

…House Bill 504 updates the state energy policy with a more detailed plan promoting an all-of-the-above technology solutions approach with emphasis on affordability, reliability and security.

Not a single one of those three requirements are met by wind or solar.

Again, the cult lobby squawked, but to no avail.

…“This policy is narrow-minded and largely backward looking,” Reynolds told the House.

The bill was approved on a 204-165 vote.

New Hampshire has been independent as the rest of New England marches towards becoming little Germanys. 

In fact, their stubborn insistence on remaining focused on reliability and security has actually saved their New England neighbors in these connected mega electrical management organizations plenty, simply because they have the reliable backup power ready for the grid when, say, Massachusetts wind and or Maine solar poops out.

They also have not contributed to the explosion in electrical demand on the grid by mandating transitions to all-electric households and businesses.

…“Compliance with the New England Decarbonization Plans would cost $815 billion through 2050,” the report concludes. “New England families would see their electric bills increase by an average of $99 per year. Commercial businesses would see their costs increase by $489 per year. Industrial (manufacturing) customers would see their electric bills increase by an average of almost $5,280 per year.” 

The report shows that on a per-capita basis, the cumulative cost of the plans increases expenses for each person in New England by an additional $2,061 in 2030, $15,552 in 2040, and an additional $51,914 in 2050. All these increases will make New England less affordable.

As the only New England state that doesn’t impose unrealistic electrification mandates for transportation and home heating, New Hampshire offers the only bright spot in the study.

“New Hampshire’s energy policies produce substantial benefits for the entire ISO-NE region,” the study concludes. “The Granite State’s lack of electrification mandates for transportation and home heating reduces the projected peak system demand from 57 GW to 52.5 GW, and the continued use of natural gas provides critical dispatchable capacity for the system, allowing it to perform better during periods of low wind and solar output.”

“New Hampshire’s current energy policies would save all New Englanders $56.5 billion during the time period studied,” the report finds.

It’s nice to see a little of that spirit alive, well, and warm where you least expect it.

Then again, they did vote…orange this [Beege fixes: PRIMARY] election.

I hope it spreads like a virus.

Beege Adds: Interesting information ALWAYS in our comments (which is a GREAT reason to be a VIP member, too, if you’re not already) pointing out that New Hampshire gets most of their electrical generation from nuclear. Now, as that wasn’t a focus of the two bills or the complaints about them from the opposition, I hadn’t heard about it. But since I have now, let me drop some really neat US Energy Information Administration factoids about NH’s energy profile.

• About three-fifths (59%) of New Hampshire households use petroleum products as their primary heating fuel, the second-largest share among the states.
• Seabrook, one of only two nuclear power plants in New England and the largest power plant in New Hampshire, provided 56% of New Hampshire’s 2023 total in-state electricity net generation.
• In 2023, 18% of New Hampshire’s electricity generation came from renewable resources, including small-scale solar installations. Most of the state’s renewable generation comes from hydroelectric power, biomass, and wind.
• New Hampshire has the two remaining coal-fired power plants in New England: Schiller at Portsmouth and Merrimack at Bow. However, Schiller is scheduled to be retired by 2025 and Merrimack by 2028.
• Wood is used as a primary heating source for 1 in 16 New Hampshire households, almost 5 times the national average.

So that one nuclear plant provides over half of the state’s electricity and exports to the NE grid as well. And that many folks still use wood was different. I’m curious if they’re primarily traditional woodstove-type set-ups or if they’re more the German/European radiating chimneys like Ebola had in his house there. Five logs when he got home from work in the evening would get the entire downstairs toasty, and it stayed that way well into the dead of night. It was an amazingly efficient design.

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Beege had ‘questions’ yesterday. The answers are coming into view — boosted by DOGE, and will be accelerated by audits everywhere else.

Both DOGE and new EPA administrator Lee Zeldin dug up $20 billion in slush-fund spending through this agency, handed to bureaucrats ostensibly to push Joe Biden’s Green New Deal agenda. Ten percent of that money came to Stacey Abrams’ non-profit Power Forward Communities in April 2024, part of that $20 billion tranche earmarked for the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program. 

Only seven other groups got funds from the GGRF, and Power Forward Communities’ grant was nearly inexplicable, as the Free Beacon’s Thomas Catenacci reported on Wednesday:

Power Forward Communities received the green energy grant despite the fact that it was founded months earlier in late 2023 and never managed anywhere near the grant’s dollar figure—it reported just $100 in total revenue during its first three months in operation, according to its latest tax filings. …

In its only press release to date, Power Forward Communities said that, in addition to induction stoves, it would use the $2 billion received from the EPA to help install heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, solar panels, home battery systems, EV chargers, and weatherization upgrades.

