Shocking new statistical evidence has emerged that suggests the golden eagle could be on a wind turbine-induced glide path to extinction in the United States, as the annual death rate increase leaps nearly 50% since 2020.
The post Massive Wind Turbine Expansion Puts Golden Eagle on Path to Possible American Extinction as Annual Death Rate Increase Leaps by 50% appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Okay, this is awesome.
With research assistance from James Rushmore
With President Trump sitting next to him, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday that no, he is not going to release Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from his country’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), despite a Justice Department lawyer admitting in a court filing that Abrego Garcia’s deportation last month was an “administrative error.”
No matter, said Bukele:
Bukele: Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.
Reporter: But you could release him inside El Salvador.
Bukele: Yeah, but I’m not releasing, I mean, I’m not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country. We just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country in the Western hemisphere, and you want us to go back into releasing criminals so we can go back to being the murder capital of the world? That’s not going to happen.
There was little doubt what Bukele would say. Attorney General Pam Bondi set the tone early on in the meeting. She explained what the Supreme Court meant last week when it said a lower court ruling “properly requires the government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.”
The Supreme Court ruled, [Mr.] President, that if El Salvador wants to return him … we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane.
It brings to mind President Clinton’s infamous grand jury testimony when he said: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
Abrego-Garcia left El Salvador and illegally entered the U.S. in 2011. His status as an illegal immigrant changed after he was arrested in 2019 and the Department of Homeland Security accused him of being a member of the MS-13 gang. Abrego Garcia fought the accusation and applied for asylum. Instead, an immigration judge granted him “withholding of removal” status.
A federal judge wrote in an April 6 opinion that in El Salvador “the Barrio 18 gang had been targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family’s pupusa business.”
The Justice Department argues its hands are tied. It doesn’t matter that the U.S. is paying El Salvador $6 million a year to house U.S. deportees at CECOT.
“The United States does not have control over Abrego Garcia. Or the sovereign nation of El Salvador,” says one court filing.
Below is a timeline of the case since Abrego Garcia was arrested last month, leading up to Monday’s Oval Office meeting with Bukele.
ICE agents stop Abrego Garcia and tell him that he is no longer under “withholding of removal” status. The Trump administration says he is a member of the MS-13 gang, which the president has designated a foreign terrorist organization.
Abrego Garcia, who denies he is part of MS-13, is sent to an ICE detention facility in La Villa, Texas, and from there he is deported to El Salvador on March 15 along with 260 others, primarily Venezuelan nationals. He is being held in CECOT, a prison that has a capacity of 40,000 inmates.
Abrego Garcia and his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, file a lawsuit that notes Abrego Garcia has been in the U.S. legally since 2019 under withholding of removal status, and that the designation was never lifted.
They also accuse the government of sending Abrego Garcia to El Salvador despite “knowing that he would be immediately incarcerated and tortured in that country’s most notorious prison; indeed, Defendants have paid the government of El Salvador millions of dollars to do exactly that. Such conduct shocks the conscience and cries out for immediate judicial relief.”
The lawsuit requests the court order the U.S. government to tell the government of El Salvador to release and deliver Abrego Garcia to the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador.
The Justice Department acknowledges in a court filing that “although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error.”
Still, the Justice Department argues the motion should be denied because the court “has no power” over El Salvador. Justice Department attorneys argue:
Under their (plaintiffs) logic, this Court may assume jurisdiction to decide whether the order is legal, but if the order were determined legal, then jurisdiction would disappear again.
The government also says there’s no proof that Abrego Garcia will be tortured or killed in CECOT:
Plaintiffs point to little evidence about conditions in CECOT itself (focusing primarily on its capacity for detainees), instead extrapolating from allegations about conditions in different Salvadoran prisons. While there may be allegations of abuses in other Salvadoran prisons—very few in relation to the large number of detainees—there is no clear showing that Abrego Garcia himself is likely to be tortured or killed in CECOT. More fundamentally, this Court should defer to the government’s determination that Abrego Garcia will not likely be tortured or killed in El Salvador.
U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis orders the Trump Administration to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. by 11:59 p.m., April 7. She writes:
Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits because Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador In violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act…and without any legal process; his continued presence in El Salvador, for obvious reasons, constitutes irreparable harm; the balance of equities and the public interest weigh in favor of returning him to the United States; and issuance of a preliminary injunction without further delay is necessary to restore him to the status quo and to avoid ongoing irreparable harm resulting from Abrego Garcia’s unlawful removal.
The Justice Department appeals the order, calling it “indefensible” that “a federal district judge ordered the United States to force El Salvador to send one of its citizens—a member of MS-13, no less—back to the United States by midnight on Monday. “If there was ever a case for an emergency stay pending appeal, this would be it.”
More from the appellate motion:
Foremost, [the order] commands Defendants to do something they have no independent authority to do: Make El Salvador release Abrego Garcia, and send him to America. That is why Plaintiffs did not even ask the district court for an order directing Abrego Garcia’s return. As Plaintiffs themselves acknowledged, a federal court “has no jurisdiction over the Government of El Salvador and cannot force that sovereign nation to release Plaintiff Abrego Garcia from its prison.” That concession is all that is needed to order a stay here. No federal court has the power to command the Executive to engage in a certain act of foreign relations; that is the exclusive prerogative of Article II, immune from superintendence by Article III.
Judge Xinis issues a follow-up memorandum opinion to her April 4 order:
Although the legal basis for the mass removal of hundreds of individuals to El Salvador remains disturbingly unclear, Abrego Garcia’s case is categorically different—there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention, or removal. Nor does any evidence suggest that Abrego Garcia is being held in CECOT at the behest of Salvadoran authorities to answer for crimes in that country. Rather, his detention appears wholly lawless.
The judge also writes that in 2019, Homeland Security “relied principally on a singular unsubstantiated allegation that Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13.”
A three-judge panel of Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously denies the government’s motion for a stay of Xinis’ order that says Abrego Garcia must be returned to the U.S. by 11:59 p.m. Judge Stephanie Thacker writes:
The United States Government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process. The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable.
The Trump Administration appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Chief Justice John Roberts grants an administrative stay to give justices time to consider the case.
Following the stay, Bondi accuses Abrego Garcia of being a “violent gang member” in the video above:
We will continue to fight for the safety of Americans and get these people out of our country to make America safe.
The Supreme Court rules against the Trump administration but directs Judge Xinis to “clarify” a portion of her ruling. From the Supreme Court’s decision:
The order properly requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador. The intended scope of the term “effectuate” in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority. The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs. For its part, the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.
If the Supreme Court said, ‘Bring somebody back,’ I would do that. I respect the Supreme Court.
President Trump says that aboard Air Force One a day after the Supreme Court upholds a lower court ruling and says the government should “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S.
Meanwhile, Judge Xinis issues a new order that directs the government to “take all available steps to facilitate the return” of Abrego Garcia. In a hearing, she also makes clear her frustration with the Justice Department.
“The record, as it stands, is, despite this court's clear directive, your clients have done nothing to facilitate the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia,” she says.
Xinis also orders the administration to provide daily updates on the status of Abrego Garcia’s return. She also criticizes Justice Department attorneys in her order:
During the hearing, the Court posed straightforward questions, including: Where is Abrego Garcia right now? What steps had Defendants taken to facilitate his return while the Court’s initial order on injunctive relief was in effect…? Defendants’ counsel responded that he could not answer these questions, and at times suggested that Defendants had withheld such information from him. As a result, counsel could not confirm, and thus did not advance any evidence, that Defendants had done anything to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. This remained Defendants’ position even after this Court reminded them that the Supreme Court of the United States expressly affirmed this Court’s authority to require the Government “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. From this Court’s perspective, Defendants’ contention that they could not answer these basic questions absent some nonspecific “vetting” that has yet to take place, provides no basis for their lack of compliance.
