Today's the day the FBI-DOJ Cabal died. Bondi and Kash for the win. I don't think Clinesmith or any other swamp traitor will be going before a FISA committee anytime soon with fake-false statement documents to support a request for a warrant. Nope. Not gonna happen. Clinesmith, by the way, got probation and his law license was suspended for six months or a year something. Whereas his false statement generated years of Russia, Russia, Russia and ruined the life of Carter Page and cost him hundreds and hundreds of thousands in legal fees. Then the swampster admitted that he lied on the warrant application and got a slap on the wrist. As I said, that is not going to happen again soon. Have to wait for the next dem administration for that.
Who needs a functional, effective post office anyways? Trump expected to take control of USPS, fire postal board, officials say https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/20/trump-usps-takeover-dejoy/ President Donald Trump is preparing to dissolve the leadership of the U.S. Postal Service and absorb the independent mail agency into his administration, potentially throwing the 250-year-old mail provider and trillions of dollars of e-commerce transactions into turmoil. Trump is expected to issue an executive order as soon as this week to fire the members of the Postal Service’s governing board and place the agency under the control of the Commerce Department and Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to six people familiar with the plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals. The board is planning to fight Trump’s order, three of those people told The Washington Post. In an emergency meeting Thursday, the board retained outside counsel and gave instructions to sue the White House if the president were to remove members of the board or attempt to alter the agency’s independent status. Two of the group’s GOP members — Derek Kan, a former Trump administration official, and Mike Duncan, a former chair of the Republican National Committee — were not in attendance, according to a person familiar with the gathering. The two did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Trump’s order to place the Commerce Department in charge of the Postal Service would probably violate federal law, according to postal experts. Another executive order earlier this week instructed independent agencies to align more closely with the White House, though that order is likely to prompt court challenges and the Postal Service by law is generally exempt from executive orders. Members of the Postal Service’s bipartisan board are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Trump, at Lutnick’s urging, has mused about privatizing the Postal Service, and Trump’s presidential transition team vetted candidates to replace Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a retired logistics executive and GOP fundraising official who took office in 2020 during Trump’s first term. “There is a lot of talk about the Postal Service being taken private,” Trump said in December. “It’s a lot different today, between Amazon and UPS and FedEx and all the things that you didn’t have. But there is talk about that. It’s an idea that a lot of people have liked for a long time.” “This is a somewhat regal approach that says the king knows better than his subjects and he will do his best for them. But it also removes any sense that there’s oversight, impartiality and fairness and that some states wouldn’t be treated better than other states or cities better than other cities,” said James O’Rourke, who studies the Postal Service at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. “The anxiety over the Postal Service is not only three-quarters of a million workers. It’s that this is something that does not belong to the president or the White House. It belongs to the American people.” After this story was published, a White House spokesperson said no such executive order was planned. A representative for Postal Service did not respond to a request for comment. The immediate effects of moving the Postal Service into the Commerce Department are uncertain. The Postal Regulatory Commission has direct oversight of the mail system and closely watches for geographic discrimination in delivery service and prices. It is unclear if Trump’s order will affect that group, as well. From its founding in 1775 until 1970, the U.S. mail system was a political organ of the White House. Presidents were known to appoint their political allies or campaign leaders as postmaster general, and the mail chief was often a key White House negotiator with Congress. But the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, the product of a crippling nationwide mail strike, led Congress to split the agency off into a freestanding organization, purposefully walling it off from political tinkering. Americans consistently rank the Postal Service among their most-beloved government agencies, second only to the National Park Service. A 2024 study by the Pew Research Center found more than 70 percent of Americans had a favorable view of the agency, a view that was similar among Democrats and Republicans. Trump’s first administration sought to test the agency’s independence. Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s first-term treasury secretary, attempted to control the 2020 hiring process that brought DeJoy to the Postal Service, and a task force run out of Mnuchin’s department recommended dramatically shrinking the scope of the agency and preparing it for privatization via an initial public offering. The president’s pending moves elicited immediate criticism from congressional Democrats. “Privatizing the Postal Service is an attack on Americans’ access to critical information, benefits and life-saving medical care,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (Virginia), the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Accountability Committee, told The Post. “It is clear that Trump and his cronies value lining their own pockets more than the lives and connection of the American public.” Trump has long had a tense relationship with the mail agency. He once derided it from the Oval Office as “a joke” and in a social media post as Amazon’s “Delivery Boy.” In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump threatened to withhold emergency assistance from the Postal Service unless it quadrupled package prices, and Mnuchin authorized a loan for the mail agency only in exchange for access to its confidential contracts with top customers. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.) Ahead of the 2020 election, Trump said the Postal Service was incapable of facilitating mail-in voting because the agency could not access the emergency funding he was blocking. The Postal Service ultimately delivered 97.9 percent of ballots from voters to election officials within three days. The successful delivery of ballots turned Trump’s opinion of DeJoy, The Post has previously reported. The postmaster is in the midst of a 10-year cost-cutting and modernization plan for the agency that last month bore its most promising results. It posted a profit — excluding expenses on pension and health-care payments — in the quarter that ended Dec. 31, its first profitable period since the height of the pandemic. But on-time delivery service has struggled under DeJoy’s tenure, and the rocky rollout of his “Delivering for America” plan has cost him and Postal Service allies on Capitol Hill. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) pledged to “do everything I can to kill” DeJoy’s plan during a December hearing. The same month, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Kentucky) warned DeJoy of “significant changes” afoot for the Postal Service. “There are lots of ideas — I don’t know if they’ll be advantageous or not to the Postal Service,” Comer said. Republicans have grown wary of DeJoy and the Postal Service’s close ties to the Biden administration. The two partnered to deliver nearly 1 billion coronavirus test kits, the largest expansion of postal capabilities in a generation, and to fund a fleet of more than 60,000 electric mail delivery vehicles, though those were plagued by delivery delays.
