Milley, the retired Army general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who on several occasions subverted orders from his Commander-in-Chief, had his portrait removed from the Pentagon within two hours of President Donald Trump's inauguration.

The portrait's removal has been confirmed by CNN and Reuters. It had been revealed just 10 days ago. //

Of those pardoned by Biden, Milley stands out as having taken actions that could reasonably be described as treason. It is far from hyperbole in the case of the former Joint Chiefs Chair.

Milley, according to a book titled "Peril," assured his counterpart, General Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army of China, in the final days of Trump's first term that the United States military would not strike the communist country. Even if Trump ordered such actions based on his assessment they were in the best interest of the defense of America.

Perhaps most astonishing was the quote from that book, which shows Milley was willing to warn China — a hostile foreign nation — if an attack was in the works. //

Trump's nominee for FBI Director, Kash Patel, in an exclusive interview with RedState, suggested Milley contravened authorization from then-President Trump regarding the deployment of the National Guard on January 6th.

Milley had claimed the National Guard was deployed to the Capitol at “sprint speed.”

However, congressional testimony from Brig. Gen. Aaron R. Dean II, then the Guard’s adjutant general, suggested the deployment was stalled for the sake of optics, as evidenced by several calls to Ryan D. McCarthy, the Secretary of the Army at the time, to commence deployment going "directly to voice mail.". //

MyDogsMum TXavatar
7 hours ago
Does the pardon exempt him from a dishonorable discharge?

Mike Ford MyDogsMum
6 hours ago edited
Yes. A dishonorable requires conviction by a General Court Martial. A GCM is part of the same federal “sovereign.”

The Biden pardon precludes that
Streiff and I had that phone conversation earlier today.

Having said that, the pardon removes his self incrimination protection and do he can be compelled to testify regarding anything he has done prior to the Biden pardon.

Carey J Dolfin9999
6 hours ago
The Fifth Amendment only protects you from self-incrimination, which requires legal jeopardy. The pardon removed the legal jeopardy, making it impossible for him to incriminate himself. Therefore, he can be required to testify about ANYTHING he has knowledge of, or face Contempt of Court/Congress charges. If he lies under oath, he is subject to perjury charges.

Years ago, when I read The Mythical Man-Month, I found lots of stuff which I already knew from other sources. However, there were also new things in there, despite the book being from 1975. One of them was:

The Surgical Team

Mills proposes that each segment of a large job be tackled a team, but that the team be organized like a surgical team rather than a hog-butchering team. That is, instead of each member cutting away on the problem, one does the cutting and the others give him every support that will enhance his effectiveness and productivity.

This is a very interesting pattern for organizing a software development team, but I never found it described in any other Software Engineering book, not even mentioned anywhere.

Why is that?

Trump has long promised to issue mass pardons for convicted J6ers once he was back in office, but as RedState's Bob Hoge reported Sunday, he ran into some interference from fellow Republicans like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who argued pardons should not be given to those who attacked law enforcement.

Undaunted by the resistance, Trump plowed ahead with his plan as soon as he set foot back in the Oval Office. Trump was certainly emboldened by the fact that his predecessor, Joe Biden, blew all standards and norms to shreds by pardoning his son, Hunter, and various other family members. Pardon-palooza was on.

Officially, President Trump has commuted the sentences of Proud Boys and Oath Keeper members and issued "a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021" for other defendants. Or, as Trump has called them in the past, J6 "hostages."

For this final installment in the inauguration series, we talk about the inaugural balls.

The new order maintains that "the Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States" and centers on two specific scenarios:

Among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.

I’m guessing it would take quite a lot to cross California Democrat Sen. Adam Schiff’s ethical line because in Donald Trump’s first term and in the subsequent corrupt J6 Committee, the long-necked Democrat proved that he was willing to do just about anything to “get Trump.” As fierce and nasty a partisan as you could find in The Swamp, Schiff was a leader of both impeachment trials against the 45th president—now the 47th president—and for years promised evidence of Russia collusion that he never produced.

We're still waiting, Adam.

He is so dishonest that the House censured him in 2023, making him only the 25th House lawmaker to face the punishment in U.S. history.