A State Department official reports to the court that Abrego Garcia is “alive and secure” at CECOT. “He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador,” the State Department’s Michael Kozak says in a filing.
However, he does not give an update on the status of Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S.
Meanwhile, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys use Trump’s statements aboard Air Force One the previous day to justify a motion for additional relief:
Yesterday, President Trump confirmed that the United States has the power to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from prison and return to the United States: “If the Supreme Court said, ‘Bring somebody back,’ I would do that. ... I respect the Supreme Court.”1 Of course, that is precisely what the Supreme Court did when it ruled that this Court’s injunction “properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.
His attorneys ask Judge Xinis to order the government to:
Request El Salvador to release Abrego Garcia.
Dispatch personnel to accompany Abrego Garcia.
Provide air transportation for Abrego Garcia to return to Maryland.
Grant Abrego Garcia parole.
The motion also asks Xinis to order the government to show why it shouldn’t be held in contempt for “failing to comply with this Court’s orders,” and immediately produce documents related to the government’s use of CECOT.
The Justice Department puts in writing how it interprets “facilitate” in the Supreme Court’s order:
Defendants understand “facilitate” to mean what that term has long meant in the immigration context, namely actions allowing an alien to enter the United States. Taking “all available steps to facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia is thus best read as taking all available steps to remove any domestic obstacles that would otherwise impede the alien’s ability to return here. Indeed, no other reading of “facilitate” is tenable—or constitutional—here.
Any other interpretation, the motion argues, would “violate the separation of powers. The federal courts have no authority to direct the Executive Branch to conduct foreign relations in a particular way, or engage with a foreign sovereign in a given manner.”
Judge Xinis approves a request by Abrego Garcia’s attorneys to depose Trump Administration officials to learn how the case has been handled and find out what’s been done to try to get him back to the U.S.
“I do need evidence in this regard because to date what the record shows is nothing has been done,” Xinis said in a hearing.
In her written order, Xinis also made clear what is meant by “facilitate.”
This Court…ordered no more than what the Supreme Court endorsed: that Defendants “take all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United States as soon as possible,” because bound within this remedy is Abrego Garcia’s “release from custody” and the assurance that Abrego Garcia’s “case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.
Xinis provided definitions from different dictionaries with web links.
The fallacy in the Defendants’ argument is twofold. First, in the “immigration context” as it were, id., facilitating return of those wrongly deported can and has included more extensive governmental efforts, endorsed in prior precedent and DHS publications.1 Thus, the Court cannot credit that “facilitating” the ordered relief is as limited as Defendants suggest.
Second, and more fundamentally, Defendants appear to have done nothing to aid in Abrego Garcia’s release from custody and return to the United States to“ensure that his case is handled as it would have been” but for Defendants’ wrongful expulsion of him. Thus, Defendants’ attempt to skirt this issue by redefining “facilitate” runs contrary to law and logic.
An attorney for Abrego Garcia, Rina Gandhi, says she understands why Xinis didn’t hold Justice Department attorneys in contempt.
“I think that this is a highly politicized case and the judge understood that by doing so it would only raise tempers. Would it have been appropriate? Arguably, yes. But I think it was likely ultimately the right call to actually move this case forward.”
The case is getting more politicized. U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland flies to El Salvador to meeting with Abrego Garcia. The government denies that request.
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security posts documents on X that show Abrego Garcia’s wife sought a domestic violence protective order against him in 2021.
In the video above, Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushes back on the media referring to Abrego Garcia as a “Maryland father.”
The Democrats and the media in this room have continually and wrognly labeled Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a Maryland father. There is no Maryland father. Let me reiterate: Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an illegal alien MS-13 gang member and foreign terrorist who deported back to his home country.
Sen. Van Hollen meets with Abrego. After being told no on two consecutive days, El Salavor authorities brought Abrego Garcia to Van Hollen’s hotel.
Van Hollen says that Abrego Garcia told him he was place in a cell at CECOT with about 25 people.
He said he was not afraid of the other prisoners in his immediate cell, but that he was traumatized by being at CECOT and fearful of many of the prisoners in other cell blocks who called out to him and taunted him in various ways.
Abrego Garcia also told him that he was transfered to another prison on April 9 where conditions are better, but:
He said despite the better conditions, he still has no access to any news from the outside world and no ability to commuicate with anybody in the outside world. His conversation with me was the first communication he had with anybody outside a prison since he was abducted. He said he felt very sad about being in a prison because he had not committed any crime.
Trumps posts this image and message:
The image Trump post with “MS-13” on it has spurred accusations that it was doctored, in part because the MS-13 symbols were never mentioned in court documents. Judge Xinis wrote in an April 6 memorandum opinion that in 2019, Homeland Security “relied principally on a singular unsubstantiated allegation that Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13.”
Attorneys for Abrego Garcia say the government is failing to comply with Xinis’ April 15 discovery order and request a conference with Justice Department attorneys. At issue again is the meaning of “facilitate.” Attorneys for both sides give their perspectives in the same letter to Xinis. Abrego Garcia’s attorneys write:
The Government refuses to respond to interrogatories it claims are “based on the false premise that the United States can or has been ordered to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador,” despite the Supreme Court’s clear holding that “[t]he [O]rder properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.”
They also say the government refuses to provide documents “concerning the legal basis for Abrego Garcia’s confinement,” nor provide any information about the administration’s agreement with El Salvador to hold migrants in the country’s prisons.
Justice Department attorneys counter that they’ve made a “good-faith effort” to responds, but object to some requests made by Abrego Garcia’s attorneys.
The insistence on examining “legal basis for Abrego’s confinement”is an absurdity. Upon Abrego’s repatriation to El Salvador, his detention was no longer a matter of the United States’ confinement, but a matter belonging to the government of El Salvador – which has been explained to the Plaintiffs repeatedly. Any requirement of a more detailed response by the Defendants would be wholly inappropriate and an invasion of diplomatic discussions.
Judge Xinis issues an order rather than schedule a conference, and she clearly not happy with government attorneys. Her order says:
For weeks, Defendants have sought refuge behind vague and unsubstantiated assertions of privilege, using them as a shield to obstruct discovery and evade compliance with this Court’s orders. Defendants have known, at least since last week, that this Court requires specific legal and factual showings to support any claim of privilege. Yet they have continued to rely on boilerplate assertions. That ends now.”
Xinis set a deadline for 6 p.m. April 23 for the government to provide all requested material.
Eventually, Smith declared himself a candidate for the White House. His proposed platform was an awkward conglomeration of popular, though incongruent, principles including restoring the national bank, cutting Congress members’ salaries, annexing Texas, and instituting the gradual abolition of slavery. Hundreds of Mormon men, including Brigham Young, swarmed the nation campaigning for their prophet to become president.
That is from the new and excellent Benjamin E. Park, American Zion: A New History of Mormonism. An excellent book, good enough to make the year’s best non-fiction list.
I also learned recently (from Utah, not from this book) that early Mormons would drink alcohol and “Brigham Young even operated a commercial distillery east of Salt Lake City, and his southern‐Utah “Dixie Wine Mission” (1860s‑80s) was organized to supply sacramental, medicinal, and commercial wine for the territory.” By the time Prohibition rolled around, however, Mormons were close to completely “dry.”
The post I never knew Joseph Smith ran for President appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
For years, some of us have written about the Biden family’s multimillion-dollar influence-peddling operation and the Justice Department’s refusal to charge Hunter Biden with being an unregistered foreign agent. Now, years later, the New York Times has found evidence suggesting that Hunter Biden was acting as a foreign agent as early as the Obama Administration, when his Dad was Vice President.
