FEMA AN EVEN BIGGER DISASTER THAN THE STORMS
THEMSELVES -- AND HOW IT CAN BE REPLACED
By Ned Barnett, October 5, 2024

This is more of a think piece than an article, so please stay with me here. It’s based on decades of public health and disaster management work I’ve been involved with during my career.

I first got involved in this while working as an executive at Lexington County Hospital, across the river from the state Capital of Columbia in South Carolina. I’ve had similar positions at other county and city hospitals, including such disaster areas as Flint, Michigan’s city hospital. In all cases, those hospitals were responsible for public health in the counties and cities they served.

At Lexington County Hospital, we were hit by Hurricane David – not just hit, but for roughly eight hours, the eye of the storm seemed to hover right on top of our hospital, which was in itself frightening.

Nowhere near as big as Helene, even a relatively mild hurricane like David is a monster storm. Until you’ve seen water blown into the hospital through the brick wall, you have no idea what a deluge coming at you at 85 miles per hour can do – let alone Helene’s 140 miles per hour winds – you really can’t appreciate the damage it can do. I do know that when David was approaching, I evacuated my family – my wife and infant son, but not our pet Sheltie, “Pumpkin” – into the hospital. This protected them – hospitals are built to withstand such winds and environmental violence – so I could focus on doing my job without worrying about their safety.

In this South Carolina community, the Army at nearby Fort Jackson provided helicopter emergency medivac – medical and evacuation services. This was great, real-life training for the Army helicopter and air-rescue crews, and it provided excellent med-evac services for our five-county region.

This got me involved in what the military have to offer in the realm of support services during a natural disaster. Later, I worked with a hospital in Jacksonville, on the North Carolina coast, and immediately adjacent to Marine Corps Camp LeJeune. During my time with them, both Hurricane Fran and Hurricane Floyd slammed into the North Carolina coast with winds of up to 137 and 122 miles per hour, respectively. The disaster rivaled Helene’s impact, but in a much smaller scale.

My point (and I do have one) is I’ve seen what’s involved in hurricane recovery, both short-term and long-term. Added to that, my father-in-law, John Lines, was the senior Civil Service employee at what is now the Department of Health and Human Services. This was before FEMA, when his agency responded to natural disasters. His job was to get on site fast and coordinate disaster recovery. I learned a lot from his after-action discussions over the family dinner table, lessons I later put into use when I had similar responsibilities, but on a city or county level. He was a rare breed – a career civil servant who actually cared about what he did and the lives he impacted, for good or ill. We need more like him.

But how does this impact Helene? Well, first, we just learned that the Biden-Harris administration diverted funds intended for hurricane disaster relief to help illegal aliens. Since we can count on having hurricanes each year, this was a Capital B “Bad” decision. Not because of mythical “global warming,” but because hurricanes are how the Atlantic interacts with large land masses. In the Pacific, most tropical cyclones are called “typhoons,” but in the Atlantic, they’re “hurricanes.”

The worst one on record – at least in terms of lost human life – is the monster that clobbered Galveston, Texas more than a century ago. They didn’t have cute names back then – it has gone down in history as the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900. This monster took between 8,000 and 12,000 lives – a more massive disaster than the San Francisco earthquake half a decade later, and far worse than Helene or even Katrina.

However, because there is so much more population in coastal areas today, and so much built-up cities to be destroyed, Katrina is odds-on the king of the monsters, the Godzilla of American hurricanes. But Helene is far and away the worst hurricane to do so much inland damage in the 21st Century.

We can count on these murderous Atlantic mega-storms occurring every year, and if diverting funds from American disaster relief to support in high style millions of people who don’t belong here isn’t a crime, it should be. This makes diversion of funds on a massive scale away from hurricane relief an even bigger crime.

Which brings us back to FEMA and Helene. FEMA exists to help American citizens and legal residents survive and recover from emergencies, natural or man-made. FEMA was called into action after 9/11, just as they were called into action after each hurricane since the agency’s inception. Overall, with a few exceptions, they have botched each disaster recovery effort, caring more about bureaucratic red tape than they do for the human lives they are saving … or losing. Certainly, after both hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, they should have been ready.

Between disasters, FEMA is mocked, the fodder of stand-up comedians. But there is a parallel between FEMA and another, far more effective, disaster-relief agency.

Soldiers, sailors, airmen, spacemen and Marines joke about their modern replacement for the venerable C-Ration known as the MRE – three lies in one: Meals, Ready, to Eat. In the same way, FEMA is several lies in one: Federal – no lie there; Emergency – that’s what they are called on to handle, not to deal with a manageable tidal wave of illegal immigrants; Management, an oxymoron when it comes to almost anything “federal,” and agency, a neutral term that means everything and nothing. FEMA doesn’t exist to help the influx of illegals. It exists to help Americans recover from natural and man-made disasters. In a perfect world, FEMA and its bureaucrats would be essential, efficient and effective. But there’s nothing perfect in Washington, and this agency is worse than most.

But if not FEMA, then who? What civilian, volunteer or military service is more capable of handling disasters than FEMA?

Well, how about the U.S. military – the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Space Force? They have the resources to deal with invasions of other countries, of helping the locals to rebuild after the war has moved on. They also have a long and noble history of disaster relief here in the United States. For example: In late 1929, the coastal city of Tacoma, Washington had a massive power failure. Hospitals were blacked out, lives were at stake. The naval aircraft carrier USS Lexington (CV-2) – at that time the largest warship on earth – tied up at Baker Dock and, for a month, the ship’s turbines were used to create electricity that was piped into Tacoma.

There are books written about how the military has helped civilians survive and recover from disasters, in the U.S. and abroad.

While not a war-fighting skill per se, this is a skill set that the military has continued to keep razor-sharp. Because the military can never predict when or where it will need to deploy a half-million troops from America to the Persian Gulf, as it did in Desert Shield, it maintains stocks of in-good-condition gear needed to support such a force. They have tons of MREs – those much-maligned but rather tasty and certainly convenient Meals, Ready to Eat. They have tents, clothing for all climates, medical supplies, fuel storage blivets and everything else needed for half a million or more personnel to deploy, ready to kick ass and take names. Plus they have massive cargo planes and tactical heavy-lift helicopters, all ready to fly this gear – and the men and women who operate that gear – half-way around the world on a moment’s notice.

Surely, they can muster huge amounts of survival supplies within the United States on little more than a moment’s notice, especially given the advance warning any hurricane provides.

Imagine if, instead of sunning it on the beach in Delaware, President Biden – or his alter ego, Vice President Harris – had convened a national security meeting in the White House, then ordered the military to execute Plan Delta Bravo (they have contingency plans for everything, including this). Within hours, the first flights of heavy-lift C-5M Galaxy and C-17 Globemaster IIIs could be ferrying supplies and experts to staging fields, where C-130J Hercules tactical transports would be winging their way toward the disaster areas most in need. Those massive planes would then disgorge the relief supplies and the troops assigned to getting the food, potable water, shelter, fuel and other necessities to suffering Americans.

Along with the mounds of supplies and skilled operators who know how to deploy them to maximum benefit, a group of logistics wizards with incredibly sophisticated computer systems would be setting up to direct each pallet of supplies from each plane to where it is most needed.

I cannot overstate this – these men and women are wizards who routinely work miracles. A supply sergeant from the Second World War – or even the Korea or Vietnam era – would be stunned at how efficient and effective these would be.

In each locale, the National Guard could be federalized and delegated to the regular troops on the ground to get them where they need to go. While all of this is happening, both fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters would be using sophisticated FLIR – Forward-Looking Infrared – scanners, which can spot the warmth of a living human being even buried in mud and muck, and start identifying survivors in need of rescue, which can be done by the Army’s, Navy’s and Air Force’s fleet of para-rescue helicopters.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg they could deliver. Almost every ground-pounder and every aviator will have a role to play, rescuing Americans and helping to restore essential services, from clean water to electricity. The military must do all this when the tip of the spear goes into battle, and for them, a Helene-level hurricane is just a useful “live-fire” training exercise. It’s all for real, except the part about fighting and defeating the enemy. Here the enemy is Mother Nature herself.

Once all the lives have been saved, once essential services have been restored, once life is poised toward getting back to some measure of normalcy, then FEMA can come in. Even if most of their funds have been diverted to helping illegal aliens instead of American citizens and legal residents, by the time they take over, all they’ll really need is a good broom, and maybe a mop.

Of course, all of this is too obvious for the Biden/Harris administration. They believe that anything worth doing is worth mucking up beyond human belief. But once the lives are saved and the clean-up has begun, there will be little else for them to do – which is about all they’re capable of.

Ned Barnett, in addition to a long career in primarily entrepreneurial public health – and who testified twice before Congress on National Health Policy – is the author of 40 published books, soon to be 41. Many of these focused on the business side of healthcare – or the business side of writing and publishing books. However, 17 were ghost-written for others and more than a dozen are novels. Barnett has worked on three Presidential campaigns, beginning with Ford in 1976. Working at the state level, he managed news media relations and campaign strategy. Currently, Barnett helps other writers to get their books out of their heads and onto bookstore shelves. His wife, Lynn, is a gifted book editor.

He can be reached at Ned Barnett, Not Ed Press, 420 N. Nellis Blvd., A3-289, Las Vegas, NV 89110 – nedbarnett51@gmail.com – 702-561-1167

They call it the elephant in the room or the issue that won't go away. I am talking about the price of food or that weekly purchase that we all make. VP Harris may pretend to feel our pain or to propose silly solutions to ease it but it's the same old inflation crushing our wallets.

Let's take a look.

This is a good post from the respected TIPP Insights:

As I overheard someone say, inflation is a number on the TV screen until you go shopping. Then it takes over your family's budget and you feel like you are drowning all the time.

Inflation is also topic one when you go out with friends. How often have you heard someone say that he paid this or that for something? I hear it all the time even when I’d rather talk baseball.

The Trump campaign needs to focus on the cost of living, the border and repeat the same line until Election Day. Talking about anything else will simply get the Harris campaign off the hook.

P.S.: Check out my blog for posts, podcasts and videos.

There is more than an average share of discontent brewing from sea to shining sea as ever more Americans get the sense that their country, which has been pivotal to ensuring global security, stands on the edge of a cliff. Many comfort themselves by looking at other pivotal moments in our history where the country’s future was in doubt right before the ship was righted. But, due to a confluence of factors, it is hard to imagine America bouncing back.

There are four problems that, if not reversed soon, will lead to collapse, and America will fall.

1. The most obvious problem is out-of-control government spending. The interest on the national debt is pushing toward a cool trillion dollars, clocking in at $659 billion for fiscal 2022, gobbling up ever more American tax dollars. While wise politicians should be sobered by that number, they instead are pushing the ship to ludicrous speed in search of Mad Max. It is forcing ever higher deficit spending since it is mathematically impossible to bring in enough tax revenue to buy off voting blocs, meaning that it will skyrocket in the years ahead. It’s a serious problem that demands serious politicians in both parties. But you first need a serious electorate, something in short supply these days. The “ask not what your country can do for you” ethos of yesterday has transformed into the “give us more free stuff and we’ll take some reparations on the side” grievance ethos of today. America’s political leadership, voted in by an electorate addicted to handouts, will take the approach of Belshazzar, the Babylonian king who was partying even as the armies of doom were at the gates. What’s the tipping point? Few of our leaders seem to care. I suppose that when collapse comes, we can at least take great comfort in the fact that we paid for the retirements of the charmingly corrupt Ukrainian cocktail class.

2. So how did we get to this state where solutions seem impossible? That’s where the second trend comes in, which is the complete takeover of our institutions by real radicals, not the pretend kind that the Mitt Cheneys of this world see behind every rock.

The core of this problem was the complete fall of the American university, which has been in motion for decades. All institutional rot flows from that. The teachers who are radicalizing America’s kids, the Pravda press who control the narrative, the social media kingpins kicking up a pining among our youth for Bin Laden, the politicians, lawyers, bureaucrats, writers, publishers, and industry leaders all have one thing in common: they were indoctrinated and radicalized in American universities.

We’ve reached an interesting point in our history where Americans are far more likely to be intelligent, wise, and self-controlled if they never set foot in an American university. Once the university system fell and started cranking out generations of people who see the world only through an oppressor versus oppressed lens, the other institutions toppled like dominoes. Why study something useless like math when you can marinate in classes focused on whom you should resent and hate the most?When a nation faces tough times, it relies on its norms and institutions to pull it out of the nosedive. But most of our institutions have reached a point from which they cannot be saved, and, sadly, we aren’t going to adapt Ripley’s advice from Aliens and nuke them from orbit since it is the only way to be sure.But we should starve them of resources at every opportunity.

3. A big part of why these institutions stand secure in their corruption and toxic missions is the lack of common values and decency within America today. We can all see what is happening on the surface since it is largely happening out in the open at this point. But the spiritual condition that underpins it is a deeper concern. We are suffering from a societal lack of respect for life and from an inability to see a common humanity within our fellow citizens. These Jewish and Christian spiritual values are what allowed us to see other people as neighbors instead of enemies. The collapse of those values is what enables a gang of fifteen boys to take joy in beating someone to death.

The recent elections were somewhat instructive as to where we are as a nation — not because of who won, but due to how they did it. In the weeks leading up to the election, there was a never-ending parade of commercials in my home state of Virginia featuring Democrats extolling the wonderful glories of abortion. They could have replaced the “D” with an “A” after their names because they ran as the abortion party.It was the only issue they ran on, the one value to rule them all. And the electorate embraced many of them for it. It is already a certainty that it will be the one issue that Democrats run on in 2024.When it comes to basic societal values, diversity is not our strength.

Our once common values, even if we sometimes failed to live up to them, were enshrined in our founding documents and formed the foundation of our society. That foundation has now been shattered, and we are left with nothing that binds us together.Remove agreed upon norms of decency that are expected of everyone, and you end up with Lord of the Flies, or the latest “mostly peaceful” fiery protest du jour by the lovely lemmings who make up the core of the Democrat party, or what passes for San Francisco these days.

4. So what would an American collapse leave behind? That should be more obvious now than perhaps it was before the brutal Hamas attacks of October 7. Most of Europe is falling to Islam and is too far gone to reverse course. Death-spiral birth rates among native Europeans combined with out-of-control migration from the Islamic world has led Europe to where it is today: a continent full of countries whose policies will increasingly reflect its population. While the blatant antisemitism is on full display for all to see, it’s going to get a lot worse, to the point where anyone who is not willing to convert to Islam will find himself either under attack or marginalized as a second-class citizen. The left prattles on about Islamophobia, even as it tries to ignore and gloss over very real antisemitism, but no such thing as Islamophobia can actually exist, since a phobia is an irrational fear.

The pro-terrorist mobs who blot out the scenery in London and other European cities (and take over the previously mentioned American universities) will seem quaint in another decade. Even if migration were cut off tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter at this point based on disparity of birth rates.

Why does this matter to America? For one, our politicians are every bit as foolish as the globalist Europeans we are emulating. The only thing that has slowed down America from suffering the same fate is geography. As horrific as our open borders are, they would be far worse if we bordered Islamic states.Even at that, Islamic migration is already influencing our electoral politics and policy positions, which was on display when the president tried to bully Israel into a foolish ceasefire, almost certainly out of concern over losing Michigan, as just one obvious example.More importantly, it is hard to imagine America flourishing in a world where most of its traditional allies have fallen to Islam. Indeed, this will only exacerbate the descent into brutish darkness.How could Israel even survive in such a world?

While there are plenty of other trends to be concerned about, these four all but ensure that the American moment, short of a spiritual reawakening, will end far sooner than most expect and it is wise to start preparing for that outcome. In the meantime, these are the areas where conservatives should focus their efforts, or at least be aware of these trends and how they are influencing other policy discussions. We need to educate as many people as we can on the stakes involved, and now is a great moment for that, when so many of the systemic problems should be obvious to all.

WALL STREET JOURNAL STATES THE OBVIOUS ABOUT FEDERAL BUREAUCRACIES SEEKING IMMORTALITY
By Jack Hellner, November 14, 2023

Now that Republican presidential candidates are talking about abolishing federal agencies, it looks like the Wall Street Journal has decided to wake up and smell the coffee.

They ran this recently:

Look at this quote from the article as the journalist at the WSJ lobbies for the Education Department by saying that schools wouldn't be able to function without the generosity of government bureaucrats and taxpayers, or borrowed money.

How did the schools function before the grants? No matter how much schools get, the results don't seem to improve. Of course, results don't matter. They just keep throwing out more money to pretend they care

The Federal Department of Education started functioning May 4, 1980, at the end of Jimmy Carter's term.

Somehow schools functioned for the first 204 years of the United States's history as a nation and we became the most powerful, successful, and wealthiest country in the world before the DOE began.

The government started funding student loans in the 1960s to supposedly make them more affordable.

As the schools continually hired more administrators, the costs skyrocketed and the government threw more money at them instead of seeking to control costs.

Then in 2010, the government took over student loans to pretend they would make a profit to help pay for Obamacare.

That didn't work.

Then with COVID, the government decided college graduates shouldn't have to make payments for three years, creating more wards of the government which is clearly the goal -- to buy votes.

After three years of a moratorium, some students are forced to pay back their loans, (what a concept!) but that is not good for an authoritarian president. He has dictatorially decided that a lot of students shouldn't have to pay off their loans.

With Obamacare, when not enough people signed up, they just raised the income eligibility and subsidies. It was always a lie that you could keep your doctor, keep your plan, and prices would go down substantially. Whenever Trump or anyone wanted to change or reduce Obamacare, we heard the lie that Republicans didn't want people to have health care or insurance.

Like most federal programs, once they are started, they are essentially on autopilot no matter how bad the results are.

With COVID, they "temporarily" greatly increased subsidies for food and day care which contributed to higher inflation. When Republicans tried to roll back some of these "temporary" subsidies they were called anti-woman and ridiculous claims were made that they wanted people to go without food. Those talking points are always in the Democrat playbook.

And the green pushers are the greediest of all. Many government agencies are shoveling out money to them as fast as they can, all to pretend they can control the climate. No matter how wrong the predictions have been or how absent any evidence that our use of natural resources has a direct effect on temperatures, storms, or sea levels, the shakedown and kickbacks continue.

Democrats rail against the rich yet the richest counties are around D.C. where they produce nothing but regulations. Five of the richest ten counties in the United States are around D.C., Those towns make a lot of politicians, lobbyists, bureaucrats, lawyers and others rich.

They all benefit from a bigger government. The more departments there are, the richer they become. There is no incentive at all to control costs for the benefits of the taxpayers or the general public.

And you better not want lower taxes and fewer regulations or an authoritarian like Obama will use the IRS to violate your Constitutional free speech and freedom of association right.

And his assistant, the puppet Joe Biden may compare you to domestic terrorists.

The IRS targets political opponents, protects corrupt tax abusers like the Bidens and does a lousy job administering the tax code, but no one is punished. Instead the Democrats want to reward this do-nothing federal government with over 80,000 new bureaucrats and lots more taxpayer money.

The FBI targets and illegally spies on political opponents while protecting corrupt people it supports from prosecution and few if any are punished. Instead they are being rewarded with a brand new $300 million building which I am sure they will construct on time and under budget, all to fill with more like-minded bureaucrats.

The intelligence agencies and the State Department somehow didn't spot Hamas planning an attack on Israel but many were working hard to build up Iran's finances.

Yet no one is fired for pure incompetence.

The DHS refuses to enforce immigration laws that Congress passed but no one is punished or fired. They did try to destroy border guards with lies about whipping people. No one was fired for those lies, either.

The State Department and Department of Defense screwed up the Afghan withdrawal but bragged about how great it was. No one was punished for the thirteen American deaths on the way out.

But look how quickly the media, bureaucrats, Democrats and many Republicans mobilized to destroy the outsider Donald Trump even before he took office. They could not stand the thought that he would transfer money, power, freedom and people from their fiefdom in D.C. So they sought to destroy him every day for the last seven years despite how successful his policies were at helping the people, especially the poor and minorities.

