By a vote of 212-212, the amendment failed. One hundred and twenty-eight Republicans voted for the amendment, and 86 voted against it. On the Democrat side, the vote was 84 yes and 126 no.

Thomas Massie
@RepThomasMassie
·
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This is how the Constitution dies.

By a tie vote, the amendment to require a warrant to spy on Americans goes down in flames.

This is a sad day for America.

The Speaker doesn’t always vote in the House, but he was the tie breaker today. He voted against warrants.
12:37 PM · Apr 12, 2024 //

I'm sorry, if I know the FBI is lying about using FISA, why would I suddenly believe their sales pitch on its critical role in national security? It isn't like the FBI had a few bad actors making the occasional abuse. The data shows that abuse of FISA and lying to the FISA court are baked into the system.

Rep Andy Biggs
@RepAndyBiggsAZ
·
Follow
3.4 million warrantless searches of Americans' private communications.

278,000 improper searches on American citizens.

19,000 improper searches of donors to a congressional candidate.

There is no shortage of spying authority abuses by the weaponized FBI. Get a warrant. #FISA

1:19 PM · Apr 10, 2024. //

But the fix was in. Biden's attorney general and national security advisor called individual members of Congress, telling them Doomsday loomed if the federal government had to obey the US Constitution. //

It is abused relentlessly and there is no effort within the government to hold anyone to account for violating that law. For instance, no one involved in the abuse of FISA to spy on the 2016 Trump campaign and transition team has been punished. //

Weminuche45
6 minutes ago edited
The way this works is that if he doesn't support it, his career will be destroyed by the same "intelligence community" people and the system that has collected and stored everything he has said or done for the last 10+ yrs, and you too. That is who actually runs our country, and this is how. Welcome to Stasi American Democracy.

What is the Biden administration doing to prevent this catastrophe? It's pulling out the same playbook it used in its attempt to stop the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Specifically, all of these leaks to major news outlets like The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are purposeful and are meant to signal to Iran that we know when, where, and what they are going to do. Taking away the element of surprise can be a powerful tool in war. That's where the idea that Tehran "may temper the size and scope" of its attack in response to these revelations comes from.

As we know, that didn't work with Russia. They moved into Ukraine anyway, and Biden's weakness across the globe no doubt played a role in that. Ask yourself, what has changed since then? Is there any reason for Iran to believe a retaliatory strike from the United States would be anything more than blowing up some warehouses in the deserts of Syria? //

With the U.S. on the Brink of War With Iran, the Biden Administration Tries One Last, Desperate Ploy
By Bonchie | 9:59 AM on April 12, 2024The opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of RedState.com.

AP Photo/Susan Walsh
At the end of Donald Trump's presidential term, Iran was nearing an economic collapse with little ability to project strength outside of funding terrorist proxies. Internal revolutions were brewing, and the Mullahs were in their weakest position in decades.

Then Joe Biden took over. Since then Iran has been revitalized, seeing significant growth in its military budget due to the waiving of sanctions. The Islamic power has also come far closer to developing usable nuclear weapons. What did the United States get in return? It received a frayed relationship with long-time ally Saudia Arabia and absolute chaos from Kabul to Tel Aviv.

Wherever Biden's foreign policy has been, abject failure has followed. One can't help but laugh at this post from his 2020 presidential campaign.

Biden always has the "answers" until he's actually in charge, and his weakness has begotten aggression. As RedState reported in the early morning on Friday, Iran is preparing to attack Israel directly, a move that would draw the United States into a broader war.

SEE: Iran Attack on Israel Expected Within the Next 48 Hours

American military forces are already being positioned to respond.

What is the Biden administration doing to prevent this catastrophe? It's pulling out the same playbook it used in its attempt to stop the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Specifically, all of these leaks to major news outlets like The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are purposeful and are meant to signal to Iran that we know when, where, and what they are going to do. Taking away the element of surprise can be a powerful tool in war. That's where the idea that Tehran "may temper the size and scope" of its attack in response to these revelations comes from.

As we know, that didn't work with Russia. They moved into Ukraine anyway, and Biden's weakness across the globe no doubt played a role in that. Ask yourself, what has changed since then? Is there any reason for Iran to believe a retaliatory strike from the United States would be anything more than blowing up some warehouses in the deserts of Syria?

Again, when you spend years fluffing and empowering an Islamic dictatorship for no logical reason (which points to something more nefarious behind the scenes), the consequences are predictable. Biden's strategy against Russia before it invaded Ukraine, holding off on sanctions in an attempt to appease Moscow, turned out to be a colossal mistake. The president is repeating that mistake by continuing to waive sanctions on Iran instead of taking a hardline before the missiles start flying.

