Recent Appearances...

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Recent Appearances...

Government Corruption

House Oversight Chair Wants To Question Biden Handlers Acting As ‘De Facto Presidents'

2025-05-25

[Modernity] House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer has announced that he is seeking depositions from four former Biden staffers in addition to former White House physician Kevin O’Connor in an effort to find out if they were influencing the cognitively impaired Joe Biden and acting as ’de facto Presidents’.

Describing the former handlers as "unelected bureaucrats", Comer told Fox News host Jesse Watters that the committee has identified them "as the main gatekeepers for the Biden White House."

When asked who they are, Comer responded that "they’re no names that anyone that normally watches Fox would know," adding "They’re behind the scenes."

Link

-Great Cultural Revolution

Fury as top military schools are caught in secret underground plots to usurp Trump's orders

2025-05-25

Those students are unfortunately a sunk cost. But the new cohort coming in will be inspired by the idea of stripping the work to its essence — making war, not “love” — and the teaching staff will be forced to accept the change or likewise give way.

[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] Top military schools have faced a swift backlash after using underground means to discuss books and topics banned by the Trump administration.

Cadets and staff at the US Naval Academy have been creating non-governmental emails to chat about the banned ideas, including the likes of critical race theory.

The president has cracked down on what made up the curriculum at the school, with faculty saying they run their research through an AI tool screen their findings.

Words that are flagged include 'barrier', 'Black', 'allyship', 'cultural differences' and 'The Gulf of Mexico'.

Professors have been told to teach that 'America and its founding documents remains the most powerful force for good in human history' after a memo Pete Hegseth.

One unnamed professor told the Washington Post: 'We at the Naval Academy are here to prepare young officers to command.

'They need to know what we have learned from our study of politics and history and literature and languages.

'We are failing them and we are failing in our jobs if we suppress some things we know are true and we parrot other things we know are false.'

They also said that students are feeling conflicted about the possibility of being deployed under the current White House. One professor said they had advised cadets to serve until they receive an order that they feel might be illegal. He told them if that point comes to 'reject it rather than compromise yourself'.

Graham Parsons, a former professor of philosophy at West Point Military Academy, left his position earlier this month in protest over the changes to the curriculum. He said that the entire US armed forces have been left up in arms over Trump's reversal of DEI initiatives and social justice programs. Parsons told the outlet: 'It's a feeling of real whiplash. We used to raise the possibility in the military and beyond, there are still real structural problems with racism and sexism. That would not fly now.'

He stood down from his post after writing a scathing opinion piece for The New York Times. In it, he said: 'I cannot tolerate these changes, which prevent me from doing my job responsibly. I am ashamed to be associated with the academy in its current form.'

Trump was at West Point Academy on Saturday to give a commencement speech in which he vowed to ditch DEI programs and support for transgender service people. He said: 'We´re getting rid of distractions and we're focusing our military on its core mission: crushing America's adversaries, killing America's enemies and defending our great American flag like it has never been defended before.

He later said that 'the job of the U.S. armed forces is not to host drag shows or transform foreign cultures,' a reference to drag shows on military bases that President Joe Biden's administration halted after Republican criticism.

Trump said the cadets were graduating at a 'defining moment' in Army history as he accused political leaders in the past of sending soldiers into 'nation-building crusades to nations that wanted nothing to do with us.'

He said he was clearing the military of transgender ideas, 'critical race theory' and types of training he called divisive and political.

Past administrations, he said, 'subjected the armed forces to all manner of social projects and political causes while leaving our borders undefended and depleting our arsenals to fight other countries wars.'

Link

Economy

Trump Announces US Steel–Nippon Partnership

2025-05-25

[Epoch Times] President Donald Trump announced on May 23 that he has approved the "planned partnership" between U.S. Steel and Japan’s Nippon Steel, stating that the company will stay in Pittsburgh and is expected to create at least 70,000 jobs.

"I am proud to announce that, after much consideration and negotiation, U.S. Steel will REMAIN in America, and keep its Headquarters in the Great City of Pittsburgh," Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Nippon Steel, the world’s fourth-largest steelmaker, announced in December 2023 that it would purchase U.S. Steel for $14.9 billion in an all-cash agreement. A few months later, U.S. Steel shareholders approved the takeover bid.

However, President Joe Biden opposed the deal, citing national security concerns.