It is clearer every day that Democrats, bureaucrats, and some Republicans care more about D.C. than what is good for the country. It is a shame that most journalists also clearly care more about a wealthy, powerful government than the rest of us.

On May 13, 1912, Congress passed the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was ratified on April 8, 1913. The 17th Amendment instituted the direct election by voters of U.S. senators who until then were chosen by state legislatures pursuant to Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution. The Amendment was part of the early 20th century’s progressive movement reforms. It is time to repeal that amendment.

The remarkable group of men who devised our Constitution and the Bill of Rights sought to enhance the powers of the federal government (which were ineffectual under the Articles of Confederation), but share that power among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government. But they also believed that the state governments should have significant residual powers as evidenced by the 10th Amendment that reserves all powers not expressly delegated to the federal government to the states or the people.

In constructing the legislative branch of the federal government, the Founders established a bicameral Congress -- the House of Representatives based on a state’s population that would directly represent the people in their legislative districts and the Senate that would afford the states equal representation in Congress regardless of their population. In Federalist 62, James Madison or Alexander Hamilton (we’re still not certain which man wrote it) explained the benefits of Article I, Section 3:

The phrases “giving to the state governments such an agency in the formation of the federal government” and “no law or resolution can... be passed without the concurrence... of a majority of the states,” reveal what the Founders intended -- a strong, institutionally protected federalism; the originally designed federalism that the 17th Amendment emasculated.

When state legislatures selected U.S. senators, that legislative body benefited from the wisdom, prudence, and eloquence of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, among others. Today’s Senate is exhibit #1 in support of repealing the 17th Amendment: Chuck Schumer, Diane Feinstein, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Richard Durbin, Bernie Sanders, Patrick Leahy, Susan Collins, Mitt Romney -- the list could go on and on. And they were preceded by the likes of Edward Kennedy (the so-called “Lion of the Senate”), Hillary Clinton, Arlen Specter, Robert Byrd, Al Gore (Sr and Jr), Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, Sam Ervin, and many others. To be sure, some of these politicians may have reached the Senate even if the 17th Amendment had never been passed and ratified, and there are examples of statesmanlike senators since 1913 -- Robert Taft, Henry M. Jackson, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan come immediately to mind. But the more fundamental point is that repeal of the 17th Amendment would return us to the structure of federalism devised by the Founders to limit federal power and preserve our liberty.
The current U.S. Senate elected pursuant to the 17th Amendment has 50 Republicans and 48 Democrats and 2 independents who vote with the Democrats. The Vice-President is a Democrat who can vote to break a tie. According to Americans for Tax Reform, Republicans control 30 state legislatures in states with a combined population of 185,164,412, while Democrats control 18 state legislatures in states with a combined population of 133,888,565. Under the system originally devised by the Founders, the U.S. Senate would be overwhelmingly Republican -- with at least 60 GOP senators.

The Founders made the amendment process difficult, and rightly so. Should the Republicans take over the House and Senate in 2022, repealing the 17th Amendment should, but probably won’t, be a priority. An amendment to repeal the 17th Amendment can be proposed by a two-thirds majority vote in both houses of Congress and must then be ratified by three-fourths (38) of the state legislatures. Alternatively, two-thirds of the states can call a Constitutional convention for the purpose of passing an Amendment, and if passed that, too, must be ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures or Constitutional conventions in the states.

The United States is a republic, not a pure democracy. We elect our presidents indirectly via the Electoral College, and from 1789 to 1913 we selected our U.S. senators indirectly by virtue of who we voted into office in state legislative races. Repeal of the 17th Amendment would re-institutionalize federalism and place needed limits on the ever-expanding power of the federal government.

AIR FORCE TO MISS RECRUITING GOAL FOR THE FIRST TIME IN TWO DECADES
Micaela Burrow, Investigative Reporter, Defense, September 12, 2023

The Air Force will miss its active duty recruiting goal for 2024 by about 10%, the first time it hasn’t met quota since 1999, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said Monday, according to Military.com.

As of July, with two months left in the fiscal year, the Air Force had achieved 19,413 new active duty recruits out of a goal of 22,660, or about 86%, according to the latest available data from the Department of Defense (DOD). The same issues that plagued the services in 2022, including lingering effects from the COVID-19 pandemic, strong private sector competition and fewer young Americans who are both eligible and interested in joining up continue to suppress recruiting, according to Military.com.

“We’re almost to the end of the fiscal year, and the expectation is we’re going to come in short about 10%,” Kendall told Military.com. “I’m overall encouraged by where we are in recruiting, but we still have a lot of work.”

The last time the Air Force came short of recruiting goals, in 1999, happened as Millennials began to reach the age of service, Military.com reported, citing Air Force Recruiting Service. A similar strain on recruiting took place in 1979 as Generation X was coming of age, according to an internal research paper from 2002.

The Air Force believes recruiting for fiscal year 2024 will produce more positive outcomes, according to Military.com.

“Currently, the active duty is projected to miss [its] goal by about 10%,” Air Force Recruiting Service spokeswoman Leslie Brown told the outlet. “We are cautiously optimistic though as we head into FY24.”

Brown said the Air Force had seen “positive trends” in the delayed-entry program, where high school students interested in serving can “reserve” jobs in the Air Force before heading to basic training.

The program is “double what it was this time last year,” Brown told Military.com.

“It’s still lower than we want it to be, but we are continuing to see increases,” she said.

She said the Air Force has filled all of its job requirements for October, kicking off the next fiscal year, and has 15 more to fill for November.

The service has tried several new ways of attracting recruits, including offering promotions and awards for airmen who convince others to join, doling out $10,000 bonuses for prior-service airmen who agree to a three-year Reserves commitment, raising body fat standards, offering up to $65,000 in college loan repayments and relaxing its tattoo policy, according to Military.com. It also rolled out a smartphone app feature allowing anyone to submit another person’s information to the Air Force recruiting office.

Kendall said he doesn’t see recruiting problems persisting for long, according to Military.com.

“I don’t think at the end of the day that this is going to be a fundamental constraint for national security, at least not for the Department of the Air Force,” he said.

The Air Force is also slated to fall 150 pilots short of its annual training goal for 2023, although that is not a new issue, Military Times reported. In June, the Air Force announced $50,000 bonuses for experienced pilots who opt to renew their contracts.

Reprinted with permission from the Daily Caller: https://dailycaller.com/

THE ACTUAL INSURRECTION IN DC WENT UNPUNISHED
By Don Surber, March 9, 2023

For two years now, we have heard about an insurrection that everyone knows was bogus. The media deliberately lied in its vain attempt to ruin President Donald John Trump — one in a series of attempts by the real deniers of election results.

Tucker Carlson’s revelation that the Capitol Police incited peaceful protesters has been dismissed by a media obsessed with lying. The key to Pravda — the Soviet version of propaganda — was not to get people to believe it, but to get people to stop following the news. Judging by television ratings in the 21st century, it is working. It indoctrinates Americans to believe they are powerless and that resistance is futile.

NBC told the fools who trust it, “Tucker Carlson, with video provided by Speaker McCarthy, falsely depicts Jan. 6 riot as a peaceful gathering.”

The NBC fairy tale said, “Carlson focused Monday’s segment on promoting former President Donald Trump’s narrative by showing video of his supporters walking calmly around the U.S. Capitol. He asserted that other media accounts lied about the attack, proclaiming that while there were some bad apples, most of the rioters were peaceful and calling them sightseers, not insurrectionists.”

Well, they weren’t sightseers, but they were far from being insurrectionists. No, Nancy Pelosi and the rest plotted to hijack President Trump’s peaceful rally on the National Mall. A few hundred of the 250,000 people gathered in the nation’s capital went to the Capitol — which was closed to the public due to covid — and the heavy doors were opened. To paraphrase Mayor Marion Barry Jr., the bitch set them up.

In fact, Capitol Police goon Michael Byrd shot and killed an unarmed woman who was caught in the maelstrom.

After two years of selective leaks of video by Pelosi’s Pretorian Guard, the nation finally gets to see the whole story — and the Capitolists hate it.

CNN said, “US Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger on Tuesday ripped into Fox News host Tucker Carlson over his commentary about footage from the January 6, 2021, insurrection that he aired Monday night, saying the host cherry-picked from the footage to present offensive and misleading conclusions about the attack.”

The political appointee whined in a memo leaked to CNN, “Last night an opinion program aired commentary that was filled with offensive and misleading conclusions about the January 6 attack.”
Manger also wrote, “The program conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video. The commentary fails to provide context about the chaos and violence that happened before or during these less tense moments.”

This is the same group that selective leaked out-of-context video for two years. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy released all the video.

CNN tossed the word insurrection into its report three times, even though it was a mostly peaceful protest. The word insurrection is important for Washington elitists to establish because it is the key to their plan to bar Donald Trump from the presidency.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states, “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

By framing a mostly peaceful protest as an insurrection, Nancy and her RINO accessories to this crime believe they can prevent Americans from re-electing President Trump. I doubt it because the amendment clearly states “elector of President and Vice-President” and not president or vice president. If the Republicans who wrote the amendment after the Civil War meant president or vice president, they would have said so. Instead, they limited the prohibition to members of the Electoral College who select the president and vice president.

The press has published one conspiracy theory after another about this noisy protest for two years. My favorite wacky theory was Newsweek’s claim that “when security declined to bring Trump to the Capitol, the former president allegedly grabbed at the steering wheel of the vehicle transporting him.”

That is a physical impossibility because the vehicle is designed in a way the president could not get in the front seat — unless he could push through five inches of armor like Superman, in which case he would simply fly to the Capitol.
But as my headline states, this column is not about the coup by Congress. This is about real riots in DC that greeted the inauguration of President Trump.

CNN reported on January 21, 2017, “Six police officers were injured and 217 protesters arrested Friday after a morning of peaceful protests and coordinated disruptions of Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony gave way to ugly street clashes in downtown Washington.

“At least two DC police officers and one other person were taken to the hospital after run-ins with protesters, DC Fire Spokesman Vito Maggiolo told CNN. Acting DC Police Chief Peter Newsham said the officers’ injuries were considered minor and not life threatening.

“Bursts of chaos erupted on 12th and K streets as black-clad ‘antifascist’ protesters smashed storefronts and bus stops, hammered out the windows of a limousine and eventually launched rocks at a phalanx of police lined up in an eastbound crosswalk. Officers responded by launching smoke and flash-bang devices, which could be heard from blocks away, into the street to disperse the crowds.”

The limousine in question was hired by former CNN presenter Larry King and destroyed by rioters. A Muslim owned the vehicle. It was his livelihood.

Esquire reported on April 12, 2017, “How the Government Is Turning Protesters Into Felons.”

The magazine whined, “While scattered vandalism and punching (a neo-Nazi) were deemed headline-grabbing militancy, the media relegated the most extreme incidents involving anarchists and antifascists — namely, recent treatment of them — to footnotes.”

AP reported on July 6, 2018, “Federal prosecutors on Friday moved to drop charges against the last 39 people accused of participating in a violent protest on the day of President Donald Trump's inauguration.

“The motion to dismiss charges by the U.S. attorney's office seemingly ends an 18-month saga that started with the Justice Department attempting to convict more than 190 people.

“That effort saw the government facing off against an intensely coordinated grassroots political opposition network that made Washington the focus of a nationwide support campaign — offering free lodging for defendants, legal coordination and other support.”

Liberals learned their lesson, which was they can get away with anything. They turned 2020 into a Summer of Hate as they burned portions of cities down to protest (re-checks notes) the overdose death of a minor drug pusher in the custody of police. Not only did protesters go unpunished, they also were rewarded by the government.

CBS reported on March 1, 2023, “New York City has agreed to a multimillion dollar settlement in the case of protesters corralled by cops during George Floyd demonstrations in the summer of 2020.”

Liberals also knew they are the real kings of the media.

As Mel Brooks said, “It's good to be the king.”

Republicans must fix this. The party’s platform in 2024 should include not only a pardon of everyone arrested for the January 6 protest, but a promise to compensate them for the trashing of their God-given right to protest — as guaranteed by the very Constitution that Mitch McConnell and everyone else in Congress swore an oath to defend. If any RINOs complain.

And the party should quote Martin Luther King, who said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Someone please remind Michael Byrd that there is no statute of limitation on murder.

Simon Ateba, the Chief White House Correspondent for Today News Africa, summed up the situation best in a lengthy tweet.

He said, “Some are now trying to crucify Fox News and Tucker Carlson over January 6th footage because America has decided to live a lie, blame only Donald Trump and turn a blind eye to the massive security failure on January 6, 2021.

“But many people around the world continue to wonder, how on earth was it possible that in the greatest country in the world, in the most armed nation on the planet with the best and most expensive security agencies in the universe, one of the most important buildings was left unprotected and was easily taken over by protesters while the presidential election was being certified and the Vice President was in the building? Why is no serious investigation done to understand that security failure and hold accountable every person who was in charge that day? Isn't that the most important investigation to be carried out?

“Also, why is it hard to understand that when an election takes place during a pandemic, with millions of people shipping ballots rather than showing up at voting centers on election day, many people would be skeptical about the results of that election, especially when the candidate who lost won the election day vote?

“Instead of labeling people election deniers, is it not better to ensure that even the appearance of fraud is eliminated by having most people vote in-person on election day and with proper identification?

“When a country decides to live a lie and chases shadows, it conducts false investigations with predetermined outcomes and ends up blaming people like Tucker Carlson for showing the other side of the story. And that is a shame!”

It was not a security failure. It was a deliberate solicitation of protesters and an invitation for rioting in order to disqualify Trump in 2024. Thanks to Tucker Carlson, the Constitution and the truth, it won’t work.

Reprinted with permission from https://donsurber.substack.com/ Don Surber is a reader-supported publication. Please become a free or paid subscriber.

THE FESTERING ROT AT THE FBI SEEMS BIGGER AND DEEPER THAN WE EVER GUESSED
By Andrea Widburg, January 23, 2023

Charles McGonigal, a retired counterintelligence investigator from the FBI’s New York Field Office, was just arrested because he allegedly took substantial sums of money from Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire, to get the latter off a U.S. sanctions list. Where this goes beyond the ordinary corruption that periodically crops up among people with too much power, too few morals, and too little accountability is that McGonigal was one of the people investigating Trump over the Russia Hoax, while Deripaska employed Christopher Steele, whose false dossier seeded the Russia Hoax.

Anyone who paid attention during the “hot” years of the Russia Hoax recognizes Deripaska’s name. He was a close ally of Vladimir Putin and, in 2018, the U.S. government sanctioned him for his involvement in Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. Specifically with regard to the Russia Hoax, in 2021, Jerry Dunleavy summarized how closely allied Steele and Deripaska were:

You really can’t have the Russia hoax without Deripaska.

As for McGonigal, he was a staunch James Comey ally, referring to Comey as “one of the most loved leaders that we’ve had in a number of years commanding a leadership role in the FBI.” Comey, as a reminder, improperly cleared Hillary of charges connected to her violating national security laws, leaked classified information to jump-start the Russia collusion hoax, and boasted about entrapping General Mike Flynn, resulting in manufactured charges against him.

Loved by some of the troops? Clearly. Honest and faithful to the Constitution? No.

McGonigal spent the two years before his 2018 retirement supervising 150 counterintelligence agents in New York. McGonigal also worked directly on the Russia Hoax. According to the New York Post, he “was one of the first FBI agents to learn that a Trump campaign official claimed that the Russians had “dirt” onthen-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, which triggered the investigation that continued into Donald Trump’s presidency.” It’s unclear, however, whether he first met Deripaska in connection with that investigation.

The charges against McGonigal, who retired from the FBI in 2018, are extremely serious:

One of the problems flowing from consorting with criminals, which is what law enforcement officers often do, is that those without strong moral compasses are vulnerable to the seemingly easy money associated with working with those same criminals. If the charges against McGonigal stick, he will have been one of those who couldn’t be near crime without being corrupted.

SCHADENFREUDE: DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY RAMPS UP WAR AGAINST TAX SLAVES (US)
By Olivia Murray, December 25, 2022

On December 19, 2022, the Biden White House released a statement briefing the public on a newly proposed rule by the Department of Energy which would require lightbulb manufacturers to comply with new “climate change” efficiency standards. In fact, the move was just the latest transgressions against the American citizenry:

This is the 110th action to strengthen energy efficiency standards that the Administration has taken in 2022. These 110 actions span a range of household products—everything from air conditioners and furnaces, to clothes washers and dryers, to kitchen appliances and water heaters—as well as commercial and industrial equipment.

The move brings two major issues to the forefront of my mind: The first being the complete disregard for the constitutional rule of law, and separation of powers. The second, the contemptuous display of elitism and immodest display of climate communism.

As Patrick Carroll at FEE noted:

The proposal is the first step to creating a new regulation, and it outlines what the agency plans to do. For example, the action taken on Dec. 19 was a proposal to raise the minimum lightbulb efficiency level from 45 to over 120 lumens per watt for the most common bulbs.

Once the agency has announced their proposal and some time has elapsed for public comment, the agency takes a finalizing action which establishes the rule as an official regulation.

First off, let’s all acknowledge the DOE has no right to exist, because the Constitution did not create it, and therefore only the individual states have the right to create statewide departments of energy if they so choose. Secondly, and most relevantly because the DOE does exist despite my sincerest wishes it didn’t — yet reality has no bearing on my personal feelings (“transgenders” are you listening?) — the agency should not be making up “official regulations” because they are just de facto federal laws. As the overused quip goes, “The Constitution doesn’t need to be rewritten, it needs to be reread” — lawmaking is for lawmakers in Congress, not bureaucrats in this amorphous Fourth Branch.

Secondly, I can’t help but reflect on the haughtiness and hypocrisy of our “electeds” as they seize our lives, our liberty, and our prosperity — shorthand: communism — in the name of “climate change.”

These climate tyrants push baby murder to curb the impact of humans, now they’re putting us into a vice, lowering our standard of living and, forcing a bleak and oppressive reality, all while bleeding us dry.

Do Jetset John Kerry, or Al Gore with his 28-room “20 times the national average… energy gobbler” mansion ring a bell? Remember when Joe Biden conceded to the reality of “economic setbacks and job insecurity” for coal miners thanks to Democrats, but his lifesaver was… learn to code. In Uncle Joe’s words: “Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!” What about Marie Antoinette’s modern counterpart Pete Buttigeig and his ‘let them buy electric cars!’ moment? Or, look at these facts regarding SF6:

It is 23,500 times more warning than carbon dioxide (CO2).

Just one kilogram of SF6 warms the Earth to the same extent as 24 people flying London to New York return.

It also persists in the atmosphere for a long time, warming the Earth for at least 1,000 years.

Yet, SF6 remains the preferred etching gas for solar panels, is needed for the batteries in the electric cars that they push, and is a key component of “renewable” technologies like wind turbines.

Fraud to the nth degree. Or, an reimagined Occam’s Razor quip: “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras” could instead read “when you see tyranny, think communism, not altruism.”

Zelensky visited a banana republic on Wednesday, a country rife with corruption and a state police that protects the crooked politicians while attacking dissidents.

We call that banana republic the United States.

It's fitting.

America invented banana republics. More than a century ago, businessmen went to tropical countries in Central America, paid off the politicians, and made a mint. Red China is following the plan throughout the world with its Belt and Roadway Initiative.

The giant in the banana business was United Fruit Company.

Everything Everywhere reported, "The Boston Fruit Company initially dominated the business in the Caribbean. It was founded by a junior assistant produce seller named Andrew Preston. He got a loan of $18,000 and began importing bananas into the US, as well as developing markets for people to buy the bananas. He also pioneered the refrigeration of bananas to extend their shelf life so they could be sent further than port areas.

"In Costa Rica, a Brooklynite by the name of Minor Keith got a contract to build a railroad in the country. Costa Rica was very poor and couldn’t afford to build it themselves, so they granted him a 99-year lease on 800,000 acres of land to build the tracks from the capital of San Jose to the port of Limon on the Caribbean side.

"Keith realized that he could grow bananas on the land on either side of the train track, and then use the train to transport the bananas to the port.

"After a period of consolidation in the industry, by the end of the 19th century, there were only a handful of companies that dominated the fruit business.