There is considerably more economic leverage to be exerted over Iran due to its position compared to Russia. Instead of using it, Biden is running the same formerly failed play, desperately leaking tough talk to the press that our enemies no longer believe. The results may very well be predictable. Let's hope not. //

PetePatriot
an hour ago
From the article, "Again, when you spend years fluffing and empowering an Islamic dictatorship for no logical reason (which points to something more nefarious behind the scenes), the consequences are predictable."

Yes, they are and here are the numbers from the WSJ 11/10/23: "Iran exported nearly 1.4 million barrels of oil per day in October, sustaining its average for 2023. This is up 80% from the 775,000 barrels per day Iran averaged under the Trump Administration’s 'maximum pressure' strategy...The Iranian surge in oil exports since President Biden took over has brought Iran an additional $32 billion to $35 billion, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies."

That was before Biden traded prisoners and unfroze $6 billion of Iranian assets.

More from the WSJ: "In 2020 the State Department assessed that Iran sends $100 million a year to Palestinian terrorist groups, arming and training them to attack Israel and murder its civilians as Hamas did Oct. 7. Citing an Israeli security source, Reuters reports that Iran’s funding for Hamas ballooned in the past year to $350 million. Hamas’s new capabilities took Israel and the U.S. by surprise, but they didn’t come from nowhere."

It's hard not to loathe this administration.

What is the Nenana Ice Classic?

The Ice Classic is Alaska's greatest guessing game!

In Nenana during1917 a group of engineers surveying for the Alaska Railroad bet $800 putting in their guesses when the river would break up. This fun little guessing game has turned into an incredible tradition that has now continued for over 100 years!

Buy and turn in your $3.00 ticket between February 1st and April 5th to be involved in this long running Alaskan tradition.

A new report from the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) opens with an obvious point that has incredibly become less than obvious to some.

“A functioning democracy requires that those who elect their representatives trust the voting system in place. This means that elections must be safe and secure and that there is no doubt that elected officials were legitimately elected to their positions,” states the report, exclusively provided to The Federalist.

The paper lays out “Commonsense Solutions to Better Secure the 2024 Election.” The suggested reforms center on dealing with the explosion of absentee/mail-in voting, which surged 131 percent in Covid-stained 2020 compared to the general election just four years before. FGA says states still have the opportunity “to make the process as secure as in-person voting,” but doing so requires:

• Banning ballot harvesting
• Narrowing who can return ballots
• Banning third-party distribution of unsolicited absentee applications
• Stopping unsolicited applications and ballots by government officials
• Adopting strict guidelines for absentee ballot returns
• Requiring voter ID to cast an absentee ballot
• Prohibiting unsecured drop boxes
• Requiring absentee and mail-in ballots to be returned by Election Day

Throughout American history, abortion was regulated by the states, and it was not the province of the federal government until the Supreme Court announced its Jan. 22, 1973, Roe v. Wade decision, which preempted state abortion laws.

Because pro-abortion forces focused on the federal courts, leading to the high court, rather than through the state legislatures or Congress, the best way to judge a president's pro-life record is to examine their Supreme Court appointees and how they dealt with abortion rights.

For this piece, the focus is on Republican presidents, which puts Trump in context with other GOP chief executives. //

Beginning in 1969 and ending in 2020, Republican presidents have put 15 justices on the Supreme Court. Eight have been pro-abortion, and seven have been pro-life—three of them put on the high court by Trump.

In the same time frame, Republican presidents have nominated all three chief justices, Warren E. Burger, William H. Rehnquist, and John G. Roberts Jr.—both Burger and Roberts were pro-abortion. //

After Griswold, conservative legal scholars and jurists recognized that if they accepted the concept of unenumerated constitutional rights, the Constitution would be dethroned, and liberals on the high court would have a blank check to do whatever they wanted.

The response to the advocates for unenumerated rights was the strict constructionist movement, which was committed to the text as it was written and understood as it was written. //

The action is now in the states after 50 years in Washington, generally, at the Supreme Court, specifically.

Some people in the pro-life movement sound like Cold War veterans complaining that the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union fell, but the fact remains that Roe and Casey are gone — and Trump made it happen.

For all the recent triumphalism of the pro-abortion movement, none of them like what Trump did to them — and for the unborn.

Anglo-Saxon England experienced trade revival, surge in silver coins in 660–750 CE.

