Early in his third presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed to establish a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to “declassify and publish all documents on Deep State spying, censorship, and abuses of power.” The phrase “Truth and Reconciliation” recalls bodies established to investigate abuses by toppled Communist regimes such as East Germany’s, or the former apartheid government of South Africa. The framing suggests that Trump views the entire past decade, from “Russiagate” to the “lawfare” cases entangling himself and his advisers, as the fruits of an illegitimate regime that threw the rule of law out the window.

This interpretation of recent history, surely viewed as partisan by Trump’s opponents, will be tested by the facts, once they become better known and documented. But the president-elect’s suggestion that the workings of the U.S. government must be more transparent is long overdue. //

It is high time for a serious overhaul of classification procedures, with the appointment of a presidential “task force” of the kind suggested in the Classification Reform for Transparency Act (which still awaits passage). President Obama’s Executive Order 13526 of 2009 limited classification times for ordinary records to 10 years and established a cap of 25 years for more sensitive files. But the nine telltale “exemptions” were left in place, allowing security agencies to continue stonewalling — while adding massively to the vault of our nation’s secrets.

If we streamline exemptions to a few simple categories such as “sources at risk,” private data of living citizens, and military-technological and trade secrets and shorten classification to a single presidential term of four years (e.g., to prevent an opposition party from mining recent presidential files for use in election campaigns), we could exponentially reduce the expense of classification going forward and restore public trust in Washington, D.C. — not least by putting a healthy fear into our public servants that they cannot abuse their powers and get away with it.

Meanwhile, why not declassify all U.S. government files more than 25 years old? If a strict exemption threshold is met, government agencies could still redact personal data or trade or military secrets — but the files themselves should be opened. Rather than require citizens and historians to pry information out of Washington via FOIA applications, the burden of classification should be placed where it belongs — on the government.

Files should be open to the public unless otherwise specified, not secret by default. We the people have a right to know what our government does in our name, and to know our own history.

It was clear to forty percent of young women that Kamala Harris only offered death or subjugation: economically, the issue of men in women's spaces, and harm to their bodies from criminal actors. Many young women voted for a future that looked beyond "my body, my choice," and looked toward "my vote, my future."

If this trend holds and grows, the kids are going to be all right.

Mildred's Oldest Son
6 hours ago
Well, how did the last two SECDEF 4-stars work out for the USA, especially Austin?

Laocoön of Troy Mildred's Oldest Son
6 hours ago
Don't forget Mattis.

The upside about having 2 SECDEF 4 stars from Republican and
Dem administrations is that we've proven that course from each side and it's dramatically failed every time. It just doesn't work. The truth is that the statuatory prohibition for General Officers as SECDEF was a wise one and departing from that design invites disaster. As a nation we need to shelve that option.

SECDEF needs to be a civilian. Period. The Generals and Admirals must subordinate themselves to that civilian leadership.

The CJCS is the President's primary military advisor, but he has no command authority. He has no troops to command. That too is a wise choice. No more Milley's calling up some PLA generalissmo and writing checks he can't cash. His job is to give the President his best military advice and then shut the flock up and let the Prez direct a course of action.

The box of prescription drugs had been forgotten in a back closet of a retail pharmacy for so long that some of the pills predated the 1969 moon landing. Most were 30 to 40 years past their expiration dates — possibly toxic, probably worthless.

But to Lee Cantrell, who helps run the California Poison Control System, the cache was an opportunity to answer an enduring question about the actual shelf life of drugs: Could these drugs from the bell-bottom era still be potent? //

The age of the drugs might have been bizarre, but the question the researchers wanted to answer wasn't. Pharmacies across the country in major medical centers and in neighborhood strip malls routinely toss out tons of scarce and potentially valuable prescription drugs when they hit their expiration dates. //

Experts estimate such squandering eats up about $765 billion a year — as much as a quarter of all the country's health care spending. //

The findings surprised both researchers: A dozen of the 14 compounds were still as potent as they were when they were manufactured, some at almost 100 percent of their labeled concentrations. //

"Refining our prescription drug dating process could save billions," he says.

But after a brief burst of attention, the response to their study faded. That raises an even bigger question: If some drugs remain effective well beyond the date on their labels, why hasn't there been a push to extend their expiration dates?

It turns out that the FDA, the agency that helps set the dates, has long known the shelf life of some drugs can be extended, sometimes by years.

