Trump Budget Would Abolish 19 Agencies, Cut Thousands of Federal Jobs

Via Cousin John

With the aim of “making government work again,” the Trump White House on Thursday unveiled a $1.1 trillion budget blueprint for discretionary spending in fiscal 2017 and 2018 that would abolish 19 agencies and eliminate thousands of agency jobs.

The 54-page “America First” document, focused primarily on fiscal 2018, would boost the Defense Department and related programs at Energy by $54 billion, and Homeland Security by $2.8 billion. It would offset such increases by cutting the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development by $10.1 billion (28 percent) and the Environmental Protection Agency by $2.6 billion (31 percent). The latter cut would eliminate approximately 3,200 positions, according to the document.

More @ Government Executive

GOP Kicks Off Effort To Roll Back Obama’s Monument Designations

Via Billy

House lawmakers kicked off their effort to push back against national monuments designations, targeting the large swaths of ocean the Obama administration made off limits to fishing.

“I don’t believe the Antiquities Act should have ever been applied to oceans,” Alaska Republican Rep. Don Young said during a Wednesday hearing on marine monument designations. “There was never intent of that.”

Republicans on the House Committee on Natural Resources have long criticized former President Barack Obama’s use of the Antiquities Act to put millions of square miles off limits to commercial fishing with little to no input from locals.

More @ The Daily Caller

State Legislatures Consider More Voter ID Law Proposals Since Sessions' Action

Via Billy

State legislatures have begun pushing voter identification proposals since Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered the Justice Department to withdraw from its legal fight against Texas’s voter ID law.

The move by Sessions is a reversal of the previous administration’s DOJ six-year legal battle against the Texas law.

Officials from the Justice Department contacted liberal activist groups on board with the lawsuit against Texas, including the Brennan Center for Justice, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the NAACP, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund about the change in policy at the DOJ, Salon reported.

More @ The Daily Caller

Video shows Mormon missionary beat back would-be attacker

Via John

The Facebook video begins with two Mormon missionaries on the tough streets of Manaus, Brazil, perhaps just trying to bear a little testimony about the LDS gospel with some passers-by.

Then, two men ride up on a motorcycle. One leaps off, approaches the white shirt and tie-wearing pair, appears to pull a gun from his belt and threatens the missionaries as he tries to rifle their pockets.

Oops.

The taller and heftier of the Mormon emissaries grabs the gun out of the surprised street thug's hand. When the second suspect darts into the fray trying to reclaim the weapon, the missionary throws it over a fence.

More @ The Salt Lake Tribune

House to Vote Soon on Repealing Veterans Gun Ban

Via John

 

It has been one of the most contemptible chapters in American history.

Over 257,000 veterans -- fresh from putting their lives on the line for American freedom -- have returned to our country, only to be stripped of their constitutional rights without due process.

But this chapter is about to come to an end.

Tomorrow, on the House floor, the House will consider H.R. 1181 -- a bill to restore the rights of veterans to keep and bear arms.

So here is the current situation:  over 257,000 veterans who have experienced trauma in Vietnam, or Sarajevo, or Kabul, or Mosul, have made the mistake of seeking counseling from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

VA psychiatrists, with no due process whatsoever, then proceeded to appoint a “guardian” over the finances of these law-abiding veterans -- and have used this appointment as an excuse to send their names to the NICS secret “gun ban list” in West Virginia.

In some cases, police have arrived at their homes to take away the guns they already have.

And those veterans who have kept a single gun for hunting or self-defense risk a felony conviction and a decade in prison.

All for honorably serving their country.  And all at the behest of cowards like Barack Obama who wouldn’t have thought of risking their lives for America’s freedom.

                                                                      More @  GOA

Judicial Watch Sues DOJ for Records Related to Loretta Lynch, Bill Clinton Tarmac Meeting

Via Billy

Meeting occurred days before Clinton was interviewed about her private email server

Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group, has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice after the agency failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request related to the infamous tarmac meeting between then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton just days before Hillary Clinton was interviewed by the FBI about her private email server.

The lawsuit was filed in the United States Court for the District of Columbia and seeks to retrieve records the group attempted to gather through a June 2016 FOIA request. According to U.S. Postal Service records, the agency received the request in early July. In December, request numbers were assigned to the FOIA. However, the agency did not determine if they would accept or deny the request within the allotted amount of time applicable under FOIA.

More @ The Washington Free Beacon

U.S. nuke 'killing power' boosted by factor of 3

Via Iver

A little-known change in the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal has boosted the killing power of the W-76 warheads used on submarine-based missiles by a factor of three, prompting concern that Russia will “undertake countermeasures that would increase the already dangerously high readiness of Russian nuclear forces,” according to a report in Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.

A report published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists by Hans M. Kristensen, Matthew McKinzie and Theodore A. Postol explains how a “modernization program” has implemented “revolutionary new technologies that will vastly increase the targeting capability of the U.S. ballistic missile arsenal.”

“This increase in capability is astonishing – boosting the overall killing power of existing U.S. ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three – and it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike,” they said.

More @ WND

Some More Thoughts on Automating Populism

 

Here's some more thinking on how Trump (with Bannon's help) could (~will) use social networking to turn the populist insurgency that got them into the White House into a dynamic (or extremely dangerous, depending on your perspective) political force.

A transition to a networked political party is likely to happen first in populist movements like Trump's.  The rest of the political spectrum will follow quickly thereafter.

Within a handful of years after its emergence, all political parties will be networked parties. 

More @ Global Guerrillas

The South’s Gonna Do It Again

A few days ago I ran into an old friend, an historian, who started in on the Partisan. “I’ve lived all my life in the South,” he grumbled, “but I don’t see what makes Southern life so wonderful that you and your friends want to impose it on the rest of the country.” I did my best to reassure him that nothing was further from our intention than any form of standardization—whether making the South like New England or vice-versa. He seemed somewhat mollified. Still, his remark set me to thinking about the great gulf between educated Southerners (like my friend the historian) and those plain folks we have learned to despise as rednecks, grits, and crackers. (Speak for yourself)

More @ The Abbeville Institute

Rule by Thieves: One Week in the Life of the American Kleptocracy

Via John

“The first and most important thing to understand about politics is this: forget Right, Left, Center, socialism, fascism, or democracy. Every government that exists — or ever existed, or ever will exist — is a kleptocracy, meaning ‘rule by thieves.’ Competing ideologies merely provide different excuses to separate the Productive Class from what they produce. If the taxpayer/voters won’t willingly fork over to end poverty, then maybe they’ll cough up to fight drugs or terrorism. Conflicting ideologies, as presently constituted, are nothing more than a cover for what’s really going on, like the colors of competing gangs.” — Author L. Neil Smith

The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) continues to suck the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

Case in point: in the same week that Wikileaks dropped its bombshell about the CIA’s use of spy tools to subject law-abiding Americans to all manner of government surveillance and hacking—a revelation that caused barely a ripple of concern among the citizenry—the government quietly and with little fanfare continued to wage its devastating, stomach-churning, debilitating war on the American people.

Incredibly, hardly anyone noticed.

More LRC