Sometime around 660 CE, silver coinage replaced gold as the dominant form of currency in northwest Europe. But what was the source of all that silver? According to a recent paper published in the journal Antiquity, silver for the earlier post-Roman coins during this period came from Byzantine silver plate, while silver for the later coins most likely came from mines located in Melle, Aquitaine.

there is no such thing as a gun show loophole. The term itself is a canard invented by gun control advocates. Every sale at a gun show has to follow every law regarding firearms sales for the jurisdiction within which the show takes place. In Colorado, where the state requires a background check for a sale between private parties, gun shows have personnel on-site to carry out those checks, and the checks are required for any transaction at the show. Here in Alaska, the state makes no such requirement, and so private transactions do not require a background check--at a gun show or anywhere else.

Here's the thing: A 2022 report indicated that 42 percent of rejected firearms background checks were denied due to prior felony convictions. The report also indicated that in 2017, 12 of 12,000 people denied a gun purchase were prosecuted. It is a federal felony for a prohibited person, like a convicted felon, to attempt to purchase a firearm - and yet, in the most recent year for which data is available, the federal government prosecuted 0.1% of the attempts. That's a bad joke.

My grandfather was fond of pointing out that "...eatin' ain't eatin' unless there's a dead critter involved," and he was right. //

it's easy to hit Gloat Factor Six when you hear of a study that shows you are at a higher risk of diabetes and heart problems from eating the vegan Impossible Burger than the real thing.

Eric Berger

I've got a guilty secret that I can now share—I loved the Delta IV Heavy rocket.

No, I didn't love the price, which was preposterous, at times approaching $400 million. This precluded Delta from having any other customers than the US government. I didn't love the low flight rate, just 16 missions in 20 years. This prevented the rocket's operator, United Launch Alliance, from ever approaching anything remotely like efficient operations.

But there were two things I adored about the Delta IV Heavy rocket, which made its final launch on Tuesday. I loved watching it take flight. And I love that, warts and all, it demonstrated that private companies could develop a heavy lift rocket. The Delta booster, although the product of decades of traditional space development, offered a glimpse of the commercial launch future that we're living in today. //

The most metal of rockets
As in heavy metal rock concert, lots of pyrotechnics and sound!

Shlazzargh Ars Praetorian
8y
536
I think that the fact that you can point to a specific Falcon 9 rocket and say "This rocket has flown more times than all of the Delta IV Heavy's combined" says quite a bit about how our view on rockets and reusability have changed. The D4H is an amazing rocket that does the job well -- a now it is even easier to see what a shame it was to just throw all that work in the ocean after one time. //

Wickwick
To be a bit more fair, the Delta IV flew 45 (?) times. With side cores on the Heavy variant, that’s a total of 77 total cores. For the pre-SpaceX industry, that was a respectable number. //

melgross Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
21y
9,197
Subscriptor++
stdaro said:
the sad thing, to me, is the lack of vision from the venerable old space enterprises. They had the engineering skill and the resources to scale up space access like spaceX has, but were strip mined for profit by finance bros who just saw an opportunity to demand rent from the government for the accomplishments of their predecessors.

Had the D4H been developed and evolved over time, and especially if rocketdyne had made an attempt to scale up and reduce the cost of the rs-68, we could be seeing it competing with F9H and Atlas now, instead of being abandoned.

Boeing/ULA and rocketdyne had a 40 year head start on SpaceX, but somehow ended up with raptor being the better engine, and starship being the largest launcher to ever reach orbit.
It wasn’t that management stripped them. It was a different time, when NASA and other space agencies hated the very idea of independent companies competing with them. Even the Delta was really done in conjunction with the government. not until someone at NASA, a few years ago, I forget her name, convinced them to give a contract to SpaceX, did things change. //

normally butters Ars Praefectus
17y
4,935
Boeing designed the Decatur rocket factory to produce 50 Delta IV core stages per year. This was an audacious bet on the future of commercial launch demand. Soyuz/R-7 barely achieved those annual late rates at their Soviet-era peak. Now Delta IV is retired after fewer than 50 launches all-time, although over 50 cores were flown due to the triple-core Heavy configuration.

It would take another generation for Falcon 9 to meet and exceed the flight rates that Delta IV was envisioned to support. But when that finally happened in 2022, SpaceX did it with just 4 new F9 boosters. It's the much smaller upper stage that occupies most of the stage manufacturing floor space in Hawthorne.

Ultimately, I think Boeing was looking at the same market potential we see today: LEO comsats from the likes of Orbcomm, Globalstar, and Teledesic. But the business model for those companies collapsed across the board due to high costs and the dot-com bust. They needed launch costs lower than anybody could provide at the time, even ILS Proton, and frankly they probably had cost issues with the production of their satellites as well.