In fact, the federal government has saved a fortune by doing this. //

For decades, the federal government has stockpiled massive stashes of medication, antidotes and vaccines in secure locations throughout the country. The drugs are worth tens of billions of dollars and would provide a first line of defense in case of a large-scale emergency.

Maintaining these stockpiles is expensive. The drugs have to be kept secure and at the proper humidity and temperature so they don't degrade. Luckily, the country has rarely needed to tap into many of the drugs, but this means they often reach their expiration dates. Though the government requires pharmacies to throw away expired drugs, it doesn't always follow these instructions itself. Instead, for more than 30 years, it has pulled some medicines and tested their quality. //

In 1986, the Air Force, hoping to save on replacement costs, asked the FDA if certain drugs' expiration dates could be extended. In response, the FDA and Defense Department created the Shelf Life Extension Program.

Each year, drugs from the stockpiles are selected based on their value and pending expiration, and analyzed in batches to determine whether their end dates could be safely extended. For several decades, the program has found that the actual shelf life of many drugs is well beyond the original expiration dates.

A 2006 study of 122 drugs tested by the program showed that two-thirds of the expired medications were stable every time a lot was tested. Each of them had their expiration dates extended, on average, by more than four years, according to research published in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences.

Some that failed to hold their potency include the common asthma inhalant albuterol, the topical rash spray diphenhydramine, and a local anesthetic made from lidocaine and epinephrine, the study said. //

An official with the Department of Defense, which maintains about $13.6 billion worth of drugs in its stockpile, says that in 2016 it cost $3.1 million to run the extension program — which saved the department from replacing $2.1 billion in expired drugs. //

Federal and state laws prohibit pharmacists from dispensing expired drugs, and The Joint Commission, which accredits thousands of health care organizations, requires facilities to remove expired medication from their supply. //

Testing showed 24 of the 40 expired devices contained at least 90 percent of their stated amount of epinephrine, enough to be considered as potent as when they were made. All of them contained at least 80 percent of their labeled concentration of medication. The takeaway? Even EpiPens stored in less than ideal conditions may last longer than their labels say they do, and if there's no other option, an expired EpiPen may be better than nothing, Cantrell says. //

"The question is: Should the FDA be doing more stability testing?" Berkowitz says. "Could they come up with a safe and systematic way to cut down on the drugs being wasted in hospitals?"

Four scientists who worked on the FDA extension program told ProPublica something like that could work for drugs stored in hospital pharmacies, where conditions are carefully controlled.

Greg Burel, director of the CDC's stockpile, says he worries that if drugmakers were forced to extend their expiration dates it could backfire, making it unprofitable to produce certain drugs and thereby reducing access or increasing prices.

The analyst claimed during a discussion with the Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government that the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) division of the FBI was using the tool to "search open-source databases about content indicative of criminal conduct."

“According to the analyst’s testimony, the FBI uses this tool to monitor social media posts by users, regardless of whether the users are American citizens or foreign actors, to search for ‘content indicative of criminal conduct,'” Jordan wrote. //

House Judiciary Committee Republicans posted a copy of the letter on X asking, "Was the FBI using a software tool to spy on you during election season?"

"Seems like it," they concluded. //

Americans will recognize this example of the FBI spreading its tentacles of election interference into social media and squeezing the hell out of free speech as the norm, not an exception.

They tipped the scales of the 2020 presidential election by intimidating Facebook and Twitter (now X) to censor stories regarding the New York Post's bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg dropped jaws by admitting Facebook throttled information about the laptop scandal in the days leading up to that election thanks in part to the FBI coming to them with a message having all the subtleties of a mob boss meeting.

I look forward to Elon and Vivek making changes to the Federal Bureaucracy with an eye on efficiency and, at the same time, making life better for all Americans. Importantly, we will drive out the massive waste and fraud which exists throughout our annual $6.5 Trillion Dollars of Government Spending. They will work together to liberate our Economy, and make the U.S. Government accountable to “WE THE PEOPLE.” Their work will conclude no later than July 4, 2026 - A smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence. I am confident they will succeed!

Turnout is roughly the same as it was four years ago, but it’s casting some suspicious vibes among many about the 81 million votes cast for Joe Biden. The pandemic election was arguably fraught with shenanigans, including midnight vote dumps with unverified mail-in ballots. That's why the Republican National Committee and the party's activist wing did an excellent job of having a legal brigade ready to file lawsuits and challenges on voting processes this time. Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is a prime example, where voters were illegally turned away, leading to a challenge and a judge extending the early voting period. On the county's last day of early voting, the lines were long, and the locations were still understaffed, but everyone who waited cast their ballot. Trump eventually won the county, another first for a Republican since 1988.