How about we put the former leader of the Oath Keepers in as Deputy Director of the FBI? Would anyone in the GOP have a problem with that? I thought not. Oath Keepers' ex-leader convicted of sedition now wants to work for FBI https://www.rawstory.com/stewart-rhodes-2671190081/
What's up with Kash Patel showing up to his swearing in ceremony with a babe? I didn't think that he was allowed to have fun according to the dem plans for him. You dog, Kash. WOOF! WOOF! Golden Age? https://www.timesnownews.com/world/...-side-singer-alexis-wilkins-article-118463845
The problem with going to Mars is the high risk that you will not be coming back again. You know, the risk is right up there with the risk of sending someone to the Space Station during the Biden administration.
An interesting summary... Trump moves with light speed and brute force in shaking the core of what America has been https://apnews.com/article/trump-re...cutive-power-0e8b6724d45fcdb3e6f0cef05ae7b952 WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is moving with light speed and brute force to break the existing order and reshape America at home and abroad. He likes the ring of calling himself king. No one can absorb it all. By the time you try to process one big thing — he covets Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal and Gaza; he turns away from historic alliancesand Ukraine; fires many thousands of federal workers, then brings some right back; raises doubts whether he will obey laws he doesn’t like; orders an about-face in the missions of department after department; declares there are only two genders, which federal documents will henceforth call sexes; announces heavy tariffs, suspends them, then imposes some — three more big things have happened. Trump’s core supporters are thrilled with what they see. Those who don’t like him watch in horror. The nation is far from any consensus on what makes America great and what may make it sink. What’s undeniable is that Trump has ushered in the sharpest change of direction for the country at least since Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Great Depression. But the long-term implications of Trump’s national reset, and by extension his own legacy, cannot yet be determined. “Make American Great Again” figure Steve Bannon calls all this action “muzzle velocity” — firing every way at once to confuse the enemy. The barrage has left a variety of foreign leaders and many public servants picking figurative buckshot out of their backsides. Paul Light, an expert on the workings of government and the civil service, reaches for another analogy: “It’s the never-ending volcano. It just doesn’t stop, and it’s hot.” Says Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service: “We’re essentially playing Russian roulette and they just added a bunch more bullets to the chamber.” Or is it instead a “controlled burn,” as Kevin Roberts, an architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, puts it? “A controlled burn destroys the dangerous deadwood so that the whole forest can flourish,” he asserts. Project 2025 offered Trump a preelection blueprint for some of what is happening now. Some 75,000 federal workers accepted the new administration’s “deferred resignation” proposal in exchange for financial incentives, and tens of thousands more have been laid off or are in line to be, out of a civilian federal workforce of about 2.4 million, excluding postal workers. Democrats, the minority in Congress, and the broader political opposition are mulling which fights are worth fighting and which are not, out of so many to choose from. “Democrats,” said one of them, Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, “are not going to engage in the outrage Olympics.” At the moment, polls suggest slightly less than half of U.S. adults like the Republican president’s handling of his job, a tick better than Democrat Joe Biden’s approval when he left office in January. That sentiment could shift for the better or worse in an hour, after the next big things. He brings Russia in from the cold In his first month, Trump performed a pirouette in foreign policy, disavowing the age-old commitment to defend fellow NATO members if they are attacked, reaching out to Russia and suspending most U.S. foreign aid. Washington, Ukraine’s steadfast and potent wartime supporter for three years, has suddenly become its scold. At home, Trump’s explosion of executive orders and marching orders reaches beyond the workings of government and into the culture. Corporate boardrooms as well as government itself are shedding their diversity, equity and inclusion programs in alignment with the nascent new order, though a judge on Friday largely blocked Trump’s mandate. Institutions are also being pressed to abandon any recognition of or accommodations for transgender people, at risk of losing federal money if they don’t. How much all of this sticks will largely depend on courts, which appear to be the only check on Trump’s expansive use of executive power. The Republican-controlled Congress has been compliant as Trump pursues his ends by executive action instead of legislation. Trump “has issued about a squillion executive orders,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said a while back. “I’m still trying to read them.” Longtime Republican articles of faith such as support for free trade and strong U.S.