Last August, the New York Times ran a story about Hunter seeking help from the government for his client Burisma. Ken Vogel just ran a follow-up story with damaging new details:
Hunter Biden sought assistance from the U.S. government for a potentially lucrative energy project in Italy while his father was vice president, according to newly released records and interviews.
The records, which the Biden administration had withheld for years, indicate that Hunter Biden wrote at least one letter to the U.S. ambassador to Italy in 2016 seeking assistance for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where he was a board member…
The State Department did not release the actual text of the letter.
That is precisely what many of us have been writing about in asking why Hunter was not charged with being an unregistered foreign agent as was the case under cases from Paul Manafort to Bob Menendez.
The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) covers anyone acting as “agent of a foreign principal,” including but not limited to (1) attempting to influence federal officials or the public on domestic or foreign policy or the political or public interests in favor of a foreign country; (2) collecting or disbursing money and or other things of value within the United States; or (3) representing the interests of the foreign principal before U.S. Government officials or agencies.
It is sweeping. So is the definition of what a “foreign principal” encompasses, including “a foreign government, a foreign political party, any person outside the United States (except U.S. citizens who are domiciled within the United States), and any entity organized under the laws of a foreign country or having its principal place of business in a foreign country.”
As I previously wrote, special counsel Robert Mueller seemed to charge by the gross under the act. He hit a line of Trump associates with such allegations from Manafort to Michael Flynn to George Papadopoulos to Rick Gates. The Justice Department used FARA to conduct searches on the homes and files of former Trump counsel Rudy Giuliani, Republican counsel Victoria Toensing and others.
However, the Justice Department and Special Counsel David Weiss seemed to tie themselves into knots to avoid tripping the wire on FARA even as it discussed Hunter’s work for foreign clients.
The government also resisted FOIA requests from the Times and other media. Vogel wrote:
The request was initially filed under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, in June 2021. After nearly eight months, the State Department had not released any records, and The Times sued. About 18 months later, the department moved to close the case after releasing thousands of pages of records — none of which shed light on Hunter Biden’s outreach to the U.S. government.
The Times challenged the thoroughness of the search, noting that the department had failed to produce responsive records contained in a cache of files connected to a laptop that Mr. Biden had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop. The department resumed the search and periodic productions, but had produced few documents related to Mr. Biden until the week after his father ended his re-election campaign and endorsed Vice President Harris for the Democratic nomination.
Now we have a copy of a key letter from Hunter that gives us an insight into the evidence buried for years:
The State Department last week released a letter that Hunter Biden wrote while his father was serving as vice president in which he sought assistance from the U.S. government for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
In the previously unpublished June 2016 letter on Burisma letterhead to the U.S. ambassador to Italy, Mr. Biden requested “support and guidance” in arranging a meeting with an Italian official to resolve regulatory hurdles to geothermal energy projects Burisma was pursuing in the Tuscany region…
The letter requested help arranging a meeting between Burisma officials and Enrico Rossi, the president of the Tuscany regional government at the time, “to introduce geothermal projects led by Burisma Group, to highlight their social and economic benefits for local communities and develop a common action plan that would lead to further development of the Tuscany Region.”
How could any Justice Department official, let alone a Special Counsel, read that letter and not see the glaring disconnect between the handling of the case involving Joe Biden’s son and others like Manafort?
The letter references a trip on which Hunter, as was his pattern, used official travel with his father to make these business connections. The letter mentions meeting a key ambassador on Air Force Two as he seeks assistance for his client.
The ambassador then sent a follow-up letter saying he knew the president of Tuscany and identified a Commerce Department official working at the US embassy to “see where our interests may overlap.”
It was another example of alleged influence peddling through his father and work for a foreign client in lobbying the government.
During this period, the Justice Department seemed to be on a hair-trigger for FARA charges. Yet, when it came to Hunter Biden, the entire department seemed composed of legal Sgt. Schultzs.
Many in the media attacked those of us who have been writing about this corruption stretching back to the Obama Administration. Many simply insisted that there was no evidence while taking no steps to find out. While the media was unrelenting in investigating Trump allegations of Russian collusion and business improprieties, it took a largely passive stance in pursuing this story.
Even the New York Times, which can be credited with pursuing this FOIA information, did comparably little with the ample evidence of corruption by the Bidens in securing millions through influence peddling.
What remains is a corruption scandal involving not only what the Bidens did but also what the Justice Department did not do over this extended period. It appears to heed the advice not of whistleblowers but politicians like former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) that “everybody needs to back off” the influence-peddling story.
Of course, Joe Biden ultimately broke his repeated promise not to pardon his son. What was most notable, however, was that he not only pardoned him for any crimes from human trafficking to tax evasion, but did so for a period running from Jan. 1, 2014 to Dec. 1, 2024.
This letter explains why such a sweeping, extended pardon was needed. Yet, in the end, the greatest indictment from this scandal was of the Justice Department itself.
This column also ran on Fox.com
Leila Fadel and National Public Radio recently interviewed me on free speech. While the program ominously warned that “what you’re about to hear is hate speech” in playing extreme voices on the right, it did interview me and former Columbia University president Lee Bollinger from the free speech community. I wanted to address a statement made about the program that is not accurate but has been repeated like a mantra by many seeking to dismiss the censorship system under the Biden Administration. The claim is that the Supreme Court rejected the claim of coordination between the government and social media companies. That is entirely untrue, but you do not have to take my word for it. The Supreme Court expressly stated that it was not doing so last year.
I appreciate the opportunity afforded by NPR to present the views of many in the free speech community. In all fairness to Fadel, it is also important to acknowledge that NPR was quoting a widely repeated claim by law professors. However, it is important to set this record straight on the matter.
During the program, Fadel quotes me: “You had a level of cooperation, coordination between the government and these other entities, that the effect was that thousands were censored.”
Fadel immediately rebuts the claim:
FADEL: It’s a charge often made by Republicans and Trump allies. Last year, the Supreme Court rejected the claim that social media companies were pressured to take down posts about COVID-19 and the 2020 election.
That is a reference to the court’s decision in Murthy v. Missouri last year. The states of Missouri and Louisiana, led by Missouri’s then-Attorney General (and now United States senator) Eric Schmitt, claimed that the federal government pressured social media companies to censor conservatives and critics. The court ruled 6-3 that the states lacked standing to bring the case.
However, in the opinion, the justices went out of their way to expressly refute the notion that they were ruling on the merits of the coordination with the social media companies. In footnote 3, the Court states that “Because we do not reach the merits, we express no view as to whether the Fifth Circuit correctly articulated the standard for when the Government transforms private conduct into state action.”
The opinion was based on standing, not whether coordination occurred or whether such coordination violated the First Amendment, as found by the district court.
Thus, it is demonstrably untrue that “the Supreme Court rejected the claim that social media companies were pressured to take down posts about COVID-19 and the 2020 election.”
Yet, anti-free speech figures and others have repeated this claim, including law professors. Most recently, I testified in the Senate on free speech where both law professor Mary Anne Franks and a senator repeated this claim. Professor Franks told the Committee:
“For Republicans to call yet another Congressional hearing to investigate the so-called “censorship industrial complex” of Biden administration officials, nonprofit organizations, and Big Tech companies allegedly collaborating to censor conversative speech—a conspiracy theory so ludicrous that even the current Supreme Court, stacked with a supermajority of far-right conservative judges, dismissed it out of hand last year in Murthy v. Missouri—while ignoring the current wholesale assault on the First Amendment by the Trump administration is a betrayal of the American people.”
Obviously, the hearing became quite heated between Professor Franks and the Committee, but two of us wanted to address the claim. (Fellow witness Benjamin Weingarten was able to note the countervailing language in the opinion as part of another question). It was a shame because we might have been able to fully refute this oft-repeated false claim. (The full testimony is available here). I would have welcomed an opportunity to have a civil exchange with Professor Franks and the Democratic senators on why this is not what the Supreme Court said in Murthy.
