Authored by Bronson Winslow via American Greatness,

President Joe Biden oversaw the most anti-Second Amendment administration in the history of the United States – effectively creating a police state that left every American open to prosecution. But when his son Hunter Biden ran into legal trouble and was convicted of three firearm felonies, Biden seemingly forgot about his own beliefs and granted clemency for all of Hunter’s crimes spanning the last ten years. To make matters worse, Biden continually assured the American people that he would not intervene.

Now, millions of gun owners remain in legal jeopardy under Biden’s policies, while Hunter walks free with his criminal record wiped clean. This blatant double standard is a slap in the face to the American people and a betrayal of whatever trust they may have still had in his leadership.

Unsurprisingly, Biden attempted to rationalize his decision by pointing fingers at the prosecution, saying it was “unfair and selective.” Regardless of his reasons, every American now facing legal prosecution due to unconstitutional firearm policies deserves the same treatment as Hunter.

Biden’s willingness to lie to the American people about his intentions highlights the ever-hypocritical left but also begs the question: If Biden is so eager to break his promises, why not break away from his leftist handlers and help American gun owners?

After all, Biden did not focus heavily on gun control as a U.S. senator and only became a radical gun-grabber after running for president in 2020. Biden’s only course of action is to apply a blanket pardon to all gun owners who have suffered under his administration’s abuse of power.

A History of Anti-Second Amendment Policies

The Biden-Harris administration has pursued the most aggressively anti-Second Amendment agenda in U.S. history. While they stopped short of outright gun confiscation, it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Biden’s weaponization of federal agencies, particularly the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), led to a series of sweeping regulatory actions that turned millions of lawful gun owners into felons overnight.

Biden also advanced and implemented numerous policies that violated the Second Amendment by restricting every American’s right to bear arms. His administration sought “assault weapon” bans, red flag laws, magazine capacity limits, and universal background checks—all while limiting the places where law-abiding citizens may exercise their unlimited right to carry firearms.

These measures have not only undermined the Second Amendment but also emboldened federal agencies to act with impunity. In March, the consequences of this overreach turned deadly when Brian Malinowski was fatally shot during a botched ATF raid.

The ATF justified the raid by accusing Malinowski of illegally selling firearms at gun shows—a claim rooted in a controversial 2023 rule approved by the agency without congressional oversight. This rule redefined what qualifies as a “gun dealer,” allowing the ATF to target law-abiding citizens under a broader, unchecked mandate.

Malinowski, who was never proven guilty of the alleged crimes, was denied his day in court and lost his life over accusations far less severe than those against Hunter Biden.

Last-Minute Redemption

Biden will never outlive the detrimental policies his administration has implemented and will always be remembered as a hypocrite for pardoning his own son, but he could salvage some of his reputation if he applied his reasoning to all gun owners in America.

A blanket pardon for law-abiding gun owners—those now labeled as felons under ATF’s arbitrary and unconstitutional mandates—would be a step toward restoring trust and fairness.

If Biden is willing to protect his son, he should have no qualms about protecting ordinary Americans from his own unjust laws and regulations.

By breaking from the radical left’s playbook, Biden has an opportunity to show that clemency applies to all—not just to his family. The millions of gun owners affected by these policies deserve more than an apology.

They deserve action.

Authored by Ryan Silverstein via RealClearPolitics,

In November, President Trump and Republicans won a broad mandate to govern. Consequently, Democrats are now seeking refuge in traditions and institutions they once sought to destroy – the Senate filibuster and courts of law. President Trump and Republicans should seize this opportunity to use Article 5 of the U.S. Constitution to protect these institutions for generations to come.

Article 5 provides a two-step process for amending our Constitution. First, an amendment must be proposed. Under Article 5, there are two ways for proposing an amendment to the Constitution: (1) an amendment passes by two-thirds of each chamber of Congress, or (2) two-thirds of state legislatures call for a constitutional convention and two-thirds of the delegates support an amendment. Once an amendment is proposed, three-fourths of states must ratify it for it to become law. Since there are fifty states, that means to change our constitution, 38 states must ratify an amendment.