The tandem duo of F9 and Starlink cracked the chicken-and-egg problem, by using vertical integration to bootstrap the new market segment rather than anticipating others putting the remaining pieces in place. //

normally butters Ars Praefectus

I think it's important to understand that RS-68 was a prime example of the kind of vision you're describing. That's what happens when the venerable old space enterprises enthusiastically take on the challenge of developing a less expensive rocket engine. RS-68 was their vision of a highly-simplified replacement for the RS-25, sacrificing performance in pursuit of lower cost. The J-2X engine developed for the Ares rockets was over 70% heavier than than Apollo-era J-2 in pursuit of simpler manufacturing.

There was once a proposal for an RS-68R evolution with a regeneratively-cooled nozzle instead of ablative cooling. But regen isn't something that's easily bolted on to an existing engine, it would have been a dramatic redesign, and the redesign process would have been very expensive. It's difficult to pay Aerojet-Rocketdyne to make their engines cheaper without the amortized cost of the redesign exceeding the unit cost reduction. That's what happened with NASA's decision to fund RS-25E development. The amortized development costs actually made each engine more expensive than the older version.

Also note that when Delta IV was being conceived by McDonnell Douglas in the 1990s, post-Soviet Russia was offering phenomenal world-beating kerolox booster engines for extremely attractive prices, and that's what designs like Delta IV would be up against. Boeing was more interested in their stake in the commercial Sea Launch venture, based on the Russian/Ukrainian Zenit rocket, than their Air Force bid. It seemed foolish to invest in kerolox engine development when it would require billions of dollars and well over a decade to match what they could buy off the shelf for the aerospace equivalent of "dirt cheap."

Last week, the internet dodged a major nation-state attack that would have had catastrophic cybersecurity repercussions worldwide. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen, so it won’t get much attention—but it should. There’s an important moral to the story of the attack and its discovery: The security of the global internet depends on countless obscure pieces of software written and maintained by even more obscure unpaid, distractible, and sometimes vulnerable volunteers. It’s an untenable situation, and one that is being exploited by malicious actors. Yet precious little is being done to remedy it.

Author
Southworth, Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte, 1819-1899

Title
Capitola's Peril
A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand'

LILY TANG WILLIAMS: Hi, my name is Lily Tang Williams. Welcome to my live free or die state. Actually, I am a Chinese immigrant who survived communism. And under Mao, you know, 40 million people were starving to death after he sold communism to them. And 20 million people died... murdered during his cultural revolution. So my question to you, David, is that can you guarantee me, a gun owner tonight, that our government in the U.S., in D.C., will never become a tyrannical government? Can you guarantee that to me?

DAVID HOGG: There's no way I can ever guarantee that any government will not be tyrannical.

LILY TANG WILLIAMS: Well then the debate on gun control is over because I will never give up my guns. And you should go to China. Never. Never. And you should go to China to see how gun control works for the dictatorship of the CCP.

Reading those headlines, you would never know that Reed fired and injured an officer before police fired upon him. Instead, the perception being pushed is that an unarmed black man was unjustly shot and killed. For context, the injured officer was black.

The bodies of the stories are no better. For example, The Washington Post's write-up doesn't mention that Reed opened fire first until the 8th paragraph. //

Much is being made about the number of times the officers fired and the fact that Reed no longer had the gun once he exited the vehicle. Both points are incredibly misleading. Once a suspect opens fire and strikes an officer, any expectation that the use of force will be limited goes out the window. At that point, the mission is to neutralize the deadly threat fully. No officer is going to count the number of shots they fire in the heat of the moment to make it look better for the press. Further, there would have been no way to know whether Reed was still armed or not after he exited the vehicle and began to move around it. That is hindsight that has no place in a fair analysis of what occurred. //

This was a justified shooting by every metric, yet one would be forgiven for speculating that members of the press want violence to occur in response to it. Why else would they go so far to cover up what actually happened? //

PetePatriot
4 minutes ago
The classic response to the question of why were so many rounds fired comes from Polk County, FL Sheriff Grady Judd who told reporters:

"'I suspect the only reason 110 rounds was all that was fired was that's all the ammunition they had,' Judd said. 'We were not going to take any chance of him shooting back.'"

On Monday, Donald Trump announced that his stance on abortion is that the states should decide the intricacies of their abortion laws within their respective territories. I found this to be a very solid move for a few reasons, chief among them is that it is the constitutional view, and it makes the abortion fight for pro-abortion groups that much harder to win. //

As I wrote later, the Republican Party could actually use this avenue of handing power to the states to great effect. They could remove a lot of the deciding power about a lot of subjects from the federal government, craft laws for the government that close the doors on these subjects forever, and hand all the deciding power to the states. They could rightfully bill it as giving the power back to the people.

