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Mayor Adams, Dear Mayor Adams! You’re Now Obnoxious and Disliked, That Cannot Be Denied

Mayor Adams, Dear Mayor Adams! You're Now Obnoxious and Disliked, That Cannot Be Denied 1

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Mayor Adams, Dear Mayor Adams! You're Now Obnoxious and Disliked, That Cannot Be Denied 2

As you force your worthless governor to mayor-cide!

ICE cooperation triggers her Dem vindictive pride.

 ~ Apologies to 1776

If there’s one thing holding true about the Democrats, particularly the progressive ones, they don’t have a problem drawing blood in public if you are one of the flock and somehow step out of the mass of bodies for a moment.

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It doesn’t matter what the reason is – God forbid it’s even legitimate…or legal.

When the rest are steadily plodding along en masse, the consequences for an oblique movement are swift and as brutal as they can conjure up.

In April two years ago, Mayor Eric Adams of New York City – not the sharpest tack, but certainly the sharpest dresser in the box – took a very public swipe at the Biden administration for what he saw as a lack of resources commensurate with the number of immigrants POTATUS and Co. expected NYC to absorb and succor.

Completely forgetting his part in inviting all those ‘homeless, tempest-tost’ to come on up to the Big Apple if they needed a place to hang, mind you.

By mid-April 2023, Adams was standing at a podium going at the Biden administration – and POTATUS – on full blast.

Mayor Adams Criticizes Biden in Rare Public Rebuke Over Migrant Crisis

The mayor blamed the White House for not doing enough to help New York City deal with the influx of migrants, or helping them find work.

As New York City was inundated with asylum seekers bused from the border last year, Mayor Eric Adams cast blame on the Republican governors of Texas, Arizona and Florida.

But when the cost to feed and house the migrants quickly escalated, Mr. Adams shifted his ire to the federal government, pressing for more emergency aid, and to allow asylum seekers to work legally.

On Wednesday, Mr. Adams delivered his harshest criticism yet, singling out President Biden, an ally who has placed Mr. Adams on a national advisory board for his re-election campaign.

“The president and the White House have failed New York City on this issue,” Mayor Adams said during a news conference at City Hall, mentioning Mr. Biden by name.

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At the time, wise observers kind of cringed and were like, ‘Yo, brother – you really want to be cracking on these people in public that hard?’ and meant ‘these people’ in the worst kind of way, knowing their retaliatory bent.

That wasn’t the last they heard of it either because Adams lit off again in July when the numbers topped almost 55 000 illegals in a city woefully unprepared to handle the influx with a chief executive who was never up to a job of that magnitude.

And Adams didn’t do it at a press conference – he had another anti-administration screed posted on the official NYC mayor’s website.

…I’m assuming they’re referencing this big of PR from the mayor’s office.

…“During this humanitarian crisis, New York City has stepped up in a way that no other locality in the country has in support of asylum seekers,” said Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs Manuel Castro. “From the start, we have called on the federal government to develop a fair decompression strategy to ensure asylum seekers find the support they need across the country, and not just rely on any one city. Unfortunately, this has not happened. As we move forward, we continue to call on the federal government to do more. We also call on the federal government to use all their powers to expedite work permits for asylum seekers, including establishing and redesignating Temporary Protection Status for those who arrived in the last year.”

The war of words went on for more than a year as the hordes poured over the border and found their way, be it Abbott Bus Tours, or Biden stealth flights in the middle of the night, into and overwhelming America’s biggest cities. By the summer of 2024, NYC was ‘full up’ and had publicly laid the blame on the administration enough that the NYT felt they had to defend the White House.

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As of August, more than 210,000 migrants had arrived in New York City since the spring of 2022, a two-year influx that has strained government resources and the city’s openness to immigration.

…In New York, many have sought shelter with the city, which has a legal obligation to provide it to anyone who asks. That rule has forced the city to find beds for migrants in more than 200 hotels, tent dormitories and office buildings. The influx has pushed the city’s homeless shelter population to a record high.

The mayor has said that President Biden “failed” the city by not doing more. But in June, Mr. Biden issued an executive order to essentially block asylum at the southern border and deter illegal crossings. The move sharply decreased border crossings this summer, as well as the number of people arriving in New York.

That was August. The following month the hammer fell on Adams.

Helping the Turks or some such.

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And everyone said, ‘Man, we TOLD you they’d be coming for you…’

Including a certain presidential candidate at a time-honored October political dinner attended by everyone who is anyone in NYC and televised for the country to see.

…In a supportive but pointed tone, Trump referenced the legal troubles facing Adams, suggesting they were politically motivated.

“They went after you, Mayor,” Trump remarked. “I said nine and a half months ago, ‘He’s going to get indicted,’ and guess what happened?” Despite the challenges, Trump expressed confidence in Adams’ ability to overcome the situation, stating, “But you’re gonna win. I think you’re gonna win. I know you’re gonna win. So, good luck.” 

The remarks underscored Trump’s ongoing focus on legal battles and political retribution, a theme consistent with his broader rhetoric against institutions he views as aligned against him and his allies.