In the 2024 election, President Trump carried 31 states. Moreover, Republicans control the state legislatures in 26 states, including some states Trump lost, like New Hampshire. Moreover, they flipped one chamber of state legislatures in Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. They also made inroads in deep blue states like Maine and ended the Democratic supermajority in Vermont. From the top of the ticket to the bottom of the ballot, the country shifted right. President-elect Trump and Republicans should seize this opportunity to push for constitutional amendments that protect key norms and institutions from future attacks.

First, Republicans should support an amendment constitutionalizing the Senate filibuster for all legislation, excluding spending bills from the House. The filibuster – a Senate procedural mechanism that requires 60 votes for legislation to be passed – plays a key role in requiring bipartisan cooperation in the Senate. It has been used by both parties to prevent radical legislation from becoming law.

While Democrats recently found support for the filibuster, there is a movement on the left calling to abolish it. For example, in 2022, Democrats tried to kill the filibuster. This effort only failed because independent Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema voted against the filibuster-killing plan. In August, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer expressed a desire to change the filibuster again so Democrats could have an easier time passing legislation. Democrats clearly only value the filibuster when they’re in the minority – but have no issue destroying it when they control the Senate. Adding the filibuster to the Constitution would preserve bipartisan cooperation and debate in the Senate, ensuring it remains the “greatest deliberative body in the world.”

Second, Republicans should back an amendment that sets the size of the Supreme Court at nine justices. Currently, the Constitution does not set the size of the Supreme Court. Democrats have spent years undermining the Court’s integrity to justify expanding it. Other Democrats like President Joe Biden claim the historically low public approval of the Supreme Court shows there is a need to reform our highest court. Yet, the Supreme Court still has higher approval ratings than Congress and President Biden. Moreover, the Supreme Court still has higher public confidence than Congress or the presidency.

The court’s size has not been changed since 1869 when Congress set the size at nine. The court’s size remaining at nine has played a key part in allowing the court to maintain the public’s support and its independence. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to expand the court in 1937, he failed because the public viewed his attempt at expanding the Court as an attack on a sacrosanct institution. There is a long institutional and democratic tradition of nine justices, which has allowed our highest court to remain isolated from the political fray. Alexander Hamilton famously defended an independent judiciary insulated from politics in Federalist Paper No. 78, where he argued liberty would be extinguished if the judicial power were co-opted by the executive or legislative branches. Hamilton’s fear may become reality as Democrats may push for more justices when they retain power – especially if President Trump gets to appoint more justices.

Adding more seats would destroy the public’s trust in any decision rendered by changing the public’s perception of justices to politicians in robes instead of neutral arbiters of law. Enshrining the number of Supreme Court justices in the Constitution would preserve the high court’s independence from political pressures and ensure the public’s trust in our independent judiciary isn’t destroyed.

President Trump and Republicans should utilize their momentum and get Congress to propose an amendment or pressure state legislatures to call a convention of states. Doing so will preserve core American institutions for years to come.

Ryan Silverstein is a J.D. candidate at Villanova University and a fellow with Villanova’s McCullen Center for Law, Religion and Public Policy. His work has previously appeared in the New York Daily News, Post & Courier, and the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Nuclear adoption continues accelerating, and now Virginia sure thinks it has found the way to “clean energy, billions in investment, and a solution to surging power demand”. The state is going to host the world’s first fusion power plant, according to the Virginia Mercury.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin said this week: “Commonwealth Fusion Systems plans on building the world’s first grid scale commercial fusion power plant in the world, full stop, and it’s going to be right here in the commonwealth of Virginia.”

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), founded in 2018 in Cambridge, Mass., plans to build a fusion power plant in Chesterfield County’s James River Industrial Park. The facility, set to produce 400 megawatts of electricity to power 150,000 homes, could be operational by the early 2030s.

