Fox News Senior Correspondent and host of "Special Report" Bret Baier sat down with Elon Musk and the entire DOGE team on Thursday. This is a step up from the individual interviews done with Musk and one or two of the members. While their work overlaps all of the government agencies, each DOGE member spoke to the findings at particular agencies like the Social Security Administration, the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institute of Health, the Department of the Treasury, and the Department of the Interior.

Baier kicked off his questioning with Musk, asking what are the DOGE budgetary savings goals and what he thinks he's achieved thus far?

During the continuing resolution fight, the drum the Democrats kept beating was that Republicans wanted to gut Medicare - despite the fact that Joe Biden's administration oversaw years of cuts to Medicare Advantage, the plan increasingly chosen by the nation's seniors. Dems won't characterize cuts to Medicare Advantage as Medicare cuts, though, because what they're really trying to do is eliminate Medicare Advantage as a way to push "Medicare for All."

We all know that Dad is the IT infrastructure manager at home, so when it became clear that we needed a VPN for everyone to enjoy that infrastructure (aka access to streaming services) on their phones and laptops when they were away- it became Dad's job to make it happen.

This is the kind of information that all the sites you visit, as well as their advertisers and any embedded widget, can see and collect about you.

rsync -rin --ignore-existing "$LEFT_DIR"/ "$RIGHT_DIR"/|sed -e 's/^[^ ]* /L             /'
rsync -rin --ignore-existing "$RIGHT_DIR"/ "$LEFT_DIR"/|sed -e 's/^[^ ]* /R             /'
rsync -rin --existing "$LEFT_DIR"/ "$RIGHT_DIR"/|sed -e 's/^/X /'

One of the distinctives of Christianity is the call to behave otherworldly.

Revenge is a human instinct and something most people would say is a natural right. Christ tells Christians to turn the other cheek and let God take care of vengeance for them. Humanity has no natural impulse to love their neighbor if their neighbor is from a different tribe. Christ says to love your neighbor with no exception—yes, love even that neighbor. The natural order does not call for sacrificial love. Christ does. //

A Christian leader should be able to say, “I screwed up.”

We do not live in Christian times.

We live in pagan times where we behave like Romans. Lawsuits are all the rage. Doubling down on behaviors and attacking the other side, no matter the merit of their argument, is what we do. Our politicians in a post-Christian America, even many of the Christian ones, cannot admit a mistake. It is a sign of worldly weakness. It is likewise a sign of worldly weakness when too many Christians are willing to go along for the ride with the lie because it is easier than accepting that the leader made a mistake.

Christian theology is about mercy and grace. The early Church Fathers embraced the apology, and Christians have long been urged to behave contrary to the spirit of the age—show grace and apologize when you mess up. Ask for forgiveness. Be quick to forgive. And move on.

The pagans will always try to hold the mistake over your head. The pagans will always try to shame you with past sins. The pagans will never show grace. And the pagan does not apologize because paganism sees confession as weakness.

However, Christianity shows that grace and confession make us stronger, and a simple apology from the powerful to the people goes a long way to restoring trust when trust in institutions is needed. Instead, our politicians gaslight us, hoping the faithful repeat their spin. We’ve gone from demands for and respect of others’ pronouns, to demands for a restatement of and acceptance of each other’s lies.

If only we had in leadership on display today the humility to admit a mistake. It is harder to find in politics and the church as the West leaves Christianity behind, not for something new, but for the things that existed before Christ. The old gods are creeping back in from the shadows. And yes, just like turning your cheek, saying “sorry” helps keep them at bay.

Russia does not provide medical assistance at the front to its own soldiers. So, if you get seriously wounded, too bad for you and your family.

I've seen drone videos of such Russian men writhing on the ground in filthy trenches littered with dead bodies. And they end up killing themselves with a rifle or grenade rather than die slowly alone in agony.

The thinking in news media is often that graphically detailed news coverage of such conflicts is too gruesome for viewers or readers back home. Often, they don't even show or describe dead bodies.

We should have provocative discussions about such unofficial censorship that sanitizes the horrors of war. Because that reduces the awful ongoing events basically to an imaginary game far away. Who's going to oppose war — or support it, for that matter — if they never see how bad it really is? I ran into some of this editorial opposition at the end of the Vietnam War. //

While Russian forces are killing Ukrainian men in combat at the front lines (and thousands of civilians in indiscriminate artillery, bombing, and missile attacks on cities), other Russians are kidnapping children from Ukrainian homes behind the front lines. They are simply seizing them from their families — I call that kidnapping — and shipping them off to Russia, never to be seen again.