But evidently, Adam has found someone even more corrupt than himself: former (oh, I type that with such glee!) President Joe Biden, who has thrown out a slew of pardons in his waning days in office. Even Schiff was able to see that the pardons were not in the best interests of the country: //

He tries to claim that Biden’s J6 Committee pardons were “unnecessary” and “unwise” because he and fellow committee members, former Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) and Liz Cheney (R-WY) did such “important work.” But if it was so important, why did Trump become president on Monday despite your stunning conclusions, and why does Biden feel the need to give you a preemptive pardon? A classic Shakespeare quote comes to mind, Adam: You "doth protest too much, methinks." //

When one of the most ethically challenged people ever to cast a cloud over Congress says you've crossed a line, you've really, really crossed a line. //

It wasnt me
43 minutes ago
He doesn't have to accept the Pardon.

Submitted by another.
In the 1915 Supreme Court case Burdick v. United States, the Court ruled that a pardon carries an "imputation of guilt". The Court also stated that accepting a pardon was "an admission of guilt". //

Black Magic
8 minutes ago
“I continue to believe that the grant of pardons to a committee that undertook such important work to uphold the law was unnecessary, and because of the precedent it establishes, unwise,”

Buuuut......I'll take it.

President Trump's State Department transition team has asked scores of bureaucrats to resign from their positions no later than noon on Monday. The focus of the changes seems aimed at gutting the notoriously recalcitrant, hidebound, and, yes, leftist State Department staff and preventing any centers of resistance from forming as Marco Rubio builds his team. //

Rubio's team is forcing out basically all of State's second tier leadership and replacing them with handpicked personnel, including people called out of retirement. //

GBenton
3 hours ago
Should I call a doctor NOW? This has lasted since November 5th and shows no signs of letting up.

Damocles GBenton
3 hours ago
I'm not a doctor, but I play one on the weekends.... and I diagnose you with Winning!
Right now there is no cure, so enjoy...

A new online product called the Edison Lost Generator Plans has been gaining a lot of attention lately, with advertisements claiming it can help people build their own power generators to reduce or eliminate their electricity bills. However, many people are questioning the legitimacy of these plans and wondering if it is actually a scam designed to take advantage of consumers. //

The advertisements for the Edison Lost Generator Plans appear online through social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube. They often begin with a video or image of an elderly man claiming to have built his own generator which allows him to stop paying electricity bills.

Other actors appear and make exaggerated claims that the plans will allow consumers to build generators that can produce free, unlimited energy. The ads claim the instructions are being sold for a one-time low payment of $59 or less. //

Once purchased, customers gain access to a set of online articles that barely pass as generator plans. They consist of vague, generic information and lack the specific steps, diagrams, and part lists that would actually be needed to construct a working generator.

Often, the instructions simply mention general components like “battery system” or “charge controller” without any directions on which parts and brands to purchase. There are no schematics, wiring diagrams, or adequate explanations for how to convert energy sources like solar, wind, or kinetic energy into electricity.

this is a final moment of shame for what is now inarguably the worst presidency in modern history. He has deeply abused his power to protect people from the repercussions of the law while repeatedly claiming to be "defending democracy." Does handing out pardons like candy for unspecified crimes while claiming the recipients didn't do anything wrong sound like defending democracy to you? This is the move of a third-world dictator, not a President of the United States. //

polyjunkie
an hour ago
Posted elsewhere but germane here:

What FJB has just set precedent for is utterly corrupt and may bring down our Republic.

Consider this: Now a President’s minions can do anything he wants them to do and be pardoned for it. For example, a future president could order the assassination of political rivals, then pardon the assassin. If there are objections by Congress or the Courts, a few more assassinations and pardons will solve that problem. FJB has just set the stage for a future president to end his political opposition because he is effectively untouchable. Now executive branch members are effectively above the law. They can lie to Congress, the Courts, the public, and there are no consequences.

FJB, you despicable a$$hole. //

jester6 polyjunkie
an hour ago edited
This is several orders of magnitude worse than the presidential immunity ruling in Trump v. US that the left freaked out about.