Fusion power, replicating the sun’s energy production, offers a cleaner alternative to traditional fission. The 25-acre project highlights Virginia’s role in advancing energy solutions amid surging demand from energy-intensive data centers supporting big tech.

A JLARC report projects Virginia’s data center energy demand could triple to 30,000 megawatts by 2040 if infrastructure supports it. To meet rising needs, Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power are exploring modular nuclear reactors, wind, solar, and natural gas, the Virginia Mercury reported.

Fusion power offers a clean alternative, avoiding emissions tied to climate change. It combines hydrogen isotopes under extreme heat and pressure, using magnets to generate electricity via steam turbines, with helium as the only byproduct.

Dominion Energy Virginia President Edward H. Baine said: “Our customers’ growing needs for reliable, carbon-free power benefits from as diverse a menu of power generation options as possible, and in that spirit, we are delighted to assist CFS in their efforts.” 

The report says that CFS chose Chesterfield after a global search and will lease the site from Dominion Energy. Virginia secured the project with $2 million in state and county funding, a tax exemption for equipment, and federal DOE support. Gov. Youngkin estimates it will bring “billions” in development and “hundreds” of jobs.

CFS is building its SPARC demo plant in Massachusetts to pave the way for ARC technology in Chesterfield. Unlike laser-based fusion by California’s Lawrence Livermore Lab, CFS uses a tokamak, a donut-shaped device, to confine and fuse molecules.

Alex Creely, CFS director of tokamak operations, concluded: “One of the big advantages of fusion is that it doesn’t produce any long lived waste material, and there’s no risk of some kind of meltdown even. It’s a very safe energy source — something that you can live right next to and feel very comfortable with.”

Recall earlier this week we wrote that nuclear startup Oklo joined the long list of names signing deals with data centers for power heading into the next decade. 

Authored by former lead Senate investigator Paul D. Thacker via The Disinformation Chronicle,

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released their final report earlier this month, concluding that the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Tony Fauci funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where a lab accident likely started the initial outbreak.

Multiple U.S. agencies aided by virologist sought to cover-up this evidence, the Select Subcommittee charged, and several people broke the law by misleading congressional staff including Peter Daszak of EcoHealth, who funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab; NIH employee David Morens who served as Tony Fauci’s advisor; and former New York Governor Cuomo who lied about nursing home fatalities in his state.

The Select Subcommittee’s report will likely serve as roadmap for incoming Trump officials seeking to clean up federal research. However, Scripps researcher Kristian Andersen sought to invert the report’s findings, posting a series of false allegations about the report’s conclusions on Bluesky a social media app popular with Democrats fleeing X. Andersen was previously caught misleading Congress by myself and Ryan Grim at The Intercept, and his latest actions pile on the evidence that the Scripps scientist cannot tell the truth and lacks even a mob lawyer’s fleeting interest in candor.

Follow the Documents

Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, emerged as a controversial researcher early in the pandemic, and has been one of the most outspoken cheerleaders for the theory that pandemic started with a natural spillover from an animal to humans outside of a lab. But emails released a year after the pandemic’s beginning showed that Andersen initially thought the virus had been genetically engineered. However, after a phone call with Fauci and another major virology funder, Jeremy Farrar, then with the Wellcome Trust, Andersen reversed course.

Along with other virologists funded by Fauci and Farrar, Andersen then published a March 2020 Nature Medicine paper called “Proximal Origins” which concluded a Wuhan lab accident was not “plausible.” The Nature Medicine paper thus diverted any blame from Fauci for possibly starting the pandemic, as he was funding that same lab in Wuhan. Emails later showed that Fauci and Farrar helped guide the Nature Medicine piece to publication, a fact which Andersen continues to deny.

Emails and other private messages released in the summer of 2023 by Congress also indicated that Andersen’s co-authors on the Nature Medicine paper may have put politics before science.

“[G]iven the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to [a] natural process,” Andersen’s colleague, Dr. Andrew Rambaut, wrote to a group of virologists over Slack in February 2020.