Instead, as shown on NPR, it continues to be repeated and replicated despite being demonstrably in conflict with the express words of the Court.
The effort to portray evidence of collaboration between the government and social media companies as a “conspiracy theory” or “myth” is all too familiar. It attempts to portray free speech advocates as unhinged or fringe figures to avoid answering the troubling questions raised by the Twitter Files, the Facebook Files, and thousands of pages of documentation produced in litigation and Congress.
Indeed, some apologists for the censorship system have attacked journalists and free speech advocates as fellow travelers of Vladimir Putin. That is why it was rather ironic to hear NPR raise the question on the program of whether Trump is “the biggest threat to [free speech] since the McCarthy era in the 1940s and ’50s, when fear mongering around Soviet and Communist influence led to the political persecution of academics and leftists?”
The program did not mention that it is the left who have been using McCarthy-like tactics against free speech advocates, including calling them traitors or questioning their loyalty. There was nary a mention of such attacks from the left.
Ironically, in a prior hearing, I warned that this was reminiscent of the McCarthy period where the FBI played a role in the establishment of blacklists for socialists, communists, and others. I encouraged Congress not to repeat its failures from the 1950s by turning a blind eye to such abuse.
This view was amplified by former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who was labeled a “Russian asset” by Hillary Clinton due to Gabbard’s anti-war positions.
If anything, my warning of McCarthy-like attacks and measures seemed to be taken more as a suggestion than an admonition by Democratic figures. Soon after the end of the hearing, MSNBC contributor and former Sen. Claire McCaskill appeared on MSNBC to denounce the member witnesses (Sen. Chuck Grassley, Sen. Ron Johnson, and former Rep. Gabbard) as “Putin apologists” and Putin lovers.
She exclaimed, “I mean, look at this, I mean, all three of those politicians are Putin apologists. I mean, Tulsi Gabbard loves Putin.”
It is obvious that few of these anti-free speech figures want to address the thousands of pages on coordination and pressure exercised by the government. They also do not want to address the express statements from social media executives (including in my testimony) stating that the government pressured them to censor critics and target individuals. As with the express statement of the Supreme Court, these direct contradictions are simply denied or dismissed.
What is missing is a sense of obligation to acknowledge the countervailing evidence. Unfortunately, we have come a long way from when Democratic icon Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan declared, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”
Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a Democrat representing California’s 37th district in Los Angeles, began her opening remarks in a House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee hearing Tuesday with a comment directed to me. “To distract from the dumpster fire this administration is pursuing,” she said, the Republicans were “elevating a serial sexual harrasser as their star witness.”
Right after the hearing, she re-tweeted the comment on X and BlueSky, writing, “After this, Republicans gave Matt Taibbi time to defend himself. It’s telling that he didn’t.”
There is not much a person like me can say to a member of Congress hiding behind the protections of the Speech and Debate clause of the Constitution.
One can however respond to a member arrogant enough to repeat those claims on social media. I’ve now done so, in the form of a $10 million libel lawsuit filed today in a New Jersey federal court:
Rep. Kamlager-Dove, no woman has ever accused me of engaging in sexual harrassment once, let alone serially. See you in court. Please do not evade service.
German language RTV here reports: All the talk in the media of a dying Great Barrier coral reef near Australia is “a media swindle”.
Symbol image, provided by Grok AI
The facts: Record numbers of coral reefs were already measured in 2024 and the coverage has indeed tripled over the last 12 years.
According to RTV, “coral bleaching due to high water temperatures has been proven to be a lie” and the claim of damage to the reef in recent years said to be due to climate change has in fact a completely different background and has the reef has recovered.
According to Report 24, all the media claims made on a yearly basis, e.g. from the Guardian and CBS, of the Great Barrier reef near Australia dying at a record speed and being irreversible is “a fairy tale” and “false, misleading or simply a lie.”
Report 24 writes that the damage to the reef was caused by a tropical cyclone that moved across across the reef in 2009 and caused immense damage. A study by the Australian Institute of Marine Science summarized the damage which ranged from exfoliation, scouring, which removed all living tissue from the corals, and included coral breakage where both massive coral heads and more fragile branching corals broke off.
It had nothing to do with CO2 and climate change.
Moreover, according to scientists, coral bleaching is by no means a sign of a dying reef and does not produce a white dead coral lump like the ones you can buy in a souvenir shop on the beach. Instead, bleaching means that the coral has lost the algae living in it, usually due to various stress factors such as fluctuations in light or changes in water temperature. This causes the living coral to turn white but not necessarily die.
Report 24 adds that occurrences of coral bleaching could become even more frequent due to the record growth of recent years.
The dying reef narrative began 12 years ago when the reef was severely damaged by the cyclone, with up to 85% of the coral cover gone. At the time, real scientists stated that recovery could take up to 15 years, and this is exactly what has since happened.
The reef has not only recovered, but also continued to expand.
The NYTimes has an excellent piece by Kate Morgan on AI discovering new uses for old drugs:
A little over a year ago, Joseph Coates was told there was only one thing left to decide. Did he want to die at home, or in the hospital?
Coates, then 37 and living in Renton, Wash., was barely conscious. For months, he had been battling a rare blood disorder called POEMS syndrome, which had left him with numb hands and feet, an enlarged heart and failing kidneys. Every few days, doctors needed to drain liters of fluid from his abdomen. He became too sick to receive a stem cell transplant — one of the only treatments that could have put him into remission.
“I gave up,” he said. “I just thought the end was inevitable.”
But Coates’s girlfriend, Tara Theobald, wasn’t ready to quit. So she sent an email begging for help to a doctor in Philadelphia named David Fajgenbaum, whom the couple met a year earlier at a rare disease summit.
By the next morning, Dr. Fajgenbaum had replied, suggesting an unconventional combination of chemotherapy, immunotherapy and steroids previously untested as a treatment for Coates’s disorder.
Within a week, Coates was responding to treatment. In four months, he was healthy enough for a stem cell transplant. Today, he’s in remission.
The lifesaving drug regimen wasn’t thought up by the doctor, or any person. It had been spit out by an artificial intelligence model.
AI is excellent at combing through large amounts of data to find surprising connections.
Discovering new uses for old drugs has some big advantages and one disadvantage. A big advantage is that once a drug has been approved for some use it can be prescribed for any use–thus new uses of old drugs do not have to go through the lengthy and arduous FDA approval procedures. In essence, off-label uses have been safety-tested but not FDA efficacy-tested in the new use. I use this fact about off-label prescribing to evaluate the FDA. During COVID, for example, the British Recovery trial, discovered that the common drug, dexamethasone could reduce mortality by up to one-third in hospitalized patients on oxygen support that knowledge was immediately applied, saving millions of lives worldwide:
Within hours, the result was breaking news across the world and hospitals were adopting the drug into the standard care given to all patients with COVID-19. In the nine months following the discovery, dexamethasone saved an estimated one million lives worldwide.
New uses for old drugs are typically unpatentable, which helps keep them cheap—but the disadvantage is that this also weakens private incentives to discover them. While FDA trials for these new uses are often unnecessary, making development costs much lower, the lack of strong market protection can still deter investment. The FDA offers some limited exclusivity through programs like 505(b)(2), which grants temporary protection for new clinical trials or safety and efficacy data. These programs are hard to calibrate—balancing cost and reward is difficult—but likely provide some net benefits.
The NIH should continue prioritizing research into unpatentable treatments, as this is where the market is most challenged. More broadly, research on novel mechanisms to support non-patentable innovations is valuable. That said, I’m not overly concerned about under-investment in repurposing old drugs, especially as AI further reduces the cost of discovery.