-led security guarantees against foreign adversaries have been lost in the din, if not discarded. ‘Long live the king’ Republicans have historically preached the virtues of letting state and local governments make decisions about their communities without the federal government calling the shots. But the Trump administration did just that this past week, halting New York City’s new commuter tolls for driving into Manhattan. Trump was quick to take credit. “Long live the king,” he posted in all-caps, meaning himself. The White House circulated an image of him wearing a crown. In the civil service upheaval, a blanket staff reduction, largely of thousands of newer employees with fewer job protections, has been combined with the targeted firing of senior officials deemed disloyal to Trump or otherwise an impediment. Multitudes of nonpolitical public servants, normally left in place when new presidents come in, are out. Senior officials responsible for keeping agencies honest and accountable were among those purged. Nearly 20 departmental inspectors general were fired late one night without the legally required 30 days notice. Trump also dismissed the head of the Office of Government Ethics, an agency that protects government whistleblowers; the Supreme Court on Friday temporarily kept the official on the job. Trump terminated a dozen federal career prosecutors who had worked on criminal cases brought against him, striking at the heart of what he calls the “deep state.” ‘We are in a dangerous place’ Congress, which holds the power of the purse, is letting the president exercise it instead, so far leaving federal judges to decide when to rein him in. The early result has been massive cuts or freezes in grants and other spending that Congress approved in law, but Trump is stopping on his own, if courts let him. “The last month has been entirely distinctive in American history,” said Cal Jillson, a constitutional and presidential scholar at Southern Methodist University. “We have never had an American president who moved this decisively in the face of the law and the Constitution. We are in a dangerous place.” Jillson and other historians say such tumult in the machinery of government has only come in reaction to dire emergencies: states leaving the union before the Civil War, FDR’s New Deal thrust in the depths of the Great Depression, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society burst of programs when taking office after John Kennedy’s assassination. No catastrophes of such magnitude greeted Trump. Illegal border crossings that had surged during the Biden administration, for example, subsided before Biden left office. Even so, Trump let loose in all the ways he telegraphed, and in most cases promised, in the campaign. To Trump and Elon Musk, though, a challenge to democracy comes not from their efforts to upend the bureaucracy but from the bureaucracy itself — the unelected officials who resist the agenda of a duly elected president. “There’s a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the the president and the Cabinet,” Musk told “Hannity” on Fox News Channel this past week in an interview joined by Trump. Musk, the Tesla, SpaceX and X titan, is leading Trump’s scouring of the civil service. “If the will of the president is not implemented and the president is representative of the people, that means the will of the people is not being implemented,” Musk said. “And that means we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy.” Chaos is a feature, not a bug Light, author of several dozen books on the workings of government, said times like these can yield positive results. “Every once in a while you have to scrub down the operation.” But this chaos, he said, is both intentional and corrosive, exposing the country to the inadequacy of a hollowed-out civil service when the next crisis comes, whether it’s a pandemic, a hurricane, a war or a massive IT attack. “That’s Trump’s basic MO — keep people jumping,” he said. Trump “really doesn’t know anything except breaking things.” Some polls done this month carry warning signs for Trump as he pursues his audacious course. More than half of adults in a Washington Post/Ipsos survey (57%) said he has exceeded his authority since taking office. More than half in a CNN/SSRS poll (55%) said he hasn’t paid attention to the most pressing problems. In essence, though, this is a half-and-half country that Trump is responsible for leading the whole of. For vast numbers of Americans, he can do no wrong, or no right, depending which side you are on.
Nice! https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/ju...irector-kash-patel-named-atf-chief-rcna193332 FBI Director Kash Patel to be named ATF chief Patel is set to lead an agency that's been a frequent target of Republicans, including an effort to abolish it altogether.