“Yup, I totally agree that that’s a very reasonable conclusion. Although I hate when politics is injected into science – but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstances,” Andersen replied.

Andersen did not return a request to explain his false statements, nor provide an explanation for who paid his lawyer when he appeared before the Committee.

Follow My Lies on BlueSky

Continuing his political campaign to deny a possible lab accident, Andersen posted excerpts of the House final report on Bluesky. In particular, Andersen posted a screenshot of a memo found on page 20 of the Select Subcommittee report. “This memo proves that Dr. Fauci can’t possibly have orchestrated a cover-up,” Andersen wrote. Andersen then repeated the dishonest claim that the memo is proof that Fauci had no involvement in directing the Nature Medicine paper, despite emails to the contrary.

In a later Bluesky post, Andersen charges that these emails are “a conspiracy theory, to be clear.” But Andersen’s Bluesky posts omit one small detail about this memo found on page 20—the report’s next page, page 21.

On the following page of the report, investigators note that Andersen testified that Fauci had suggested that he write a peer-reviewed paper (this is the Nature Medicine, Proximal Origins paper) on the possibility of a lab accident at Wuhan. Page 21 also reveals that Andersen emailed to Nature that Fauci and others “prompted” the paper:

When Dr. Andersen presented a draft of Proximal Origin to Nature, he stated it was “prompted” by Dr. Fauci and later stated the goal of Proximal Origin was to “disprove the lab leak theory.”

Here’s the report’s page 21 that Andersen failed to post on Bluesky.

And here’s the email Andersen wrote to Nature Medicine, where he explained that the Nature Medicine Proximal Origins paper was “prompted by Jeremy Farrar, Tony Fauci, and Francis Collins.”

To be clear, nothing is stopping Andersen from lying to his followers on Bluesky. He can continue posting truncated portions of the report to falsely assert Fauci had no involvement in his Nature Medicine paper. Lying liars lie.

But Andersen also got caught lying to Congress, and that’s where he can run into legal peril. Unlike lying on Bluesky, lying liars can be prosecuted when they lie to Congress.

Will DOJ Prosecute Lying Liars?

To mediate the Select Subcommittee’s demand for answers and to protect him during a deposition and public hearing, Andersen hired criminal defense lawyer, John P. Rowley, a former federal prosecutor who defended Trump before the Department of Justice.

In testimony Andersen submitted for a July 2023 House hearing, he sought to dismiss the emails showing that NIH officials Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins helped to orchestrate his Nature Medicine Proximal Origins paper.

But after Nature Medicine accepted the paper in March 2020, Andersen sent Fauci and Collins the paper’s draft and a draft of the press release. Andersen then thanked them for “advice and leadership” on the matter. “Please let me know if you have any comments, suggestions, or questions about the paper or the press release,” Andersen wrote the two NIH officials who funded his research.

“Nice job on the paper,” Fauci replied.

But in his July 2023 testimony, Andersen alleged that Fauci had not provided “advice and leadership” on the paper. Instead, Andersend proclaimed some monumental difference between asking someone to comment or offer suggestions about a paper instead of on a paper.

“Note, that I say ‘about the paper’, not e.g., ‘on the paper,’” Andersen testified.

Andersen sought to clarify later in his testimony, “Sending a copy of a paper that has been accepted and is in ‘proof’ (i.e., at a stage where only changes directly requested by the journal can be introduced) is simply a professional courtesy.”

Emails impeach this portion of Andersen’s testimony, as Fauci was provided multiple drafts of the paper. A month before Andersen emailed Fauci and Collins the “proof” of the paper in March 2020, Jeremy Farrar forwarded Fauci a “rough first draft” from Andersen’s co-author Edward “Eddie” Holmes.

“Please treat in confidence—a very rough first draft from Eddie and team—they will send on the edited, cleaner version later,” Farrar emailed Fauci and Collins. The following day, Farrar emailed Fauci and Collins, “Tony and Francis, The revised draft from Eddie, copied here.”