There was nary a peep out of New York’s scary clown governor, Kathy Hochul, throughout the entire charade. 

In fact, there weren’t really any burps at all in city administration with an indicted mayor at the helm. Business as usual. Humming right along until the Trump Justice Department threw a wrench in the works and moved to drop the charges against Adams.

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Resignations flew like crazy as prosecutors in high dudgeon dropped acidly worded letters on desks on their way out the door, refusing to be the one to sign the paperwork to let the mayor off the hook, with one accusing the mayor of accepting a Trump quid pro quo: he goes free after agreeing to work with the Trump immigration gang.

…The prosecutors, led by Acting US Attorney Danielle Sassoon, refused and resigned en masse, accusing Trump-aligned officials and Adams’ defense attorneys of engaging in a “quid pro quo.”

Adams, under the reputed deal, would acquiesce to Trump’s hardline immigration plans to get his case dropped, Sassoon alleged in a scathing resignation letter.

 For the record, Tom Homan says the idea of an Adams quid pro quo is ridiculous.

White House border czar Tom Homan on Sunday denied allegations of a quid pro quo between the Trump administration and New York Mayor Eric Adams, calling the notion that the Justice Department moved to dismiss criminal charges against Adams in exchange for the mayor’s cooperation on immigration “ridiculous.”

 But Adams has agreed to work with Homan to start removing criminal aliens from his city.

And it is that –not indictment on criminal bribery charges – which has his staff resigning in protest…

Half of New York City’s deputy mayors dramatically resigned Monday in a major blow to Eric Adams’ administration – as a top rival threatened the mass exodus could lead to his ouster.

The resignations of Adams’ four senior aides — led by First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer –thrust City Hall even deeper into uncharted territory as the mayor faces mounting questions about whether he can govern the city after his controversial reprieve from his historic corruption case by President Trump’s Justice Department.

The four deputy mayors — Torres-Springer, Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi, Deputy Mayor for Health Human Services Anne Williams-Isom and Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Chauncey Parker — resigned as dozens rallied in support of Adams unfolded in Rehoboth Cathedral in Brooklyn.

The rally contrasted with the growing calls for Adams to resign or Gov. Kathy Hochul to remove him from office in light of Trump’s DOJ moving to scuttle his criminal case — a move that many critics argue makes the mayor a hostage to the president.

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…and the scary clown running the state of New York seriously considering removing him from office if he doesn’t leave voluntarily.

VURT DE FURK

You got to be kidding me.

As if suddenly it’s Hochul’s most solemn of duties.

All this in the light of day.

These people are shameless.

Posted in Republican News

Is ‘Brokenism’ The True Political Divide?

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Is 'Brokenism' The True Political Divide? 4

In our weekly VIP Gold chat shows on Wednesdays (1:30 pm ET), my friend Cam Edwards often says, “Everything is stupid and it’s only getting worse.” Perhaps another way of saying this is that everything is broken, and everyone knows it — but does nothing about it. 

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At the Free Press, Oliver Wiseman picks up on that same sense of frustration in the electorate, and asks whether the political poles have changed. Forget Republicans and Democrats, progressives and conservatives, or even the class-warfare arguments, all of which nibble at the edges of this political moment. Wiseman recalls Tablet editor-in-chief writing about “brokenism,” and posits that the real divide is between those who see the wisdom of Cam’s perspective and those who want to protect the ruins of institutions that they themselves have ruined:

In January 2021, Newhouse wrote an essay addressing what she would later describe as “the growing sense, made more glaring during the first year of the pandemic, that whole parts of America were breaking down before our eyes.” She argued that major institutions of American life—from the media to medicine—no longer worked. “Everything Is Broken,” was Newhouse’s unsparing conclusion—and the essay’s memorable headline.

Almost two years later, Newhouse wrote a follow-up, titled “Brokenism,” which translated the ideas of her first essay into a new political rubric. The most important divide in our politics, she argued, wasn’t between left and right, but between “brokenists” and “status-quoists.” Brokenists can be on the left or the right, or in the middle, but they agree that “what used to work is not working for enough people anymore.” Status-quoists, by contrast, “are invested in the established institutions of American life, even as they acknowledge that this or that problem around the margins should of course be tackled.” Bernie Sanders? Brokenist. Liz Cheney? Status-Quoist. Or—to pick further examples Newhouse doesn’t name in her piece—Joe Rogan? Brokenist. Matthew Yglesias? Status-quoist. (Presciently, Newhouse identified Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk as two tech world brokenists—two years before they would come out for Trump.)

Newhouse’s argument struck me as obviously true and important back in 2022. It explained how tech, Trump’s first term, Covid, wokeness, and so much else had combined to scramble our politics. After almost a month of Trump’s second term, “brokenism” looks like a more important idea than ever—the thread that connects so much of the revolution underway in Washington, D.C.

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RFK and Tulsi Gabbard? Brokenist. Pete Hegseth? Brokenist. Elon Musk? Brokenist. 