"U.S. Steel has been an iconic American company for more than a century, and it should remain totally American," Biden told union workers during a speech at the United Steelworkers headquarters in Pittsburgh on April 17, 2024.
Ironic, Joe and Trump agreeing. Except Trump made something positive happen.
In February, standing alongside Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Trump said Nippon Steel would "invest heavily in U.S. Steel, as opposed to [owning] it," and welcomed the proposed capital infusion. "Investment is mutually beneficial," Ishiba said during the joint press conference at the White House.

"Japanese technology will be provided, and better quality products will be manufactured in the United States."

Link

Government Corruption

The Ingraham Angle 5-23-25 - Segment starts at 46 minutes in - verbatim]

2025-05-24

FoxNews Anchors Continue to Dance Around the Big "O"
[The Ingraham Angle 5/23/25 — Segment starts at 46 minutes in - verbatim]

Lisa Boothe anchors. A clip is shown of The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart [YouTube Podcast — Thursday 5/22/25 Entitled OBAMA BRO: I WANTED BIDEN TO WIN]

Lisa: A former Obama aide was admitting why he wasn’t honest about Joe Biden’s mental decline.

Aide: It was April and he was rambling and was hard to follow and repeated a story, but we were assured that he was just exhausted by the people around him.

I remember feeling I want to talk about this as a hugh liability, I want to talk something that Joe Biden can overcome. But I think that Joe Biden must drop out — he’s too old to be President, but I don’t know exactly what was going on behind the scenes.

If Joe biden is the candidate, I want him to f__ g win! Because I care about the country.

Lisa then interviews Jason Rantz, the Auto Radio(?) host and Terry Schilling, the President of some organization.

Jason: They lie about Donald Trump so he loses. They will say and do anything if it satisfies some sort of political agena of theirs.

I think you’ve got the point here. I wonder who writes this guy’s speeches.

[Related: Rantburg 2025-05-21, see comment #5]
https://rantburg.com/poparticle.php?D=05/21/2025&SO=&HC=4&ID=760913

Link

Government Corruption

Friday morning Kunstler-superb encapsulation of the last 20 years of Presidential politics

2025-05-24

His opening:

Bad as it was, “Joe Biden,” the figment president was merely one manifestation of a nation made mad by power-seeking demons, real-live, ill-intentioned human beings driving a runaway political machine, the party of hoaxes, hustles, and hatred. The country is just now struggling to exit a convulsion of mass mental illness. The demons are still there, though, and still hard at work trying to drag you all back into mass formation.

A central mystery is how the news media made itself the enemy of the people, and this conundrum is not at all explained by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson in their book Original Sin. It’s actually just another hustle with overtones of hoax, like everything else in the evil cavalcade of narratives spun out in the news media’s war on reality. Tapper and Marshall want you to believe that a faceless collective they call “the White House” managed to conceal “Joe Biden’s” well-advanced disintegration from the voting public, and that was... that. The media wuz fooled! Goll-lee!

Of course, that fails to explain a whole lot — such as: how come anybody watching daily video clips of “Joe Biden” in action, could not fail to see the broken old puppet he is. Alex Thompson, receiving his “award for excellence” from the White House Correspondents’ Association weeks ago said, “We just missed it.” Yeah, sure... They also apparently missed the programmatic devastation to American society that was carried out in the old stumblebum’s name.

Link

Great White North

Canada's energy-rich province signals to Trump it's ready for new pipelines, partnership

2025-05-24

[JustTheNews] Top oil and gas executives in Canada and the United States confirmed Alberta's top industry companies would love to get past any tariff issues and begin building pipelines.

Amid high-stakes U.S. trade negotiations and internal secession rumblings, Canada's energy-rich province of Alberta is signaling to President Donald Trump it is ready to move further from China and embrace new partnerships and pipelines with America.

"It turns out that China is not developing the way we thought," Alberta Premier Danielle Smith told Just the News in an exclusive interview Thursday night.

"They're not becoming a more democratic jurisdiction, and they're using capitalism against us to hollow out our various industries. So I think that there has been a lot of re-calibration that has had to happen about our relationship with China, and certainly the U.S. president is causing us to have that rethink," she added.

Smith is Canada's most prominent conservative after liberal Mark Carney won the election last month to become its new prime minister.