The post AI Discovers New Uses for Old Drugs appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Keir Starmer’s free trade deal with the US is at risk over free speech after the US State Department warned there would be "no free trade without free speech" – but Whitehall officials have dismissed it as a bluff.
The post No Free Trade with US Without Free Speech, State Department Warns Starmer appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
I’ve been shouting Sell! for many years. Perhaps now is the chance to do it. Here’s a recap:
The Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. See the map (PDF) for more [N.B. the vast majority of this land is NOT parks, AT 2011]. It is time for a sale. Selling even some western land could raise hundreds of billions of dollars – perhaps trillions of dollars – for the Federal government at a time when the funds are badly needed and no one want to raise taxes. At the same time, a sale of western land would improve the efficiency of land allocation.
But it’s not just federal lands in the West. Floyd Bennett Field is an old military airport in Brooklyn that hasn’t been used much since the 1970s. Today, it’s literally used as a training ground for sanitation drivers and to occasionally host radio-controlled airplane hobbyists.
In August 2023, state and federal officials reached an agreement to build a large shelter for migrants at Floyd Bennett Field, amid a citywide migrant housing crisis caused by a sharp increase in the number of asylum seekers traveling to the city. The shelter opened that November, but its remote location deterred many migrants. City officials announced plans in December 2024 to close the shelter.
Floyd Bennett Field is over 1000 acres and should be immediately sold to the highest bidder.
Brad Hargreaves on twitter has a good thread with some more examples.
Addendum: Here’s a NPR article (!) from 10 years ago that I am sure still applies even if not in all details:
Government estimates suggest there may be 77,000 empty or underutilized buildings across the country. Taxpayers own them, and even vacant, they’re expensive. The Office of Management and Budget believes these buildings could be costing taxpayers $1.7 billion a year.
…But doing something with these buildings is a complicated job. It turns out that the federal government does not know what it owns.
…even when an agency knows it has a building it would like to sell, bureaucratic hurdles limit it from doing so. No federal agency can sell anything unless it’s uncontaminated, asbestos-free and environmentally safe. Those are expensive fixes.
Then the agency has to make sure another one doesn’t want it. Then state and local governments get a crack at it, then nonprofits — and finally, a 25-year-old law requires the government to see if it could be used as a homeless shelter.
Many agencies just lock the doors and say forget it.
The post Sell Floyd Bennett Field! appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
There is a major story developing on Capitol Hill after House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman James Comer, R-Ky, revealed that a long-withheld report from the Biden Administration directly contradicted the claims of climate change used to limit increased U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. The suggestion is that this was an knowing effort to cap carbon admissions rather than carbon emissions.
The impact that new U.S. LNG exports have on the environment and the economy was reviewed by U.S. Energy Department scientists and completed by September 2023. It appears that neither President Biden nor Secretary Jennifer Granholm liked the science or the conclusions. Rather than “follow the science,” they buried the report while allegedly making claims directly refuted by their own experts.
The report was finished while Biden was still running for reelection and would have likely enraged environmentalists. The draft study, “Energy, Economic, and Environmental Assessment of U.S. LNG Exports,” found that, under all modeled scenarios, an increase in U.S. LNG exports and natural gas production would not change global or U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. It further found that it would not increase energy prices for consumers.
Biden and Granholm reportedly buried the report and then announced a pause on all new U.S. LNG export terminals in January 2024, citing the danger to environmental and economic impacts.
Comer’s office told Fox News Digital that DOE repeatedly declined to provide this study to the House Oversight Committee or comply with other requests for information.
What is most concerning is that our LNG exports help reduce the dependence on Russia and would have decreased the revenues to that country to support its war in Ukraine. However, critics charge that Biden ignored the national security and economic benefits. Supporters note that we still exported a massive amount of LNG.
When the U.S. ramped up exports to Europe, progressive Democrats like Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., went ballistic. This appears to have worked in shelving the study while slowing demands for further increases.
The Biden Administration later released data in December 2024 suggesting that a rise in exports could cause consumer prices to rise by as much as 30%.
There are obviously two sides to this debate. The problem is that it seems that only one side was allowed to be publicly presented by the delay in the release of the study.
After returning recently from speaking at the World Forum in Berlin, I testified in the Senate Judiciary Committee and warned about the building threat to free speech from the use of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA). House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan has taken up the issue and received a letter from the EU’s Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Henna Virkkunen. The letter is both evasive and deceptive.
In my book, The Indispensable Right, I detail how the DSA has been used to allow for sweeping speech investigations and prosecutions. In direct contradiction to past statements by the EU, Virkkunen denied any effort to regulate speech or enforce the DSA outside of Europe.
What is particularly maddening is the false claim that the EU remains “deeply committed to protecting and promoting free speech.” Many in the free speech community view the EU and the DSA as the greatest threats to free speech in the West.
In his letter, Jordan correctly raised the concern that the DSA could “limit or restrict Americans” constitutionally protected speech in the United States by compelling platforms to crack down on what the EU considers “misleading or deceptive” speech.
In her response, Virkkunen bizarrely describes the DSA as “content-agnostic” while insisting that the DSA “applies exclusively within the European Union.”
That is not what EU officials previously said or what the law itself allows. Articles 34 and 35 of the DSA require all sites to identify, assess, and mitigate “systemic risks” posed by content, including any threats to “civic discourse”, “electoral processes,” and “public health.” It is up to the EU to define and judge such categories in terms of compliance.
The act bars speech that is viewed as “disinformation” or “incitement.” European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager celebrated its passage by declaring that it is “not a slogan anymore, that what is illegal offline should also be seen and dealt with as illegal online. Now it is a real thing. Democracy’s back.”
Some in this country have turned to the EU to force the censorship of their fellow citizens. After Elon Musk bought Twitter and dismantled most of the company’s censorship program, many on the left went bonkers. That fury only increased when Musk released the “Twitter files,” confirming the long-denied coordination and support by the government in targeting and suppressing speech.
In response, Hillary Clinton and other Democratic figures turned to Europe and called upon them to use their Digital Services Act to force censorship against Americans. (Clinton spoke at the World Forum and lashed out at the failure to control disinformation).
The EU immediately responded by threatening Musk with confiscatory penalties against not just his company but himself. He would have to resume massive censorship or else face ruin.
This campaign recently came to a head when Musk had the audacity to interview former president Donald Trump. In anticipation of the interview, one of the world’s most notorious anti-free speech figures went ballistic.
Former European Commissioner for Internal Markets and Services Thierry Breton issued a threatening message to Musk, “We are monitoring the potential risks in the EU associated with the dissemination of content that may incite violence, hate and racism in conjunction with major political — or societal — events around the world, including debates and interviews in the context of elections.”
The EU has long been one of the most aggressively anti-free speech bodies in the world. It has actively supported the evisceration of free speech among its 27 member states. The EU is not “agnostic” when it comes to free speech; it has long championed a type of free-speech atheism. We have faced EU officials engaging in Orwellian doublespeak for years. Nevertheless, Virkkunen’s letter to Jordan stands out for its sheer mendacity.
Jts5665Apparently only non democrats are considered to have personal agency by media.
Normally when a perp drives a car into a crowd, the media conceals the identity of the driver so people avoid wrongthink.
Who Controls the Administrative State?
by Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone Institute
President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.
It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.
The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.
How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.
All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.
The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.
Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.
This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.
The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.
The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.
The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.
A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.
There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.
Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.
Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.
After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?
So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.
What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.
We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.
All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.
What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.
For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.
That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.
That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.
There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.
First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.
That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.
Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.
In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.
Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?
Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.
Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.
If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.
The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?
Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.
Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.
Who Controls the Administrative State?
by Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone Institute - Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society
Nope, this isn't The Babylon Bee.