This paradigm does fit the moment pretty well, although one could argue that this has a more well-known name: populism. Populism is always a revolt against institutions perceived as corrupt or unresponsive, and its opposition is always oriented to defend the institutions. “Brokenism” may describe the specific mood more accurately, but Donald Trump and his “brokenists” are essentially populists — Hegseth perhaps especially. Rather than appoint a SecDef from the general staff or the Senate, Trump picked a lower-ranking officer who served in the field and has oriented himself firmly against the status quo defended by the elites. 

Populists don’t champion those who promise to do nip-and-tuck fixes to the status quo. They pick people who plan to deconstruct the status quo and rebuild it to respond to popular will. That’s precisely what Trump pledged to do as a candidate in 2016, and what he ferociously pledged to do in 2024 if he returned to the White House. Every single one of his Cabinet picks has oriented themselves to overhauls rather than adjustments to the status quo.

There is something else in play too. Last month, I read a column whose link I have since lost that put this same dynamic in different and somewhat more positive terms. The difference can also be seen as choosing creators or managers. If voters were satisfied with the status quo, they would choose someone to manage it. If they found the status quo unacceptable, they would choose someone to create a new status quo — or perhaps in this case, a return to a previous status quo of secure borders, sanity on crime, and biological realities taking precedence over feelings. 

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Biden — or whoever ran him — was a manager over a status quo that no one liked, and a defender of institutions he and his allies looted and corrupted. Harris and her string-pullers were pinch-hitting managers of the status quo. Trump is a creator, this time backed by a team of creators, who had no allegiance to a corrupt status quo. If it hadn’t been for his high personal unfavorability last year, Trump might have won 45 states. 

Both imperfectly cover this moment on their own. Together, though, they explain the political environment we see, and also why Democrats still can’t find their footing in it. They are so invested in the corrupt status quo — literally, in the corrupt funding that DOGE is exposing and undoing — that they cannot reorient themselves as either “brokenists” or creators. They have grown fat and lazy in the status quo of the last few decades, and everyone on their bench are managers of it rather than creators. And until they can find creators, Democrats will spend a very long time in the wilderness. 

Posted in Republican News

Now She Tells Us…

Now She Tells Us... 5

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Golly gee wizzikers. 

Would you look at that! Deborah Birx is back to tell us that maybe, perhaps, in just this one case, it might have been better to follow the science instead of The Science™. 

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Saying what Deborah Birx just did to Piers Morgan got people banned across social media, called “conspiracy theorists,” “vaccine deniers,” and accused of killing grandmas. 

We are in the “now it can be told” phase of history, in which all the liars who made their fortunes and reputations by lying to you are now increasing their fortunes and reputations by admitting that they lied to you. 

Except in this case they are also cruel murderers who impoverished millions, forced millions more to endure experimental treatments for diseases they would never suffer harm from, destroyed trust in a public health system that had built it up over nearly two centuries, and created the conditions for the return of childhood diseases that had nearly been vanquished. 

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Aging parents and grandparents died alone, unable to see their families because of Deborah Birx. She bragged in her book that she defied Trump’s policies with the collusion of Mike Pence. She simply ignored any orders she disagreed with and got away with it. 

This little documentary on Birx lays out her evil ways. It makes clear that she, even more than Fauci, drove the worst of the policies that ruined millions of lives, cost trillions of dollars, and harmed two generations of our youth. It is half an hour, but if you can spare the time it is well worth the watch. 

Yet Birx, like Fauci, is thriving. You’ll never guess where she is now…

Now She Tells Us... 6George W Bush Presidential Center.

Geez. Nice gig if you can get it. And apparently conspiring against the American people is a good way to get that gig. 

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Somebody in the current Trump administration–perhaps a Bobby Kennedy Jr. intern?–should do a deep dive into her emails and work product to see if she violated any laws during her time as Pandemic Coordinator. 

One of the greatest frustrations of my job is seeing corruption go unpunished and people get rewarded time and again for causing untold amounts of damage to others. 

Birx is one of the great villains of our lifetimes, yet she is doing even better than Fauci. At least Fauci has millions of people who hate him; few people remember Deborah Birx, and most who do think of her flair for wearing scarves. 

Is there ever any justice in the world?

Posted in Republican News

Follow the Money: DEI Dominoes Are All Falling Now

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Follow the Money: DEI Dominoes Are All Falling Now 8

Alternate headline: Robby Starbuck Really Gets Around. 

In this case, though, we may have reached the cultural tipping point on DEI. Last week, we learned that the politically well-connected Goldman Sachs had decided to abandon ship on the Left’s attempt to force quotas onto corporate America. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reports that the entire banking industry will soon follow suit:

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Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup are removing or watering down public language around efforts to promote or support diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, according to people familiar with the matter. Wells Fargo and Bank of America have also started to pore over their language, some of the people said.

The moves mark the beginning of a pullback from Wall Street’s push into DEI, according to bank executives and lawyers, which came after the 2020 protests over the death of George Floyd, a Black man murdered by police. The banks are joining a retreat by many other big companies that have dialed back similar efforts, including Ford, McDonald’s and Walmart. Tech giants such as Meta Platforms and Alphabet’s Google have done so, too.

More changes are in the works at banks in the coming weeks, when companies release their annual reports, proxies and other public filings. Banks have also launched audits of DEI policies, programs and events that could open them up to legal risks. 

