Leitmotif
4 hours ago
Civil asset forfeiture is an egregious scam, a violation of basic human rights, and should be completely abolished at the federal, state, and local levels.

Period.

Full stop.

Adam Selene / Simon Jester Leitmotif
3 hours ago
We, as a society have somehow rationalized that 'civil' charges from government are not a big deal - just another lawsuit, so the constitutional protections afforded from 'criminal' charges don't apply. They just take your savings, your property and the labors of years of work. So in the end, you worked (retroactively and involuntary without the option to leave and against your will) without compensation. So basically ex post facto slavery.

The idea that a reporter would think that the White House has any legal means to interfere with any American, particularly a candidate for the presidency in an election year, saying any damn thing they want to demonstrates how thoroughly corrupt and fascist-adjacent the mainstream press has become. The fact that a reporter from a newspaper that shared a Pulitzer prize for pushing a totally discredited hoax thinks he has any moral ground to protest "misinformation" is the official death knell of irony.

To the extent that 'misinformation' is a problem, Ground Zero of that problem is the mainstream press. They are the ones who insisted that an obviously demented and sometimes drugged Joe Biden was completely in control of his faculties. //

Giving the yahoos in the press corps a license to police misinformation is like giving a three-year-old a can of gasoline and a lighter. //

RiverRev
29 minutes ago
I think I trust the three year old more.

First, the DNA collection law at issue has been on the books since 2005, when it passed with bipartisan support. It requires the collection of DNA samples from "non-United States persons in detention for immigration violations." Per the whistleblowers, DHS is not enforcing that law — certainly not fully — and hasn't been under both Democrat and Republican administrations.

A December 2021 internal government memo from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel regarding its investigation of the charges levied by Jones, Taylor, and Wynn found that the agency had intentionally failed to implement the law — designed to protect public safety — for decades. //

Taylor, Wynn, and Jones all are confident that the continued, willful failure to enforce the law has resulted in American deaths — deaths that were preventable. //

The whistleblowers affirm that DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has been notified of the failure to comply with the law, but no one at DHS has been disciplined for that failure.

The only ones who have been disciplined are the whistleblowers themselves. The internal OSC memo referenced above concluded that the agency retaliated against the whistleblowers, including denial of promotion, hostile work environment, and reputational harm. The OSC refused to disclose the memo, and the whistleblowers were only able to obtain it via discovery. They have had to spend their own money to pursue litigation to confirm that they were subject to that retaliation. //

Both Taylor and Jones have had their law enforcement credentials and firearms taken away from them. Taylor has had his law enforcement retirement stripped. Taylor notes, "In a law enforcement environment, publicly removing someone's firearm is the ultimate insult and degradation." Per Wynn, "I was basically iced — left to sit at my desk every day, do nothing but the most menial of tasks." States Jones, "I was demoted three levels. Like Mr. Taylor, my firearm was taken, my credentials were taken. And it was the final blow to a professional career. And what we did, was we came forward." This despite the fact that none of the men had ever received a written or verbal disciplinary action.

Jones sums it up thusly:

"One of the supervisors said, very matter of fact: 'The agency's goal is to bankrupt you, make you quit, die, kill yourselves, or basically, preferably, all of the above.'"

Clinical doctors smiled (actually, they grimaced) while reading two recent headlines. The first was “Wyden, Blackburn Introduce Bipartisan Legislation to Tackle Health Care Workforce Shortages.” This is one more demonstration of Ronald Reagan’s prescience when he said in his 1981 Inaugural Address, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Every direct care provider understands from painful daily experience that government regulations stemming from federal legislation are the real reason for shortages.

Federal agencies used the pretext of foreign interference in the 2020 election to surveil and suppress domestic news. //

America’s speech police are reassembling to once again influence our elections. At the same time the security state is creating potential pretexts for renewed censorship by issuing warnings of cyberattacks that could “hinder public access to election information,” they are also reprising old claims of coming Russian election interference on behalf of Donald Trump.

The little-noticed development comes in a report from the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) on the DOJ’s efforts to “Coordinate Information Sharing About Foreign Malign Influence Threats to U.S. Elections” — a euphemism for the chief law enforcement agency’s prior censorship activities.

The U.S. Constitution explicitly grants Congress the power to issue letters of marque and reprisal (Article I, Section 8, Clause 11), providing a legal foundation for privateering. This concept remains an option under U.S. law. //

Engaging privateers to target the Russian ghost fleet could also have the secondary effect of incentivizing international shippers to register under the U.S. flag. The prospect of U.S. Navy protection against potential retaliation by Russia or other adversarial powers would be a significant draw for these companies. Currently, U.S.-flagged vessels are entitled to the protection of the U.S. Navy, providing a security assurance that can be crucial in unstable maritime environments.