There, they are punished if they don't speak Russian. The goal is to erase from the minds of these Ukrainian youngsters the national identity that Putin maintains does not exist. Hundreds of thousands of children stolen from their families.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited ruling in Bondi v. Vanderstok, upholding the Biden administration’s 2022 rule that allows the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to regulate so-called “ghost guns.” But while headlines may frame this as a Second Amendment loss, that’s not the real story here.

The real story is this: the administrative state just scored another narrow, but important, win—and once again, it did so not through an act of Congress, but through bureaucratic interpretation.

Let’s walk through what actually happened. //

This case was a challenge to the ATF’s rule under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA)—a law meant to prevent executive agencies from exceeding their statutory authority. //

This may sound reasonable on paper—especially given concerns over untraceable firearms—but it opens the door to something much more troubling: the broadening of executive power through regulation rather than legislation.

Congress never passed a law banning or regulating ghost guns. Instead, the ATF reinterpreted existing law to give itself that authority. And the Supreme Court just signed off on that approach.

That’s the real concern here. Not the regulation itself, but the process. //

In a blistering dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas warned that the Court was effectively rewriting the statute to allow the executive branch to regulate products Congress never intended to regulate. He pointed out that the Gun Control Act only allows the ATF to regulate certain gun parts, not any part or unfinished frame that might one day become part of a gun.

He also noted that the logic behind the majority’s ruling could eventually be used to justify classifying AR-15 receivers as “machineguns” under the National Firearms Act—an outcome that would have massive legal implications for millions of gun owners nationwide.

he Democracy Fund lawyers champion Amish clients in the legal battle over ArriveCan tickets.

WELLAND, ONTARIO: The Democracy Fund (TDF) has successfully reopened a number of ArriveCan tickets for five Amish clients. These individuals received tickets in 2021 and 2022 for allegedly failing to complete the ArriveCan app but had not received any notification of court dates or convictions, leading to outstanding fines being sent to collections and, in some cases, liens placed against their family farms. These individuals, due to their faith, avoid modern technology. They do not use any form of electricity and have little to no experience using a telephone, much less navigating an app on a modern smartphone.

TDF recently filed documents with the court seeking to have these tickets reopened. The court has now granted this request, which will allow the clients to receive a Notice of Trial and, eventually, set a trial date.

The New York Times, ever ready to preach the faith of “climate responsibility,” recently published a piece titled “What Shopping Bags Should I Use?” It’s a fascinating read, not because it provides clarity, but because it demonstrates just how convoluted eco-virtue has become. Spoiler alert: you can’t win. But you can feel like you’re winning, and maybe that’s the point. //

Plastic bags, we are told, are the spawn of fossil fuels, and as such, must be banished. Their recycling rate is a dismal 10%, and their afterlife often involves floating past a turtle’s nose or breaking into confetti-sized microplastics that haunt us for centuries. But here’s the twist—according to not one but two studies cited by the article (from Britain’s Environment Agency and Denmark’s Environmental Protection Agency), those unholy plastic bags actually have the smallest environmental footprint of the lot when judged by greenhouse gas emissions.

So how did they become public enemy number one? Simple. They look bad. They’re flimsy, crinkly, and associated with other people who don’t bring their own bags to Trader Joe’s. //

Then there’s paper—renewable, biodegradable, and about as sturdy as wet tissue paper and prone to tearing dramatically halfway across the parking lot, right as your oat milk makes a break for it. Surely this is the sanctified option? Not quite. Paper bags, according to the same British study, need to be reused three times to match the global warming impact of a single plastic bag. Which, for anyone who’s ever had a soggy-bottomed paper bag explode in the rain, is optimistic bordering on delusional.

Still, paper has better PR. Its recycling rate is 43%—respectable, though still meaning most paper bags end up decomposing into methane and carbon dioxide in landfills. Methane, for those keeping theological score, is one of the top demons in the pantheon of greenhouse gases. That’s right: while plastic might just sit there, paper actively farts its way through the afterlife.

We've noticed that some of our automatic tests fail when they run at 00:30 but work fine the rest of the day. They fail with the message

gimme gimme gimme

in stderr, which wasn't expected. Why are we getting this output?

Answer:

Dear @colmmacuait, I think that if you type "man" at 0001 hours it should print "gimme gimme gimme". #abba
@marnanel - 3 November 2011

er, that was my fault, I suggested it. Sorry.