Executives’ worries about DEI efforts increased after President Trump’s executive order last month directing federal departments and agencies to launch civil investigations into the programs at companies. 

Are they worried? Or are they relieved? Because this looks much more like the latter in corporate America. 

To return to Starbuck, he began getting results long before Trump got elected. Starbuck launched a very public campaign a couple of years ago to embarrass corporate boards that imposed racial and gender quotas in hiring and promotion, and began to score victories while Joe Biden was still in the presidential race. The more of these victories Starbuck scored, the more that came his way — and that was no accident. Naming and shaming turned out to be a very successful strategy, not because DEI was broadly popular, but because it wasn’t. Starbuck’s campaign of ridicule and public criticism alerted consumers to these practices, who turned out to dislike then intensely. 

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Even by September 2024 — while the media celebrated the Joy McBrat campaign of Democrats’ DEI anointee — Starbuck had begun to gain converts merely by mention. At that point, Starbuck had convinced a number of significant corporations to dump DEI:

  • Molson Coors
  • Harley-Davidson
  • Lowe’s 
  • Tractor Supply
  • The parent company of Jack Daniels whiskey

A month later, Toyota and Ford had thrown in the towel. After the election but before Trump had articulated a specific DEI policy, Walmart reversed course, followed by McDonald’s and Amazon two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, and Target immediately after it. Google dumped their DEI ‘hiring targets’ after Trump’s EOs, and now we have the banking industry about to follow suit. What had been a Sisyphean task for Starbuck in 2023 and early 2024 had already turned into an avalanche, now seemingly on auto-pilot. 

So what’s really going on? The banking industry has significant regulatory ties to the federal government, so one could assume that Trump’s threats to stamp out DEI may play a part in this decision. The rest of these corporations don’t have that problem, though, and they tumbled sooner than the financial institutions did. The real impetus for this acceleration is that corporate executives have belatedly discovered how deeply unpopular these quotas-in-all-but-name actually are. Trump’s election certainly provides evidence for that, along with the polling that shows a vast majority of Americans support the end of DEI, affirmative action, and especially the radical transgender activism that provided the straw that broke the camel’s back for DEI. 

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Starbuck deserves a ton of credit for battling out the war for the culture — and for its success. 

Posted in Republican News

Associated Press Now Making S**t Up Because They Are Big Mad at Trump

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Associated Press Now Making S**t Up Because They Are Big Mad at Trump 10

The Associated Press and the White House are having an argument over whether the “journalists” can deadname the Gulf of America. 

Because the AP refuses to use the official name of the Gulf, the White House has revoked the organization’s pass to enter the Oval Office and board Air Force One. It still has a seat at the White House briefing room but no special access as it has had in the past. 

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Many people think the White House is being petty, but they have a point–the Associated Press is having a temper tantrum and actively spreading what amounts to misinformation from the White House’s point of view, and frankly the AP deserves to get its snout slapped with a newspaper for all the crap they pull. 

The AP, as you might imagine, is big mad. So they are using the one tool they have to get back at Trump: they are spinning stories even harder. 

The latest example crosses the line from spin to complete bulls**t. In a story trying to pin the blame for a Canadian aircraft accident, reporter Tara Copp throws everything, including the kitchen sink, at Trump. Because she is a Pentagon reporter, she latches onto the strangest things, like FAA technicians working at an early warning radar site in Hawaii, as proof that Trump wants us all dead by falling out of the sky. 

Other FAA employees who were fired were working on an urgent and classified early warning radar system the Air Force had announced in 2023 for Hawaii to detect incoming cruise missiles, through a program that was in part funded by the Department of Defense. It’s one of several programs that the FAA’s National Defense Program manages that involve radars providing longer-range detection around the country’s borders.

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The article reads as if she sat down at her keyboard and vomited her rage out into the internet, and is as accurate as you might imagine. 

Kopp gives us a particularly troublesome example of an employee who was fired because he was a critic of Tesla, and provided the proof:

Spitzer-Stadtlander suggested he was targeted for firing for his views on Tesla and X, formerly Twitter, not as part of a general probationary-level sweep. Both companies are owned by Elon Musk, who is leading Trump’s effort to cut the federal government.

Spitzer-Stadtlander is Jewish and was angered by Elon Musk’s straight arm saluting at Trump’s inauguration. On his personal Facebook account he urged friends to get rid of their Teslas and “X,” or Twitter, accounts in response.

That post drew the attention of a DOGE Facebook account, which reacted with a laughing emoji. Soon after, he saw the same account reacting to much older posts through his personal Facebook feed.

“The official DOGE Facebook page started harassing me on my personal Facebook account after I criticized Tesla and Twitter,” Spitzer-Stadtlander wrote in a post over the weekend on Linked In. “Less than a week later, I was fired, despite my position allegedly being exempted due to national security.”

He added: “When DOGE fired me, they turned off my computer and wiped all of my files without warning.”

Spitzer-Stadtlander said he was supposed to be exempted from the probationary firings because the FAA office he worked in focused on national security threats such as attacks on the national airspace by drones.