“For an organization that has no experience in this, that was literally just established, and had $100 in the bank to receive a $2 billion grant—it doesn’t just fly in the face of common sense, it’s out and out fraud,” Daniel Turner, the executive director of energy advocacy group Power the Future, alleged in an interview with the Free Beacon.

Yes, and it’s a fraud with a purpose. Catenacci dug further into Power Forward Communities and discovered that while it still hasn’t announced any specific projects with the $2 billion windfall from Biden, it has created some interesting partnerships. Two of them are non-profits founded by Abrams herself, the Southern Economic Advancement Project and Fair Count, both of which Abrams founded after losing to Brian Kemp in 2018. SEAP is funded by the progressive-activist Tides Center, according to Influence Watch. 

Abrams also serves on the board of another non-profit, Climate Power, along with teachers-union chief Randi Weingarten. Somehow, Climate Power found $55 million to promote Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. At least for now, no one has connected the dots between the $2 billion in one of Abrams’ organizations to the $55 million that went into campaigning for Kamala Harris. But the $20 billion went to a lot of left-wing political activists, and as Catenacci points out, the Biden administration did its best to keep it from any scrutiny:

EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced on Feb. 13 that his staff and Department of Government Efficiency officials discovered that the Biden administration parked that same $20 billion at an outside financial institution before leaving office, limiting the federal government’s oversight of the program.

That’s no accident. Biden — or whoever was pulling the Weekend At Bernie’s act at the White House — deliberately chose to shield this money from accountability. That speaks to motive and intent, and I doubt very seriously that this only applies to the “Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.” For just two other examples, the Biden administration got $42 billion for broadband expansion without ever linking a single house to the Internet, and $7.5 billion to build EV charging stations, with fewer than 50 installed. 

This is a racket, and it’s been done before — in Canada. Three decades ago, their parliament created the Sponsorship Program to deal gently with separatist sentiment in Quebec. They poured at least $100 million (Canadian) into sponsoring cultural events and running advertising. However, investigations later showed that a lot of that money ended up benefiting cronies of the governing Liberal Party:

By the early spring of 2002, then prime minister Jean Chrétien was forced to address the issue. The Globe and Mail – under the Access to Information Act – tried to find out why the government paid $550,000 to advertising firm Groupaction Marketing for a report that could not be found. No one at Public Works or the company could explain it. 

Chrétien asked federal Auditor General Sheila Fraser to see what she could find out. She learned enough to launch a full investigation – and to ask the RCMP to get involved as well. …

She found that $100 million was paid to a variety of communications agencies in the form of fees and commissions and said the program was basically designed to generate commissions for these companies rather than to produce any benefit for Canadians.

Public Works officials “broke just about every rule in the book” when it came to awarding contracts to Groupaction, which was paid millions doing work for the government under the sponsorship program, Fraser said.

The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund is simply a new and perhaps more sophisticated version of Adscam. (Full disclosure: I played a small role in publicizing the corruption in Adscam in 2005 at my previous blog, Captain’s Quarters.)  Just in these three programs alone, $70 billion in just two years has disappeared with very little to show for it, and that money had to go into someone’s pockets. Lo and behold, from the money we can still track, it all disappeared into the pockets of Democrat Party cronies and activists, and arguably some of it came back to fund Kamala Harris’ campaign. 

This is precisely why we need DOGE, and why it could force the same kind of accountability that belatedly arrived in Canada for a much smaller scale of corruption. We need to claw back all of this money, force the return of oversight to the federal agencies, and start forcing the recipients to testify in Congress as to where the money went. Taxpayers have been robbed blind while unknowingly funding the radical Left, and accountability has to be imposed — as soon as we know the true scale of this American Adscam. 

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The Pravda Media are going all out to create fear, cause chaos, generate sympathy for fired federal employees, and wrap it all around Trump’s political neck. 

The problem for them is that it is all a terrible stretch. Not that there won’t be some chaos to be found, or sympathy for individuals to be given, but the sob stories are a bit thin once you take a look a bit deeper into them. 

I think I’ve come up with a way fix this mess: make some new keys and then give them to more than one employee. https://t.co/iK65evgKH9

— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) February 21, 2025

The archetypical story is the “tourists will be trapped in Yosemite bathrooms” for lack of a locksmith story. 