"In 1899, the United Fruit Company was created in a merger of Keith’s Central American operations and Preston’s Caribbean operations.

"The United Fruit Company controlled over 80% of the banana business in the United States after buying up over a dozen of their competitors."

***

Readers may believe calling America a banana republic is an exaggeration but think about it. Congress is in the midst of passing what is laughingly called a budget. Half the money comes from taxpayers. Half the money is borrowed. All the money goes to special interests.

The FBI provides the muscle.

In 2016, it investigated Hillary who sent 33,000 emails to a trucking company in Red China. The FBI granted immunity from prosecution to her staff and helped destroy key evidence. Jimmy the Weasel Comey said that since she didn't mean to break the law, he would recommend not prosecuting.

He made that recommendation days after his boss, Loretta Lynch, and Bill Clinton had an impromptu 45-minute talk on an airport tarmac. Clinton said they discussed their grandchildren. By grandchildren, he meant that vacancy on the Supreme Court.

At the same time, the FBI tried to con a judge into approving wiretapping of Donald Trump. In a rare act of courage, the judge turned them down in June but in October the judge caved in and the FBI spied. A lot. We do not know if the FBI ever stopped spying. There sure seem to be a lot of leaks about what The Donald is doing.

When the FBI isn't covering up crimes and spying for Democrats and RINOs, it is entrapping civilians. Democrat Governor Whitmer was in jeopardy of losing her job when an FBI informant convinced four losers to hatch an asinine plot to kidnap her.

This is why many people believe that the FBI and Capitol Police enticed people to enter the Capitol, which was closed to the public at the time, on January 6, 2021. This allowed Nancy Pelosi and the rest to recast a rally on the National Mall as an insurrection. This led to a post-presidency impeachment trial.

These people are nuts.

But these people are in power.

Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter has led him to reveal that the FBI and other intelligence agencies leaned on Twitter to suppress criticism of the government, particularly its covid policy, support of Ukraine and Hunter Biden's laptop, which the FBI protected under Bill Barr. This suppression of Hunter's drug abuse, sex abuse and political corruption enablSCHed the election of Biden, a man who sells his country to the highest bidder.

Twitter was only one of the social media outlets that worked for the FBI. The bureau owned the media in Washington through leaks and the like. Now it owns social media.

And while the FBI covered up Biden Family corruption, it invented a weird story about Trump stealing nuclear code, a fairy tale that convinced a Biden appointee to issue a warrant to raid Mar-a-Lago. The FBI stole 11,000 non-classified documents, including clothing, in an effort to intimidate and discredit him.

While bananas do grow in Hawaii and Florida, our nation is largely a banana republic without the bananas.

I still hold out hope that this can be reversed, but only by limiting the powers and the size of the government.

Until then, corrupt boogers like Zelensky are going to waltz into Washington, demand billions, and kick back millions to that Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization we call the federal government.

Reprinted with permission from Don Surber: https://donsurber.blogspot.com/

THE DEATH WARRANT FOR AMERICAN INGENUITY
By Janet Levy, September 1, 2022

Last September, scores of patent-holders demonstrated in six cities across the U.S. wearing black t-shirts that said, "Homo sapiens inventoris: Endangered Species." These men and women of ingenuity were protesting America's decade of stolen dreams: the years since the passage of the America Invents Act (AIA) of 2011 and the establishment of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), which together have made it easy for big corporations to steal their ideas and profit from them with impunity.

"We've had piracy for all the years I've been an inventor, but the AIA just put it on steroids, in the context that now you can get PTAB-ed and lose your rights without any due process at all," said Dan Brown at the Detroit rally. A professor with more than 40 patents, including inventions used in space shuttles, Brown invented the bionic wrench, a one-size-fits-all wrench that obviates the problem of stripped bolt corners. He says Sears stole his idea, down to the marketing pitch, and replaced his product on its shelves with a Chinese rip-off.

Participants at these rallies, organized by U.S. Inventor, a non-profit fighting for inventors' rights, had similar stories. So do others represented by U.S. Inventor. Among them are Molly Metz, a jump rope champion whose patented idea for a ball-and-eye pivot mechanism for speed ropes was stolen by a rogue competitor; Glenn Sanders, whose patent on Emmy award–winning wireless video recording equipment was invalidated by PTAB; and Gene Luoma, an octogenarian muscular dystrophy patient who lost his patent and millions in royalties on his Zip-It drain cleaner.

These are individuals who came up with brilliant ideas or solutions, worked on them, built prototypes, set up small businesses, and plowed ahead to sell their products. But the new patent system under AIA is throttling them. For them, it is destroying the culture of inventiveness, innovation, and creating original products and solutions that made America great and rocketed it into space.

To understand how that came about, a brief history of American patent law is in order.

As early as during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, our founding fathers recognized the need to promote innovation and finely balance it against the competitive spirit of the free market. So, under Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, they granted Congress the power to give authors and inventors exclusive rights for a limited time over their writing and discoveries. They viewed intellectual property as real property and wisely foresaw its protection and nurturing as the road to American prosperity and greatness through creativity.

The third law of Congress was the Patent Act of 1790. The Bill of Rights of 1791 further affirmed, through the Fifth Amendment, that property rights (which also meant intellectual property, such as patents) were not to be taken away without due process of law or without just compensation.

Then the Patent Act of 1836 gave the first inventor the right to a patent, not the first to file for one. It also established that the U.S. Patent and Trade Office (USPTO) would issue patents, decide on infringements, and revoke or invalidate patents after holding hearings, and examining expert testimony and material and other evidence. Though this could entail lengthy and expensive legal proceedings, the system empowered inventors and small businesses with the means to protect their intellectual property.

Two ancillary but relevant facts. In 1946, the law was amended to change the first-to-invent principle from first to invent in the world to first to invent in America in response to a 1939 SCOTUS judgment (Electric Storage Battery v. Shimadzu) that could have allowed American patents to be invalidated by claims from abroad. In 1982, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals was created, with exclusive jurisdiction on appeals over decisions by patent appeal boards or district courts, after inconsistencies that raised forum shopping concerns. The same year, limits were set on the breadth of a patent so that it would not restrict related inventions.

American innovation thrived from the late 18th century onward, with wars and hard times galvanizing invention and myriad spin-offs that have benefited humankind in unforeseen ways. Incentivizing invention made America a superpower — took it into space and into the molecular-level research that is unfolding the secrets of life itself. Not for nothing have Yankee ingenuity and can-do spirit become American shibboleths.

But things began to fall apart beginning in 2007. A sustained and exaggerated campaign by the Coalition for Patent Fairness, an ad hoc organization of Big Tech corporations like Amazon, Google, Intel, and others, sought to alter eligibility doctrine and get rid of the system of injunctions and sanctions for patent violations. At the same time, Big Tech had been building up the myth of the Patent Troll, against whom "true innovators" — that is, Big Tech and Big Business, which have actually been stealing ideas and used financial muscle to browbeat the solo inventor with litigation — must be protected.

Unfortunately for America, their narrative has prevailed. In 2011, President Barack Obama presented the AIA, ostensibly to end frivolous lawsuits, and make the patent process easier, less expensive, faster, and fairer than handling patent suits in courts or before the USPTO. America also switched to the first-to-file principle, followed worldwide. The final nail in the coffin was the establishment of PTAB, an administrative body without a lifetime-appointed judge. PTAB hearings are conducted with little due process — there are instances in which it has refused to admit material evidence — and so far, 84% of its decisions invalidated inventors' patents. As retired federal judge Paul Michel says, "[t]hey [Big Tech] got their way with Congress in 2011 with a statute creating an administrative tribunal where it would be easier to kill patents when they could not do so in the courts."

Jeff Parker, a longtime inventor and CEO of ParkerVision, laments the squelching of the incentive to invent and the end of the cooperative spirit. In the 1970s, he developed some of the first digital thermostats for air-conditioners and patented several of their features. Impressed by the achievements of a small company with a limited R&D budget, Carrier approached him to embark on a joint venture. Such interactions, he says, were the foundation of the U.S. economy then. The symbiosis between spirited inventors and deep-pocket corporations improved products, solved problems, and benefited consumers.

Later, when a much larger competitor copied their product, down to the text in the instruction manual, all it took was a letter for the copycat to acknowledge wrongdoing and pull down the product for fear of litigation. But that's a vestige of the past, says Parker: today, his company would end up before a hostile board. Big corporations don't have to invent anything. They can wait for inventions, scoop them up, and then either get to the patent office first or get the inventor's patent invalidated. Patent litigation has already reduced the market cap of Parker's company from $500 million to $30 million, and the technology he developed can now be used for free.

It's indeed the death of the American Dream, built on innovation. Meanwhile, in 2019, China wrested the U.S.'s long-held position of the country which filed the most international patents. China continued to rank first in 2020 and 2021. And while America left the solo inventor defenseless, China has strengthened its patent laws and innovation policy so much that Erick Robinson, a patent attorney with Beijing East IP, says, "China may be the best place in the world to file a patent lawsuit."

Hopefully, H.R. 5874, or the Restoring America's Leadership in Innovation Act (RALIA), introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), will eliminate the PTAB and provisions of the AIA that encourage patent robbery by Big Business. That will bring relief to hundreds of ingenious inventors like Brown, Sanders, Parker, and the octogenarian Luoma, whose intellectual property must be protected like physical property. Just as our founding fathers envisioned it. Remember, two of them — Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson — were prolific inventors.

WE HAVE BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS ALL WRONG
By Kevin Lewis, September 1, 2022

For many of us, the path our governmental leaders have recently taken has been perplexing. Many of the policy decisions that perhaps sounded good (at least to some) have turned out to be not only clearly deleterious, but often catastrophic for our country. Without hyperbole, I mean catastrophic for our economy, our national defense capability, our national sovereignty, the safety and security of citizens, and our standing among other nations of the world.

We hear that inflation is "temporary," that "we are not in a recession," that the administration "feels our pain" at the gas pump and is making a historic effort to bring down prices (though we should really focus on the fact that we are in an exciting "Great Transition"). Even though our money doesn't go nearly as far as it used to, our economy is in the midst of a "booming recovery." We are told that a massive new spending bill will somehow reduce inflation — (the "Inflation Reduction Bill"). Even the government's own CBO stated that it will do almost nothing to reduce inflation. Most economists say it will make inflation much worse.

These statements don't seem to align with empirical evidence — our everyday experience! Sadly, it would not surprise me at all if it were suddenly announced that "due to the racial overtones and white supremacist associations of 'up,' in the interest of equity, it will henceforth be considered down."

One might reasonably ask, "Why are our government officials doing these things and saying these things that don't seem to help us or our country?" I believe that asking this question would indicate a basic misunderstanding of our current governmental environment, their views and their goals. You're thinking about this all wrong!

There are some simple, obvious explanations that we can see and hear from various political experts. One such would be the "do the opposite of whatever Trump did" explanation. That mentality certainly exists. We have seen this from various individuals on both sides of the aisle — the desire to distance themselves from whatever Donald Trump did, whether good or bad. Another explanation would be unwavering allegiance to the progressive/Green New Deal contingent of the Democrat party, who, I assume, Joe Biden believes helped get him elected. There is always the "old standby" Democrat position that more government and more spending are always a good thing. With regard to the administration's complete disregard for and puzzling silence regarding the unsecured southern border, there is the conventional wisdom that if individuals come to the U.S. illegally and are given benefits and, more than likely, the chance to stay, they will be beholden to the Democrat policies of which they are beneficiaries, and therefore be lifelong democratic voters, ostensibly keeping Democratic politicians in power forever.

These are all good possibilities, each with a degree of validity, but they don't seem like enough. They might explain some things, but not all of them. When decisions are made that are blatantly unconstitutional, when policies are adopted that do not benefit U.S. citizens, and may even demonstrably hurt them, one might rightly begin to believe that there is more at play here — that there may be an even more insidious agenda afoot. I believe that there is. I believe that the goal, simply put, is to make America less, in every respect.

If the U.S. is arguably the most powerful, wealthiest, and most independent nation, with safeguards to avoid tyranny and subversion built into its founding documents, it becomes a major (if not the major) obstacle to a globalist one-world government, wherein all nations have equity. Some might consider the idea of a one-world government a conspiracy theory espoused by the Alt-Right or some other equally vilified group. Listening to the narratives from the United Nations' deliberations or from many of their leaders, it seems clear that it is indeed a real goal. Many of our own leaders, including several U.S. presidents, both Democrat and Republican, have extolled the virtue of the New World Order. Whatever you choose to call it, I believe that many (most?) within our government consider the U.S. too wealthy, too powerful — too privileged. For them, that must change.

The movers and shakers running the government, along with their happily willing figurehead (currently Joe Biden), view all who oppose this "transition" with disgust. They view anything like an "America First" mentality and certainly the "Make America Great Again" mentality merely as primitive tribalism.

If seen from this perspective, Biden's perplexing decisions and policies align and make some sort of perverse sense. America is not just "transitioning" away from fossil fuel toward green and renewable energy. It is transitioning toward its place as just another nation-state of the world — no better, no worse. For that to occur, the U.S. must be "brought down" from its current position. Since citizens would not voluntarily jump on the bandwagon if this goal were stated clearly, it must be done surreptitiously.

Biden didn't shut down oil and gas production in America (then plead to buy it from other countries) because of the climate or because he was seeking "green energy" (obviously, because we are still using oil and gas, just paying much more for it, and becoming beholden to other countries). It was done because it was one simple but very powerful way to weaken America (under the pretext of helping the climate or moving toward green energy). Not only has Joe Biden failed to fulfill his oath of office (to defend the U.S. from all enemies, foreign and domestic), but he (and the obviously intricate network of controlling governmental operatives) has intentionally and specifically disparaged and discarded it.

Now it all begins to make sense, and it scares the hell out of me.

Congress now has had more prime time committee hearings on the January 6th protest than it did on 9/11. I am not sure just what the purpose of the January 6th hearings are. Americans have turned their attention to inflation and recession.

But in Washington, where no one ever gets laid off and no one has to go to work if it snows, the show is the talk of the town. The rest of the country has to work today. DC closed for Juneteenth.

The great divide in America is not between lefties and righties. The divide is between the governed and the government. Two reports from Salena Zito, the Pittsburgh reporter who actually talks to people, confirm this.

The first report is about a city park honoring the Hampton Battery, a band of brothers who fought in the Civil War under the command of its founder, Captain Robert B. Hampton.

Zito wrote, "Residents say the Civil War statue is literally surrounded by drug dealers, buyers, and users around the clock. They are getting more aggressive with panhandling, trespassing, and theft.

"Just yards away, along the old Pennsylvania canal, a man walks down the street, carrying a brand new patio chair stolen from the porch of a nearby home, toward the new and growing homeless camp. Last week, there were two tents or makeshift abodes. Now, there are over a dozen.

"On the sidewalk, a woman dances erratically in her socks, her hoodie pulled up over her head. She then abruptly collapses in the street — within minutes, the medics arrive, and she is revived. She then continues on despite having overdosed minutes earlier."

But the politicians of Pittsburgh ignore the drug dealing. They are focused on other things, she reported.

Hers is an unpleasant column about the denegation of America. Let us turn to a happier time when the nation had Howard Johnson restaurants from coast to coast. Well, the last one closed recently. But in its heyday, HoJo was the Sears, Roebuck of franchised restaurants.

Zito wrote, "Richard W. Sears understood customers’ needs because he understood and experienced their challenges, which is easy when you come from Stewartville, Minnesota, where the population at the turn of the 20th century was under 800. You are in touch with the customer when you are the customer. In short, he was able to put himself in their shoes.

"Howard D. Johnson, a World War I veteran who inherited his father’s soda shop, knew people. Despite failing a lot more times than succeeding in his early days, he never stopped trying, innovating and learning what his customers wanted.

"The beginning of the end for both companies began as they kept getting sold and resold and sold again to venture capital groups, the operators of which never once ate at a HoJo’s or bought Sears auto parts to fix their car or had their children circle what they wanted for Christmas in the Wish Book. When you share little in common with your customers, how do you innovate to keep them and their children?"

She made a good point.

They say the beginning of the end for Union Carbide was when it moved its headquarters from West Virginia to Stamford, Connecticut. Within 10 years, Bhopal happened and the company was no more, being mercifully bought out by Dow. The sale saved many a retired Carbider's life savings.

Sears, which became a national retailer through mail orders, could have been Amazon but its CEOs were money men, not retailers. Jeff Bezos came along and wanted to sell books online. After a couple of decades, he retired as the richest man in the world. Elon Musk has since supplanted him.

Our politicians are not Sears or Howard Johnson or Bezos or Musk. Our politicians are just money men out of touch with the nation they would lead. Which brings me back to the January 6 obsession in Washington.

Food inflation is in the double-digits. It costs $100 now to fill up a pickup truck. Baby formula and tampons are in short supply. The stock market is tanking. Poverty is just around the corner. Miles of homeless people in pup tents line the streets along the West Coast. Drug overdose deaths now top 100,000 a year. Millions of terrorists, gangbangers and other illegal aliens have flooded in under Biden.

But Congress hired a former ABC executive to put together a TV extravaganza on J6 featuring some guy in a buffalo hat grinning inside the Capitol. He looked like Randy Quaid in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation film. I would have busted my bladder if the guy said, "Shitter's full."

We put Liz Cheney and the rest in charge. They may soon learn we can replace them.

There is an election on November 8. Chickens won't be coming home to roost. Eagles will arrive, talons up.

Newt Gingrich sees 75 House seats flipping Republican -- which would be his party's best showing in 128 years. This only works if you flush about half those 200 or so sitting Republican congressmen down the commode with their Democrat pals. We found that out in 2010 when Republicans threw away their Tea Party victory like Biden threw away Afghanistan.

The people we elected to take care of our politics don't live here anymore. They live in gated communities and work in a Capitol patrolled by 1,869 uniformed officers.

Zito ended her park piece, "This ugly reality will affect the elections this fall, probably far more than the political class understands. Why? Because they never take the time to walk down a street like Cedar Avenue and ask how it is going. More importantly, they take for granted that they will always have the voters they have always had, never realizing most people have a breaking point."

We shall see how many voters break with the status quo on November 8.

EVERY TIME BIDEN DRAINED STRATEGIC OIL RESERVES, PRICES ENDED UP HIGHER. HERE'S THE PROOF
THOMAS CATENACCI, May 29, 2022

President Joe Biden has raided the Strategic Petroleum Reserve three times, but the actions have had minimal impact on oil and gasoline prices, data showed.
“Today, we’re launching a major effort to moderate the price of oil — an effort that will span the globe in its reach and, ultimately, reach your corner gas station, God willing,” Biden said on Nov. 23, 2021, after the first SPR release.
“The action I’m calling for will make a real difference over time,” the president remarked on March 31, 2022, after the third release.
Oil and gasoline prices increased after each of President Joe Biden’s three Strategic Petroleum Reserve releases which were designed to curb consumer costs.

Biden ordered a 50-million-barrel SPR release in November, a 30-million-barrel release on March 1 and a 180-million-barrel release on March 31, saying the “historic” actions would ease pressure felt by Americans at the pump. But marketplace and government data analyzed by The Daily Caller News Foundation paint a different picture. (RELATED: Biden Considers Draining Yet Another Key Emergency Fuel Stockpile: REPORT)

On Tuesday, the average price of gasoline reached an all-time high of $4.59 per gallon, according to AAA data, while domestic oil prices remained above $110 a barrel, far higher than their 2015-2021 average of $53.15 per barrel and 2021 average of $68.14 a barrel, Federal Reserve data showed.

Release 1: Nov. 23, 2021 Oil price: $76.75 a barrel. Gasoline price: $3.40 per gallon.

Biden ordered the DOE to accelerate the congressionally-mandated SPR release of 18 million barrels of oil and release an additional 32 million barrels on Nov. 23. The action was taken in conjunction with various nations including China, India, Japan, South Korea and the U.K.

“The bottom line: Today, we’re launching a major effort to moderate the price of oil — an effort that will span the globe in its reach and, ultimately, reach your corner gas station, God willing,” Biden remarked after he took the action.