This would have an insane amount of benefits. Not only would the Republican Party become the party of the people, but it would also result in far less chaos around the nation as power becomes more localized. //

I know this is a very solid path to take and that this iron is hot to strike thanks to the people being made well aware of just how bad centralized power can be, compliments of the Biden administration. The Democrats are well aware of the danger of this as well, and they actually reached out to corporate media sources to swiftly have them correct headlines about Trump's stance.

The Court's abortion decision two years ago said it was up to the individual states to restrict or permit the gruesome end-of-pregnancy operation.

Now, Donald Trump has said that is his position, too, that there should not be a one-size-fits-all policy on abortion in the form of a national ban. That is basically the same states-rights position that the Founding Fathers sought so hard to enshrine across the new government at the very beginning of our national history.

And it has also been the Republican Party's position for all these years.

Some pro-lifers want all or nothing. Now, even Trump is signaling a willingness to take the win and move on to other matters.

Satisfying photos for perfectionists - thread

We got what we wanted. And that’s what some members of our party are mad about. They want a federal law controlling abortion. Except that’s not what we promised.

It’s hard to understand how one justifies dishonesty as a political strategy. That’s what this is. They are asking that we conduct a bait and switch. We promised that every state would decide for itself, and now it’s, “No, now we’re going to decide for you.” How do you expect people to react to that? We overturned Roe with the understanding that some states would be awesome and largely ban the barbarian practice and that other states, like my own California, would declare open season on fetuses. And that’s what has happened. But you know what? Thousands and thousands of lives have been saved. In the butchery states? No, abortion continues there. But we’ve made progress. We’ve saved lives.

We have to stop making the good the enemy of the perfect and start understanding that progress is made incrementally. The left imposed Roe v. Wade, which made a huge, horrifying leap in one fell swoop. And look what happened. It got overturned in one fell swoop.

The battle against abortion is not going to end by passing a law at the federal level. It just isn’t. First of all, it’s not clear Congress even could enact one. You know, we just threw out a ruling that said the federal government could make abortion laws. //

The Democrats have been beating us around the head with abortion. What they’ll do is call us liars if we try and pass an abortion law, and they have the advantage of truth because we didn’t promise this. We promised the opposite. It’s electoral poison, and there’s a lot more at stake than abortion – free speech, economic prosperity, and peace, to name just a few. But as for abortion itself, if the Democrats get the power, they’ll legalize it up to the moment that a kid gets his driver’s license. If you want to kill more kids, push for a federal abortion ban because that is a certain way of killing more kids.

The way to change abortion is to change hearts and minds one state at a time. I wish we could wave a magic wand and make this barbaric practice disappear. But I’m not a child. I understand that even things I believe in deeply are not going to just happen through the sheer power of rightness. We’ve got a lot of work to do. We can’t just wish the practice away because we accurately assess it as horribly wrong.

Is Donald Trump immoral for feeling the way he does about abortion? There are lots of pro-life people who are ticked off at him, but these people need to understand that Donald Trump, first of all, represents most Americans’ position and, second, that he was the most successful pro-life president in American history. This man has saved thousands upon thousands of lives through his judicial appointments who tossed out Roe. Trump hasn’t betrayed anybody. He just disagrees at the margins.

Trump is looking at things realistically and, yes, politically. And he damn well better look at things politically because there’s a lot more at stake here than abortion in 2024. A lot more.

You're driving along, minding your own business, and happen to turn into a bunch of Black Lives Matter rioters who think you're trying to disrupt their "mostly peaceful" protest, so they surround your car and try to drag you out and beat you to death. This law would make it so you wouldn't have to surrender to the mob and get yourself killed.

Sounds awesome.

Smirnov reached out to Grassley in 2022 to inform him about the FD-1023 document, which detailed the alleged bribery scheme.

The FD-1023 document includes Smirnov’s claims that Burisma executives paid $5 million to Joe Biden and $5 million to Hunter Biden, while Joe Biden was still in office as vice president. Smirnov also claims that the Bidens were paid so that Joe Biden could help to quash criminal investigation into Burisma being conducted by then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

The letter notes that the indictment “leaves many questions unanswered,” which includes, 

“how the Justice Department and FBI could use this Confidential Human Source for approximately 14 years, pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars, use this information in investigations and prosecutions, and the ultimately determine he’s a liar.”