Pretty much the whole story is in the commit. The maintainer of man is a good friend of mine, and one day six years ago I jokingly said to him that if you invoke man after midnight it should print "gimme gimme gimme", because of the Abba song called "Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight":

Well, he did actually put it in. A few people were amused to discover it, and we mostly forgot about it until today.

I can't speak for Col, obviously, but I didn't expect this to ever cause any problems: what sort of test would break on parsing the output of man with no page specified? I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that one turned up eventually, but it did take six years.

(The commit message calls me Thomas, which is my legal first name though I don't use it online much.)

This issue has been fixed with commit 84bde8: Running man with man -w will no longer trigger this easter egg.

According to numbers compiled by the Harvard Law Review, U.S. District Courts have issued more sweeping injunctions against Trump in the past two months than they have against three former presidents over their entire terms.

Since Jan. 20, lower courts have imposed 15 nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration, compared to what the Harvard Law Review recounts as six over the course of George W. Bush’s eight-year presidency, 12 over the course of Barack Obama’s eight years in the White House, and 14 during Joe Biden’s single four-year term.

During his first term, Trump was subjected to 64 nationwide injunctions. If inferior courts continue issuing nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration at the current rate (15 for every two months in office), then the second Trump administration will have accumulated 360 nationwide injunctions by the time the president leaves office—and a grand total of 424 over the course of both of Trump’s terms. However, there have been a total of over 45 rulings or more targeted injunctions leveled against the second Trump administration overall, according to The New York Times. //

The Harvard Law Review’s tally (published in 2024) also noted the increased partisanship of the federal judiciary. Of the six injunctions imposed against Republican Bush, half came from judges appointed by Democrats and half from judges appointed by Republicans. Of the 12 injunctions imposed against Democrat Obama, seven (less than 60%) were issued by judges appointed by Republicans. Of the 64 injunctions Trump’s first Republican administration was slapped with, 92.2% were issued by judges appointed by Democrats. All—100%—of the 14 injunctions issued against Democrat Biden came from Republican-appointed judges. //

The growing use of nationwide injunctions by inferior courts, the prestigious legal journal warned, necessarily has a chilling effect on the development of law and precedent. When several inferior courts of different jurisdictions issue conflicting rulings, the matter often winds up at the U.S. Supreme Court, where a definitive standard is set for addressing similar issues going forward. However, nationwide injunctions halt the continued challenging of executive orders, executive actions, or laws, since, as the Harvard Law Review pointed out, various other inferior courts simply refuse to take up related cases, determining that there can be no demonstration of injury in fact while the nationwide injunctions are in place.

Israel armed forces “eliminated the terrorist Hossam Basel Abdul Karim Shabat, a sniper terrorist from the Beit Hanoun Battalion of the Hamas terrorist organization, who cynically posed as an Al-Jazeera journalist,” the IDF said in a statement Tuesday. //

The ties between Al Jazeera and Hamas are so deep that Israel in May 2024 had to ban the Qatari state-funded broadcaster from operating in the country.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Al Jazeera a “terror channel.”

“Al Jazeera harmed Israel’s security, actively participated in the Oct. 7 massacre, and incited against Israeli soldiers,” Prime Minister Netanyahu said in March 2024.

The Solar Eclipse Analemma Project
Image Credit & Copyright: Hunter Wells

Where were these Guardians of Justice when Joe Biden illegally invited and lured in millions and millions of "new Americans and undocumented immigrants?" Where? Why nowhere, of course. These robes seemingly had very little to say about U.S. Code § 1325 (based on Article IV, Section IV of the Constitution) and its undeniable violation. A violation that has, and will continue to for decades, fundamentally changed the history of America. Letting in millions and millions of aliens, and then making the citizenry pay for their everything from schooling, health care, drunk driving deaths, rapes, murders, and any other crimes they committed while here has changed life for us all on many different levels.

The loquacious Enten detailed what the numbers mean:

“If the polls have historically underestimated Donald Trump, what is a metric that might get an understanding of how popular he may actually be. So let’s take a look at the percentage of the country who say that we’re on the right track,” Enten said. “It’s actually a very high percentage when you compare it to some historical numbers. What are we talking about? According to Marist, 45% say that we’re on the right track. That’s the second highest that Marist has measured since 2009. How about NBC News? 44%? That’s the highest since 2004.”

“The bottom line is the percentage of Americans who say we’re on the right track is through the roof….

“And also keep in mind, back when [former Vice President] Kamala Harris lost and the Democrats were turned out of power, only about 27 to 28% of the country said the country was on the right track.”