The West Texas Intermediate (WTI) index, the U.S. oil benchmark, ticked up from $76.75 a barrel to $78.50 a barrel between Nov. 22-23, according to market data. The domestic benchmark then dipped throughout December before bursting past $80 a barrel in early January.

Similarly, the average price of gasoline nationwide, which stood at $3.40 per gallon on Nov. 22, fell about 10 cents before increasing to $3.61 a gallon by late February, federal data showed.

Release 2: March 1, 2022 Oil price: $95.72 a barrel. Gasoline price: $3.61 per gallon.

The White House announced a second SPR release on March 1 in conjunction with 30 other International Energy Agency member nations. The U.S. agreed to release 30 million barrels of oil as part of the 60-million-barrel global release in an effort to “protect American businesses and consumers, including from rising prices at the pump,” former White House press secretary Jen Psaki said.

“These steps will help blunt gas prices here at home,” Biden said during his State of the Union address that evening. “And I know the news about what’s happening can seem alarming. But I want you to know that we are going to be okay.”

The WTI benchmark, though, surged from $95.72 a barrel on Feb. 28 to $103.41 per barrel on March 1 and $123.70 a barrel a week later on March 8, market data showed. The March 8 figure marked the highest oil price since the 2008 recession.

The average price of gasoline rose from $3.61 a gallon on Feb. 28 to $4.32 per gallon two weeks later, according to the Energy Information Administration. It hasn’t dipped below $4 a gallon since the March 1 release.

Release 3: March 31, 2022 Oil price: $107.82 a barrel. Gasoline price: $4.23 per gallon.

Finally, Biden announced the largest release to date on March 31, ordering the DOE to release 180 million barrels of oil from the SPR between April-September. The president said the move would provide a “historic amount of supply for a historic amount of time” and act as a “six-month bridge” to the fall.

“The action I’m calling for will make a real difference over time,” he said during remarks titled “Actions to Lower Gas Prices at the Pump for American Families.” (RELATED: Is Biden’s Mass Release From The Strategic Oil Reserves Even Legal?)

Biden then predicted gas prices would fall 10-35 cents a gallon.

However, the price of oil declined substantially from $107.82 a barrel on March 30 to $100.28 per barrel on March 31. Oil prices remained near that level through April and early May before increasing again and hitting $114.20 per barrel on May 16.

Gasoline prices followed a similar trajectory as oil prices, declining through April before skyrocketing in mid May and hitting multiple all-time highs.

Reprinted with permission from the Daily Caller https://dailycaller.com/

President Joe Biden believes the Ukraine war will mark the start of a “new world order.” In the middle of the COVID global pandemic, Klaus Schwab and global elites likewise announced a “great reset.”

Accordingly, the nations of the world would have to surrender their sovereignty to an international body of experts. They would enlighten us on taxes, diversity and green policies.

When former President Donald Trump got elected in 2016, marquee journalists announced partisan reporting would have to displace the old, supposedly disinterested approach to the news.

There is a common theme here.

In normal times progressives worry that they do not have public support for their policies. Only in crises do they feel that the political Left and media can merge to use apocalyptic times to ram through usually unpopular approaches to foreign and domestic problems.

We saw that last year: fleeing from Afghanistan, the embrace of critical race theory, trying to end the filibuster, pack the court, junk the Electoral College and nationalize voting laws.

These “new orders” and “resets” always entail far bigger government and more unelected, powerful bureaucracies. Elites assume that their radical changes in energy use, media reporting, voting, sovereignty, and racial and ethnic quotas will never quite apply to themselves, the architects of such top-down changes.

So we common folk must quit fossil fuels, but not those who need to use corporate jets. Walls will not mar our borders but will protect the homes of Nancy Pelosi, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.

Hunter Biden’s lost laptop will be declared, by fiat, not news. In contrast, the fake Alfa Bank “collusion” narrative will be national headline news for weeks.

Middle class lifestyles will be curbed as we are instructed to strive for sustainability and transition to apartment living and mass transit. But the Obamas will still keep their three mansions, and Silicon Valley futurists will insist on exemptions for their yachts.

In truth, we are about to see a radical reset – of the current reset. It will be a different sort of transformation than the elites are expecting and one that they should greatly fear.

The world and the United States are furious over hyperinflation that may soon exceed 10% per year. We will be lucky if it ends only in recession or stagflation, rather than a global depression.

The mess was created by the same apparat who bought into “modern monetary theory.” That silly university idea claimed prosperity would follow vastly expanding the money supply, keeping interest rates at de facto zero levels, running huge annual deficits, piling up unsustainable national debt, and subsidizing workers to stay home.

Natural gas and oil costs are now soaring to unsustainable levels – and to the point where the middle class simply will not be able to travel, keep warm in winter, or cool in summer.

Both in Europe and the United States left-wing governments deliberately curbed drilling and non-Russian pipelines. They shut down nuclear power plants and subsidized costly, inefficient solar and wind projects. They ended up not with utopia, but with fuel shortages, high prices, and energy dependency on the world’s most repressive regimes.

The woke revolution in the West was supposed to teach us that the “white male”-dominated Western world is toxic. Its origins, ascendence, and current leisure and affluence were supposedly due only to systemic exploitation, racism, and sexism.

Elites introduced cancel culture, doxxing, deplatforming and social ostracism to shame these supposed exploiters and to destroy their lives and careers.

Few asked how a supposedly noxious West of some 2,500 years duration became the number one destination of millions of global non-Western migrants and offered the greatest degree of global prosperity and freedom for its citizens.

So a reset reckoning is coming – in reaction to the “new orders” championed by Biden and the Davos set.

In the November 2022 midterms, we are likely to see a historic “No!” to the orthodox left-wing agenda that has resulted in unsustainable inflation, unaffordable energy, war, and humiliation abroad, spiraling crime, racial hostility – as well as arrogant defiance from those who deliberately enacted these disastrous policies.

What will replace it is a return to what until recently had worked.

Closed and secure borders with only legal and measured immigration will return. Americans will demand tough police enforcement and deterrent sentencing, and a return to integration and the primacy of individual character rather than separatist fixations on the “color our skin.”

The public will continue to tune out of the partisan and mediocre “mainstream” media. We will see greater increased production of oil and natural gas to transition us slowly to a wider variety of energy, strong national defense, and deterrent foreign policies.

The prophets of the new world order sowed the wind and they will soon reap the whirlwind of an angry public worn out by elite incompetence, arrogance, and ignorance.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.

WHY SHOULD DEPLORABLES FIGHT FOR THOSE WHO HATE THEM?
By J.B. Shurk, March 8, 2022

What happens when a self-anointed "ruling class" spends years demonizing its own citizens as racist, white supremacist, deplorable, insurrectionist Neanderthals bitterly clinging to their guns and their Bibles? What happens when the fools in charge censor dissent and throw their political enemies in prison? What happens when the political Establishment floods the country with illegal aliens while publicly wishing for the quick "extinction" of those proud to wave the red, white, and blue? Maybe when those same elitist snob-goblins start beating the drums of war, declare patriotic love of country acceptable once again, and call for deep sacrifices to be made in the interest of preserving freedom, the people most needed to pick up a rifle, fight, and sacrifice life and limb instead turn their backs on those who have relentlessly tormented them. Maybe America's real protectors just walk away.

Right now, Congress and the White House seem vested in initiating World War III between Russia and the West, and a lot of America's natural warriors couldn't care less. Why is that? Could it be that our elected officials and their bureaucratic shock troops have spent so many decades betraying American citizens that now many American citizens could never justify dying for a cause supported by those same cretinous manipulators and bloodsucking lice? Could it be that Americans have no idea why they would rush onto foreign battlefields for the preservation of another nation's freedoms when their own freedoms are under sustained attack here at home? Could it be that it makes little sense to get bloody out of a fervent devotion to country when that country's leaders have spent years denigrating patriotism as nothing more than Nazism?

Here's a thought for the champagne socialists controlling both political parties: should you want the American people to back your play against foreign enemies, perhaps you shouldn't disparage them as enemies, too. Perhaps it is asinine to mock them daily, hunt them down as "domestic terrorists" for their political beliefs, and add nothing but misery to their lives. Perhaps constantly trying to start domestic race wars, inflating the costs of fuel and food, and sticking it to white men out of sheer petulance isn't a winning strategy for building national unity and ferocious loyalty.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the wars of the future will all be fought by politically correct, "detoxified," androgynous know-nothings marching uniformly into battle because MSNBC, Google, and Teen Vogue tell them doing so will prove they are committed to fighting racism and global warming. Maybe that gender-confused pipsqueak huddled in a "safe space" because he/she/they/it is afraid of being "triggered" by words or the carnage of free speech is just what the U.S. military needs when going mano a mano against the Russians. I'm sure those pink pussy hat–wearing womynx are ready to jump out of a good airplane, parachute into chaos, and start slitting throats for good Ol' Uncle Sam (or is it non-binary Auxnt Sam now?).

Where are all the climate change warriors when their country needs them? Come on, "gladiators," get to it! Go find out what it's like to fight something that's fighting back. Let's move, wokesters! Show the mean Russkies how dangerous you are with your ski masks, bike chains, and fondness for attacking people from behind. All that burning, looting, and murdering in cities across the USA over the last few years had to prepare Democrats' wannabe soldiers for something, right?

Since the federal government has repeatedly taken a knee to prove its allegiance to Black Lives Matter and Antifa, now's the chance for America's leftist paramilitaries to prove that they can repay the feds, stand up, fight under fire, and repel a hostile force advancing with more than just hashtags and slogans. To the Americans who spend all day, every day trying to "cancel" other Americans for their beliefs, here's your opportunity to put your keyboard warrior skills to the test. Cancel or be canceled looks a whole hell of a lot different in the real world, though — far from the protection of corrupt prosecutors, Democrat politicians, and a partisan FBI. Go with God, I mean Gaia, you Earth-worshiping primitives. Good luck!

What, no takers? All those vicious woke-charged tweets against "authoritarianism" constituted the vertebral limits of the left's backbone? All of those digital diatribes against "fascism" represented the full extent of our Marxist vanguard's heroics? Surely the journalist class — always eager to belch forth their valor and courage in the face of "mean tweets" — is just itching to jump into the fray for the sake of...I don't know...Ukrainian diversity or some such rubbish.

No? Oh, my, well, then whom will the governing "elites" send into battle to die on their behalf? It can't be the tens of millions of illegal aliens in the United States because their job is to cast votes for Democrats in "fraud-free" elections. It can't be the public school teachers because they're too exhausted from refusing to teach students for two years, taping masks on children, and spreading racism in the form of CRT. It can't be the "social justice" crowd because they're too busy fighting the cesspool of neo-Nazism flaring up at local school board meetings where parents don't seem thrilled to have boys changing clothes in the same locker rooms as their daughters.

Oh, shucks — that means regular Americans who celebrate the Fourth of July will have to come to the rescue once again — you know, the ones who work, support their families, and pay taxes — even after the federal government spent the last two years destroying their savings; forcing them to say goodbye to their parents and grandparents from hospital hallways; and banning them from social media platforms for having opinions about the pandemic, the 2020 election, or America's future.

How is it always the case that our governing class treats Americans who just want to be left alone with such disdain yet invariably depends upon their service and sacrifice when the seas get rough and the devil comes out to play? Why is it that the same privileged, corporate-owned and operated, vile Fourth Estate that smiles when the likes of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama castigate ordinary Americans as "deplorable" always turns on a dime to rally patriotic Americans to fight in foreign lands at their behest? Why is it that Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney are always eager to call their own Republican voters "extremist" or "insurrectionist" or "ignorant" yet first in line to beg those same voters to defend their precious "principles" in their stead? How many different ways can politicians and the globalist cartel they actually serve demonstrate that they despise freedom-loving Americans before those Americans realize that giving the "last full measure of devotion" for those who hold them in contempt only serves to deprive the United States of its best while leaving us with its worst?

I have no sympathy for despotism in any form — whether it be Russian, Chinese, or Great Reset in nature. I do think American warriors should think long and hard, though, about fighting for freedom abroad when freedom is under attack here at home. I'm angry that the same members of Congress who have refused to stand up for the J6 political prisoners could turn around and urge those prisoners' friends and families to head off to a potential war. If the political class want blood-and-guts Americans to do their bidding, the prima donnas running that class need to earn the privilege.

What do Congress and the White House look like without a united American people prepared to do battle? A few hundred powerless "leaders" without anyone to lead. No rights, no warriors.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com

WHAT DO WE DO WITH THE FBI NOW?
By John Green and Quentin Smith, December 24, 2021

The events of the past five or six years have demonstrated to America that the FBI is no longer the unbiased law enforcement agency it once was. Between the Hillary Clinton investigation-in-name-only, the Crossfire Hurricane hoax, the targeting of Americans as domestic terrorists, and playing three blind mice with the Biden graft machine, the bureau’s issues can’t be ignored any longer. If we don’t take corrective action soon, the FBI will finish its transition from law enforcement to being a political functionary advancing the interests of one party.

There are only two options: rehabilitate the FBI, or eliminate it. The current state is unacceptable in a functioning constitutional republic. We need a credible and competent federal law enforcement capability. Sadly, the FBI has lost it claim on both those things.

A company I once worked for ran afoul of equal opportunity employment regulations. It was essentially placed on probation for a period of five years. That probation came in the form of a consent decree -- an agreement between the parties to resolve the problems, overseen by a court, and often verified by a court-appointed administrator. It’s time for a consent decree between the FBI and the American people.

An FBI consent decree is definitely going to need oversight, and not by the Department of Justice. The current problems have festered under DoJ oversight for years. The DoJ has not only failed to provide course correction to the FBI, it has arguably contributed to the problems. The rebuilding of the FBI should be overseen by a board chartered with the mission of rehabilitation, and staffed with people who care about integrity and understand what a well-functioning police organization should look like.

The oversight board should include retired FBI agents. Most retired agents left the bureau before it made its mad dash to be a political player. They are proud of what it was, and ashamed of what it has become. Nobody wants to see it rehabilitated more than they do.

The board should also include the membership of an assortment of police chiefs/commissioners from around the country. They will bring an outside perspective and have no bureaucratic loyalties within the FBI. They know what policing should look like and can represent U.S. citizens on the board.

The board should be vested with broad powers. It should have the authority to terminate anyone at the FBI for malfeasance -- including the director. Presidents retain the authority to appoint directors. But unfortunately, terminating bad directors has become political. Give the board the ability to terminate directors for cause, outside of the political sphere.

The board should have oversight of all training, employee terminations, and employee promotions. By training agents to behave ethically, and ensuring that those who embrace those lessons advance professionally, the board will gradually rebuild a culture of integrity.

Give the board oversight of charging decisions where bureau criminal violations are involved. As we have seen, DoJ prosecutors have a history of declining prosecution of criminal behavior in other government agencies. Even though Deputy Director Andrew McCabe violated numerous laws and was referred for prosecution by the Inspector General, the DoJ declined prosecution. Recently we have learned that over the past 14 years, nearly a dozen CIA employees committed sex crimes against children -- one as young as two years old! The issue was referred to the DoJ, which decided that job termination rather than criminal prosecution was just fine. That’s the DoJ, taking a pass on multiple instances of child rape because the offenders were fellow federal employees. The FBI cannot be rehabilitated unless its employees are held to at least the same standard as the general public. The board needs to be consulted for all FBI employee charging decisions.

The board should have the authority to initiate investigations within the FBI. It should be authorized to draw on the resources of the inspector general to conduct those investigations, and the IG should be answerable to the board for any FBI related investigations.

Finally, the board should be in an advice and consent role in the appointment of FBI directors. The President should still hold the authority to appoint, but the board should be involved in identifying and vetting candidates.
For the probation period to work, some structural changes will also be necessary. Victor Davis Hanson recently proposed that the FBI headquarters be moved out of the Washington, D.C. area, and into the heartland of America. Get the bureau leadership out of the Washington echo chamber. Special functions such as training and technical labs can remain in their current locations. But make the FBI leadership reside with the people they are sworn to serve.

Civil servant protections need to be addressed. There needs to be an efficient means to dismiss corrupt or incompetent employees, without facing years of appeals for doing so. Andrew McCabe was terminated for both policy and criminal violations. He protested the termination. Years later, the termination was overturned by the attorney general. That is no way to send a message of accountability to agents of the FBI.

The IG needs to have enhanced powers -- at least as it pertains to the FBI. Currently the IG only has the power to interview current employees to investigate departmental malfeasance. The IG can only refer criminal matters to the DoJ, which as we have noted above, is not inclined to take action when politics is involved. The IG needs to have the authority to empanel a grand jury, issue subpoenas to fully investigate any criminal behavior within the FBI, and to hire prosecutors from outside the DoJ when criminal conduct is found.

The thing about a consent decree is that it relies on consent. We know the FBI is not going to like being put on probation. If the current staff doesn’t want rehabilitation, no amount of oversight will be successful. An alcoholic can’t be rehabilitated against his will. If the people of the FBI refuse the opportunity to correct themselves, they will resist every step, and the rehabilitation will fail.

But the current state is unacceptable. The bureau cannot be allowed to continue working counter to the Constitution, as the enforcers for one political party. America will not tolerate the FBI becoming the secret police, pursuing ideological rather than criminal investigations.

The bureau must be made to understand that if they will not embrace option 1 -- rehabilitation -- America will be left with only option 2 -- elimination. If the bureau can’t be rehabilitated, then the only alternative is to:

No doubt, many good people will get hurt if we’re forced to go this route. But government employees need to understand that when a private company loses a big customer, good employees lose their jobs. It’s just the way it is. And the FBI is losing its biggest customer -- the American people.

So, what does the FBI want? One last chance? Or an opportunity to explore job openings in mall security?

Quentin Smith is a military veteran and retired FBI Special Agent who served in the bureau for nearly 29 years and now lives in Idaho.
John Green is a political refugee from Minnesota, now residing in Idaho. He currently writes at the American Free News Network (afnn.us). He can be followed on Facebook or reached at greenjeg@gmail.com.

HOW MANY ZOMBIE AGENCIES DOES GOVERNMENT NEED?
By Trish Randall, November 16, 2021

How many federal agencies do we pay for? I bet you think, as I once did, that a quick internet search would tell. But researching for an essay a couple of years ago, I found numbers varying from 78 to 158, and websites saying the exact number was impossible to determine.

Looking at the USA.gov website recently, I discovered a tab for Federal Agencies A to Z (actually there are none past W). Scrolling around the list for two days, subtracting duplicate listings, like Useless Policy, Office of and Office of Useless Policy, I counted 456 (and a few more as I checked some links while drafting this essay).

The large number of agencies was my first, but not my only surprise. Each agency’s listing had a field for government branch, mostly filled with Executive, some Legislative, some Judicial. But sometimes that field contained: Independent, Quasi, or None. How can we have parts of government that are not part of a branch of our government?

It amused me that some agency names made it easy to guess when they were created. Delinquency was a focus in the 1930s; nuclear threats, 1950s; civil rights, 1960s; cyberterrorism, after 2001.

This just started with to know how many federal agencies we have. But discovering there are agencies decades past their freshness date, begs to be explored. This essay is a just cursory view.

Let’s start with Millennium Challenge Corporation. Interestingly, my guess that the year it was created began with “19” was incorrect. Congress set it up in 2004. MCC’s vapid catchphrase is: “reducing poverty through growth.” This agency gives monetary aid to countries committed to “…good governance, economic freedom and investing in their citizens.” A country of that description is likely to be prosperous. There are other examples of agencies with the same mission: USAID, Bureau of International Labor Affairs, State Department, Africa Development Foundation, Foreign Agricultural Service, International Development Finance Corp, International Growth, Energy & the Environment, International Trade Administration, International Trade Commission, Open World Leadership Center, Peace Corps. A substantial worldwide decline in poverty had been in progress for about a decade before MCC was founded.

Next, let’s explore the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition. It was created in 1956, as the Council on Youth Fitness, to address poor fitness among young Americans. Somehow, sixty-six years of press releases naming new directors, adding new council members, announcing the council’s (several) new names, free publications, adding senior fitness to the mission, and giving a few hundred schoolchildren awards each year have been monumentally ineffective at addressing Americans’ fitness.