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The only problem? There is no official DOGE page on Facebook. Somebody has set up a Facebook page NAMED DOGE–presumably a fan–but the fine folks at DOGE are a bit too busy to monitor random FAA employees in Hawaii. 

The Associated Press claims to be the gold standard of journalism, but their reporters are about what you would expect: entitled midwits who are emotionally incontinent and who weaponize their hatred for their own ends. 

Sean Duffy gives the receipts:

Mayor Pete failed for four years to address the air traffic controller shortage and upgrade our outdated, World War II-era air traffic control system. In less than four weeks, we have already begun the process and are engaging the smartest minds in the entire world. 

Here’s the truth: the FAA alone has a staggering 45,000 employees. Less than 400 were let go, and they were all probationary, meaning they had been hired less than a year ago. Zero air traffic controllers and critical safety personnel were let go. 

Mayor Pete chose to use this amazing department—that is so critical to America’s success—as a slush fund for the green new scam and environmental justice nonsense. Not to mention that over 90% of the workforce under his leadership were working from home – including him. The building was empty! 

When we finally get a full accounting of his mismanagement, I look forward to hearing from him.

In the meantime, I will not rest until I return the Department of Transportation and its incredible employees to its mission of efficiency and safety.

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In other words, the AP story is BS from start to finish. 

Donald Trump has magical powers. One of the most powerful of them is forcing our elite institutions to unmask themselves as totally fake. 

Posted in Republican News

Monday’s Final Word

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Closing the pot-luck tabs …

Harvey Weinstein has sued his brother, Bob Weinstein, and another executive at the Weinstein Company alleging fraud and a conspiracy to push him out of the company. 

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The suit, filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York Saturday, alleges that Bob Weinstein, Weinstein Company executive David Glasser and others got Harvey Weinstein to guarantee a $45 million loan from AI International Holdings to support the film production and distribution company. However, the suit alleges that the money was not used to help the company, but rather that Bob Weinstein and Glasser took the money for “personal use, unauthorized bonuses, and unrelated financial dealings.”

Ed: Can we root for both of them to lose? Seriously?

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Ed: To paraphrase memorable philosopher Walter Sobchak: Say what you will about MSNBC, but at least it’s an ethos. 

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The knowledge that these police-state concepts were being planned for deployment here was a major strike against the Biden/Harris campaign. Vance Friday was surely speaking not just to Europe, but to America’s own intelligence services, which have been the surreptitious sponsors (if not the architects) of a lot of these European laws against “misinformation.” Though the 60 Minutes piece centered on German officials, it’s hard to avoid thinking of this subtext when watching last night’s story. Germany is a state whose constitution allows it under extreme circumstances to reject democratic choices in order to preserve a pre-determined set of values. The power to reject speech falls into the same general intellectual basket.

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I wonder if after Vance told off Europe, Europe is telling Americans it has a successful model for preventing unwelcome election results. In German media that would be merely obnoxious. From 60 Minutes? It’s wild. A true head-shaker.

Ed: I don’t mean this as a criticism of Matt Taibbi, but it’s not THAT much of a head-shaker. 60 Minutes just got caught editing Kamala Harris’ interview to make her sound more coherent, and 60 Minutes has a decades-long track record of dishonest practices. As does CBS News more generally. 

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Ed: Glad everyone got out, which is a testament to the professionalism of the Delta crew. But this will raise a lot of questions about how a plane flipped after landing, and whether conditions at the airport contributed to the accident. I spent years flying in and out of Minneapolis in the winter, so I know it can be done safely, but sometimes it means taking more time to ensure safety. 

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The foreman of the jury that found that CNN committed defamation against U.S. Navy veteran Zachary Young doesn’t believe the network did itself any favors during the high-stakes trial.  

“I think it may change the way a lot of people look at CNN and maybe not take their news 100% to be correct,” Katy Svitenko told Fox News Digital in her first interview. 

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Ed: Worth reading in full. Apparently, the testimony of CNN’s principals turned out to have done the most damage to CNN. They came across as arrogant and unremorseful, the forewoman told Fox. Or to paraphrase again, this time from an old axiom, they opened their mouths and removed all doubt.

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Ed: The Poster Child Strategy continues apace for Democrats. Every time a House or Senate Democrat laments a very specific line item being interrupted, two questions should be asked. What percentage of that spending actually reached the Poster Children, as opposed to the bureaucrats and paid NGO staffers? And why doesn’t Tim Kaine (in this case) propose a specific appropriation for that cause in Congress?

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NATO’s last annual report revealed the U.S. represents 53 percent of the GDP of all countries in the alliance. But the U.S. makes 67 percent of alliance defense expenditures. NATO sets a goal for members to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense. Even with rising tensions, only 11 of the alliance’s 32 members hit that benchmark in that report (the next report should show more meeting the goal).

Among the countries not hitting the 2 percent mark are Canada, France, and Germany—all wealthy countries that could significantly contribute to the alliance’s defense. Germany claims to have hit the 2 percent target in its latest budget. But Canada’s government reportedly told NATO that it “will never” hit the target.