This shift could bolster the U.S. merchant marine fleet, enhance national security, and ensure better compliance with international laws and sanctions. Moreover, a larger U.S.-flagged fleet would create a more robust logistical network — absolutely vital in deterring the PRC across the vast expanse of the Pacific.

At first glance, vitamins and other dietary supplements seem like qualified medical expenses for health savings account (HSA) and flexible spending account (FSA) holders. They are designed to fill "gaps" in the average diet, offsetting nutritional deficiencies along the way — yes, even those deficiencies that can lead to larger health problems.

However, the IRS defines qualified medical expenses within the IRS Section 213(d) as “amounts paid for the diagnosis, cure, mitigation or treatment of a disease, and for treatments affecting any structure or function of the body.” The IRS has further specified that these expenses must be primarily to alleviate a physical or mental defect or illness.

So why are HSA users coming up empty when searching for HSA eligible vitamins and supplements? Learn which vitamins and supplements are HSA eligible. //

Currently, the only way to use a consumer-directed healthcare account to pay for most vitamins and supplements is if a specific vitamin or supplement is recommended by a medical professional to treat or mitigate a medical condition with a letter of medical necessity.

Do you know what the thing is about principles, as opposed to politics? Principles are consistent. Principles, as opposed to politics, apply equally in all circumstances. That's why so few politicians, especially Democrats, have anything even remotely approaching principles; they are all about The Side.

As an example: If, say, a presidential candidate was virulently against requiring voters to show ID before casting a ballot, then they should be open to letting would-be voters enter a campaign rally without showing ID. Right?

Not if you're Kamala Harris. //

Now, let's go on record here: There's nothing wrong with making rally attendees show an ID to get in, especially when there is an RSVP list. That's a perfectly reasonable requirement, and in our modern world where one has to have a photo ID for almost every essential facet of life - ... //

This is especially true considering that there has already been an attempt on the life of a presidential candidate this year.

But it's the hypocrisy that galls. This is a woman who has been adamantly against voter ID requirements for years, and she makes up the most ridiculous reasons for her opposition. //

She is, as I have said and will keep saying, not only dishonest, but a hypocrite, and for those and many other reasons, she is utterly unqualified to be president.

Yashar Ali 🐘
@yashar
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The U.S. Secret Service is apologizing to a Massachusetts salon owner after an agent covered her security camera with duct tape and broke into her salon by picking the lock so that its bathroom could be used by various people for a two-hour period. //

"And then when they were done using the bathroom for two hours, they left, and left my building completely unlocked, and did not take the tape off the camera," she added. //

Dieter Schultz
3 hours ago
Powers said the Secret Service’s Boston office has apologized on behalf of the agency.
The one thing I didn't hear or read in the article that I should have was that someone was fired from the SS and they had already been charged for breaking and entering and criminal trespass.

I don't care about apologies nor should anybody else.

It’s not just young adults: The Free Press cites insurance-claim data indicating that about 12,000 youths under age 17 sought gender-related care at PP clinics between 2017 and 2023.

Meanwhile, ever-more Americans have rightly focused on the distressing trend of children being put on hormones or undergoing surgical procedures in a fruitless attempt to change their gender.

Parents’ rights groups are fighting on behalf of mothers and fathers who’ve been kept in the dark about their own children’s mental health.

Alliance Defending Freedom, for example, has seven active cases representing parents suing school districts that secretly transitioned their children behind their backs.

Under 17 - these are children. They can't buy a gun or a beer, they can't sign a contract, they can't get a tattoo, but Planned Parenthood is allowing them to take permanent, irreversible hormonal treatments. The schools are allowing them to keep the secret from these kids' parents.

This is unconscionable. //

The Cass Review has shown that it is harmful, and research in the Netherlands has shown that the great majority of these kids outgrow any feelings of gender dysphoria - making the practice of rushing them into treatment for which they are incapable of informed consent all the more egregious.

Tom Lopes flew a 2018 Cessna 172S Skyhawk SP on a ferry flight between California to Hawai’i. He flew the small single-engine general aviation aircraft an incredible 2,425 miles over more than 17 hours over the Pacific Ocean to the aircraft’s new home. This feat is even more mind-blowing when you learn that this was a nonstop flight that was more than three times the normal range of the aircraft. Here’s how Lopes did it.