If we didn’t have the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition, we’d still have plenty of agencies equipped to fail this task, including the Department of Education, Food & Nutrition Service, Department of Health & Human Services, Health Resources & Services Administration, National Health Information Center, National Institutes of Health, Food & Nutrition Service, Center for Food Safety & Applied Nutrition, Center for Nutrition Policy & Promotion.

Just the name The Women’s Bureau has an air of bygone progressive policies and drop waist dresses, which makes sense as the name hasn’t changed since the agency formed in 1920. Established by the Bureau of Labor to promote the interests of wage-earning women (then 20% of the workforce), and “…formulate standards and policies which shall promote the welfare of wage-earning women, improve their working conditions, increase their efficiency, and advance their opportunities for profitable employment.” Once the Equal Pay Act was signed in 1963, one would think the Women’s Bureau could be respectably retired with 43 years’ service.

Instead, this agency has had another 58 years, and counting, of mission creep (strangely never creeping to the failed Equal Rights Amendment, unmentioned on the Women’s Bureau webpage).

In the 1960s, old laws protecting working women were reexamined for negative effects on opportunity.
In the 1970s, focus shifted to discrimination against women and minorities, and spreading bureau expertise abroad.
During the 1980s, the bureau pushed for employer-paid childcare and onsite daycare.
The 1990s focus was on nontraditional employment for women, fair pay (like 1963 never happened) and the effects of domestic violence on the workplace.
After 2000, the agency turned to pushing STEM education and careers for girls, higher pay and economic security for women, seeking out disenfranchised women, paid family leave, and workplace segregation. More recently, the bureau’s priorities have been sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in the workplace, and addressing pay inequity (like 1963 never happened).

Its website says, “The Women’s Bureau is the only federal agency mandated to represent the needs of wage-earning women in the public policy process.” (There is no federal agency that represents the needs of stay-at-home mothers and housewives, which is probably for the best.) With legislation and agencies addressing equality of pay and worker treatment, and 47% of the current workforce being women, workplace issues could be handled by agencies including the Civil Rights Divisions of the Education Department, DOJ and/or HHS, Commission on Civil Rights, Wage & Hours Division, or Equal Employment Opportunity Council.

It’s been decades since the breakup of the Soviet Union. But I would be ok with keeping Radio Free Europe, if it redirected its pro-freedom, anti-censorship, anti-communist, pro-American messages toward the mainstream media, Congress and the White House.

Here’s a fact that makes these zombie agencies more discouraging. Until the middle of the 19th century, corporations in America had charters for only a limited number of years, rarely as long as 50, and often less. The corporation’s principals had to show how they planned to pay their investors, and the proposed project’s benefit to the community allowing the corporation to be created.

Unfortunately, the feds’ A to Z list still has room for more zombie agencies to form and feed at our expense. There are no zombie hunters in the federal universe.

Allow me to suggest three cheat codes for separating truth from propaganda in the Age of Mass Media Manipulation:

(1) Whatever is censored is true.

(2) Refusal to audit elections is proof that vote totals are unverifiable and fraudulent.

(3) Any president who inexplicably disappears for days at a time and admits that he is "not allowed" to answer questions from the press is not actually president.

If you put (1), (2), and (3) together, you get an incompetent and schizophrenic government incapable of protecting its armed forces overseas, securing its borders at home, preventing runaway inflation from destroying the economy, or acting in the best interest of the American people. What you get is a dazed and addled puppet pretending to be commander-in-chief while unelected and unaccountable shadow figures call the shots. What you get is a praetorian press that has no problem lying about the fake president's obvious dementia by framing his mental handicaps as nothing more than a "childhood stutter." You get American service members murdered and maimed at the tail end of a twenty-year war because the stooges in charge put optics and political correctness ahead of troop safety. You get a world devoid of American leadership because an evil cabal of media monopolists, corrupt election officials, and Deep State politicos conspired to rid Washington of President Trump and put one of the dumbest and most venal members of the D.C. Club into the Oval Office to do its bidding. What you get is a ruling class with blood on its hands.

Is there anybody who doesn't understand at this point that the news media and permanent government occupying D.C. have joined hands to run psychological operations against the American people? When Obama's director of the CIA, John Brennan, spends years on television pushing a demonstrably false Russia collusion hoax created out of thin air by Hillary's political network and used by Obama's administration to spy on the Trump campaign (and nobody goes to prison), is there any question that the U.S. government is engaging in domestic information warfare to manipulate American sentiment? When the Russia hoax (perpetrated by two former directors of the FBI; the CIA; Obama's director of National Intelligence, James Clapper; and both Republicans and Democrats on the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence, among many other players) was finally exposed as a classic disinformation maneuver meant to hurt President Trump, did the mainstream media take a moment to acknowledge that high-ranking members of the Intelligence Community had attempted to take down a sitting president?

Of course not. Accomplices don't ask questions; they hide motives. They just moved right on to a fake "quid pro quo" impeachment cynically used to damage President Trump during an election year while covering up the Biden family's financial corruption in Ukraine and China. When that had little effect on the president's approval polls in the spring of 2020, the press turned the China Virus into an electoral weapon for justifying the illegal imposition of mass mail-in balloting while terrifying millions of Americans into believing that their lives depended upon a Biden victory.

Military and intelligence officials with no honor whatsoever signed their names to a document falsely attributing as "Russian disinformation" the New York Post's accurate reporting on a damning Hunter Biden laptop exposing the Biden family's corruption and vulnerability to blackmail, and in another letter, military and intelligence officials claimed that only Joe Biden could return "character, principles, wisdom, and leadership" to the position of commander-in-chief. It should not have taken Biden's disastrous train wreck this month in Afghanistan to know that a man with a history of racism and sexual assault and an unnatural fixation with inappropriately touching children is not capable of acting honorably. It should not have taken the Biden administration's conscious destruction of America's newly won energy independence and eagerness to jump back into bed with Iran's terrorist-sponsoring regime to question whether his history of pay-for-play self-enrichment from foreign adversaries and his son's history of unpunished criminality put the United States at risk. Because the FBI and DOJ stayed mum about Hunter's laptop and the press suppressed the story, nobody knows how the measly 40,000 votes that handed victory to Biden might have otherwise been cast. In other words, the U.S. Intelligence Community actively engaged in disinformation and propaganda against the American people in order to affect a presidential election. And they did so by spending years amping up tensions with Russia by falsely accusing our nuclear adversary of engaging in the exact information warfare our intel officials were conducting. Only a press corps so thoroughly corrupted by partisan impulses as ours could sit back while the Deep State attempts to hang its own wrongdoing on a foreign power, with all the national security risks that entails, and conclude, "There's nothing to see here; let's all move along."

How can a sitting president win over ten million more votes than his first election, beat his opponent in almost every traditional bellwether county across the country by double-digits, and still come up short of victory after four days of additional vote-counting in a handful of Democrat-run metropolitan counties in battleground states? That's such an obvious question that reporters should have jumped at the opportunity to scrutinize how a candidate who had hidden away in his basement for the entirety of the campaign had pulled off such a historic feat. Instead, that question and any investigations toward finding answers were immediately censored by the same Big Tech social media companies and news conglomerates that actively pushed for Biden's victory while they eagerly framed Trump voters as "insurrectionists" and "enemies of the state." Just as censorship of the Intelligence Community's active war against the American people became the order of the day in American newsrooms, censorship of too many unanswered questions surrounding the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election became part of that same information war, too.

I don't think D.C.'s despots are capable of processing information or learning in real-time. They're too busy preening and fluffing each other's egos to stop and consider how reviled they are by the rest of the country. For those outside of D.C., however, I challenge anybody to articulate a bigger threat to America today than the onslaught of government-sponsored disinformation, mass media manipulation, and censorship used to support the regime in the White House. I challenge anybody to look at the crumbling of America around us and not see the Intelligence Community and its partners in the press as those most responsible for our mess. When the government is committed to manipulating truth and the media are committed to censoring truth, neither stands for the American people.

There's a biting meme online showing a picture of one of President Trump's countless informal press conferences next to the now ubiquitous image of Biden's back seen while he shuffles away from reporters' questions. The caption nails the distinction: "The truth does not mind being questioned. It is lies that do not like to be challenged." I would add only this: the more our government and press attack Americans for challenging "official" lies, the more responsible they are for the damage those official lies bring. Every disaster endured by Americans today because of the Biden regime's mendacity and incompetence ultimately rests with those who first enabled the regime to come to power through lies of their own.

MICHAEL FLYNN'S LEGAL TORMENTORS SHOULD BE PROSECUTED
Former Rep. Bob Barr, May 04, 2020

Much has been reported in recent days about the manner in which the FBI “trapped” President Trump’s former National Security Adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, into lying in an early 2017 interview. Under federal law, it is strikingly easy for unethical federal officials to successfully play a game of legal “gotcha” with individuals they decide to target. This is precisely why we must insist on maintaining the highest ethical standards for federal investigators and prosecutors, which tragically did not happen in Flynn’s case.

What the FBI — then under the leadership of the since-discredited James Comey – did to Gen. Flynn constitutes a blatant violation of the most basic ethical principles which federal investigators and prosecutors are sworn to uphold. The fundamental ethical foundation according to which these men and women, including Comey and former Special Counsel Robert Mueller — whose office prosecuted Flynn — is best captured in a speech delivered by then-Attorney General Robert Jackson in early 1940.

Jackson’s remarks, delivered at the Justice Department to the assembled United States Attorneys, concluded with this eloquent statement supposed to undergird the duties of these powerful officials:

“The qualities of a good prosecutor are as elusive and as impossible to define as those which mark a gentleman. And those who need to be told would not understand it anyway. A sensitiveness to fair play and sportsmanship is perhaps the best protection against the abuse of power, and the citizen’s safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who approaches his task with humility.”

Revelations in just the past week illustrate how completely government agents strayed from Jackson’s admonition in their case against Flynn: targeting him for partisan political reasons when there was no evidence of any underlying violation of any U.S. law, cleverly lulling him into a sense of confidence that he was discussing matters of mutual interest with fellow employees of the same administration and finally springing the trap shut by threatening the one thing the agents knew would be more important to the him than even his own career – that of his son.

The first vehicle by which the federal agents targeted Flynn was something known as the Logan Act, a centuries old but never used federal law prohibiting civilians from engaging in diplomacy with foreign governments. Not only was there no evidence to justify an investigation of Flynn beyond even a preliminary inquiry into whether this law had been violated, but it would not even apply to an official in his position.

Ultimately, the noose Mueller’s band of partisan prosecutors hung around Flynn’s neck is a law that often is used by federal attorneys – 18 U.S.C. §1001. This is the single count to which Flynn plead guilty in late 2017 (and for which he still awaits sentencing). It is this non-descript law that is in many respects a “prosecutor’s best friend” because of its broad scope.

Make no mistake, this section of the federal criminal code is legitimate and serves a valuable public purpose if properly utilized. In essence, the provision makes it a felony to “knowingly and willfully” lie to a federal agent. Unlike a number of other, similar federal and state crimes such as perjury, however, a person can be convicted of violating “Section 1001” (as the section is commonly known) without having been first placed under oath; hence its broad reach.

This “1001” language also can be found in the small print on almost every federal form that individuals sign, including most banking forms, federal assistance paperwork and so forth. It truly is a trap for the unwary and the dishonest. Its use in the Flynn case, however, demonstrates that a legitimate and well-intended law, when placed in the hands of overly zealous investigators and prosecutors, becomes a cudgel by which federal agents can punish those with whom they disagree.

Hopefully, Bill Barr, the current Attorney General of the United States, will heed his predecessor’s 1940 admonition, and bring to justice those who so blatantly abused their positions of trust in targeting Gen. Flynn.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s 7th District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003 and was the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia from 1986 to 1990. He now serves as President of the Law Enforcement Education Foundation based in Atlanta, Georgia. Reprinted with permission from The Daily Caller, https://dailycaller.com

A Breitbart News report ripping the New York Times -- always a fun read -- revealed the true cost to American workers for allowing illegal aliens to work here.

$493.9 billion annually, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Illegal aliens lower wages by that amount. It is a 5.2% payroll reduction, a tax if you will on workers.

And unlike federal income taxes that hit the 1% hardest, this payroll tax hits lower wage workers the hardest.

Released on September 21, 2016, the report said:

The same Democrats who promote giving the Chamber of Commerce cheap labor then turn around and pretend to champion the victims of illegal aliens by pushing for $15 an hour wages. The chamber is OK with that because it represents big business that can absorb the rising cost. The small businesses that compete with them cannot as easily absorb those costs.

The study also said, "immigrants do not pay enough in taxes to cover their consumption of public services at the present time. The NAS report presents eight different scenarios based on different assumptions about the current fiscal impact (taxes paid minus services used) of immigrants and their dependent children. All of the scenarios show that immigrants are a fiscal drain. The drain is as large as $299 billion a year."

Since the election of Donald John Trump as president, American workers have enjoyed record-high employment, the lowest unemployment rate since we landed a man on the moon, and actual wage increases that beat inflation.

In promoting his Breitbart News story, Neil Munro tweeted, "Many Americans are already working in chicken processing factories, and more will take the jobs when low-wage illegals are sent home and the starting wages are pushed up. Another win for Econ 101: supply and demand."

He is correct. Eliminating an illegal supply increases the demand for legal workers who cost more.

Illegal aliens help the 1%. Small wonder the 1% has the most vocal supporters of illegal aliens. Barbra Streisand wants cheap landscapers and maids, which is why Malibu is a sanctuary city.

And if we commoners object it is because we are deplorable.

OBAMA JUDGE BLOCKS TRUMP FROM KEEPING ILLEGALS IN MEXICO
By Don Surber, April 08, 2019 DonSurber@gmail.com

zDemocrat obstruction of the presidency continues as Obama-appointee Judge Richard Seeborg sided with a liberal group in stopping President Donald John Trump from executing his constitutional duty as commander in chief.

Seeborg is the same obstructionist judge who earlier blocked the Trump administration from restoring the citizenship question on the census that Obama had unilaterally removed in the 2010 Census. That unconstitutional decision is on appeal.

Fox News reported, "The so-called Remain in Mexico policy was one of the primary innovations of former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, whom President Trump announced on Sunday will be leaving her position after 16 months in the job.

"Judge Richard Seeborg in San Francisco granted a request by civil liberties groups to halt the practice while their lawsuit moves forward. He put the decision on hold until Friday to give U.S. officials the chance to appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals -- which, thanks to Trump's aggressive judicial appointments, is now more friendly to conservatives than it has been in more than three decades.

"The launch of the policy in January in San Diego at the nation's busiest border crossing marked an unprecedented change to the U.S. asylum system, government officials and asylum experts said. Families seeking asylum typically had been released in the U.S. with notices to appear in court -- and, conservatives have charged, they often can't be relied upon to show up.

"The American Civil Liberties Union, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, which brought the lawsuit on behalf of 11 asylum applicants and several other organizations, praised the ruling in a statement Monday."

So Seeborg does not work for American citizens. He works for illegals.

Making asylum seekers remain in Mexico and prove themselves makes sense. It is not up to us to prove they are not refugees; it is up to them to prove they are.

Given that they have not sought asylum in Mexico, the whole thing is a sham.

President Trump has a duty to protect our borders.

He also has a duty to protect us from authoritarian judges. We really must strip district judges of the power to enjoin presidential edicts.

President Trump and Mitch McConnell are replacing socialist judges like this Seeborg fellow. This is why I refuse to dump on McConnell.

BEST ECONOMY IN 53 YEARS
By Don Surber, Saturday, March 30, 2019 DonSurber@gmail.com

Throughout the 2016 campaign, elitists said Donald John Trump wanted to bring back the 1950s. A New York Times headline mocked, "Voters Who Long for 'Leave It to Beaver.'"

Well, he's already returned us to 1966. This time without the war.

The University of Michigan's latest monthly survey showed consumer sentiment rose to 98.4 from February’s 93.8.

Survey director Richard Curtin said, "Middle and lower income households more frequently reported income gains than last month, although income gains were still widespread among upper income households. Indeed, the last time a larger proportion of households reported income gains was in 1966."

So while the media and other Democrats chased their tails looking for collusion with Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, President Trump was fixing the economy. Those jobs the idiot Obama said are not coming back came back.

Tariffs were supposed to kill us. US Steel and others reopened plants.

The elitists always said he would destroy the economy.

Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman, the voice of Democrat economics, wrote on Election Night, "It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover?

"Frankly, I find it hard to care much, even though this is my specialty. The disaster for America and the world has so many aspects that the economic ramifications are way down my list of things to fear.

"Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never."

Never.

Krugman wanted a recession. He hoped for the economic ruin of America because we voted for someone he doesn't approve of.

They all did. From Barbara Bush to Barbra Streisand, these elitists have theirs and they don't want you to have yours.

That is why they do not want to Make America Great Again.

YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN, WALL STREET
By Don Surber, January 18, 2019, DonSurber@gmail.com

The Reuters headline said: "Watch out, Wall Street: Here comes Ocasio-Cortez."

Conservatives are supposed to rally behind Wall Street.

Why? The financial services industry backed Hillary in 2016. Call her. My number is busy.

The Chamber of (Open Borders) Commerce can call her as well.

They bet the wrong pony.

Let them suffer.

Reuters reported, "U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, part of a new crop of Democrats swept into office this year on a stronger liberal platform, said she is poised to serve on a key congressional panel overseeing Wall Street, a potential setback for the financial services industry.

"'I'm looking forward to digging into the student loan crisis, examining for-profit prisons/ICE detention, and exploring the development of public and postal banking,' Ocasio-Cortez tweeted late Tuesday. 'I am very grateful for the opportunity to sit on this committee as a freshman.'

"Other incoming progressive Democrats, including Katie Porter, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley, are also expected to secure spots on the committee, Politico reported."

Maxine Waters heads the committee.

Hahaha.

Wall Streeters reap what they sow. All their baloney about toxic masculinity and diversity is biting them in the butt -- and I am loving it.

Corporate America is polluted with Social Justice Warriors at the top. Procter and Gamble -- once a sensible company -- came out against "toxic masculinity" in its new Gillette blades ad campaign. No man will ever buy their stuff again. Pajama Boys will. Generation XYZ chromosomes.

Maxine Waters promised to go after the big banks. Good. The new trend in banking is to block gun sales on credit cards.

I really don't care if Waters makes them place women, minorities, and anti-Semitic Muslim cretins like Rashida Tlaib on their boards of directors. Corporations have become weenies. Roast 'em.

Wall Street went left like Hollywood did. Let Wall Street figure its way out of this mess.

HERE ARE THE DETAILS OF THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION'S PLAN TO REORGANIZE ONE OF ITS BIGGEST AGENCIES
Jason Hopkins, Energy Investigator, The Daily Caller 8/30/2018

The Department of the Interior released its long-awaited reorganization proposal on Wednesday, a plan that calls on separating the agency into 12 “unified regions.”

In a memo sent to the Interior Department’s 70,000 staffers, Secretary Ryan Zinke unveiled his plan to streamline the agency by shifting offices across the country into 12 unified regions. The proposal aims to manage the Interior Department via watershed and ecosystem boundaries instead of state lines.

“Our new Unified Regions will allow important decisions to be made nearer to where our stakeholders and intergovernmental partners live and work, and will make joint problem-solving and improved coordination between our Bureaus and other Federal, State, and local agencies easier,” Zinke explained in the staff-wide email, adding that the new plan will “reduce bureaucratic redundancy, will improve communication between our experts in the field and leaders in Washington, D.C., and will allow us to share our knowledge and resources more effectively.”

The new management map, which can be found on the Interior’s website, has been in the works for months. The Interior Department had submitted its reorganization proposals to the Office of Management and Budget as early as September 2017, and Zinke had announced the overhaul in January.

The unified regions map is meant to better organize a department that has been characterized as inefficient and cumbersome by the Trump administration, however, critics counter that the proposal will be costly and result in employee layoffs. Zinke made clear in the email that no immediate personnel changes would take place.