And it's not just that Biden did it, it's that a significant part of the country supports it. Politics is the art of the possible. The scenario you describe above is not only possible, it is more or less likely at this point. //

Ed in North Texas anon-shh5
an hour ago
Not at all a precedent. Been done before, will be done again. Pardoning people who have not been criminally charged goes back to George Washington and on to Ford's Nixon Pardon (Nixon had not been criminally charged, not even with an Article of Impeachment introduced or passing the House).

Quite honestly, I don't see the case for not grinding ByteDance's commie face in the gravel. It has already said divestiture is off the table. If it would let TikTok, which is worth billions of dollars, die rather than sell it, that tells you the real purpose was never to make money. It is equally difficult to see how a company that Trump castigated this way in 2020:

"TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories. This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage."

becomes better without changing the underlying problem;

In the ever-evolving landscape of energy logistics, Russia is exploring an unconventional approach that could redefine the transportation of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Imagine this: massive nuclear-powered submarines quietly carrying LNG beneath the icy waters of the Arctic, bypassing traditional shipping routes and geopolitical hurdles. This ambitious idea, proposed by Russian experts, might seem like something out of a science fiction novel, but it reflects a bold strategy to navigate a challenging economic and political environment. //

The proposed submarine model would weigh a staggering 180,000 tons and boast a draft of under 14 meters, making it capable of navigating areas that conventional LNG carriers cannot. The ability to traverse beneath the Arctic’s frozen expanse presents a tantalizing opportunity to shorten shipping times and bypass traditional chokepoints. //

The design isn’t just impressive—it’s revolutionary. Equipped with three Rhythm-200 nuclear reactors, the submarine would rely on 30 MW electric propellers, allowing it to reach speeds of 17 knots (about 31.5 km/h). At 360 meters long and 70 meters wide, the vessel’s size rivals that of the world’s largest oil tankers. More importantly, its operational capabilities would cut transit times between Arctic gas fields and Asian markets from 20 days to just 12.

This innovation isn’t solely about speed. These nuclear-powered giants could safely operate year-round, including during the harsh Arctic winter months when sea ice renders many traditional shipping lanes impassable. //

Russia’s largest LNG producer, Novatek, recently announced plans to acquire 16 ice-class LNG carriers. Yet sanctions and technological barriers have stymied progress, highlighting the difficulties of expanding Arctic shipping routes. By turning to nuclear-powered submarines, Russia hopes to sidestep these roadblocks while reinforcing its sovereignty over the Arctic.

CNN was found liable on Friday for defaming U.S. Navy veteran Zachary Young.

Following roughly eight hours of deliberations, jurors found CNN both “committed defamation per se” and “committed defamation by implication.”

Jurors awarded Young $4 million in economic damages and $1 million in emotional damages and agreed that punitive damages are warranted, prompting phase 2 of the trial. Punitive damages will be awarded to Young to dissuade CNN and other networks from doing what CNN did.

The case arose after CNN aired a segment in November of 2021 on “The Lead with Jake Tapper” that falsely framed Young as exploiting Afghans by offering evacuations from Afghanistan on a “black market.” A court later found Young did nothing illegal. Young alleged the segment “rendered Young permanently unemployable” because the use of the term “black market” in the chyron implied Young was engaged in illegal conduct — something his defense contracts expressly prohibited.

It’s conservatives who don’t want the government to restrict our speech or gas-powered vehicles or Covid therapeutics. So why are we up in arms over what, according to the “science,” could be a fairly innocuous synthetic color additive made from petroleum, chemically known as erythrosine?

A better question may be: Why was this chemical with zero nutritional value put in our food in the first place? The artificial food coloring was added to make unhealthy food options attractive to kids. The ingredient is often found alongside sugar in foods such as candy, cereal, and juices. Removing the chemical does not deprive anyone of a positive good. Taste will not be sacrificed, simply one tactic to market junk food to kids. Natural ingredients that lack harmful effects, such as beets, are the alternatives to color foods in other countries where the dye has been banned. //

Furthermore, the debate also highlights the difference between conservatives and libertarians. Conservatives are not opposed to government intervention. We’re opposed to ill-defined government intervention, wielded by an unelected bureaucracy captured by corporations, that lacks the support of those who are supposed to have the ultimate say: we the people.