During a wide-ranging interview with the Just the News, No Noise TV show, she addressed the impact of Trump's tariffs, the growing movement within her province to hold a vote on seceding from Canada and its more liberal provinces, and the disappointment and harm former President Joe Biden created when he canceled the Keystone pipeline that ran between the two nations.

She said she believed it was possible for Alberta to strike a new energy partnership and build new pipelines to the United States even in the midst of a tariff dispute between the U.S. and Canada so that both countries could capitalize on the energy-thirsty Artificial Intelligence revolution

…a critical point, that…

and to expand North America's booming liquefied natural gas exports to Europe.

"We're looking to see if we can normalize our partnership, so that we can get into talking about what those new pipelines might look like," Smith said of the relationship with Trump. "Not only would we be able to have, I think, a bitumen heavy oil pipeline that would link our heavy oil to the heavy oil refining capacity in the US Gulf Coast, but also the opportunity for us to continue to provide additional supply of gas so that it can feed some of the European markets."

Top oil and gas executives in Canada and the United States confirmed Alberta's top industry would love to get past any tariff issues and begin building pipelines southward.

"It's being talked about behind the scenes," Mike Rose, the CEO of Tourmaline Oil, told Just the News when asked about new oil and gas pipelines that would traverse Canada and the United States.

"We can increase our exports of natural gas, certainly, and Canada is just about to enter the world LNG market," Rose explained. "We've been shipping gas to the Gulf Coast for over two years now, to the liquefaction complex down there, and then AI on both sides of the border is an added sleeve of demand that, to be fair, I don't think you know really, most of us on the producing side were thinking about two years ago."

Brendan McCracken, CEO of the natural gas company Ovintiv, said Americans are uniquely positioned to further grow their ties to Alberta because they are allowed to buy Canadian oil and natural gas at a huge discount compared to other countries.

"Looking over the past several years, the interconnectedness of our energy systems has meant that the U.S. gets Canadian oil at about a 20% discount and Canadian natural gas at up to a 60% discount to global prices," he said. "So it's been a really powerful part of the economic engine for Americans."

Pete Hoekstra, the new U.S. ambassador to Canada, said while much work needs to be done with Carney to get a deal, he is optimistic one will be reached, in part because the Alberta-American energy alliance makes so much sense.

"For much of the last four or five months, the only thing that you've heard in Canada is people being very critical of the United States and not talking about the economic strength of the relationship benefiting both countries," Hoekstra said, praising Smith's focus on the benefits of the US-Canada relationship.

"Prosperity for our people and confronting the threat from China — it's an important message for all Americans to hear, but also for all Canadians to hear," he said.

Smith signaled one advantage Trump and his energy-friendly policies hold with Alberta: many in her province chafed at the impact of liberal policies over the last decade, from Biden canceling the Keystone pipeline to ex-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's climate agenda holding back energy production.

"There's been a lot of damaging policies that have come in that have chased away tens of billions, indeed hundreds of billions of dollars worth of investment," she noted, saying such economic repression has driven a growing number of Albertans to seek a vote to secede from Canada.

“America's production has grown dramatically, whereas Alberta has stayed stagnant, and that's because of the policies of the federal government,” she continued. "... So I think that that is at the heart of some of the frustration that you're seeing. I believe that we can make Canada work. That's what I'm working towards."

Link

Government Corruption

The Walls Are Closing in on Biden's Inner Circle

2025-05-23

[PJ] Earlier this week, I made the case that Dr. Kevin O’Connor — Joe Biden’s longtime physician and former White House doctor — should be called to testify before Congress about his role in the cover-up of Biden’s obvious cognitive decline and now his cancer diagnosis. A growing number of medical experts agree that Biden’s condition didn’t just appear out of nowhere; it was likely known about for years. And now, we may finally be seeing the walls start to close in.

On Thursday, House Oversight Chairman James Comer ramped up his investigation into the deliberate and coordinated cover-up, not just of Biden’s mental and physical deterioration, but also the possible unauthorized use of an autopen to greenlight sweeping executive actions, including controversial pardons.

In a major development, Comer sent formal letters demanding transcribed interviews with five of Biden’s closest insiders. The list includes Dr. Kevin O’Connor himself, former Domestic Policy Council Director Neera Tanden, and longtime Biden loyalists Anthony Bernal, Annie Tomasini, and Ashley Williams. According to Comer, these individuals weren’t just witnesses; they were likely key players in the effort to hide Biden’s true condition while quietly allowing others to operate the levers of power on his behalf.