Much of the structure and footnotes are the same of this “rough first draft” and some phrases appear verbatim in the article Nature Medicine later published. Here are a few passages for comparison.

If this is not enough, one more bit to chew on. Andersen stated in his July 2023 testimony that Fauci had received the final “proof” of the article as “simply a professional courtesy.” But we know this is not true. Some months after Andersen’s congressional testimony Fauci testified that he had been sent multiple drafts.

Here’s Fauci discussing Andersen’s Nature Medicine paper starting on day 2, page 71 of his sworn deposition:

Q As the minority said, we’ve talked to all the U.S.-based authors or those who are acknowledged on that paper, so I won’t go through all of the science in it, except for I want — you were sent drafts periodically?

A Right.

Q A couple. I think it was less than 10, more than 5, drafts —

A Right.

Fauci’s January 2024 deposition impeaches Andersen’s July 2023 statement before Congress.

But it doesn’t end there. After Andersen was caught lying in his July 2023 congressional testimony, The Intercept published an expose a few days after, noting Andersen had also lied to Congress about his NIH funding from Fauci.

During the 2023 hearing, The Intercept discovered, Andersen sought to distract Members of Congress about a serious conflict of interest. While writing the Nature Medicine paper, whose conclusions diverted any blame from Fauci for funding research in the Wuhan lab, Andersen was awaiting Fauci’s approval for a major grant.

Here’s The Intercept:

Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research, who testified at the hearing along with Bob Garry of Tulane University, preempted the charge in his opening statement, telling the committee he had no live fundraising requests before Fauci’s agency at the time of the call. “There is no connection between the grant and the conclusions we reached about the origins of the pandemic. We applied for this grant in June 2019, and it was scored and reviewed by independent experts in November 2019,” Andersen testified. “Based on the actual timeline of this grant, it is not possible that the merit-based federal grant awarding process was influenced by a call in February, 2020.”

But Andersen’s testimony was false, The Intercept reported. While Andersen’s grant had been reviewed, it was still waiting for Fauci’s final approval and signature.

The grant wasn’t finalized until May 21, 2020. In other words, it was on Fauci’s desk at the time of the conference call. Andersen’s lab announced the funding in a press release in August 2020, nine months after he claimed it was already finalized. The press release describes it as a “new $8.9 million grant.”

In case you’re still not certain if Andersen is a liar, The Intercept posted a screenshot of Andersen’s grant, showing that Fauci had given final approval on May 21, 2020.

Congress is far from finished with addressing all the problems that happened during the pandemic. Just last week, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs (HSGAC) sent letters to a dozen federal agencies, demanding they preserve documents pertaining to Covid’s origins.

More to come…

Subscribe to The Disinformation Chronicle here…

Now with just weeks to go before the Trump administration takes over the White House, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has issued some interesting and surprising admissions. He told an audience of the Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday that Biden’s policy on Iran hasn’t been more muscular because Washington’s regime change efforts in the region over the past two decades have basically been failures. 

It’s rare for a top official who is still in office to so bluntly describe that regime change efforts have been doomed. Blinken had been asked specifically of the US supporting Iranian opposition groups to overthrow the government in Tehran.

“I think if we look at the last 20 years, our experiments in regime change have not exactly been resounding successes,” he responded. “So, I think we have to have an appropriate degree of humility in focusing in that way on a problem.”

He also said at one point, “There’s no doubt this has not been a good year for Iran, and we’re seeing that play out every single day.” 

He laid out that Iranian leaders now have to make “fundamental” choices:

“One choice it could make and should make is to focus on itself and focus on trying to build a better, more successful country that delivers for its people … and to stop getting involved in these adventures or misadventures throughout the region.”

Foreign media seized on the comments, particularly state media in Russia and China. For example, Russia’s RT ran a headline which somewhat stretched Blinken’s words to say “US admits attempts at regime-change in Iran.”

“US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has publicly admitted that over the past two decades Washington has conducted experiments seeking regime change in Iran,” the RT report said. “Efforts to topple the Islamic Republic’s leadership, however, have failed, he admitted.”