I can’t say whether or not the story has a grain of truth to it, but I can definitely say that if it does, then the Park Service needs to be totally cleaned out, shut down, and rebooted. Designing a system where an employee getting sick or going on vacation, no less being let go will bring the whole thing down is malfeasance of the highest order. 

The first thing you need to know is that the employees being summarily let go are “probationary” employees–meaning that they have worked for the federal government for less than a year. If the safety and stability of the entire federal government depends on employees who were just hired, you have to wonder what the rest of the employees have been doing.

These employees are being let go not because they are especially bad, but because firing people who are no longer probationary is nearly impossible. That is a bug, not a feature. In an idea world, you could reduce headcount by separating the wheat from the chaff, but our civil service laws prohibit doing anything rational, so the choice becomes ever-expanding government employment regardless of productivity or suboptimal personnel decisions. That isn’t Trump’s fault; it is the poor design of our civil service. 

In this particular case, we are supposed to believe that Yosemite Park’s tourists are dependent on one employee–1200 square miles of particularly dangerous national park territory, and only one person who has worked there for 48 weeks has a key to open doors or gun safes. 

Uh, yeah, either that is a total lie, or everybody in charge should be summarily dismissed and checked for mental deficiencies. 

Vince’s job as the park’s sole keyholder required him to keep track of the hundreds of keys and locks to the park’s bathrooms, gun safes, administrative buildings and gates, he told the Washington Post. When guests became stuck inside vault toilets or employees got locked out of their overnight accommodations, it was Vince who came to their rescue. 

“We have endless things that need to be secured in various forms, and I’m the sole keeper of those keys, the one that makes the keys, the one that fixes the locks, installs the locks, and has all that knowledge of the security behind the park. And so it’s a critical role. And without it, everyone else in the park is handicapped,” Vince told the Post. 

Vince wrote on Instagram that along with the end of his career, he’s also now required to immediately move out of the park’s employee housing — and he’s not alone. Many laid-off workers now have mere weeks to move from their homes, a recently fired Yosemite park worker told SFGATE. The worker, who feared reprisal from the Trump administration, was interviewed under the condition of anonymity, which was granted in accordance with Hearst’s ethics policy. 

The hell of it is, millions of people take this at face value and get outraged at TRUMP for this idiocy. 

You know, it’s funny…

CNN didn’t run a single story about my neighbors in Western North Carolina living in tents for MONTHS under Joe Biden…

…but Trump fires federal workers after offering 8 MONTHS OF VACATION, and they get wall-to-wall coverage?!!

pic.twitter.com/yZTdL3anvx

— Matt Van Swol (@matt_vanswol) February 21, 2025

There is a full-court press on generating sympathy for federal workers who have enjoyed near immunity from the realities of living in a market economy. I have been fired multiple times in my life, or let go due to cutbacks, and it is always painful. But it is a fact of life for most people that things change for any number of reasons and we have to adapt. 

That federal employees, many of whom get better pay, better job security, much better benefits, and near immunity from the consequences for failure, feel entitled to lifetime employment is symbolic of the divide between the elite and the hoi polloi. We pay the taxes, they reap the benefits, and the Pravda Media is trying to sell us that this is the way it should always be. 

But if these people have designed systems so fragile that the letting go of a probationary employee is a disaster unparalleled in human history then they need to go much more than that probationary employee, whose only fault is being hired last. 

To this point, malice at least shows ability that can be directed with incentives. If there’s no ability at this point there is unlikely to be ability in the future …

— Gerbil (@surelyagerbil) February 21, 2025

But Pravda will tell you that it is an even worse betrayal to let those people go. What will they do with their gender studies degrees if they don’t get full employment for life?

The reason why we are here is not that each of the people being fired is a bad person, unproductive, or a grifter; it is that the system has become so corrupt, so dysfunctional, that the only thing you can do is take a chainsaw to it. 

No doubt Javier Milei cut some good people and programs in Argentina; but if he hadn’t done what he did his country would be poorer, everybody worse off, and the only beneficiaries would be the corrupt people who designed the system for their own benefit. 

The same is true for the illegal migrants. No doubt some are good people contributing to society. If we had an immigration system that let in such people legally and kept the violent criminals and the grfiters wanting free food and housing out of the country mass deportations wouldn’t be necessary. 

Blame the people who made dysfunctional, horribly harmful systems, not the people trying to fix them. 

Liberals: it’s your own fault. If these stories are true (doubtful), it’s even more shameful than if the system were merely bloated. 