“I want to reassure you that there will not be any office or personnel relocations during the initial implementation of our new Unified Regions, and your reporting structure is unchanged during the initial implementation phase,” the secretary guaranteed in the memo.

The process outlined in the memo will take place over the coming months and Zinke will be working with U.S. lawmakers in Congress — including key Democrats — to win over their support.

“In the next few months, many of our senior executives will be working in each Unified Region and focusing on and designing core elements of its operations, depending on the actual circumstances on the ground,” Zinke continued. The Interior secretary, who has long complained that too many bureaucrats lead from Washington, D.C., argues this new plan will establish more local control.

SWAMP CREATURES ARE TERRIFIED OF WHAT BEN CARSON IS DOING TO CLEAN UP HUD
By Horace Cooper, 4/07/2018

It’s been a year since Dr. Ben Carson was confirmed as Secretary for Housing and Urban Development. For most of its existence HUD is the cabinet-level agency probably best known for management challenges and the occasional corruption scandal involving local government officials abusing funds.

Liberals love HUD, because it hands out billions of dollars in the name of social justice. Not coincidentally, the money is often hard to account for, which is why it often ends up in the pocket of corrupt officials.

HUD has a long history of mismanagement and neglect. The agency’s financial statements are such a mess that the agency’s own Inspector General couldn’t complete an internal audit of the agency’s books. In fact, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report in 2016, based on numerous HUD IG and GAO audits over a 15-year period, in which it reported that the agency failed to implement multiple financial accountability recommendations. Additionally, the agency seemingly ignored recommendations to dedicate staff and implement and enforce policies to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.

This level of institutional corruption is the very essence of the swamp. And indeed, the swamp dwellers are fighting to keep things the way they were.

Then Ben Carson moved in and started turning things around.

President Donald Trump’s new budget for Fiscal Year 2019 proposes to eliminate more than $4 billion in HUD grants, believing the money would be better managed, and more effective, if it originated at the state and local level. At the same time, Secretary Carson is implementing a culture of accountability and financial responsibility that the agency hasn’t experienced in years. This began with the hiring of a former partner with one of the big four accounting firms to serve as the agency’s chief financial officer. This vital role has not had a permanent occupant for more than a decade. The Secretary then directed the CFO to design and implement a transformation plan and lead an internal task force to combat waste, fraud, and abuse.

The secretary also set the agency on course to manage its existing resources in an accountable manner.

From the standpoint of swamp dwellers, accountable and lower HUD budgets are intolerable. However, Ben Carson is a very smart black conservative leader who understands the importance of applying conservative principles to our nation’s housing and urban planning needs. Nevertheless, the stakes are high. If he succeeds as an administrator in whipping HUD into shape, the progressive left will be humiliated. It’s no surprise that the mainstream media, leftist elected officials, and progressive, George Soros-funded groups attack HUD and Carson almost daily.

His critics ran to the establishment media to make a fuss over the since cancelled purchase of a $31,000 dining room set that would have been used by HUD executives for years to come. Replacement was long overdue considering the set was about a half century old.

In addition, a number of these organizations signed on to a letter penned by a so-called “fair housing” group that complained about Carson updating the agency’s mission statement – a routine action that takes place under every incoming administration.

Ironically, many of the housing groups that signed the letter receive taxpayer money through HUD grants. These groups frequently sue HUD over policy changes and implementations. So they take our money, as taxpayers, and then use our money to sue us for even more money. A perfect microcosm of the swamp.

Swamp creatures are terrified of what Ben Carson is doing to clean up HUD. Let’s all hope he keeps at it.

Horace Cooper is a legal commentator and Co-Chair of Project 21, a national network of black conservatives

Article reprinted with permission from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's draining of the State Department -- aka Foggy Bottom -- just kicked into high gear. The government will offer 641 workers up to $25,000 each just to leave.

Overall he wants to pare the payroll by 1,982 people, or 8% of the workforce, according to United Press International.

All the right people are complaining:

Lack of experience?

Tillerson has cut oil deals all over the world.

Likewise, Trump built resorts in lands across the seas.

What was Obama's experience? He once visited a mud hut in Kenya. Seriously. In the 2008 campaign he called it Mud Hut Diplomacy.

But Obama parroted the same academic idiots that the State Department lauds.

He signed off on giving Russian oligarchs 20% of U.S. production of uranium.

He bombed Libya.

He was OK with overthrowing Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

He dropped sanctions against Cuba without gaining anything.

He gave billions to Iran in unmarked bills, along with permission to build nukes.

Obama was a disaster. He did everything State told him to do.

Under Trump, the Islamic State is on the run, Kim Jong Un is being muzzled, China is investing $250 billion in U.S. industry, NAFTA is under re-negotiation, and NATO countries are paying to defend themselves.

When he's done cleaning up State, make Tillerson our national intelligence chief and revamp those agencies. Then the FBI. The VA. And then elect him to Congress.

THE NDAA IS FATALLY FLAWED AND THREATENS NATIONAL SECURITY
By Cesar Conda, 9/18/2017

Looking at some of the early Christmas gifts buried deep on the National Defense Authorization Act for both liberals like Elizabeth Warren and our enemies like North Korea and Iran, it’s almost hard believe Republicans won an election in November.

Somehow, deep in the fine print almost no one in Washington ever reads, are a series of provisions snuck in to the NDAA by Senator Warren and Obama Administration holdovers at the Defense Department that will actually make America less safe and grow government bureaucracy.

The first Warren provision forces all new DOD technology to be built with so-called “open source” software. It was open source software that Equifax was using when hackers stole the identities of 143 million Americans. “Open source” means that the code at the very center of how the technology is run is open to be viewed by anyone. In fact, Sen. Warren’s provision in the NDAA specifically calls for any such software put in place at the Dept. of Defense to be made “available to anyone for any purpose” by the Secretary of Defense ‘for the public good.’ But the only good that will come out of it is for Russia, North Korea and Iran and other countries that want to more easily hack American military systems.

The new language also separately requires all technology to be built by only in-house government contractors. It’s impossible to understand why the government would be building new technology itself. Since when is the U.S. government more sophisticated than private industry when it comes to technology and software? In fact, just a few months back a former Defense Department CIO in a presentation to Congress reported that the Pentagon was DECADES behind in technology. So the very-behind department is now going to develop its own new technology? That doesn’t sound right.

Upon further investigation I read that the department would make use of two operations – built by and chock-filled with Obama Administration officials — called U.S. Digital Service and 18F. Two groups that are U.S. government entities that have an interest in doing away with having the government ever contract with private companies.

Each of these departments has approximately 200 developer-types, all paid for by your tax dollars, and charged with charging other government agencies for digital support. The Obama Administration was in love with the idea of running whiz-bang tech startup-like government agencies inside the bureaucracy, but once he vacated the White House I thought they’d be shown the door. Instead, Senator Warren is working overtime to slide provisions into bill language to bolster these startups-on-welfare.

I’m not so sure those are the government workers I want developing the technology that should be strengthening our national security. In fact, on their website, 18F promises to work transparently by using “open source and open data.” As mentioned above, not so sure we want that to be the motto for our most sensitive national security and homeland security programs!

Finally, as if eliminating all competition from the private sector and endangering national defense by “open sourcing” everything at DoD wasn’t enough, Sen. Warren has also somehow managed to slip a provision into the NDAA that would confiscate the intellectual property of private sector technology companies already working with the Defense Department.

That’s right, there’s a final provision she has snuck in – Sec. 881 – that would seek to force every technology company currently working with the DoD to hand over their source code as a condition of continuing to work with the Defense Department. For most technology companies, their source code is about the most important trade secret they own. They should never be asked to hand it over. And to ask for it violates every contract the DoD signed with them previously.

The American people deserve the best, most sophisticated developers and technologists working to build programs that protect the country. What we don’t need is a bunch of Obama holdovers looking for job security. There is no place for Elizabeth Warren and her dangerous, liberal provisions in the NDAA.

Article reprinted with permission from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com

Imagine that you were elected to a federal office several years ago and had a safe seat with all the perks attached, including salary, expense account, and influence with corporate CEOs and other titans of industry. Suppose further that you knew that the future would be prosperous when you left office because the connections you made would make you a fortune as a lobbyist. Moreover, since unseating an incumbent is a herculean task, you felt that you were set for life. In fact, as soon as you got elected, you began raising money and preparing for re-election. Governing and legislating became an afterthought – something you might engage in after your next campaign was carefully planned.

Suddenly, a guy runs for office with a lot of ideas about "draining the swamp" and making rules that include a prohibition on lobbying for at least five years after leaving office. As if that's not enough, he criticizes the "establishment" of which you are a significant part. To add insult to injury, this upstart comes from the private sector with no record of elective office, yet he has the audacity to run for the highest office in the land. You, and most of your colleagues, got where you are by starting in local elections, from city councils to mayor to state rep, and on to your currents spots at the national level.

You didn't take him seriously throughout his long and vociferous campaign, often refusing to endorse what he said and what he stood for. When he shocked the world with a strong win against a candidate the polls said would win easily, all you could do was feign approval and acceptance. You didn't dare speak publicly about your disdain for the man who was elected to actually make America great again!

Not only did this newcomer speak bluntly, eschewing politically correct tap-dancing around issues, but he spoke forcefully about the venal nature of politics and those who use it for personal aggrandizement. He didn't use lofty rhetoric and eloquent phrases like his predecessor. Instead, he spoke in a language rarely heard in a country weaned on Pied Piper-style oratory. He merely told the truth in plain words that would resonate with the proletariat, the people who made this country the envy of the world. The voters were thrilled to finally have a leader who uses common sense, rather than a wet finger in the air before making decisions.

However, those who have been entrenched in their private little fiefdoms in the nation's capital began to wonder how they were going to deal with this brilliant maverick who had captured the imagination of millions of Americans who had given up on government.

Democrats hate him with a ferocious intensity that comes from seeing their plans for party dominance collapse under the weight of this new spirit of patriotism. Republicans hate him for beating all their veteran politicians and for proving how ineffective they've been at improving the lives of their constituents. After all, if neither party can win with the customary bromides, spewing from the mouths of the usual suspects, they must have lost touch with the people who once lapped up their verbal vacuity, believing that it was the only pabulum on the shelf. Why would voters reject prominent names like Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich, et al., political veterans all, in favor of a neophyte?

Those questions continue to haunt the inhabitants of that sewer on the Potomac. They don't appreciate being forced out of the darkness, where greedy deals are made and concern for the people gets thrown under the grinding wheels of political expediency. These are not exactly profiles in courage. With rare exceptions, these are people who arrived at the "shining city upon a hill" with the intention of making a career, and if that meant going along to get along, it was fine with them. They weren't about to step out of their comfort zones by addressing controversial topics that might make them unpopular during the next plebiscite.

Hence, when an intrepid leader emerges and abandons caution in favor of keeping his campaign promises, he's treated like an anomaly. The fact that he's fighting for the principles voters elected him to fight for is lost on those who got elected with one thought in mind: to feather their own nests.

President Trump is reminiscent of the Founding Fathers – the type of statesmen who surmounts incredible odds to build the greatest country in the world. Now, after many years of being led by a man who apologized for our country, we have a leader working indefatigably to make America great again!

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION HAS INCREASED IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT THROUGH THIS ONE KEY ACTION
By Alex Pfeiffer, 7/06/2017

The Trump administration has ended a form of prosecutorial discretion that was prevalent during the Obama administration to make it easier to deport illegal immigrants.

Prosecutorial discretion generally refers to the ability of prosecutors to prioritize certain cases due to operational constraints. This was used by the Obama administration to enact out its immigration policy, specifically by prioritizing the deportation of gang members, criminal aliens, and very recent entries. Under this policy, immigration attorneys could make the case that their clients fell within the non-enforcement categories and thus should not be deported.

A May email from Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s office of the chief counsel in Baltimore to an immigration attorney obtained by TheDC stated that prosecutorial discretion will no longer be “triggered by an affirmative request.” An ICE spokeswoman Sarah Rodriguez told The Daily Caller last week, this meant that ICE is no longer entertaining requests of prosecutorial discretion from attorneys representing illegal immigrants.

“Before Obama, prosecutorial discretion in the immigration context simply referred to instances where ICE attorneys would, for a variety of case-specific reasons, pursue other avenues in lieu of deportation, like allowing an illegal alien to return voluntarily instead of being formally deported (known as voluntarily departure), pursuing supervised release instead of detention pending a removal-hearing, or granting a temporary stay of removal for emergency or public interest reasons,” Ian Smith, an attorney with the Immigration Reform Law Institute told TheDC.

“Unlike Obama’s broad-based nonenforcement carve-outs, each of these alternatives are expressly provided for in the federal immigration statute and are allowed to be pursued by ICE agents and attorneys according to closely set parameters and on an individualized basis,” Smith added.

The Obama administration did not keep figures on how many illegal immigrants received prosecutorial discretion, so it is hard to directly quantify how many more will be deported due to this new policy.

President Trump has put all 12 million or so illegal immigrants in the country up for deportation, except the estimated 790,000 illegal aliens who receive DACA.

ICE Director Thomas Homan said at a recent press conference that no illegal immigrant should “be comfortable” in the U.S.

Article reprinted with permission from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com

PRESS READS TOO MUCH INTO TRUMP'S ILLEGAL ALIENS MOVE
By Don Surber, June 17, 2017 http://donsurber.blogspot.com

President Trump rescinded Barack Obama's goofy Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, which allowed people to come to America illegally, give birth on American soil, and then claim legal status because, hey, their kid is an American, right?

I get that Democrats need votes, but Congress -- not the president -- enacts laws.

Some publications and bloggers believe that because he took action only against illegal alien parents that means he is cool with keeping illegal aliens who came here as kids under Obama's equally goofy Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

I liked it better when we were a nation of laws, but the Cult of Personality that elected Obama gave us eight years of the Reign of the Red Queen, who picked and chose laws in a cafeteria-style approach to law enforcement.

So now with a pen and a phone, presidents create their own law. The administration clarified that Trump is not through.

From Breitbart:

I favor the Protect the Borders approach.

You know, following the law.

Mexicans messed up their country and want to float north to mess up ours.

We "reformed" immigration in 1965, which opened the back door for Democrats to import socialist voters from Latin America.

A "reform" in 1986 made matters worse.

Build the wall. Enforce the law. Make America Great Again.

TRUMP ADMIN RESCINDS DAPA AMNESTY PROGRAM
By Peter Hasson, 6/15/2017 - The Daily Caller - http://dailycaller.com -

The Trump administration has fulfilled another one of Donald Trump’s campaign promises by rescinding the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) program implemented under Barack Obama that could have allowed as many as five million illegal aliens with children who are citizens or lawful permanent residents to remain in the country if they met certain criteria.

DAPA was blocked by the courts from implementation, which the Department of Homeland Security cited as a reason for rescinding the program. A DHS press released said Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly signed a memorandum rescinding DAPA on Thursday because “there is no credible path forward to litigate the currently enjoined policy.” (RELATED: Texas AG Says Trump Has Done More To Stop Illegal Immigration Than Anyone In World History)

The program had been challenged by 26 states after Obama issued it in November 2014. The Supreme Court deadlocked when ruling on the constitutionality of the program in June 2016, splitting the vote 4-4 due to the empty seat at the time left by late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

One of Trump’s signature campaign promises was that he would rescind both DAPA and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program if elected president.

The DHS press release added, however, that the June 2012 Obama memorandum creating DACA will remain in effect. That program applies to certain illegal aliens in the U.S. who arrived as children and met specific criteria.

Article reprinted with permission from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com

President Trump called for a review of the last 20 years of land grabs by Presidents Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama. GOOD.

Let me explain.

Presidents use executive orders to declare large patches of lands off limits to development, by designating them as memorials and the like.

For example, Barack Obama declared 1.35 million acres of Utah off limits last December because it is allegedly is an area sacred to a few Indians.

No hearing.

No vote by our representatives in Congress.

Just a lame-duck president with a pen deciding the fate of an area larger than Rhode Island.

That is not who we are. That is how strongmen dictators operate. We can do better than this.

President Trump now plans to review and reverse these abuses of power.

From the Hill:

Earlier today, I explained why the Appalachian Regional Commission must go, because as a West Virginian, I know what a boondogggle this is.

Bloomberg listed 19 independent agencies and 61 programs within Cabinet offices that Trump wants to close.

There is the African Development Foundation, which Bloomberg said, "Provides grants to community groups and small businesses that help marginalized communities in Africa."

It's a Carter creation that operates in Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cape Verde, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

You see any place on that list that is better off today than it was 37 years ago when this agency began? Certainly not Zimbabwe.

There is the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, created 30 years ago it "coordinates with federal agencies to prevent and end homelessness." You know who else was a coordinator? Fred Sanford on "Sanford and Son." Are the homeless better off? Only if they got jobs with this agency.

There is the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery program within the Department of Transportation. Obama created it in 2009 to help the nation recover from a recession. That recession is long gone. This program should be gone too.

There is the Community Development Block Grant Program -- the mother of all federal slush funds. HUD gives cities and states $3 billion a year to hand out to politically connected cronies and allies. Many "black community leaders" are tied to a group receiving CDBG money (pronounced "Seedy-B-G money").

There is the EPA's Energy Star program, which has gone so overboard with requiring appliances to be "energy efficient" that washers no longer wash clothes clean.

On paper, these are all nice things to have. But we cannot afford them. Sorry.

The real test is whether Republican congressmen and senators are willing to let their programs go.

The people who have cost tens of thousands of coal miners their jobs are about to lose theirs.

The Washington Examiner reported that President Trump plans to furlough 7,500 of the 15,000 people at the EPA.

America's air and water is cleaner today than we would have imagined when President Nixon founded it 47 years ago.

So why has the staff tripled?

The leviathan bureaucracy now poses the greatest threat to our environment, as it was responsible for the largest toxic spill in this century when its contractor dumped 3 million gallons of a toxic brew into the Animas River in Colorado two years ago.

From the Washington Examiner:

NAVY SECRETARY: IF TRUMP ROLLS BACK FEMALE INTEGRATION, THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES
By Jonah Bennett, 12/30/2016 - The Daily Caller - http://dailycaller.com

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus said recently in a December interview that while GOP President-elect Donald Trump can roll back social change in the military, doing so will make the force weaker.

Mabus, who has served in the position longer than anyone since World War I, has overseen significant social changes in the military and caused a lot of consternation in the process. Now, in a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Post, he’s warning that if Trump rolls back social change in the military, he should admit that it will damage the force.

“You make the decisions you think are right, right now, regardless what you think is going to happen in the future,” Mabus said. “But we are stronger because of this integration. That is undeniably true. So, if it gets rolled back, you’re weakening the United States military. You’re weakening the Navy. You’re weakening the Marine Corps. If that’s what you want to do, okay. But you have to be honest about it.”

Both Mabus and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter have maintained that allowing women entry into all combat roles will make the force stronger, as the move could allow access to a larger talent pool.

During his tenure, Mabus advocated for the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which was done away with in 2011. He also moved to triple maternity leave to 18 weeks and established Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs at elite colleges across the country. In an effort to make the Navy more environmentally friendly, Mabus pushed for ships to be fueled with sources other than fossil fuels, though a move toward a blended fuel in 2012 ended up costing the Navy $26.75 per gallon instead of $3.25 per gallon. This price differential attracted the attention of GOP Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, who listed the effort in his report on wasteful spending.

But by far the most controversial move has been the full integration of women into all combat positions–without exception. Mabus willingly involved himself in public spats with Marine Corps leadership over a study the service had conducted showing that mixed-gender units weren’t nearly as effective as all-male units. They outperformed mixed-gender units on 69 percent of tasks.

Mabus blamed Marine Corps leadership for having an improper mindset that he said was the reason why women underperformed. He added that with more training and better leadership, he was confident the gap could be closed.

His very public spats with the Marine Corps prompted calls for resignation by GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter.

“The only way this relationship can be repaired, I believe, is through the leadership of a new Navy Secretary — specifically one who does not regularly make a point to undercut the Marine Corps, distract it from its mission and insult its leaders,” Hunter wrote in January.