It’s not technically required that members of NATO be “democratic” nations, but it’s supposed to be important. NATO says it “promotes democratic values.” In the United States, the Defense Department in 2022 listed a commitment to “uphold democracy” as the top requirement for NATO membership.
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And yet, Romania on Sunday barred Calin Georgescu, a critic of NATO labeled by opponents and the media as an “ultranationalist,” from being a candidate in the country’s upcoming presidential election. No reason was given when the decision was made. Protests erupted in Bucharest almost immediately.
This decision comes after the country’s Constitutional Court on Dec. 6 annulled Georgescu’s first round victory in November. That decision came two days before the runoff election. The court ordered a new election, one in which, as of now, Georgescu can’t participate.
It’s not technically a timeline event, but Racket readers might want to begin with a primer on major issues in Romania from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The country has been rocked by high inflation in the last few years, reaching 13.8% in 2022. The candidates’ stances on the war in Ukraine have also been important topics. It’s all key background to the Georgescu event.
What follows is a timeline of events leading up to this election crisis:
Romania’s Constitutional court issues a ruling barring Diana Iovanovici-Șoșoacă, head of the nationalist party S.O.S. Romania, from participating in two upcoming rounds of presidential elections on November 24th and December 8th. The stated reasons begin with technicalities (signature lists appearing insufficient) but proceed to a weightier argument that Iovanovici-Șoșoacă’s pro-Russian politics violate conditions of NATO and EU membership. The Court ruling provides the intellectual template for later decisions involving Georgescu.
Calin Georgescu wins the first round of Romania’s presidential election, with 22.9% of the vote. A runoff is scheduled for December 8.
His first round victory causes a scare. Romanians protested his victory (see below). Georgescu left his far right political party, the Alliance for the Unity of Romanians, in 2022 after it accused him of being pro-Russia and anti-NATO. He has also praised Romania’s 1930s and 1940s fascist leaders as national heroes, according to this AP story. Georgescu is also a supporter of President Donald Trump.
Romania’s Constitution Court annuls Georgescu’s first round victory, citing election interference, referencing similarities to past election interference in Moldova and Ukraine that’s been attributed to Russia. The decision relied on Romanian intelligence reports of Russian involvement. From a Congressional Research Service report on the decision:
The court’s decision drew from newly declassified Romanian intelligence reports describing a large-scale online effort to aggressively promote Georgescu’s candidacy ahead of the first round. The online campaign, according to the reports, was coordinated on Telegram and Discord channels, backed by a state actor, and largely carried out on TikTok, where paid influencers and networks of accounts amplified content and hashtags associated with Georgescu’s candidacy. Some content appeared to violate Romanian electoral law requirements that political campaign material be labeled as such, resulting in Georgescu’s preferential visibility on TikTok. The reports also said that Romania’s electoral websites and systems experienced over 85,000 cyberattacks close to or on election day, likely backed by a state actor. Elsewhere, the reports described growing Russian hybrid threats targeting Romania (see below, “Black Sea Security and Russia”) and pointed to seeming similarities between the coordinated social media campaign in Romania’s election and alleged interference cases in Moldova and Ukraine attributed to Russia.
The European Union opens election interference proceedings against TikTok for suspected breach of the Digital Services Act. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen issues the following statement:
Romania’s government approves the first round of new presidential elections for May 4, followed by a second round on May 18. The candidate filing deadline is March 15, setting the calendar for new presidential elections.
The European Court for Human Rights unanimously rejects Georgescu’s request for “interim measures” to suspend the Romanian court’s decision.
The European Union’s Venice Commission, at the request of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, issues an “urgent opinion” to answer the following question: “Under which conditions and under which legal standards can a constitutional court invalidate elections, drawing from the recent Romanian case?” Among the conclusions and recommendations:
Proving violations of the law by campaigning online and via social media is particularly challenging. Well-reasoned, transparent decisions on such matters are crucial. In the opinion of the Venice Commission, such decisions should precisely indicate the violations and the evidence, and they must not be based solely on classified intelligence (which may only be used as contextual information), as this would not guarantee the necessary transparency and verifiability.
U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance cites the annulment of Georgescu’s first round victory during an address to the Munich Security Conference about suppression of free speech and democratic values in EU countries:
I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.
Georgescu is placed under “judicial control” as Romanian prosecutors launch a criminal case against him. The designation means he can’t leave the county, although Georgescu was not placed under arrest.
Police stop Georgescu while he is en route to register for the upcoming elections. A statement from prosecutors says criminal proceedings were launched “for the commission of the following crimes:”
- incitement to actions against the constitutional order
- communication of false information
- false declarations in continuous form… (regarding sources of financing of the electoral campaign and declarations of assets)
- initiating or establishing an organization with a fascist, racist or xenophobic character, joining or supporting, in any form, such a group
- promoting, in public, the cult of persons guilty of committing crimes of genocide against humanity and war crimes, as well as the act of promoting, in public, fascist, legionary, racist or xenophobic ideas, conceptions or doctrines
- initiating or establishing an organization with an anti-Semitic character, joining or supporting, in any form
By now dubbed the TikTok Messiah, Romania’s central election authority rules that Georgescu cannot be a candidate in the new presidential election scheduled for May 4. The election authority issues a statement, saying: “It is inadmissible when rerunning the election to consider that the same person meets the conditions needed to accede to the presidency.”
Georgescu appeals the decision to Romania’s Constitutional Court, calling the election authority’s ruling “a direct blow to the heart of democracy worldwide.” The court —the same body that annulled his Dec. 4 first round victory — is scheduled to meet Tuesday at 5 p.m. to take up the matter.
After two hours of deliberations, Romania’s Constitutional Court upholds the election authority’s decision to ban Georgescu from the ballot. Supporters of Georgescu stood outside the court waiving Romanian flags and shouting “thieves” and “traitors.”
Georgescu ran as an independent, but had the support of parties on the far right, including his former party, Alliance for the Unity of Romanians. The filing deadline is March 15.
Romania’s National Audiovisual Council orders TikTok to remove posts that incite violence against members of the Central Election Bureau, the agency that ruled Georgescu cannot be a candidate in the new presidential election. Romania’s Digi 24 reports that one post “contained an obscene song and the message ‘Put your hands on the axes!’ while the images featured members of the BEC.”
That same day, the election bureau barred another candidate from the May 4 presidential election, Diana Sosoaca. She was also banned from running in November for making statements “contrary to democratic values,” which include “pro-Russian views,” reports France 24.
”I am proof that we do not live in a democracy,” Socoaca posted on Facebook.
Meanwhile, several thousand people rallied in Bucharest to show support for the European Union and their disdain for Russia. “Free your mind - No to Russian wisdom,” was among the banners that protesters held. There was also a reading from the Manifesto for Europe.
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DataRepublican has become a major account on X for exposing the NGO money-laundering scheme in DC. Is it any wonder she got doxxed?
Last Friday, while leaders around the Western world were up in arms about J.D. Vance’s confrontational address to the Munich Security Council, the Washington Post published a good old-fashioned piece of journalism. From “U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts”:
Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.…
[The] Home Secretary has served Apple with… a technical capability notice, ordering it to provide access under the sweeping U.K. Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, which authorizes law enforcement to compel assistance from companies… The law, known by critics as the Snoopers’ Charter, makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government has even made such a demand.
This rare example of genuine bipartisan cooperation is fascinating for several reasons. Oregon’s Ron Wyden teamed up with Arizona Republican Congressman Andy Biggs to ask new Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for help in beating back the British. While other Democrats like Michael Bennet and Mark Warner were smearing Gabbard as a Russian proxy in confirmation hearings, Wyden performed an homage to old-school liberalism and asked a few constructive questions, including a request that Gabbard recommit to her stance against government snatching of encrypted data. Weeks later, the issue is back on the table, for real.