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Will the Israelis ever get Shiri Bibas’ remains back? Adam Boehler doubts it, and believes that Hamas deliberately sent the wrong body back in the latest exchange. Why? Donald Trump’s envoy for hostage affairs assumes that the young mother’s body would show evidence of horrific treatment at the hands of her captors — just as the bodies of her babies did, much to Israel’s horror.

Boehler has a message for Hamas, too, given through CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360. Either send back all of the hostages immediately — including the remains of four Americans — or face “total annihilation”:

The remains of an Israeli mother and her two young children were expected to be released by Hamas today. U.S. Envoy for Hostage Affairs Adam Boehler reacts to the shocking development that Israel says one of the four remains did not actually belong to any of the Israeli hostages. pic.twitter.com/Vus6WAgZCG

— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) February 21, 2025

COOPER: If the Israeli assessment is accurate and Shiri Bibas’s body was not handed over, would U.S. and Israeli officials view that as a violation of the ceasefire deal? Because, I mean, yes, would that be a violation besides being a horrific —

BOEHLER: It’s a clear violation —

COOPER: — I mean, just a horrific act.

BOEHLER: I mean, like you said, Anderson, it’s horrific. It’s a clear violation. And if I have one piece of advice for Hamas now, it’s not only do you need to release her body immediately, but we have the bodies of four Americans that are still there. And we have one American, Edan Alexander. I think you know his family well.

COOPER: Yes.

BOEHLER: And you’ve done a great job reporting on it. He needs to come home. And if I were them, I’d release everybody or they’re going to face total annihilation right now.

Benjamin Netanyahu sent a message overnight as well. Addressing the nation and world in English — a clear sign that this is intended for Western audiences — Netanyahu declared that the murderers of the Bibas children “do not deserve to walk this earth“:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

“Today is a tragic day. It’s a day of boundless sorrow, of indescribable pain.

Four-year-old Ariel Bibas, his baby brother one-year-old Kfir and 84-year-old Oded Lifshitz were brutally murdered by Hamas savages. pic.twitter.com/7TMchvOZ9E

— Prime Minister of Israel (@IsraeliPM) February 21, 2025

He calls Hamas monsters for murdering the young boys, and also for sending the body of a Gazan woman back instead of Shiri yesterday “in brazen violation of the agreement.”

“Today, the heavens shake,” he says, insisting that the “entire civilized world” should condemn the murders.

Netanyahu promises to bring to justice “the savages who executed our hostages.”

“They do not deserve to walk this earth,” he says. “Nothing will stop me. Nothing.”

That sounds as though Israel won’t follow through on Phase 2 negotiations. They are, however, still cooperating in Phase 1 exchanges. Hamas gave them a list of six hostages they will release tonight (Saturday in Israel) in exchange for 602 Palestinian prisoners:

Amani Sarahneh, a spokeswoman for the NGO, tells AFP that those slated for release include 445 individuals from Gaza who were arrested after Hamas’s October 7 attack, 60 serving long sentences, 50 serving life sentences and 47 re-arrested after a 2011 exchange for captive IDF soldier Gilad Shalit.

What about Shiri Bibas? Hamas claimed to be surprised by the news, and asked for the body back:

In a statement, Hamas says it will “examine these allegations very seriously” and announce the results of its investigation.

The Hamas statement reiterates its claim that there may have been an “error or mix up” in bodies found in the rubble of an Israeli airstrike which it said killed Shiri and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir. Israel said last night that Ariel and Kfir, whose remains were identified after being handed over, were murdered in captivity by terrorists.

Hamas calls on Israel to return to Gaza the body of the Palestinian woman that it handed over yesterday in place of Shiri.

Nonsense. The Bibas children didn’t get killed in an airstrike; they got murdered by Hamas terrorists. They know exactly what happened with Shiri Bibas and wanted to take an opportunity to conduct more psychological terror on the Bibas family and the Israelis. They are looking for ways to restart the war before they run out of hostages to trade while being able to blame the Israelis for the failure of a cease-fire they keep continually violating. 

Enough is enough. This war won’t end without the utter annihilation of one of the belligerents, because the belligerent most likely to lose an all-out war keeps trying to annihilate the one who keeps cutting deals. After twenty years of this, the game should really be over, and WWII rules should apply — utter destruction or complete capitulation. The Gazans have to be forced to choose, since they keep choosing war. 

Update: IYKYK.

pic.twitter.com/0l1Mcon7Fa

— @instapundit (@instapundit) February 21, 2025