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that the controversial Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, was illegal but stopped short of allowing a nationwide injunction issued by a federal judge in Texas to go into effect. The three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit ruling on the case restricted the scope of the injunction to Texas to allow further appeals.

DACA is, in my opinion, the toughest part of the illegal immigration catastrophe facing the United States to solve. DACA enrollees arrived in the United States as very young children when their parents or guardians illegally immigrated. They are culturally American and frequently can't speak the language of their home country and have no family or social ties to it. There are an estimated 580,000 DACA enrollees. //

DACA started out as a 2012 memorandum signed by Obama DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. It was never an executive order. It never went through the rule-making process required by the Administrative Procedure Act. It has never been enacted into law by Congress. Ordinarily, any memo by a cabinet secretary ceases to have validity when they leave office, not so with DACA. When President Trump’s DHS secretary rescinded the DACA memo based on the advice of the Attorney General of the United States, the Supreme Court held, in a 5-4 vote (guess how the Chief Justice voted), that the Trump administration was required to follow the Administrative Procedure Act to withdraw a memo that was never subjected to that act, ... //

The case is headed back to the Supreme Court, minus the rather stupid issue of whether a single memo by a cabinet secretary can masquerade as the law of the land.

Sir, why did you pause LNG exports? Liquified natural gas is in great demand by our allies, why would you do that? Cause you understand, we just talked about Ukraine, you understand you're fueling Putin's war machine?" And he looked at me, stunned, and he said, "I didn't do that." And I said, "Mr. President, yes you did, it was an executive order like three weeks ago." He said, "No, I didn't do that," he was arguing with me.

That's where things get even crazier. Biden went on to admit he signed an executive order, but he told Johnson that believed he had only authorized a study on the effects of LNG.

JOHNSON: I said, "No you're not sir, you paused it, I have the terminal, the export terminal in our state, I talked to those people this morning. This is doing massive damage to our economy, to our national security."

I thought, "We are in serious trouble." Who's running the country?" I don't know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn't know. //

It wasnt me WesW
8 hours ago
I like Johnson, but imagine if he had walked out of that meeting to cameras outside the White House and repeated that in January of 2024.

And said, "Who lied to the President about what was in the EO?
If someone didn't lie to him Why doesn't he recall what was in it?
What other decisions was the President deceived about?
How can we be sure?". //

Charlie the Deplorable
9 hours ago
I originally planned to write a comment ripping the Speaker for not taking more forceful action somehow. And then I thought through his options. Impeachment requires “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Although there’s probably some bribery somewhere along the way, nothing impeachable seems relevant to the case. His other alternative is the 25th Amendment. But he would need to convince the VP and cabinet to stick out their necks and affirm his disability. They already were covering it up such that I wouldn’t have presumed they could be convinced to act. His third option would have been to go public, hoping for the press and the people to pressure him to resign. Yeah, good luck with that one. So I don’t see any path for him to have done anything about it.

And even if he had succeeded, we would’ve been left with VP Harris in the Oval Office. Which many could argue would be worse.

This episode points out the need for a vigorous, multi-sided press. RedState readers knew of his vegetative state somewhere in 2020-2022 depending on what you believed. That simply wasn’t enough to force a compliant democrat party to act. And that is why I’m a VIP Platinum. We need a fervent press, with both left and right having a strong voice.

it’s past time for Republicans to provide a pithy answer to counter the Democrat’s deceptive question.

As I explained last year when the legacy media hounded then-Sen. J.D. Vance to say Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, there is a fundamental flaw in the question: “The query includes an undefined term — ‘lost’ — which holds a different meaning to Trump supporters and to the anti-Trump inquisitors.”

“If ‘lost’ merely meant Biden is the president of the United States, then that’s an easy answer: Yes, of course, Trump lost, as Biden was inaugurated,” and he is currently nearing the end of his four disastrous years in the Oval Office. But that’s not what those demanding an acknowledgement that Trump lost mean by “lost,” and yesterday’s hearings confirmed that reality, for Bondi repeatedly and expressly attested that, yes, Joe Biden is the president of the United States.