Once again, Trump won virtually all the bellwether counties, like in 2020, but Biden won then.

Disgraced Propagandist
@DisgracedProp
·
Follow
2004 Kerry - 59M
2008 Obama - 69.5M
2012 Obama - 65.9M
2016 Clinton - 65.9M
2020 Biden - 81.3M
2024 Harris - 66.4M

Somebody needs to go to jail for this.
10:29 AM · Nov 6, 2024

Nathan Hughes
@rallynate
·
Follow
Obama got 69M votes.
Kamala got 68M votes.

But they want us to believe Joe Biden somehow got 81M votes and won, despite losing nearly every bellweather county?

They raided our homes and sent us to jail for asking where those extra 13M votes came from.
4:19 AM · Nov 7, 2024 //

And it’s not insane, tin foil hat stuff—a Chinese student in Michigan illegally voted, but the vote will count because there’s no mechanism to flag these fraudulent ballots. And we all know he wasn’t the only one, but the pandemic is over, and voter integrity measures were passed and enforced this time, for the most part. //

Sean Davis
@seanmdav
·
Follow
That thing that never happens just happened again.
Election Wizard
@ElectionWiz
GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — Two women, one of them a USPS carrier, were arrested last week for attempting to illegally cast over a dozen ballots in Mesa County, Colorado, after stealing the ballots from the mail.
10:22 PM · Nov 11, 2024

Tech in RL
10 minutes ago
The scary part is that the Harris campaign treated their staff like Washington bureaucrats, tons of money thrown at them with no accountability. Estimate say Harris spent over $530 million on staff expenses, half the billion dollars they squandered. Trump’s entire campaign expenditure was $385 million with $10 million spent on staff expenses. Trump may have been outspent 3:1, but most of Harris’s money was essentially set on fire for useless expenditures. It’s a wonder how Harris spent 53 times more money on staff than Trump did with far worse results. That’s what we expect of government. //

Skibum
4 minutes ago
As a taxpayer, do you have any hope that Democrats would spend your money any more intelligently than they spend their own?

Didn't think so. //

Random US Citizen
20 minutes ago
So a three month campaign cost $1 billion. Check my math but I think that works out to $300+ million a month, or $10 million per day.

The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit summarily vaporized 46 years of Federal environmental regulations. Writing in a case called Marin Audubon Society, et al v. FAA, et al, the majority of a three-judge panel ruled that the Council on Environmental Quality, a cabal inside the Executive Office of the President charged with ensuring that National Environmental Protection Act requirements are interpreted uniformly across the federal government, had illegally used the Federal Register to publish that guidance thereby giving citizens, agencies, and even the courts the impression that their internal guidance had the authority of law. //

The CEQ regulations, which purport to govern how all federal agencies must comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, are ultra vires.

Ultra vires means the CEQ was acting "beyond the legal scope of it authority."

The court goes on to detail the shenanigans by which an advisory body with no regulatory authority was able to write environmental regulations for the entire United States for nearly a half-century just because it decided it could.

Making the case even more awesome is that it was set off by enviro-wackos suing the FAA for allowing sightseeing flights near some national parks. The enviros claimed the FAA used the wrong standard established by the CEQ to permit the flight. They ended up being right in a backhanded kind of way. //

frylock234
13 hours ago
I love the smell of bureaucracy burning in the morning. Which windows do I leave open to enjoy that scent? Do you think Mrs. Walz would know?

"Therapy. Therapy. We are all going to therapy," Jones replied.

Why are we here? If you are a Democrat, all we can say is, we hope that Susie [Wiles, Trump's new Chief of Staff] decides to take a vacation and they hire some terrible people to make some mistakes to give us a chance.

Right now, they have everything. They've got the Supreme Court. They've got the electoral college. They've got the House, they got -- probably they've got the Senate. They've got popular vote.

And we're just sitting here with a dunce cap on. This time last week we thought we were the smartest people in the world. We thought Donald Trump was an idiot. We thought his campaign made no sense. And it turned out they were smarter than us and we don't have anything to say to you.

In my estimation, Elon Musk is easily one of the most influential people in Western Culture, equal to, if not more so, than Donald Trump. He is a man who is taking us into the future by rectifying quite a few problems here in the present, be that our lagging behind on becoming a space-faring species, or the fight against censorship and the protection of our human right to free speech.