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Ed: Why not? Canada spends too much on its welfare state, which means we are partially subsidizing it. If Canada doesn’t want to be treated as a province of the US, maybe it should stop acting like one. 

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The most significant change is that all potential sponsors must be fingerprinted, and the fingerprints must be sent to the FBI to check for criminal records. No child will be released to a sponsor until their fingerprints are recorded in the unaccompanied child’s file. In addition, all identification documents must be legible and unexpired.

Critics of the Trump administration’s immigration policy complain that cumbersome fingerprinting and identification rules could delay the vetting of sponsors, leading to a backlog and overcrowding in shelters that house unaccompanied children. They also fear that under Harper, who has been an official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement since 2007, ORR will share information about the sponsors, most of whom are illegal immigrants themselves, with ICE, making it easier to arrest and deport them. But Harper was unapologetic in an email to the ORR staff. “The pervasive fraud in the sponsor process is undeniable,’ she wrote.

She’s right.

Ed: Read this in full and be amazed that we didn’t fingerprint ‘sponsors’ before now. Consider this in light of all the hoops one must jump through in order to foster or adopt children. Yet the Biden administration never vetted these ‘sponsors’ at all, which meant that traffickers exploited this system to put children into sexual slavery on an industrial scale. 

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Posted in Republican News

DOGE Fired Thousands of Government Employees Over the Weekend

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The Washington Post is reporting that DOGE fired thousands of government employees over the weekend, many of whom were on probationary status often reserved for new hires. 

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Many federal government employees were dismissed over the holiday weekend as managers confronted a Trump administration demand to fire workers by Tuesday. In group texts and in online forums, they dubbed the error-ridden run of firings the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

The firings targeted new hires on probation, who have fewer protections than permanent employees, and swept up people with years of service who had recently transferred between agencies, as well as military veterans and people with disabilities employed through a program that sped their hiring but put them on two years’ probation. Most probationary employees have limited rights to appeal dismissals, but union heads have vowed to challenge the mass firings in court. The largest union representing federal workers has also indicated it plans to fight the terminations and pursue legal action…

The Trump administration will not disclose how many workers it cut since last week ahead of its Tuesday deadline, but the government employed more than 200,000 probationary workers as of last year. The firings have extended to touch employees at almost every agency, including map makers, archaeologists and cancer researchers, The Post found, in choices that some workers said contradicted a U.S. Office of Personnel Management directive to retain “mission-critical” workers.

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The Post spoke to over 250 employees who claimed they had been fired with many of the decisions citing poor performance. However, some of these employees had only recently received positive reviews from their employers. A lawyer who spoke to the Post (and who filed a complaint about the process along with a left-leaning group) claimed this was illegal.

Firing employees en masse with the same claim of poor performance is illegal, said Jim Eisenmann, a partner at the Alden Law Group, a law firm specializing in litigation by federal employees. It violates federal law covering career civil service employees, he said.

“It can’t be true,” Eisenmann said. “They’re clearly not articulating this on an individual basis, which is what makes it so suspect.”

But an OPM spokesperson responded that probationary hires had no guarantee of continued employment. “The probationary period is a continuation of the job application process, not an entitlement for permanent employment,” she said.

Frankly, this reminds me a bit of President Obama’s attempt to frame DACA as an extension of prosecutorial discretion. Normally prosecutorial discretion is applied to individual cases but DACA expanded that to a large group nearly a million people. Similarly, I wonder if the firings carried out over the weekend don’t represent a similar approach to employment in which discretion usually applied to individuals (whether to retain or fire them) is being applied to a larger group all at once.

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OPM also offered a template notice agencies could send to fired workers. It read in part: “The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest.” Federal law gives agencies wide latitude to fire probationary workers so long as they provide written notice “as to why he is being separated [and] the agency’s conclusions as to the inadequacies of his performance or conduct.”

You can rest assured that this is going to wind up in court. The government will argue that probationary employees can be fired at any time so long as they are given written notice and lawyers for the employees will argue that the decisions weren’t made on an individual basis. Lawsuits over DACA have dragged on for years. The Alden Law Group and Democracy Forward have already filed a complaint over the firings. 

These firings could play into the decision expected tomorrow in a case brought by a group of 14 states. The state AG’s asked for temporary restraining order while the case proceeds but in a hearing today the judge didn’t sound inclined to grant one. However, one of the issues that couldn’t be resolved during the hearing was whether or not thousands of employees had been fired over the weekend.

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A government attorney told Chutkan he had not been able to confirm mass government layoffs took place on Friday.

“The firing of thousands of federal employees is not a small or common thing. You haven’t been able to confirm that?” she asked. The DOJ attorney said he would update the court with a letter by the end of Monday.

So if the government does confirm there were thousands of firings over the weekend, as the Post story indicates, that could potentially change the judge’s view of the situation and result in a TRO issued sometime tomorrow preventing DOGE from firing anyone else until the case is reloved. Stay tuned

Posted in Republican News

More CNN #Sadz: Frank Luntz Says Clinton Voters Who Flipped to Trump ‘Lovin’ It’

More CNN #Sadz: Frank Luntz Says Clinton Voters Who Flipped to Trump 'Lovin' It' 14

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The hits keep coming even as CNN continues its quest to find the three people in America who voted for Trump and are really pissed at him right now.