The original UK demand is apparently nearly a year old, and Apple has reportedly been resisting internally. But this show of political opposition is new. There has been no real pushback on foreign demands for data (encrypted or otherwise) for almost nine years, for an obvious reason. Europe, the FBI, and the rest of the American national security apparatus have until now mostly presented a unified front on this issue. In the Trump era especially, there has not been much political room to take a stand like the one Wyden, Biggs, and perhaps Gabbard will be making.
The encryption saga goes back at least ten years. On December 2, 2015, two men opened fire at the Inland Center in San Bernardino, killing 14 and injuring 22. About two months later, word got out that the FBI was trying to force Apple to undo its encryption safeguards, ostensibly to unlock the iPhone of accused San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook. The FBI’s legal battle was led by its General Counsel Jim Baker, who later went to work at Twitter.
One flank of FBI strategy involved overhauling Rule 41 of the Rules of Criminal Procedure. The FBI’s idea was that if it received a legal search warrant, it should be granted power to use hacking techniques, if the target is “concealed through technological means.” The Department of Justice by way of the Supreme Court a decade ago issued this recommendation to Congress, which under a law called the Rules Enabling Act would go into force automatically if legislation was not passed to stop it. In 2016, Wyden joined up with Republican congressman Ted Poe to oppose the change, via a bill called the Stopping Mass Hacking Act.
Two factors conspired to kill the effort. First, the FBI had already won its confrontation with Apple, obtaining an order requiring the firm (which said it had no way to break encryption) to write software allowing the Bureau to use “brute force” methods to crack the suspect’s password. While Apple was contesting, the FBI busted the iPhone anyway by hiring a “publicity-shy” Australian firm called Azimuth, which hacked the phone a few months after the attack. The Post, citing another set of “people familiar with the matter,” outed the company’s name years later, in 2021.
The broader issue of whether government should be allowed to use such authority in all cases was at stake with the “Stopping Mass Hacking” bill. It was a problem for the members that the FBI called its own shot in the San Bernardino case, but the fatal blow came on November 29, 2016, when the UK passed the bill invoked last week, called the Investigatory Powers Act. This legal cheat code gave agencies like Britain’s GHCQ power to use hacking techniques (called “equipment interference”) and to employ “bulk” searches using “general” warrants. Instead of concrete individuals, the UK can target a location or a group of people who “share a common purpose”:
The law was and is broad in a darkly humorous way. It mandates that companies turn over even encrypted data for any of three reasons: to protect national security, to protect the “economic well-being of the UK,” and for the “prevention or detection of serious crime.”
Once the Act passed, American opposition turtled. How to make a stand against FBI hacking when the Bureau’s close partners in England could now make such requests legally and without restriction? The Wyden-Poe gambits were wiped out, and just two days after the IPA went into effect, changes to Rule 41 in America did as well. These granted American authorities wide latitude to break into anything they wanted, provided they had a warrant. As one Senate aide told me this week, “That was a game-over moment.”
Once the British got their shiny new tool, they weren’t shy about using it. The Twitter Files were full of loony “IPA” dramas that underscored just how terrifying these laws can be. In one bizarre episode in August of 2021, Twitter was asked to turn over data on soccer fans to a collection of alphabet soup agencies, including the Home Office and the “Football Policing Unit.” The Football Police informed Twitter that “in the UK… using the ‘N word’ is a criminal offence — not a freedom of speech issue.”
Twitter executives scrambled to explain to football’s cyber-bobbies that many of their suspects were black themselves, and tweets like “RAHEEM STERLING IS DAT NIGGA” were not, in fact, “hateful conduct.” (The idea that British police needed American executives to interpret sports slang is a horror movie in itself.) Accounts like @Itsknockzz and @Wavyboomin never knew how close they came to arrest:
British overuse was obvious, but Twitter elected not to complain. They also kept quiet when American authorities began pushing for the same power. Though the Apple standoff aroused controversy, 50% of Americans still supported the FBI’s original stance against encryption, which seemed to embolden the Bureau. Senior officials began asking for the same virtually unlimited authority their friends in the UK (and soon after, Australia) were asserting. Donald Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, seethed about encryption in a keynote speech at an International Cybersecurity Conference on July 23rd, 2019. The Justice Department was tiring of negotiations with tech companies on the issue, Barr said:
While we remain open to a cooperative approach, the time to achieve that may be limited. Key countries, including important allies, have been moving toward legislative and regulatory solutions. I think it is prudent to anticipate that a major incident may well occur at any time that will galvanize public opinion on these issues.
God knows what he meant about a “major incident” that “may well occur at any time,” but Barr was referring to the Investigatory Powers Act and imitator bills that by 2019 were being drafted by most U.S. intelligence partners.
Even without a central “incident,” European officials have been pursuing the dream of full “transparency” into user data ever since, often with support from American politicians and pundits. It was not long ago that Taylor Lorenz was writing outrage porn in the New York Times about the “unconstrained” and “unfettered conversations” on the Clubhouse App. As Lorenz noted, Clubhouse simply by being hard to track aroused the hostility of German authorities, who wrote to remind the firm about European citizens’ “right to erasure” and “transparent information”:
Providers offering services to European users must respect their rights to transparent information, the right of access, the right to erasure and the right to object.
Eventually, the EU tried to submarine end-to-end encryption through dystopian bills like “Chat Control,” which would have required platforms to actively scan user activity for prohibited behavior. This concept was widely criticized even in Europe, and in the States, which was mostly still in the grip of “freedom causes Trump” mania, TechCrunch called it “Hella Scary.”
Chat Control just barely stalled out in October, thanks to the Dutch, but Europe’s feelings about encryption were still more than made clear with this past summer’s arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov. That event was largely cheered in the U.S. press, where Durov was accused of actively “hiding illegal behavior,” and turning his platform into a “misinformation hot spot” used by “far right groups,” “neo-Nazis,” and “Proud Boys and QAnon conspiracy theorists.” The consensus was Durov himself was helping sink the concept of encryption.
“If we assume this becomes a fight about encryption, it is kind of bad to have a defendant who looks irresponsible,” was how Stanford Cyber Policy Analyst Daphne Keller described Durov to the New York Times after his arrest.
The Durov arrest may have marked the moment of peak influence for the cyber-spook movement. Though the Investigatory Powers Act was a major political surveillance tool, it was far from the only important law of its type, or the most powerful. The IPA was in fact just one of a long list of acronyms mostly unfamiliar to American news consumers, from France’s LCEN to Germany’s NetzDG to the EU’s TERREG as well as its Code of Practice on Disinformation and Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online, among many others. American authorities usually followed the pattern in the case of encryption and the IPA, doing informally what European counterparts were able to effect openly and with the force of law.
Now however it looks like efforts by government officials to completely wipe out encryption have failed, and events have taken a new turn. “Wild,” is how the Senate aide characterized the Wyden-Biggs letter, resuming another bipartisan fight put on hold nine years ago. “I’d forgotten what this looks like.”
Watching everybody I know on the left pontificating about the proper way to conduct audits, after getting their accounting degrees from the University of Internet this week, is absolute cringe for me.
Guys, listen, I say this with love… You don’t know dick about shit and it’s fucking embarrassing. Just stop. You sound like idiots.
So now, as a guy who used to be an auditor, who has defended companies from dozens of audits from different government agencies, I’ll try to correct some of your incredibly stupid NPC talking points you keep endlessly barfing up.
First off, you need to know there’s a difference between an outside audit and an internal audit. An outside audit is when somebody who isn’t part of your company comes in and checks your stuff. This could be one of the fifty something government agencies that audit people/businesses, or this could be an outside CPA firm making sure you are in compliance for some reason (like the company is publicly traded). I’ll talk more about what CPAs are in a minute.