What Durbin, Blumenthal, and pretty much everyone else demanding a “yes” or “no” answer to whether Trump lost the 2020 election seek is a concession that Trump’s election challenges were frivolous, unfounded, or wrong. Democrats inject such concessions into their meaning of “lost.”

That’s why Bondi answered Durbin’s question as she did, by stating both that she accepted that Biden is president of the United States and that she saw firsthand issues in Pennsylvania’s election.

In other words, it depends on what you mean by “lost.”. //

“If asked whether Trump ‘lost’ the 2020 election, meaning that if all legal votes were counted and all illegal counts discarded — and the counting was done legally pursuant to controlling election law —” the answer should be a resounding, “I don’t know.”

As I wrote last year: “No one can possibly know the answer to that question because in 2020 there were too many election laws violated or ignored, and too many illegal votes counted. But the lawsuits challenging the election outcomes were tossed as moot once the votes were certified, so there was never a determination on the validity of the tallies, leaving uncertain the accuracy of the election results.” //

So, here’s a simple, soundbite for the next Trump nominee cornered with the query, “Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”

“It depends on what you mean by ‘lose.’ Joe Biden is the president of the United States. But Biden did not win a free and fair election, and the country has suffered the devastating consequences for the last four years as a result of the Biden presidency.”

And the 2020 election was not free and fair: Not when the FBI pre-bunked the Hunter Biden laptop story, causing social media companies to censor the evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s pay-to-play scandal; not when the Biden campaign’s senior advisor, Antony Blinken, “set in motion” the release of a public statement signed by 51 former intelligence agents that falsely framed Hunter’s laptop as Russian disinformation; not when there were “systemic violations of election law” which “disparately favor[ed] one candidate,” and “allow[ed] for tens of thousands of illegal votes to be counted;” and not when illegal drop box were placed in Democrat-heavy precincts and Zuckbucks were used to get out the Democrat vote.

The late great FOSTER BROOKS roasting DON RICKLES in 1974.

NEW: During a one-on-one meeting, Speaker Johnson asked President Biden why he paused LNG exports to Europe, says Biden was completely unaware he had done so.

The United States hasn't had a president for four years.

Johnson says Biden was completely unaware of an executive

The researchers began by testing a glass formed from a mixture of boron, sulfur, and lithium (B2S3 and Li2S). But this glass had terrible conductivity, so they started experimenting with related glasses and settled on a combination that substituted in some phosphorus and iodine.

The iodine turned out to be a critical component. While the exchange of electrons with sulfur is relatively slow, iodine undergoes electron exchange (technically termed a redox reaction) extremely quickly. So it can act as an intermediate in the transfer of electrons to sulfur, speeding up the reactions that occur at the electrode. In addition, iodine has relatively low melting and boiling points, and the researchers suggest there's some evidence that it moves around within the electrolyte, allowing it to act as an electron shuttle.

Successes and caveats
The result is a far superior electrolyte—and one that enables fast charging. It's typical that fast charging cuts into the total capacity that can be stored in a battery. But when charged at an extraordinarily fast rate (50C, meaning a full charge in just over a minute), a battery based on this system still had half the capacity of a battery charged 25 times more slowly (2C, or a half-hour to full charge).

But the striking thing was how durable the resulting battery was. Even at an intermediate charging rate (5C), it still had over 80 percent of its initial capacity after over 25,000 charge/discharge cycles. By contrast, lithium-ion batteries tend to hit that level of decay after about 1,000 cycles. If that sort of performance is possible in a mass-produced battery, it's only a slight exaggeration to say it can radically alter our relationships with many battery-powered devices.

What's not at all clear, however, is whether this takes full advantage of one of the original promises of lithium-sulfur batteries: more charge in a given weight and volume. The researchers specify the battery being used for testing; one electrode is an indium/lithium metal foil, and the other is a mix of carbon, sulfur, and the glass electrolyte. A layer of the electrolyte sits between them. But when giving numbers for the storage capacity per weight, only the weight of the sulfur is mentioned.

Still, even if weight issues would preclude this from being stuffed into a car or cell phone, there are plenty of storage applications that would benefit from something that doesn't wear out even with 65 years of daily cycling.