If the Biden team thought they could run out the clock, they have another thing coming. The investigation is gaining traction, and accountability may finally be catching up.

Link

Government Corruption

Unmasking the Real Threat to America's Democracy

2025-05-23

[American Thinker] America isn't a democracy but a constitutional republic designed to limit majority rule and protect individual rights. This distortion enables narratives that label dissent as dangerous, especially in portraying Trump as a "threat to democracy" -- a claim pushed by institutions caught spreading falsehoods about him. What appears as consensus is actually assigned opinion enforced by media and political power, as "conspiracy theories" used to silence dissent are proving to be true.

What follows is not just a list of lies -- it’s a pattern of systemic deception that reveals where the real threat lies.

The Concealment of President Biden’s Cognitive Decline: A Betrayal of Voters

For years, concerns about Joe Biden’s mental acuity were dismissed as partisan attacks or "conspiracy theories." The White House physician declared him fit for office. Staffers claimed he "ran circles around them." Meanwhile, public appearances were tightly controlled, questions were pre-approved, and scripted answers were passed off as spontaneous.

But in 2024, the dam broke. Biden’s debate performance made his decline undeniable. Millions had already cast primary ballots for a man clearly unfit to serve -- yet instead of outrage over the scale of the deception, voters watched passively as Kamala Harris stepped in as the de facto candidate.

It was an unconstitutional transfer of candidacy that the media refused to acknowledge. This wasn’t spin -- it was a deliberate, coordinated effort to deceive the American public about who was actually running the country.

All while, the same media complex screamed that Trump was the dictator.

Link

Home Front: Politix

Interesting Coincidence - The Last 8 Members of Congress Who Died Were All Democrats

2025-05-23

[BusinessInsider] No coincidence at all. While the Republicans started replacing their country club Republicans like Mitt Romney in 2007 with first TEA Partiers and then MAGA Trumpsters, the Democrat Old Guard were holding tight to power — leaving only when carried out by six, including a state funeral attended by all the former presidents except Donald Trump, who was openly told his presence wasn’t wanted.

Eight sitting members of Congress have died since November 2022.

Every single one of them was a Democrat.

The party has been wrestling with age and gerontocracy for years.

In the last two and a half years, eight sitting members of the House or Senate have died in office. Every time, it's been a Democrat.

Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, died on Wednesday at 75, after a battle with esophageal cancer.

He's the third House Democrat to die in the last three months. If Democrats had gained a narrow 1 or 2-seat majority in 2024, they would have lost it by now.

The streak of Democratic deaths could just be something of a coincidence. After all, there are plenty of elderly and diminished Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including former Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

But Democrats do tend to be older than Republicans, on average. A report from FiscalNote found that in the last Congress, the average House Democrat was six years older than the average House Republican, while the gap was seven years in he upper chamber.

There are some potential structural reasons for this as well, including the seniority system, which Democrats tend to employ more than Republicans.

The deaths are just another data point in a long-running conversation that's been raging within the Democratic Party for years about age and gerontocracy, which culminated last year in President Joe Biden's decision to drop out of the presidential race after a disastrous debate performance.

Since then, Democrats in particular have been taking age more seriously, including when it comes to who's serving in important committee positions. Connolly notably beat back a challenge from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York in December for the Oversight position he's now vacated.

Here's the full list of Democratic lawmakers who have died in office since November 2022:

Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia

Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona

Rep. Sylvester Turner of Texas

Rep. Bill Pascrell of New Jersey

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas

Rep. Donald Payne of New Jersey

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California

Rep. Donald McEachin of Virginia

Link

Africa Horn

Over 100 Militants Killed in Somalia Since Start of Trump’s Second Term, Says White House

2025-05-22

[Garowe] At least 100 terrorists, both leaning to the al-Shabaab
... the Islamic version of the old Somali warlord...
and ISIS, have been killed in Somalia since President Donald Trump
...The Hero of Butler, Pennsylvania...
assumed his second term early this year, the White House said, with the number expected to increase in the coming months..

On Monday, at least 10 hard boyz were killed in Cal-Miskaad mountains in Puntland
...a region in northeastern Somalia, centered on Garowe in the Nugaal province. Its leaders declared the territory an autonomous state in 1998. Puntland and the equally autonomous Somaliland seem to have avoided the clan rivalries and warlordism that have typified the rest of Somalia, which puts both places high on the list for Islamic subversion...
, with the White House posting a video of the battlegrounds within the mountains, which have been a base of the ISIS Death Eaters, but whose influence is declining.