Nevertheless, Mabus has hung on to his position and believes he did the right thing for the Navy and Marine Corps.

“I think sort of across the board, there have been a lot of changes,” Mabus said. “But all with one goal in mind, and that’s making us a better Navy, making us a better Marine Corps, making us stronger and more able to do the job that needs to be done.”

“Looking back — I’m looking for the right word,” he added. “I’m very satisfied with where we are. That the changes we have made have, I think, made a difference, and made a difference in the right direction.”

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Article reprinted with permission from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com

FEDS REFUSE TO DIVULGE RECORDS OF ASSAULTS ON ORPHANED IMMIGRANT CHILDREN IN THEIR CARE
By Richard Pollock 12/05/2016

Despite reports of rapes and other sexual assaults, federal officials refuse to divulge any information to the public about the safety of orphaned Central American children in facilities run by third-party contractors, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has learned.

Charges of child abuse and sexual assault have dogged the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) since it admitted in a 2014 Freedom of Information Act response to the Houston Chronicle that there were 101 “significant incident reports” of sexual abuse of unaccompanied children in the contractor facilities.

Federal officials with ORR only inspect contracted facilities every three years and depend upon contractors to self-report any crimes. Agency spokesman Victoria Palmer told TheDCNF Friday that ORR officials don’t regularly compile sexual abuse or assault data of the immigrant children living at the facilities, stating, “the statistics you are requesting are not compiled or readily available.”

That drew a sharp rebuke from Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican and outspoken critic of the Obama administration’s secretive approach to ensuring the safety of unaccompanied immigrant children held in federally funded facilities managed by government contractors.

“It is both incomprehensible and unacceptable that ORR does not appear to be keeping statistical data about child abuse at its facilities,” Blackburn told TheDCNF Monday. “ORR must pull back the curtains on its operations and provide assurances to Congress that allegations of child abuse at their facilities have been dealt with appropriately.” Blackburn is a vice-chair of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team.

Secrecy has been the center of ORR’s operations under President Barack Obama, which operate within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). But Palmer insisted “ORR takes very seriously its legal responsibility to care and shelter children referred by immigration authorities.”

Since 2013, at least 207,000 children have arrived at the U.S. border as “unaccompanied alien children” — ORR’s official designation for them — and are or have been in the agency’s care. But little is known outside of ORR about the conditions the children face inside the facilities.

“The entire program is shrouded in secrecy,” said James Simpson, an author and expert on refugee issues. “They don’t tell you where they are placing them. You don’t know what the process is once the children get there,” Simpson told TheDCNF.

HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell has not prosecuted a single federal employee for abuse of the immigrant children and claims ORR cannot discipline employees who work for the contractors, even when cases involve violent acts such as sexual assaults.

“There are no ORR employees currently being investigated by law enforcement for sexual misconduct or abuse involving unaccompanied children,” Burwell told Congress in a Feb. 23, 2015 letter to Blackburn, who is also vice-chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Burwell also said contract employees cannot be punished for child abuse, telling Blackburn, “Care workers in facilities for unaccompanied children are not HHS Federal employees, but employees of grantees of ORR.”

The agency relies on local police departments for any misconduct by its contractors, not the FBI, which would investigate abuse by federal employees.

Secrecy isn’t the only problem plaguing ORR, as officials there have dragged their feet on implementing mandated reforms. Congress attached language to the Violence Against Women Act in 2013, requiring ORR to “adopt national standards” to protect unaccompanied refugee children from rape and sexual attacks.

Nearly fours years later, the standards mandated by Congress have still not been issued, and ORR functions under an “interim” rule.

Even if the reforms were implemented, ORR relies on contractors to police themselves and voluntarily report abuses. “ORR requires all care providers to immediately report emergencies and significant incidents that may arise. Care providers also must report appropriate significant incidents,” Palmer told TheDCNF.

The problem is likely to get worse before it gets better since the number of unaccompanied immigrant children pouring into the U.S. is increasing dramatically.

The number of Central American children entering the U.S. without parents doubled from 28,000 in 2015 to 47,000 this year, Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson reported Nov. 29.

Article reprinted with permission from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com

ONLY ONE WAY FOR THE FBI TO REGAIN ITS LOST REPUTATION
By Bruce Walker, October 10, 2016

James Comey, the crooked political operative running the FBI for the left, has clearly lied to Congress, lied to the American people, and fixed the criminal investigative process to protect Hillary Clinton and her creepy aides from justice. Conservatives have gotten used to the Department of Justice under Obama as simply another organ of leftist activism. Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch have both been abominable heads of the Department of Justice, and several federal judges have indicated as much.

Using federal agencies as tools of political oppression or leftist activism is the best case yet simply abolishing the Department of Justice completely and devolving the enforcement of all federal laws to the fifty state attorney general offices.

In the same vein, one might think we should leave the FBI only for the purpose of supporting state law enforcement efforts with technical support, but that was before the incredible stream of new revelations, never volunteered by Comey and discovered only by insistent probing, that show intimate collusion between the Clinton campaign and the FBI, with sleazy actions so blatantly bad that no serious person can doubt the wrongness of it all.

Physical evidence is destroyed before anyone can see it, though subpoenaed by Congress and possibly containing classified information. Computer systems with classified documents scrubbed clean by private vendors before federal officers know what has been scrubbed. Suspects sit in on the questioning of other suspects, and suspects are given immunity, it appears, for no good reasons at all.

If this presidential election is fixed by an utterly politicized FBI, then the reputation of that agency will never recover. No serious American, in that case, should ever believe anything the FBI tells us about anything at all. If we cannot trust the FBI when powerful politicians are being investigated, then when can we trust it? If the FBI can be influenced by politicians, then it can be influenced by drug lords or crime bosses or crooked billionaires.

There is only one thing, at this point, that can rehabilitate the reputation of a once honorable organization now up to its neck in the muck of influenced investigations and tampered justice. A number of current FBI agents must publicly condemn Director Comey and deplore the deeply disturbing, very unusual actions taken by the FBI in these investigations. This may cost the agents involved their careers, but agents who care about the agency more than their careers will take that risk. These agents ought to explain exactly how this investigation was utterly wrong and how it deviated from normal practices.

Director Comey compelled twentyfive agents to sign nondisclosure agreements, but these agreements cannot prevent these agents from publicly criticizing how politicized the investigation appeared to them.

In fact, this might even be more telling: "We have been ordered by Director Comey to sign nondisclosure agreements, so until he releases us from those agreements, we cannot provide details, but we can say this: the whole thing stinks from top to bottom. Everything about this investigation fails the smell test. If Director Comey will release us from the nondisclosure agreements, we will be happy to say more."

If FBI agents need a model, they might look to the National Border Control Council, which, frustrated by politically correct border enforcement, took the Obama administration to task. These border control agents cared more about America than their careers and used their private association as a vehicle.

There is an FBI Agents Association that represents 12,000 current and retired agents and advocates criminal justice issues to Congress. Members of this private association have 55 different field office representatives in as many cities of the nation. Nothing prevents these field office representatives from signing a letter on behalf of the members in their region condemning the whole structure of this putrid conspiracy against honorable and serious investigation.

Indeed, if this association ever expects Congress or the American people to listen to it, then it is vitally important that it act before the election. The FBI Agents Association, of course, should not endorse any candidate or party, but if it urges funding increases to Congress or changes in criminal laws, it must have credibility. And if it ignores the swollen carbuncle of this scandal within the agency, no one ought to listen to it anymore.

There is this one chance for the FBI to redeem the damage done by Comey. There will be no second chance if Hillary wins because of the cowardice of the Bureau's agents.

Reprinted with permission from the Americn Thinker http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/10/only_one_way_for_the_fbi_to_regain_its_lost_reputation.html 2/3

GOV'T EMPLOYEE STEALS FROM FEDS, USES TAXPAYER-FUNDED LAWYERS
TO FIGHT EVICTION AFTER GETTING CAUGHT
By Luke Rosiak, 4/19/2016

A Department of Housing and Urban Development employee with two federally funded Section 8 apartments refused to vacate when she was caught and used a tax-paid civil rights organization to fight the government’s order to get out.

Markquonda Mathis rented one of the two subsidized units she obtained to her sister, Markquasha, who used it as a second home and to park her Lexus. Mathis faced no criminal or civil penalties even though she lied to federal investigators about the units, one of which was in the District of Columbia and the other in Alexandria, Va.

A 2014 HUD inspector general report made public by The Daily Caller News Foundation earlier this month said housing authorities were moving to evict Mathis. That’s when Mathis turned to attorneys from the Neighborhood Legal Services Program, which is supported by the federally funded Legal Services Corporation.

In other words, Mathis was using one government agency to fight another government agency to preserve her right to defraud a third, all while drawing a paycheck from HUD.

In addition to sister Markquasha, Mathis has a second sister named Markeisha and brothers named Marko and Markquez. Marquez has been charged with nine crimes, mainly burglary, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, all of which resulted in no punishment.

A DC housing project employee named Macretia knew that the HUD employee had sublet her apartment to her sister, but did nothing. An Alexandria housing project employee named Marquisha did nothing to prevent Mathis from getting the second unit despite having access to a federal database designed to show double-dipping.

Alexandria housing authority chief Roy Priest said DC officials must have incorrectly entered her name in the database. “When we found out, our attorney moved to terminate her lease,” Priest told TheDCNF April 14. But “she went to Neighborhood Legal Services” for free legal counsel to fight the eviction.

Neighborhood Legal Services’ website says it uses the courts to “secure access to healthcare and public benefits” for the poor–even, apparently, fully-employed government employees who are trying to avoid consequences for deliberately defrauding the government.

Mathis was unsuccessful in her legal battle and was forcibly evicted in December 2014.

Luckily for her, rather than fire her for the fraud and for lying to the inspector general about it, HUD promoted her immediately after being caught. She now oversees millions of dollars in HUD grants as a grants officer dealing with lead abatement. (RELATED: Fed Worker Got TWO Subsidized Housing Units Despite Long Waiting List)

“She was a HUD employee, so that does not look good. To have anyone do it is wrong, but to have someone do it inside HUD is really bad,” Priest said.

But problematic employees are anything but scarce at HUD. Rayland Young, a HUD union president, was given a six-figure payout to secure his resignation after he told his female boss that he would “mop the floor with your ass,” then said a witness who saw the encounter was a KKK member who “should be shot.” Young also said HUD is filled with white supremacists who tried to keep him down by giving him a smaller desk than those given to Caucasian workers.

Two of HUD’s top employees were ordered by the Government Accountability Office to repay their salaries because they prevented a mid-level employee from telling Congress how their superiors intentionally ignored millions of dollars in fraud. But even though it places the agency in violation of the law, HUD has not said it will actually make them do it.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Caller:: http://dailycaller.com/2016/04/19/govt-employee-steals-from-feds-uses-taxpayer-funded-lawyers-to-fight-eviction-after-getting-caught/

CFPB BASED ANTI-DISCRIMINATION SETTLEMENTS ON 'HALF-BAKED' STATISTICS
By Rick Moran, February 8, 2016

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau launched an anti-discrimination crusade against banks giving auto loans in 2012 based not on specific complaints by consumers but on "half baked" statistics according to a story in the New York Post.

In fact, there were no complaints filed with the Bureau at all. Instead, the CFPB issued summary judgments extorting and shaking down banks in an effort to achieve "racial justice."

Newly uncovered internal memos reveal the Obama administration knowingly exaggerated charges of racial discrimination in probes of Ally Bank and other defendants in the $900 billion car-lending business as part of a “racial justice” campaign that’s looking more like a massive government extortion and shakedown operation.

So far, Obama’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has reached more than $220 million in settlements with several auto lenders since the agency launched its anti-discrimination crusade against the industry in 2013. Several other banks are under active investigation.

That’s despite the fact that the CFPB had no actual complaints of racial discrimination — it was all just based on half-baked statistics.

A confidential 23-page internal report detailing CFPB’s strategy for going after lenders shows why these companies are forking over millions of dollars in restitution and fines to the government despite denying any wrongdoing.

The high-level memo, sent by top CFPB civil-rights prosecutors to the bureau’s director and revealed by a House committee, admits their methods for proving discrimination were seriously flawed from the start and had little chance of holding up in court. Yet they figured they could muscle Ally, as well as future defendants, with threats and intimidation.

“Some of the claims being made in this case present issues, such as use of [race] proxying and reliance on the disparate-impact doctrine, that would pose litigation risks meriting serious consideration prior to taking administrative action or filing suit in district court,” the Oct. 7, 2013, memo addressed to CFPB chief Richard Cordray acknowledges.

“Nevertheless,” it added, “Ally may have a powerful incentive to settle the entire matter quickly without engaging in protracted litigation.”

They sound just like mafioso plotting to extort money, don't they?

How about some threats to go with the extortion?

At the time, the Detroit-based bank was seeking permission from the Federal Reserve to remain a financial holding company. Without regulatory approval, Ally risked losing key business lines, primarily its insurance subsidiaries.

“Protracted litigation” would present “a high hurdle” to Ally retaining such status, the CFPB lawyers conspired.

"Nice bank ya got there, Ally. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it."

Prosecutors also sought to use the Community Reinvestment Act as leverage against Ally. At the time, the FDIC was reviewing the bank’s compliance with the anti- redlining law.

They huddled with FDIC and Federal Reserve officials to get them on board with their scheme; and the Fed assured them it would look favorably upon “a prompt and robust” settlement by Ally, while the FDIC confirmed that a quick resolution would help Ally pass its CRA exam.

Can you imagine private citizens or companies conspiring like this to extort cash from a bank? The Fed and the FDIC would be indicted as conspirators.

It's amazing to see separate government entities cooperating to wring money from a bank who is very likely innocent of any discriminatory practices, but forced to pay tens of millions of dollars to the government so they can continue to do business.

Government by thuggery is what we get when "social justice" is enforced.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/02/cfpb_based_antidiscrimination_settlements_on_half_baked_statistics.html#ixzz3zall6QDA

PARIS IS A TREATY, AND THE SENATE MUST NOW TREAT IT LIKE ONE
By Christopher Horner, 12/14/2015

Despite two weeks of posturing and haggling, negotiations for a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol here outside Paris ran, as has been typical throughout this process, into overtime. Amid the dismantling of much of the Le Bourget conference center’s elaborate infrastructure, late Saturday morning, the parties released the final, if annual “historic agreement.”

It is a treaty. The United States is a party. President Obama insists it isn’t a treaty. Whatever you agree to label the deal, it will be held against the U.S. (even before an occasional court) with claims that the terms bind us.

The specifics are a shadow of those in the earlier drafts. Gone is the “International Climate Justice Tribunal.” Also out is troubling language about a new regime (and revenue stream) for processing, management and relocation of displaced persons that — given the massive, existing UN operations in the refugee “space” — likely were a rapid step toward formalizing the idea that all refugees are climate refugees, for which developed countries are responsible for reasons of their industrial development.

Language automatically renewing and escalating every five years the binding vows (by select countries) which the treaty still says “shall” reduce emissions, each time “progressively more ambitious” than the prior, is watered down but remains. The same is true for massive wealth transfers.

About those, Paris does promise a *minimum* of one hundred billion dollars in “climate aid,” which the greens and recipients already decry as a fraction of what they want. So Paris has many in the global warming industry gnashing their teeth, despite that it was never realistic to obtain developed country agreement on an economic suicide pact, particularly (given the climate-refugee idea) as the current Middle East crisis spills over into Europe.

Regardless, this is a treaty, given the mandatory language, level of financial commitment, level of detail, and of course by practice and precedent in this realm — it resembles the 1992 Rio treaty (UNFCCC), which no one dared insist wasn’t a treaty. Indeed, that document, which Paris amends, was ratified with the support of the George H.W. Bush administration and Democrat-run Senate. Both left no doubt that:

Paris includes supposedly mandatory emission-reduction targets and timetables. Still, there is no requirement, anywhere, that these claim to be “legally binding” before the Senate must approve them.

As such, and despite putting some of the biggest, shiniest objects of green desire off to the future, the Paris global warming treaty does still purport to bind the U.S. to making more stringent promises every five years.

This will get ugly next time around and in any other fifth year in which a Republican occupies the White House. This was the point, because all parties knew that, in the end, there was no chance of a document formalizing these demands as some mandatory regime.

Despite its collapse from the original dream, Paris is a treaty. As such, it is incumbent upon Congress to reaffirm this to the world: there is no basis on which one may claim they reasonably relied on any U.S. representations here as anything more than a State of the Union speech, things Obama wants Congress to approve, which it probably won’t.

The strangest aspect of the Paris treaty is its marquee achievement of countries agreeing where to set the world’s thermostat. This is an absurd proposition, but observations also show that the computer models projecting lurid warming scenarios are effectively programmed to do so, building in a spectacularly higher sensitivity to the suddenly magical if marginal gas carbon dioxide (also known as plant food).

The UK’s Scientific Alliance shrewdly notes that it is quite possible the Paris negotiators recognized the modeled scenarios are mere computer-generated fantasy, and have positioned themselves to take credit for the warming not coming, which wasn’t going to come. It can thereby “declare that it had saved the planet and there would be little need to confess to undue alarmism.”

President Obama has recklessly sought to bind his country to an agenda it has rejected through the proper democratic process whenever tried, because our process stands in his way.

Paris will still provide a political cudgel, but not the one they were looking for. Still, any pressure on the U.S. to restrict its economy and transfer massive sums of taxpayer money because of the Paris treaty is too much, and the Senate should drive a stake in this folly. Paris is a treaty, and the Senate must now treat it like one.

Article reprinted with permission from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com URL to article: http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/14/paris-is-a-treaty-and-the-senate-must-now-treat-it-like-one/

AT LEAST 15 US 'CITIZEN TERRORISTS' ARE ALSO LEGAL IMMIGRANTS
By Rachel Stoltzfoos, 11/18/2015

Dozens of the U.S. citizens arrested in recent years on terror-related charges are immigrants admitted to the United States legally who later obtained citizenship.

More than 70 U.S. residents have been publicly arrested and charged with conspiring to help, attempting to help, or actually helping terror networks such as Islamic State in recent years. At least 15 of them received U.S. citizenship after being admitted to the country legally, including one of the Boston bombers. (RELATED: U.S. Refugee Chief Didn’t Know Boston Bombers Were Refugees)

Here are five examples.

Two immigrants from Pakistan who later applied for and received U.S. citizenship were convicted of plotting to detonate a bomb in New York City in 2012, and were sentenced to a combined 55 years in prison.

Federal prosecutors accused a Somalian immigrant who became a U.S. citizen of plotting to “go to a military base in Texas and kill three or four American soldiers execution style.” The man had trained with a terrorist group in Syria and was told to return to the U.S. and carry out an act of terror.

An immigrant brought by his family from Kuwait at a young age and later approved for U.S. citizenship killed four Marines in a shooting rampage at two military centers in Chattanooga, Tenn., in July.

A woman born in Saudi Arabia who obtained U.S. citizenship and taught pre-school in Queens, N.Y., was arrested on terror charges in April. She and a friend also living in Queens pledged allegiance to Islamic State and considered bombing a police funeral. FBI raids on their apartments turned up bomb-making materials, including propane tanks and a pressure cooker, in addition to bomb recipes and jihadi literature.

An immigrant from Ghana who obtained U.S. citizenship was arrested in June and charged with conspiring to support a terrorist group after investigators allegedly found he was plotting a terror attack on New York City landmarks in the name of Islamic State.

The Obama administration has ignored a request from Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and Jeff Sessions for detailed immigration histories of 72 U.S. residents arrested in the past year on terror-related charges.

Article reprinted with permission from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com

URL to article: http://dailycaller.com/2015/11/18/at-least-15-us-citizen-terrorists-ar

IN TRASHING LAND, THE EPA HAS NOTHING ON THE FOREST SERVICE
By William Perry Pendley, 9/02/2015

Americans now comprehend fully the disdain the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has for truth-telling, the rights of others, and the environment. Forget the last six spiteful years; the Colorado mine disaster suffices. The EPA’s wanton malfeasance — experts warned of a catastrophic blowout — unleashed three million gallons of orange arsenic-, cadmium-, and lead-laden wastewater into an Animas River tributary trashing public, private, and tribal lands and waters in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and the Navajo Nation. Even so, the EPA has nothing on the U.S. Forest Service.