And China’s Xinhua had this headline: “Blinken admits failure of decades-long U.S. effort seeking regime change in Iran.”

The Chinese state media report also reads a lot into Blinken’s words, claiming that he “publicly admitted Wednesday that his country’s efforts spanning the last 20 years to seek regime change in Iran did not yield much success.”

While it’s clear that countries from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Syria were all targeted for regime change in the last twenty years, it’s uncertain whether Washington ever made a decision to focus efforts on overthrowing the leadership of the Islamic Republic. Certainly, however, there have been efforts to weaken and degrade the country, including Trump’s 2020 assassination by drone strike of IRGC Quds Force General Qasem Soleimani.

Blinken also had some interesting words on Iran’s nuclear program, saying that it is “not inevitable” that Iran will purse and achieve a bomb. “This is something that may be more a question now because they’ve lost different tools. They’ve lost different lines of defense,” he said.

“Sure, you’re going to see more thinking about that, but the costs and consequences for them for pursuing that route, I think, would be severe,” he added.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

Incoming border czar Tom Homan estimates that at least 100,000 beds for illegal immigrants in detention will be needed for the Trump administration to carry out its deportation plans.

President-elect Donald Trump has promised mass deportations, and he tapped Homan, the former acting head of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to lead the operation.

ICE is currently holding about 38,700 illegal immigrants, according to agency data. An additional nearly 185,000 are being monitored by cellphone or ankle bracelet at a cost of $232,800 per day, ICE data show.

Homan told CNN on Dec. 18 that the operation will involve building new detention facilities and that officials will be seeking to hire more ICE agents.

“It all depends on the funding I get from the Hill,” Homan said, referring to lawmakers in Congress.

Both congressional chambers will be controlled by Republicans come January 2025. Republicans currently control the House of Representatives, but not the Senate.

Homan also said that he will request assistance from the military.

“They’re not going to be out arresting people, but they can be a force multiplier in doing things we need to do that doesn’t require a badge and a gun,” he said.

The first wave of arrests, at least, will target illegal immigrants with a criminal history and those deemed national security threats. But when officials in so-called sanctuary cities decline to allow ICE to take custody of criminals from jails and courts, ICE agents will go into neighborhoods to track them down. That will result in collateral arrests, Homan said this week.

Homan said on CNN that “immigration officers aren’t going to be told to walk away from somebody here illegally.” He also said that illegal immigrants whose children were born in the United States and thus have citizenship, will not be shielded from enforcement operations.

“They put themselves in this position. We didn’t,” he said.

He said that the children can go live with the other parent or a relative.

Some lawmakers and groups have praised Trump’s mass deportation plans.

“Deportations are a critical step in delivering on that promise, restoring the rule of law, and protecting American communities across the country,” the Federation for American Immigration Reform said in a recent article.

Others say that deportations will cause harm.

“Trump’s plans for mass deportation will tear families apart, raid homes, and harm our communities,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) wrote on Wednesday on the social media platform X.

“We need to resist his hateful agenda and fight back to protect our immigrant neighbors because immigrants make our communities stronger.”

The first Trump administration carried out about 1.2 million deportations over four years. During President Joe Biden’s first two years in office, deportations plunged to about 65,000 a year, though they jumped to 253,488 in fiscal year 2024, which ended in September.

This week California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) declared a state of emergency over avian influenza, aka Bird Flu.

And while Newsom says the order was simply a precaution after one person in Louisiana was hospitalized with the first severe illness caused by the bird flu in the United States, one has to wonder – WTF…

“This proclamation is a targeted action to ensure government agencies have the resources and flexibility they need to respond quickly to this outbreak,” Newsom said in a Wednesday statement.

According to the governor’s office, Bird flu has been found in dairy cows in Southern California – therefore, the emergency is needed to “contain and mitigate the spread of the virus” despite the fact that there have been no reported cases of person-to-person transmission in the state.