Perhaps the coolest part about this journey is the fact that it’s something that Lopes has done before. Tom Lopes, the owner of Gateway Air Center, is a ferry pilot. He’s the guy you hire when you’ve just purchased a plane from somewhere far away and you want it delivered to where your home base is. Two years ago, Lopes flew the same crazy journey we’re talking about today. Lopes flew a different Cessna 172 between Merced Regional Airport/Macready Field in Merced, California, and the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in Honolulu, Hawai’i. I wrote about that trip two years ago and it took Lopes over 18 hours to fly the little plane 2,521 miles, or 2,190 nautical miles.

Installation, Repair and Replacement of John Deere 165, 175, 185 Hydro Lawn Tractor Drive Belt

So if you have some service running on your macOS or Linux workstation on port 11223, and you assume no one can reach it because it's behind your firewall, and that your big-name browser blocks outside requests to localhost, guess again because that browser will route a 0.0.0.0:11223 request by a malicious page you're visiting to your service.

The TMS9900 could have powered the PC revolution. Here’s why it didn’t. //

The utter dominance of these Intel microprocessors goes back to 1978, when IBM chose the 8088 for its first personal computer. Yet that choice was far from obvious. Indeed, some who know the history assert that the Intel 8088 was the worst among several possible 16-bit microprocessors of the day.

It was not. There was a serious alternative that was worse. //

So why aren’t we all using 68K-based computers today?

The answer comes back to being first to market. Intel’s 8088 may have been imperfect but at least it was ready, whereas the Motorola 68K was not. And IBM’s thorough component qualification process required that a manufacturer offer up thousands of “production released” samples of any new part so that IBM could perform life tests and other characterizations. IBM had hundreds of engineers doing quality assurance, but component qualifications take time. In the first half of 1978, Intel already had production-released samples of the 8088. By the end of 1978, Motorola’s 68K was still not quite ready for production release.

And unfortunately for Motorola, the Boca Raton group wanted to bring its new IBM PC to market as quickly as possible. So they had only two fully qualified 16-bit microprocessors to choose from. In a competition between two imperfect chips, Intel’s chip was less imperfect than TI’s.

Analysis: “It has never been about Israel, it has always been about destroying the freedoms and liberties of the West.”

The hogweed is packed with sap that causes phytophotodermatitis — meaning it stops the skin’s ability to protect itself from the sun’s harmful rays. In extreme cases, exposure can result in third-degree burns and even blindness. And the effects can last months, or even years. //

Giant hogweed is a biennial or perennial herb in the carrot family (Apiaceae) which can grow to 14 feet or more. Its hollow, ridged stems grow 2-4 inches in diameter and have dark reddish-purple blotches. Its large compound leaves can grow up to 5 feet wide. Its white flower heads can grow up to 2 1/2 feet in diameter.

As far as certain Fulton County officials can tell, the challenge to Candace Smith’s voter registration never actually happened.

Attorney Thomas Breth told The Federalist it is ‘mind boggling’ that election officials are reluctant to share public documents.

“All data collected by the DMV that identifies noncitizens is shared with ELECT, which uses it to scrub existing voter rolls and remove noncitizens who may have purposefully or accidentally registered to vote,” Youngkin wrote. “According to data from ELECT, between January 2022 and July 2024, records indicate we removed 6,303 noncitizens from the voter rolls.”

While serving as California attorney general in 2016, Kamala Harris sent 11 California Department of Justice agents to raid the home of journalist and pro-life activist David Daleiden. Harris’ office seized Daleiden’s camera equipment and hard drives containing undercover videos allegedly exposing Planned Parenthood’s trafficking of aborted baby body parts. For eight years, much of Daleiden’s footage has been sealed and unseen until now.

In March of this year, Congress held a hearing on, “Investigating the Black Market of Baby Organ Harvesting,” which included footage subpoenaed from Daleiden’s Center for Medical Progress (CMP). In May, the San Francisco District Court ruled that CMP cannot be prevented from releasing the subpoenaed footage, and on July 30, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R- Ga., released full, unedited versions of the footage as an addendum to the congressional hearing.

The release of these new videos allows Daleiden to continue his journalistic work that began in 2015, uncovering Planned Parenthood’s alleged participation in fetal organ trafficking. His latest videos include alleged admissions from Planned Parenthood employees about their “financial incentives” and their own graphic descriptions about the process for procuring late-term fetuses to sell.