In documents filed days ago in a federal district court in Arkansas, the agency and its lawyers demand dismissal of a $5 million lawsuit against the United States for decades of tortious use and abuse of a Scot-Irish family’s farmland settled one hundred years before the Ozark National Forest’s creation made the Forest Service the family’s neighbor. Worse yet, Conner Eldridge, the United States Attorney for Arkansas, argues that, because the Forest Service trespassed upon Matthew McIlroy’s farm for years, the government owns the land! The assertion, which has no factual or legal support, is asinine, absurd, and in conflict with an admonition of the Supreme Court of the United States.

In 1808, Mr. McIlroy’s family left Tennessee, crossed the Mississippi River, and homesteaded south of the Ozark Plateau’s Boston Mountains and north of the Arkansas River at Fly Gap, Beech Grove, and Cass. Arkansas Territory was established in 1819; Arkansas won statehood in 1836; and the million-acre Ozark National Forest, which surrounded the McIlroy farmland, was proclaimed in 1908.

In 1933, Congress created the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and put a camp in the Ozark National Forest near Cass. After World War II, the CCC was discontinued, but in 1964 the newly created Job Corps took over the site. Soon, Mr. McIlroy’s grandfather, W.C. McIlroy, discovered Job Corps students trespassing on and littering his property, damaging his fences, and destroying his hay; his objections went unanswered. In 1971, W.L. McIlroy took over the farm and noticed the Forest Service had drilled a well on his property. He protested, but agency officials said the well was on federal land, a lie repeated for decades.

In 1973, unbeknownst to W.L. McIlroy, the Job Corps used heavy equipment to tear down a 100-year old levee built upstream of the farm at the confluence of Mulberry River and Fane’s Creek to protect the farm and the Jobs Corps site. The result was flooding and erosion downstream, alteration of the bed of Mulberry River due to silting and deposits of eroded rock, and destruction of 10 acres of farmland. The Forest Service’s “mitigation” exacerbated the damage, widening the channel across the farm.

In 1998, when Mr. McIlroy took over the farm, he discovered a section of fence had been flattened and a sewage effluent line installed over it and across 50-60 yards of farmland to discharge waste into Mulberry River. Then he found out the agency: put a “temporary,” quarter-mile water line across his land that blocked entry to his farm; used the water well — even though a federal survey proved it was on the farm; brought heavy equipment onto the farm to blade dirt and drag drainage ditches; built a service road across the farm to access the well and the sewage effluent line and poured concrete on the road when it eroded; used the farmland for heavy equipment training — digging down to creek rock, causing serious erosion, destroying fences, and loosening livestock; and, dumped concrete and construction waste on its property near the farm, effluent from which washed onto the farm.

The Forest Service documented its “encroachment” but took no action. In 2013, Mr. McIlroy filed a claim that the United States ignored, so in October of 2014, he sued. As his case makes its way through the courts, he wonders whether his clansmen in William Wallace’s days ever saw greater abuses by “the King’s men.”

William Perry Pendley, an attorney, is president of Mountain States Legal Foundation in Denver and author of Sagebrush Rebel: Reagan’s Battle with Environmental Extremists and Why It Matters Today (Regnery, 2013). MSLF represents the McIlroy family.

Article reprinted with permission from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com

On August 19, two excellent, mustread articles ran on the Net that are sorely needed correctives to a common misunderstanding about the 14th Amendment. Unfortunately, this mistake is made even by certain legal professionals who should know better.

Human Events ran “Fox News Anchored in Stupidity on 14th Amendment” by Ann Coulter. Ms. Coulter explains the original intent, history, and case law surrounding socalled “birthright citizenship.” Coulter makes a compelling case that the children born to illegal aliens on American soil were never intended to be granted automatic citizenship by the 1868 amendment:

One quibble: Coulter is a bit unfair to Gov. Chris Christie. Christie actually told Greta van Susteren the other day that we need to look at the 14th Amendment “through a 21st century lens, not through a 19th century lens.” I mentioned this in a blog last week, noting that Christie “delves into subjects other candidates seem afraid of, like the ‘birthright citizenship.’” If you watch Christie’s Fox News segment, you can position the video at the 8:15 mark to hear him on the 14th. (Of course, Coulter would say the problem isn’t the 14th Amendment; it’s that stupid footnote.)

The other mustread article appeared at National Review: “Trump’s Critics Are Wrong about the Fourteenth Amendment and Birthright Citizenship” by Edward J. Erler, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. I’m not going to tell you everything that’s in these articles, as they should be carefully read in their entirety. But I must quote Erler on the following point:

That “prospective only” point is important, as it should calm fears about revocation of citizenship already conferred.

Also on August 19 at Independent Sentinel was “Can Birthright Citizenship Be Overturned Without A Constitutional Amendment” by S. Noble, as well as a must-view segment on Fox News’s Hannity that featured Mark Levin (“The Great One” is always bracing).

Many conservatives are all up in arms about talk of repealing the 14th Amendment. But as Ms. Coulter writes, clarifying the language in the citizenship clause wouldn’t require an amendment; it could be done by Congress with a simple law. She cites the liberal Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals to back that up. Erler makes the same point: “A constitutional amendment is no more required today than it was in 1923.”

Were one of Osama bin Laden’s pregnant wives to scramble across the border and give birth, her child would be an American citizen according to the current interpretation of the 14th Amendment. Does that sound like a sovereign nation to you?

If we do not destroy the magnets to coming to America illegally, such as the current policy on “birthright citizenship” that spawned “anchor babies,” we’ll never get control over who gets to be an American. If we destroy the magnets, we may not need to build a 2,000-mile wall. If we don’t destroy the magnets, no wall will protect us.

Jon N. Hall is a programmer/analyst from Kansas City.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/08/not_your_fathers_14th_amendment.html#ixzz3jZ27u0iC

OYSTER FARMER: 'WE ARE TERRIFIED' OF THE GOVERNMENT
By Michael Bastasch, 4:53 PM 04/29/2015

The National Park Service used falsified data to shut down an 80-year-old oyster company in Point Reyes, Calif, its owner claims.

Drakes Bay Oyster Company operated in Point Reyes for decades until National Park Service officials used falsified data to force Kevin Lunny’s family-run oyster farm to shut down. The experience has left its mark on Lunny: “We are terrified,” he told lawmakers during a hearing Thursday.

“Let me be clear, we did not fail as a business,” Lunny said in his prepared testimony. “This was not bad luck. Rather, the Park Service engaged in a taxpayer-funded enterprise of corruption to run our small business out of Point Reyes.”

Lunny made this statement in response to a question by Republican Rep. Raul Labrador asking whether or not Lunny felt like there could be consequences from his testimony against the National Parks Service.

Even Democratic California Rep. Jared Huffman admitted that in the rush to get rid of industry from Point Reyes, government officials and environmentalists “overstated” evidence that Lunny’s farm was harming the environment.

“No one has apologized,” Lunny said.

Drakes Bay Oyster Company is located in Northern California’s Point Reyes National Seashore, where it has been for decades. Point Reyes isn’t your typical national park because it was created to preserve the historic coastline where people have been settled since the Gold Rush. It was never intended to be a major tourist attraction like Yellowstone.

For decades the Park Service had a good relationship with the oyster company, but that all changed in the mid-2000s. All of the sudden, NPS officials started blaming the company for an 80 percent decline in the local harbor seal population. Officials also blamed Lunny’s farm for upsetting the ecological balance of Drakes Estero.

But all of these accusations against Drakes Bay Oyster Company turned out to be completely false. The National Parks Service lacked any scientific data to back up its claims that the company was killing seals and hurting the local environment. In fact, studies done by the U.S. Geological Survey and the California State Health Department showed the Parks Service was completely wrong.

NPS, however, didn’t stop there and kept making false claims against the oyster company.

“The Park Service misrepresented that study,” Lunny said. “They instead attempted to demonstrate harm by substituting data from a sixty-year-old study conducted at the Sea of Japan and attributing it to our farm.”

“For example, in assessing the noise impact of our small outboard motor boats, the Park Service, rather than measuring our boats on our soundscape [as required], instead used the measurements from a seventy-horsepower, 700cc Kawasaki jet ski in New Jersey,” Lunny added.

Lunny appealed to higher ups at the National Park Service for help in the matter and to correct the record on false statements made by the agency, but he got no help from the government.

“The local Park Service staff were not willing to correct the false claims, so we went to the Regional Director,” Lunny said. “No help there. Then we went to the Park Service Director, and finally the Secretary of Interior. No one, at any level, was willing to admit that false science was being used against us, or to at least correct the record and stop the false accusations.”

The Interior Department’s own inspector general even found misconduct by agency officials and that they misrepresented facts. But even so, the inspector general was powerless to stop Parks Service officials from attacking Lunny’s business.

Eventually, Drakes Bay Oyster Farm closed its doors because of the litigation and regulatory actions taken by the federal government.

“What the Park Service did to our family was unconscionable,” Lunny said. “This polluted legacy of false science has tainted our dealings with state and federal agencies, and has resulted in unnecessary regulatory and legal action against our family and our farm.”

Article reprinted with permission from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com URL to article: http://dailycaller.com/2015/04/29/oyster-farmer-we-are-terrified-of-the-govt/

'DO NOT DISCLOSE’:
Obama Admin Tells Banks To Shut Up About Its Targeting of Consumers, Gun Dealers
By Patrick Howley, an investigative reporter for The Daily Caller. 1/28/2015

The Obama administration’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is threatening banks to be silent about the administration’s new programs supervising and investigating private bank account holders.
A shocking bulletin that CFPB issued to banks, which was obtained by The Daily Caller, was sent around this week in the midst of controversy regarding the administration’s Operation Choke Point program, by which the administration pressures banks to cut off accounts for supposedly suspicious businesses, including gun dealers. Operation Choke Point’s anti-gun mission was recently confirmed in a series of audiotapes published by the US Consumer Coalition, in which a bank teller explained to a gun dealer why his account was being shut down.

“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [CFPB] issues this compliance bulletin as a reminder that, with limited exceptions, persons in possession of confidential information, including confidential supervisory information [CSI], may not disclose such information to third parties,” the bulletin states.

“‘Confidential information’ means ‘confidential consumer complaint information, confidential investigative information, and confidential supervisory information, as well as any other CFPB information that may be exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act pursuant,” according to the bulletin.

Even non-disclosure agreements are invalid according to the CFPB’s effort to suppress information.

CFPB states that “private confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements neither alter the legal restrictions on the disclosure of CSI nor impact the CFPB’s authority to obtain information from covered persons and service providers in the exercise of its supervisory authority.”

Good thing President Obama’s Dodd-Frank Act gave CFPB vast powers to enforce this kind of information-suppressing.

“Many supervised financial institutions became subject to federal supervision for the first time under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act [Dodd-Frank Act]. Pursuant to authority granted under the Dodd-Frank Act, the CFPB has issued regulations that govern the use and disclosure of CSI. The CFPB expects all supervised financial institutions to know and comply with the regulations governing CSI.”

FEBRUARY 2015

US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE SHUTS DOWN MAJOR ASPECT OF ITS CIVIL FORFEITURE PROGRAM
CONTACT: Institute for Justice, John Kramer, (703) 682-9320 ext. 205 -- January 16, 2015

Arlington, Va.—Marking an important shift in federal law enforcement policy, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced today that the U.S. Department of Justice’s adoption program—which permits state law enforcement agencies to turn seized properties over to the federal government for forfeiture—will be suspended.

But the Justice Department policy does nothing to limit the widely used and sweeping power of the federal government, or joint federal and state task forces, to seize Americans’ property based on nothing but suspicion.

“This important change in policy will strengthen protections for property owners who stand to lose their cash, cars, and other property without being convicted of or even charged with a crime” said Scott Bullock, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, the nation’s leading legal advocate against civil forfeiture. “But it is essential that greater protections for property owners must follow at the federal level and in the states to ensure that Americans are no longer victimized by civil forfeiture.”

The announcement by Attorney General Holder follows a growing wave of criticism and outrage about the government’s forfeiture practices. Federal legislation that would sharply curtail the federal government’s civil forfeiture program, including adoption, was introduced last session and is expected to be introduced again soon.

Under civil forfeiture laws, law enforcement can take property suspected of involvement in criminal activity without convicting or charging the owner with a crime. At the federal level and in most states, agencies involved in the forfeiture, including prosecutors and police departments, can keep some or all of the proceeds for their own use.

Today’s announced policy would stop the process of adoption, where state and local officials use federal law to forfeit property without charging owners with a crime and then profit from those forfeitures, regardless of whether those forfeitures are permitted under state law. But the new policy leaves open a significant loophole, as state and local law enforcement can still partner with federal agents through joint task forces for forfeitures not permitted under state law, and state and local law enforcement can use such task forces to claim forfeiture proceeds they would not be entitled to under state law. Moreover, the federal government can still pursue its own civil forfeiture actions, where property owners face very significant burdens. And the policy does not change state forfeiture laws, many of which burden property owners and permit policing for profit.

IJ is the nation’s leading legal advocate against civil forfeiture. IJ launched its initiative against civil forfeiture in 2010 with the publication of its path-breaking report, Policing for Profit. That report first exposed the federal government’s pernicious practice of equitable sharing and adoption procedures. IJ’s initiative against civil forfeiture consists of cutting-edge court battles on behalf of property owners facing civil forfeiture, strategic research, and grassroots activism calling for ending or radically changing civil forfeiture law. In 2014, IJ launched EndForfeiture.com, a wide-ranging online initiative to educate and activate citizens and legislators to fight civil forfeiture.

“Civil forfeiture should not exist in a country that values the principles of private property rights and due process,” said Chip Mellor, IJ’s President and General Counsel. “Now is the time to enshrine today’s policy change into the law and to pass further reforms to ensure that no American loses their property without being convicted of a crime.”

IS IT TIME FOR AN ANTI-FEDERALIST PARTY?
By Bruce Walker, December 4, 2014

No wise and serious American, whatever his notional ideology, trusts the federal government. This fact is often lost in the dust and wind from that gaggle of pundits whose relevance depends upon every issue of life being controlled by an all-powerful central government. In American politics and government, the problem, of course, is Washington, and most Americans find Washington as arrogant and stupid as American colonists found London in 1776.

Is it time, then, for an Anti-Federalist Party? Such a party or movement need not prescribe the proper response from government to different issues, except that an Anti-Federalist Party would insist that whether government ought to respond to these issues and how government ought to respond to these issues should be decided by state governments and ought to reflect the wishes of the voters in the states.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The more power concentrated in Washington, the more hopelessly corrupt Washington becomes. This is surely a message that would resonate with the overwhelming majority of Americans. This is reflected in the dramatically different approval ratings given to governors and senators. While constituents tend to dislike and distrust their states’ senators, the same constituents generally like and trust their state governor. Voters perceive that a remote and insulated federal government is a festering source of waste, incompetence, and venality.

There are three reasons why this popular view is sensible. First, state governments are close to the people. State legislators actually live in their districts, which may be hundreds of miles from the state capitol. Almost any voter can sit down and visit with his state legislator. Second, people can leave badly run states; this sort of internal migration of Americans is a constant process of the marketplace of governments. Third, state governments cannot print money and cannot run deficits.

Anti-Federalism has firm roots in American politics and government, and it includes many great Americans like Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Patrick Henry, James Madison, and George Mason. The Bill of Rights was intended as a check on federal power, not state power, because Americans can leave states that are tyrannical but cannot leave the clammy embrace of federal power...except by leaving America.

A political party based upon Anti-Federalism need not insist on the best national policy toward gay marriage or minimum wage, but rather that the voters in each state ought to be able to elect politicians who reflect their position on those issues. This quietly resolves much.

Abortion prior to Roe v. Wade was regulated by state laws, and these state laws varied. Some states allowed abortion. There was no raging national conflict about abortion forty years ago, and social conservatives were not agitating for a federal law against abortion. Was abortion murder? What constitutes “murder” or even criminal homicide has always been defined by state laws, which vary from state to state.

Prohibition, as a federal design for dealing with the social problems of alcoholism, failed miserably, but prohibitions on alcohol in states where those bans reflected what people wanted largely worked. The changes in prohibition laws came only when voters in those states wanted the change.

It is the nationalization of standards that often creates the problem. Anti-Federalism is the tonic.

The message of Anti-Federalism to voters in states with differing cultural values is simple: do you want the voters of your state to decide policy, or do you want federal politicians making those decisions? Politicians represent states, and which politicians can face voters and say that politicians from other states are better judges than they are for what is good for their state?

Anti-Federalism also taps into the simmering anger voters feel toward both political parties at the national level. It allows us conservatives to tell Vermonters, Hawaiians, and Marylanders that we are happy to support their greater independence from Washington if they will support our greater independence as well.

What form might Anti-Federalism take? The heart of it ought to be reasserting the Tenth Amendment, which states clearly that state governments retain all powers not clearly given to the federal government. The method of insuring that could include individual state legislatures directly choosing presidential electors rather than delegating that task to voters. The Seventeenth Amendment, the “reform” of directly electing senators, ought also to be repealed.

The beauty of Anti-Federalism is that it all about the process of government and not the substance of policies. Almost everyone agrees that Washington is broken. Here is a way to fix the process, by returning most of government back to the states.

AMERICA, 2014: THE LAND OF ENTITLEMENTS
By David Long, September 12, 2014

I run an employee benefits company that focuses on helping small business owners with medical and other health benefit plans for their employees.
Earlier this week I had lunch with a CPA client of mine to talk with him about increasing the number of his small business clients who provide medical insurance plans to their employees. Everything I recount herein is from him; I am not making this up.

His answer and the reasoning behind his answer were stunning to me. In my naivety, I hadn’t even dreamed that I would hear anything like what he was about to tell me.

He explained that essentially, his clientele comprises Spanish-speaking business owners, almost all of whom employ essentially 100% Spanish speaking workers. They own firms such as restaurants, gardening services, custodial services, small grocery stores, painting companies, trucking companies, and so on. But, he said, most of their employees who work only 20 to 30 hours a week, with only a very few who work the full traditional “full time” 40 hours a week. As a result, my CPA client said, nearly all of his clients, the business owners, don’t feel an obligation to provide benefits to these “part-time” employees.

When I asked why they had mostly part-timers instead of full-time workers, he explained that the employees don’t want to earn too much money, or else they’ll lose their government benefits.

They like getting free things like food stamps, a housing allowance, MediCal insurance (California’s government subsidize medical care for low income people), and the like. They would rather earn less and get the entitlement programs for free than work longer hours, make more money, and have to pay for their own food, housing, insurance, and so on.

He shook his head, admitting that he found it a little embarrassing to be telling me this, and said that it was a sad commentary on the way our country operates these days. But, he pointed out with a shrug, if these people worked a full 40 hour week yet had to pay for all the things that they now get for free, they’d end up in pretty much the same financial position as they are now – but they wouldn’t have all the extra time to just lie around resting, doing nothing.

I was speechless. “Are you kidding?” I asked him, but he assured me that he was not.

“They’d rather get stuff for free and spend more time kicking back or hanging out with friends for most of the day than work all day long and end up with no real increase in their standard of living.

“Getting everything for free is a whole lot easier than working for it,” he finished.

I guess the people he was talking about have a very different “American Dream” from what my great-grandparents had when they came to America in the late 1800s. A sad commentary on how our nation is being run here in the 21st century.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: http://americanthinker.com/blog/2014/09/america_2014_the_land_of_entitlements.html

THE REAL COUNTRY-KILLER IN 2013 By Jonathon Moseley, January 2, 2013

THE FOOD SAFETY MODERNIZATION ACT Liberty Matters, October 7, 2010

THE REAL COUNTRY-KILLER IN 2013
By Jonathon Moseley, January 2, 2013

THE FOOD SAFETY MODERNIZATION ACT
Liberty Matters, October 7, 2010