But then he dropped the real kicker:

But in reality, he’s basically more popular than he was at any point in term number one and more popular than he was when he won election back in November of 2024…

anon-xnrk Laocoön of Troy
3 hours ago
China’s geopolitical strategy was always to create dependencies with other nations. It’s amazing we allowed it to get so far into a one sided game. Correct me if I’m wrong but an American company has to partner with a Chinese company then transfer technology to the Chinese one in order to set up shop there. The list of one sided nonsense goes on and on. Who loves Greenpeace more than China? EU and US decimate the industrial base while they build a coal plant a week. Can’t use a windmill to run a steel mill, sorry. Look at how people like McConnell voted pre and post WTO admission for China. Oh, and look at his family business. Chinese shipping!! And his father in law James Chao? Founder of Chinese shipping company Foremost, and also close friends and classmates with former president Jiang Zemin. This is just Mitch, any others make a nice living like this? Did this affect how this relationship between the world, US, and China evolved? Who knows? //

Guy Las Vegas anon-j5pd
3 hours ago
Since the tariff is on the wholesale price, a $10 item that costs Walmart $6 would see a $1.20 tariff. That makes the item $11.20 - just to clarify.

Francos said the order to release the files came directly from the president, and it would be part of a larger Milei project to declassify and release information about the 1970s military crackdown on government opponents, many of whom disappeared.

The government announcement came on March 24, which in Argentina is a public holiday to commemorate the victims of the political strife during the so-called Dirty War. The Dirty War ran roughly between the 1974 death of President Juan Peron and the subsequent 1976 military coup, through to the junta’s fall in 1983.

Peron, who was sent on a 1939 mission to learn about Italian fascism, is an essential figure in the Nazi migration to Argentina. He was a senior member of the fascist government coup that took over the country in 1943. That government declared war on Germany in February 1945, which could be seen as a fig leaf for its true leanings.

In a 1969 interview with historian Felix Luna, quoted by Tomas Eloy Martinez in his Wilson Center paper, “Peron and the Nazi War Criminals,” Peron said he reached out to influential members of the German community to explain that the war was over and Argentina needed to act. “Please understand, we have no choice but to go to war, for if we do not, we will go to Nuremberg.”

Eloy Martinez said Peron told him in 1970 that he orchestrated the effort to collect as many worthy Germans as possible—just as the United States, Russia, England, and France were doing—and because they were technically on the winning side, they would have a free hand.

Peron, who began his first of three presidential terms in 1946, also said he coordinated with Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who had remained formally neutral throughout the war.

There are a lot of things that God cannot do, by his very nature. For example, God cannot lie (Numbers 23:19, Hebrews 6:18). God cannot commit an unloving act. God cannot act unjustly. God cannot do an unholy thing.

God is much more consistent in himself than we are. One could even claim (probably an exaggeration) that there are more things humans can do than God can do because we are inconsistent and we can do things which violate our beliefs. We can do one thing one day and then a completely contradictory thing the next. God never acts this way. We can lie. God cannot. We can treat other people with hatred. God cannot. We can be unjust. God cannot.

My conclusion is that God cannot do anything which violates his nature. There are many things that God is… God cannot do anything which violates what he is…

The typical (and really rather shallow) example used by skeptics is that God cannot create a rock so big he cannot lift it. By his nature, since God is omnipotent, then he cannot create a thing he cannot lift. To do so would be to make him not be omnipotent, but he is omnipotent, therefore he cannot do this thing.

This question is based on a popular misunderstanding about the definitions of words like “almighty” or “omnipotent.” These terms do not mean that God can do anything. Rather, they describe the amount of God’s power. Power is the ability to effect change - to make something happen. God (being unlimited) has unlimited power, and the Bible affirms this (Job 11:7-11, 37:23; 2 Corinthians 6:18; Revelation 4:8; etc.). Therefore, God can do whatever is possible to be done. God cannot, however, do that which is actually impossible. This is because true impossibility is not based on the amount of power one has, it is based on what is really possible. The truly impossible is not made possible by adding more power. Therefore, unless context indicates otherwise (e.g. Matthew 19:26 where man’s ability is being shown in contrast to God’s), impossibility means the same thing whether or not God is involved. //

So, the first part of the question is based on a false idea—that God being almighty means that He can do anything. In fact, the Bible itself lists things God cannot do - like lie or deny Himself (Hebrews 6:18; 2 Timothy 2:13; Titus 1:2). The reason He cannot do these things is because of His nature and the nature of reality itself. God cannot do what is not actually possible to be done, like creating a two-sided triangle, or a married bachelor. Just because words can be strung together this way does not make the impossible possible—these things are contradictions, they are truly impossible in reality.