Then there are internal audits, where the person in charge has his own people audit his company, looking for problems, hoping to have everything in order before those 3rd party outsiders show up to check, or searching for fraud, waste, and abuse… You know, those annoying things that tend to screw you over and put you out of business. That’s the kind of auditing I mostly did.
An internal audit is what Donald Trump (the man in charge) is doing now, by having his people (DOGE) audit the executive branch he runs. CEOs and owners do this all the time.
You do not need to be a Certified PUBLIC Accountant to be part of an internal audit team.
In fact, even most CPA firms, auditing the biggest corporations in the world, the majority of the auditors doing the grunt work are NOT CPAs. Most government auditors are not CPAs.
CPA is a particular certification required for a few particular types of accounting, and that isn’t even close to what DOGE is doing.
Also most of the auditors for those big firms are YOUNG. They are usually around 24, because those are the dudes that the big firms can work 80 hours a week and they won’t just keel over and die. They do this kind of work BEFORE taking the CPA exam if they want to go that route, and most of them don’t, because they end up going from auditing into some other form of specialty.
These young auditors make up a team which is usually supervised by an NCO type who has got 5-7 years of experience (and may or may not be a CPA depending on the industry) and they all answer to somebody higher up, who has got the 10-20 years of experience. This will of course vary on the size of the company.
You do NOT need to be an accountant to be an auditor. Anybody who says this is a total dumb ass with zero grasp of how any of this shit works in real life. The people who make up your audit team are recruited from whatever skill sets are necessary to audit that particular system. I (the accountant) have been on audit teams with IT guys, programmers, lawyers, and even machinists. (why machinists, because I was auditing a factory, and I could count the parts, but I couldn’t tell you if the parts were bullshit or not)
So if you are auditing a computer system, then your auditors would obviously require computer people. Fucking duh, morons. Holy shit. The reason most auditors come from an accounting background is because most fraud, waste, and abuse comes from fuckery on the books. But if the fuckery is taking place in the particular systems before they get to the financials, that’s where we bring in systems experts.
Next, you morons are acting like the entire organization is half a dozen 20 somethings, because that’s who got doxxed first and you fuckers are too stupid or dishonest to realize that’s not the entire team. Newsweek has compiled a list of known DOGE staff so far, and their ages are 33, 42, 28, 34, 67, 30, 33, 36, 33, 47, 25, 24, 43, 23, 25, 45, 19, 28, 21, 44, 39, 57, 45, 41, 32, 28, 22, 37, 37, 35, 24, 42, 36, and 36.
https://www.newsweek.com/doge-list-staff-revealed-2029965
Do I need to graph that for you, you dishonest fucks? The wiz kids you keep histrionically shitting your pants over aren’t even the average. Oh, and shocker, they also come from a wide variety of backgrounds, like everybody with a fucking clue about auditing had already assumed because we aren’t retards.
But but but Elon is posting things on Twitter that aren’t 100% perfectly accurate according to liberal fact checkers from liberal news organizations which up until recently have been receiving large amounts of tax payer money for phony baloney reasons!
So what?
The stuff that’s been made public so far is what’s called findings. Findings aren’t the final report. That takes time. And you’ll probably never see those final reports because again, say it with me, INTERNAL. The only way you’ll ever see the complete detailed final report for any given agency is Donald Trump feels like it. Same as any CEO can drop whatever internal company info he feels like.
But DOGE is going TOO FAST! Well no shit. They are on a tight time frame. The republicans control everything right now (barely, and many of them are every bit as corrupt as the dems) only the government is fucking huge, Trump got elected on cutting it, and mid terms are in two years.
But (insert sob story here about how some good necessary wonderful saint of a government employee or super awesome wonderful government program got cut here) REEEEE!!!! Except too bad that’s total bullshit.
The time for a gentle, caring, measured (slow), careful pruning of government to only remove the bad tissue with a scalpel was generations ago. We are now at the axe and TQ time before the patient dies. Yeah, that sucks, but that’s what happens when you procrastinate going to the doctors while a cancerous tumor the size of a fucking watermelon grows out your back.
Those last two NPC wails are basically the same thing, appeals for Trump to slow down and lose momentum so the process can stall out and die like all the previous times Americans have tried to cut the great federal leviathan and shut off the endless money faucet.
The government is huge. Our debt is insane. This is not sustainable. We know it. They know it. Everybody knows it. I don’t know why everybody keeps pretending otherwise.
Sure, this government program is an obvious scam to funnel tax dollars to bureaucrats and their NGO friends, so cat ladies in Arlington can collect $700k salaries at the “charity” run out of her multimillion dollar town home, but if we cut that a single puppy will die!
I feel bad for the Hostage Puppy. I really do. But don’t blame the auditors who are finding this shit, and don’t blame the tax payers who are tired of getting butt fucked. If you were honest you’d blame the bureaucrats and grifters who got us to this place.
Will government programs you like get cut? Absolutely. Will this suck for a lot of people? Yes. Will good hard working employees get cut along with the legions of useless fucking dregs? Yup. Is this still necessary so our entire nation doesn’t collapse into utter dog shit under the weight of the all consuming federal leviathan, where to survive we huddle in the ruins eating rats cooked over piles of burning dollar bills? Also yes.
They’re called budget cuts because they hurt. If they were pleasant they would be called budget tickles.
Next, Elon now has access to our personal data! REEEEEE! Which is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard, because if Elon wanted all our personal data he could just buy it off the Communist Chinese, from one of the last seven times our incompetent and unaccountable federal government leaked all our data, for way cheaper. This is just idiotic obfuscation.
Then there’s this one where Elon dropped a finding to the tax payers that showed our Social Security data has a bunch of nonsensical garbage in it. Immediately some random dumbfuck on Twitter came up with an excuse. BUT WHAT ABOUT COBOL REEEEEEE!
Man, fuck your COBOL.
Because what happened next was hilarious and fascinating, because it didn’t matter how retarded and full of shit that COBOL excuse was, or how many hundreds of computer programmers went “that’s fucking bullshit that’s not how any of that works you idiots” the NPC lemming brigade immediately ran with it, repeating it over and over like a religious mantra. Because the validity of the excuse doesn’t matter. They just need an excuse. Any excuse will do. It’s like a holy symbol to ward off vampires, only this time they’re holding up a turd to ward off DOGE.
Back to auditing, just because the Social Security database is filled with garbage doesn’t mean that all that garbage is fraud. However, try that excuse when the government audits you. “Oh, I’m sorry my books are riddled with errors, it is no big deal, that’s just how we do things around here.” and see how that shakes out for you.
If a company’s records were full of broken bullshit, the government would assume the worst, fine the ever living fuck out of you, and possibly send you to jail. Because the government’s default assumption when a company’s books are all fucked up is that it is on purpose to hide fraud.
Except when our government’s books are filled with things like 30 million dollars to fund a Transsexual Peruvian Orchestra, and 99% of that money never made it out of northern Virginia, we’re supposed to assume that’s just nice fluffy goodness, and HOW DARE YOU assume there’s anything dishonest going on.
Oh yeah, the whole “but even if we fire Y% government employees” that’s only X% of the budget and there’s still all this other stuff.” Which is just pathetic obfuscation from people upset the endless money faucet is getting shut off, because all those millions add up and turn into billions, and all those billions add up and turn into trillions. This one was also more popular among the NPCs before they started poking at the entitlements which are the giant money holes and finding all sorts of wonky shit there too.
Am I missing any of the NPC wails? Point them out in the comments and I’ll add them and rip on them too.
This may be one of my favorite headlines of all time, courtesy of the pro-democracy libs over at Newsweek.
Igloo is recalling over one million of its 90 Qt. Flip & Tow Rolling Coolers sold across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico because the tow handles have the potential to amputate fingers.
Good morning from JD Vance!