Musk's business and ideological aims align with the right, and as it so happens, that's the side Trump is on, and so logic would follow that Musk and Trump, two men of vast influence and vision, would find themselves allied and working together. //

But if you take a step back and look at what Musk is actually stating, you'll start to realize that the influence they think Musk is spreading isn't his. He is not the source, merely a recipient like many other people.

In truth, Musk was, like many other people in the Western world, "red-pilled" by experience, leftist incompetence and hatred, and a drive for success that was being hampered by leftist entities. //

Take, for example, this post he made on Tuesday where he was commenting on the head of NPR, Katherine Maher, and her infamous words about the need for censorship.

“I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done,” Maher told a crowd during a speech.

This prompted Musk to ask a simple question.

"Should your tax dollars really be paying for an organization run by people who think the truth is a 'distraction,'" he asked. //

There is no ignoring Musk like they ignore us, but Musk is just saying what we're saying, and if they hate what he has to say that much, then what does that say about their attitudes toward you?

The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole84
“I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”

— Katherine Maher (NPR CEO). //

The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole84
·
If she’s not seeking truth I’m curious what the real agenda is

MarciJoy @msmarcijoy
·
Can we stop funding organizations like NPR if they aren't willing to recognize the importance of truth? If you don't base journalism on finding the truth, what do you base it on?

Heather Hammond @Queen_Heather88
·
Without truth, you have no idea what needs to be fixed, or what to unite over.

Arthur MacWaters @ArthurMacwaters
The truth really is inconvenient when you’re trying to get everyone on board with The Message™️

Democrats are also starting to confront something uncomfortable: Those ads highlighting Harris’s past support for taxpayer-funded transgender prison surgeries? They were a killer. For proof, just look at the 538 chart tracking Harris’s favorable ratings, which were rising until October 1, when she was high on vibes, and then started to sink the very week Trump and his MAGA allies started putting serious money behind those trans ads, which were absolutely inescapable on TV and streaming in the closing weeks. “I talked to so many people in the barbershop who asked about that ad,” [Richmond Democrat Mayor Levar] Stoney told me. “I get that it can be difficult to talk about those issues, but there was room for the campaign to respond to them. Why didn’t they? Because once you don’t respond, people start to believe it’s true.”

The ad was true though, as we documented back in mid-September after the Trump/Harris debate, where Trump was widely mocked on Twitter by journos and Democrat movers and shakers alike who were incredulous over the claim and thought it made him look like a fruitcake. Amazingly, it was CNN of all places that first broke that story - just two days before the debate.

On October 11, 1798, John Adams wrote to the Massachusetts Militia that

Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

But are we still a moral and religious people? In “The Real American Founding: A Conversation,” professors of politics David Azerrad and Thomas West help us answer that question.

In the fifth lecture of that course, titled “Morality and Virtue,” professors Azerrad and West discuss the fact that government always legislates morality, but what that morality consists of depends on the beliefs of those who make the laws. The nature of the legislative power is to tell people what they can and cannot do, what is right and wrong.

In the Founders’ understanding, they believed that government ought to support true morality and virtue. That is, morality and virtue grounded in the laws of nature and of nature’s God, from which they derived man’s natural rights and duties.

The Founders also believed that the laws of nature and of nature’s God, along with the natural rights and duties derived from them, were in accord with their Christian beliefs. Government therefore ought not to be hostile to Christianity, but rather should support it with laws that are friendly to it and encourage its flourishing among the citizenry.

What is the true and original root of Dutch aversion to British rule? It is the abiding fear and hatred of the movement that seeks to place the native on a level with the white man … the Kaffir is to be declared the brother of the European, to be constituted his legal equal, to be armed with political rights.

-- Winston Churchill
On the Boer War, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (1900).

Apt analogies are among the most formidable weapons of the rhetorician.

-- Winston Churchill
The Wit and Wisdom of Winston Churchill (1984)

I have derived continued benefit from criticism at all periods of my life and I do not remember any time when I was ever short of it.

-- Winston Churchill
in House of Commons 27 November 1914

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

-- Winston Churchill
The Second World War (ed. 1952)

Never give in — never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

-- Winston Churchill
Speech given at Harrow School, Harrow, England, October 29, 1941. Quoted in Churchill by Himself (2008), ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, 2008, p. 23 ISBN 1586486381

Headmasters have powers at their disposal with which Prime Ministers have never yet been invested.

-- Winston Churchill