"We haven’t forgotten the threat posed by Jihadis. 10 more were permanently removed from the battlefield in Somalia yesterday," the White House said. "That brings the total to over 100 bloodthirsty Death Eaters killed since President Trump was sworn in."

The US Africa Command has increased its tempo in Somalia, with the ~~Arclight~~ airstrike
...KABOOM!...
s targeting strategic locations, destroying the Death Eaters' military installations and other assets dangerous for peace and stability in the region.

In February, President Donald Trump announced airstrikes in Cal-Miskaad, where a senior commander of the ISIS hard boyz was killed. Since then, Puntland forces and US Africa Command have made progress, liberating several areas in the process.

Trump said the hit, less than two weeks into his term, had targeted a senior IS attack planner and other hard boyz in Somalia's semi-autonomous region of Puntland and had "destroyed the caves they live in, and killed many Death Eaters without, in any way, harming civilians".

He boasted that he had succeeded where former US President Joe The Big Guy Biden
Joe <q>The Big Guy</q> Biden

...46th president of the U.S. This Is A Man That Does Not Seem Demented...
had failed."Biden and his cronies wouldn't act quickly enough to get the job done. I did!" The president maintained that "We will find you and we will kill you".

But airstrikes are different from troops on the ground, and Trump did not stop aerial bombardments in his first term. He increased them to nearly 400. The initial number of service members was 600 before it was reduced during Trump's first administration.

Shabelle Media adds:

In a post published on X (formerly Twitter), the White House confirmed that a US operation conducted on May 19 had resulted in the deaths of 10 militants, bringing the total number of militant casualties to “over 100” since the start of the Trump administration.

The statement did not specify whether the militants targeted in the latest strike were affiliated with the al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabaab group or the Islamic State in Somalia (ISS), both of which have been the focus of an intensified US military campaign in the country.

However, local reports suggested the operation may have taken place near the town of Adan Yabaal in the Middle Shabelle region, a known al-Shabaab stronghold.

Link

Government Corruption

Biden's Presidency Is a Scandal of Historic Proportions

2025-05-21

A taste.

[ZeroHedge] Biden's Was The First Fully Deep-State Presidency

The “presidency” of Joe Biden is one of the greatest scandals in American history. The legacy media is only now covering the mental incapacity of a president who apparently left the entire ship of state to the unaccountable bureaucracy.

On Friday, Axios released Friday night news dump audio of Biden’s 2023 interview with special counsel Robert Hur.

If you heard the tape and haven’t been in a coma for the past four years, then nothing here is truly surprising. The former president sounded senile and evasive when answering questions about his handling of top secret documents.

Some of my colleagues went through the full tapes and found that Biden “forgot the names of President Barack Obama’s former secretary of defense and comedian Jay Leno; referred to Africa as a country, not a continent; and was unaware he had in his possession a notebook with war advice in it for Obama during his interview with special counsel Robert Hur and investigators in October 2023.”

Biden certainly did not sound like someone who could be trusted to make large-scale national decisions or even small-scale personal ones.

This is entirely unsurprising unless you are a left-leaning corporate media journalist on the political beat.

If you are, then I’m sure that the reports coming out about Biden in office are jaw-dropping, gob-smacking revelations to you.

The media elite are shocked, shocked to discover that Biden may have been unfit for office.

The release of these tapes was followed by a Sunday afternoon reveal that Biden has been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer.

The cancer diagnosis is certainly a terrible thing. But the idea that this should end the story about what happened the last four years is a farce. It couldn’t be clearer now that due to mental and physical ailments, Biden was a diminished man from the moment he assumed the president’s office.

Despite some of the aforementioned elite journalists calling for a lid to be put on conversations about Biden’s presidency due to his health, the reality is the cancer diagnosis only raises more unsettling questions. Is this really a new diagnosis? Did Biden’s doctors really somehow miss the signs of treatable cancer?

And that makes this situation entirely unprecedented.

Link

-Short Attention Span Theater-

White House says Trump 'trusts his physicians' following Biden's cancer announcement

2025-05-20

[FoxNews] Questions have emerged about the timing of former president Joe Biden's 'aggressive' prostate cancer diagnosis.

Link

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