This is going to be harder to find than a six-word coherent sentence in a Kamala Harris appearance.

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Nope – nuthin’ there.

Nonetheless, the sleuths at CNN are dedicated to the mission and on the hunt.

Miss Perpetually Pained had to act as if she was remotely interested in what 11 former Biden voters had to say to her during an interview on the formerly popular, used to be ‘all news’ network.

Couldn’t they just say they were happy without saying why, the gloating little toads?

Gruesome times for Trump foes.

More CNN #Sadz: Frank Luntz Says Clinton Voters Who Flipped to Trump 'Lovin' It' 15

And the spread on his approval numbers keeps ticking up point by point.

Whoda thunk? People voted for a guy who said he go after immigration, go after corruption, go after government waste, go after woke, and, when he gets elected, actually does what he says…and they love him for it.

Even better, he comes into the office like an avenging god, smoting and smiting left and right with his sword – and pen – to accomplish those goals and get the steamroller moving in record time.

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Even acting with ruthless, breathtaking efficiency, Trump is winning converts and reassuring those who might have held their noses to vote for him that their act of blind faith wasn’t squandered.

Promises made, promises being kept, and at blinding speed.

They love him for it, for the shock and awe, yes. But also for the confusion and lamentations rising from a woefully unprepared, overconfident enemy who’d rested on their evil haunches secure that the old playbook would be sufficient.

President Donald Trump is taking a page out of the playbook used by many of the tech titans who now support him, moving fast and breaking things—all to the delight of his supporters.

Voters who cast ballots for Trump in November told Newsweek they are thrilled over the rapid speed and breadth of the president’s action over his two-and-a-half weeks back in office, applauding him for for “doing everything he said he would.”

“He’s damn near got a checklist and he just going down the line,” Michaelah Montgomery, a Trump supporter and political activist from Atlanta, said in an interview.

With four years out of office to ponder where and how to govern more effectively, Trump took the White House by storm last month, moving immediately on immigration, energy, diversity programs, public health, the federal bureaucracy, TikTok, pardons for those he deemed unfairly prosecuted —addressing many of the exact issues he vowed to tackle on the campaign trail. In 16 days in office, he has signed 45 executive orders, the Federal Register shows.

Jacob Creech, who runs the popular conservative X account @WarClandestine, said even he was shocked and impressed by what he’s seen in the early days of the second Trump administration.

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Oh, they love him for it.

It makes no sense to the talking CNN heads.

…“They’re reacting to it because they love the pace of change. They were very fed up over the last four years. They wanted action. They wanted results. They looked at prices. They looked at affordability. They looked at immigration. And they didn’t see anything happening,” Luntz said. “They still don’t like what he says, but they like what he does. And these are Democrats now who felt that they were not securing the border. They were doing nothing to prevent illegal immigration, that nothing was actually happening.”

And when you’ve lost Hillary voters to the Bad Orange Man?

There’s not a lot left on the bone for the opposition to scrape up to feel better.

WaPo is trying hard. They’ve got their lower-tier Philip Bump #waah on.

The only new president Trump outperforms in the polls is himself

On his fifth Presidents’ Day in office, Trump remains a bottom-tier member of the group. 

But that’s not exactly the case. How ’bout a little Bump #FactCheck for misinformation?

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Oh, the cope.

And the burn.

It’s like Christmas every day.

Posted in Republican News

‘I’m Not Seeing It So Far’: Judge Appears Unwilling to Block DOGE for Now

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'I'm Not Seeing It So Far': Judge Appears Unwilling to Block DOGE for Now 17

Last week a group of states sued Elon Musk and DOGE demanding that he be sent to the Senate for confirmation. Today, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan held arguments in the case despite the fact that it was President’s Day, normally a holiday for the courts. The judge promised to render her decision within 24 hours, however it sounded as if she was not especially impressed with the plaintiff’s request for a temporary restraining order to block DOGE’s activity.

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The states argued their ability to carry out educational and other programs were at risk. They accused Musk’s team of using data gleaned from agency systems to dismantle initiatives and direct mass firings.

“The things I’m hearing are troubling indeed, but I have to have a record and findings of fact before I issue something,” Chutkan said. She expressed doubt that the states had met the legal standard for imminent harm required for a temporary restraining order, or TRO.

“It’s kind of a like a prophylactic TRO and that’s not allowed,” she said of the states’ request. She said if the states eventually prevailed, she could order programs to be restored.

ABC News has more:

The judge said that in order to issue such an urgent temporary restraining order, the states would have to prove a threat of “extreme” and “imminent harm” that “can’t be undone” — and although having to “scramble to rehire” laid-off employees might be difficult and challenging, it can be done.

“I’m not seeing it so far,” she said of the harms the plaintiffs are claiming.

That’s good news I guess but it’s really a pretty small win in the scope of things. Something like 20 lawsuits have been filed against DOGE and several judges have already ruled in favor of restraining orders.

Over the last week, courts have ruled that DOGE is temporarily barred from accessing sensitive Treasury Department information and payment systems; that agencies that maintain public health data must restore their websites and databases; that the State Department must pause the implementation of Trump’s sweeping 90-day foreign aid freeze and the dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and that the National Institutes of Health cannot reduce their cap on indirect funding for research, nor can the federal government withhold any federal funding because a health care entity or professional provides gender-affirming medical service to a minor.

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However DOGE has had some wins too. Last week a different judge refused to issue a restraining order on DOGE’s access to data at four agencies including HHS and Labor Department.

A federal judge declined on Friday to block the access of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to records systems containing personal information at the Health and Human Services Department, the Labor Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a setback for unions and nonprofits trying to fight Elon Musk’s effort to cut and reshape government…

“The record indicates,” Judge Bates wrote, that members of Mr. Musk’s team are federal employees “who have a need for the record in the performance of their duties.”

The Trump administration also won a case relating to the buyout offer given to about 2 million federal employees. 

As Ed noted earlier today, we’re probably about to see another host of lawsuits incoming once DOGE moves on to scrutinize the IRS but even before we get there, DOGE is having an impact at Social Security where the head of the agency just resigned.

The acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration left her job this weekend after a clash with billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service over their attempts to access sensitive government records, three people familiar with her departure said Monday.

Michelle King, who spent several decades at the agency before being named its acting commissioner last month, has now left her position after the disagreement, the people said…

“What I know is that DOGE wanted access to SSA’s sensitive files — the same way they’re trying to do at Labor and Treasury — and the acting commissioner wouldn’t give it, and she was replaced,” said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, a left-leaning group, citing conversations with several current officials at the agency.

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The exact details of the situation aren’t clear but I’m not sure what is meant by “sensitive files” in that final quote. As I’ve pointed out before, I worked at SSA for 11 years in my late 20s and early 30s. While there I had computer access to vast amounts of data including the complete work history, salary, current address, etc. for nearly every American.

To be clear, I never abused that access and there were safeguards in place to make sure employees weren’t looking up celebrities’ work history for fun. That said, I also didn’t have any kind of special security clearance, nor did any of the people I worked with who had the same access at their desks. I was just one of thousands of low level employees at the agency. 

In all, SSA has more than 50,000 full time employees. So, again, the idea that this kind of access is a state secret just doesn’t ring true. Tens of thousands of people at SSA have access to all sorts of personal data on Americans including medical and legal records. This is not limited to a few people and probably can’t be. Someone has to prepare files on the millions of people being paid money every month by SSA.

Trump hasn’t been in office for a full month yet. We’re still very early in this process. Hopefully, the legal hurdles will be resolved in a few months and DOGE will continue to look for ways to bring government waste, fraud and abuse under control.

Posted in Republican News

Reminder of What We Almost Had to Endure

Reminder of What We Almost Had to Endure 18

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Reminder of What We Almost Had to Endure 19

Did you know that Kamala Harris is currently the favorite to replace Gavin Newsom as governor of California?

Californians can’t seem to get enough of her, although it is easy to overstate any poll numbers at this stage of the game. After all, she has incredible name ID in the state; millions of people there just voted for her, and she is a famously horrible campaigner. 

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But still, she is the leading candidate. 

Which is a good reminder of what we here in the real world narrowly averted. 

Lots of people posted this video of Harris meeting with some actors at a Broadway show, mostly because they thought she looked and sounded hammered (maybe?) and that she sounded vacuous (always). But what I found striking was how everybody hung on her every word and nodded along with her nonsense. 

It’s like cult members hanging on the every word of a cult leader’s rambling. It’s as if she has the hypnotizing power of a cobra weaving in front of its victim. 

If you aren’t the hypnotized one, it looks creepy and bizarre. What is wrong with these people?

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The Democratic Party often appears to be filled with half-wits. We believe that because the people who lead the party are so clearly liars and con men, with mentally vacuous people like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris rising to the very top of the party despite being unable to string sentences together. 

But I KNOW it is not the case that most Democrats are dumb. Forget the education/credentials arguments since prestigious degrees and nice titles guarantee nothing about a person’s intelligence anymore. David Hogg went to Harvard, FFS, so credentials mean nothing. 

But I know from personal experience that plenty of Democrats are smart, yet they nod along and clap to this nonsense and don’t seem to notice that none of it makes sense. 

Which brings us back to the hypnosis hypothesis. It must be the case that the steady stream of Pravda propaganda, appeals to authority, belief in credentials, and restricted social circles combine to hypnotize otherwise capable people into believing that nonsense makes sense. Throw in some emotionally loaded words and you can make “educated” people believe anything. 

Even that Kamala Harris is a leader worth following. That she utters profundities. 

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This gets me back to a point I make often: it is the enabling institutions, such as academia and the Pravda Media, that must remain the focus of most of our efforts. They make the hypnosis possible. 

Nobody would follow Kamala Harris but for the fact that they are told she is a wise woman. Obviously, she hasn’t the capacity to teach a third-grade class. She is as profound as a fortune cookie. 

Elite institutions are our real enemy. Democratic Party politicians are, for the most part, interchangeable tools. 

Posted in Republican News
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