What makes this extra-interesting is a tidbit at the end of the new documentary, Thank You Dr. Fauci – notably an infamous op-ed penned by Fauci and his former ‘boss’, NIH head Dr. Francis Collins, in which they suggested that their dangerous research was a “risk worth taking.”

Fauci and Collins penned infamous op-ed for @washingtonpost claiming this dangerous research could cause a pandemic but it was a “Flu Risk Worth Taking” See past 🧵from @Bryce_Nickels https://t.co/rq4tfVzQXP and continue this 🧵 for more…

— Thank You Dr Fauci (@ThankYouDrFauci) December 19, 2024

Click into the tweets to read the rest of the thread…

Which brings us back to California – where the new emergency declaration will empower state and local agencies with additional funding and flexibility in dealing with the virus, that nobody in the state has caught… yet.

As the Epoch Times notes further, While not linked to human bird flu cases, a raw milk dairy based in California issued a voluntary recall several weeks ago after avian influenza was found in a lot.

All of the illnesses in the United States, except for the Louisiana case, have been mild, and the vast majority have been among farmworkers exposed to sick poultry or dairy cows. This year, more than 60 bird flu infections have been reported, with more than half of them in California, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In the Louisiana case, the infected person is older than 65, has underlying medical problems, and has also been in contact with sick and dead birds in a backyard flock, according to the CDC.

Last month, Canadian officials reported that a teen in British Columbia was hospitalized with a severe case of bird flu. CDC officials did not answer a question about whether the new U.S. case and the case in Canada had any similarities or differences, directing reporters to ask Louisiana officials.

Health officials say bird flu is still mainly an animal health issue and that the risk to the general public remains low. There has been no documented spread of the virus from person to person in the United States or elsewhere.

Update (1752ET): In what comes as a surprise to nobody, Democrats want their pork – and have said “Hell no” to the massively reduced spending package that Mike Johnson rolled out after conferring with the Trump team.

“The Musk-Johnson proposal is not serious. It’s laughable. Extreme MAGA Republicans are driving us to a government shutdown,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters as he walked into a closed-door caucus meeting Thursday afternoon.

In short, it’s doomed.

“I’m not simply a no. I’m a hell no,” Jeffries then said at the closed-door meeting, Politico reports, citing three people familiar with the meeting.

More via Politico:

Other Democratic lawmakers also expressed doubts about the legislation, which Republican leaders were teeing up for a vote Thursday evening. It would suspend the debt ceiling through early 2027, fund the government through March, and include billions in disaster relief funds, a top Democratic priority.

The vote on the bill is scheduled to come up via a process called suspension, which means it needs to meet a two-thirds vote threshold to pass. If Democrats are roundly against it, it will fail on the floor — leaving Congress without an obvious solution to avoid a shutdown.

“This was done on short notice,” said Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, who said he was opposed. “We reached an agreement on a bipartisan basis between the respective leadership and the membership of both parties, only to have an interruption take place and then a veto occurs after the agreement has been rendered and reached.”

President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk worked to spike the original deal on Wednesday, sending the House careening down an alternate path with a deadline looming.

“Elon Musk is not my constituent. My constituents are hard-working people who work very hard every day for every dime they have, and I’m sure as hell not bailing out on them in the final week,” said Rep. Ann McLane Kuster (D-N.H.), chair of the centrist New Democrat Coalition.

Top Democrats weren’t involved in the drafting of the legislation, and the unveiling caught senior lawmakers by surprise.

“All I know is it was just reported by the press. We have not been involved in anything that they have done,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Appropriations Committee Democrat.

Republicans argue the burden is now on Democrats to justify any opposition to a continuing resolution — “CR” for short — that averts a government shutdown and also prevents the U.S. from defaulting on its more than $36 trillion in debt next year.

*  *  *

Update (1350ET): Republican lawmakers have reportedly struck a new spending deal to keep the lights on in Washington until at least Jan. 30, 2027, according to Politico, citing two GOP lawmakers meeting in Speaker Mike Johnson’s office Thursday afternoon.

“There is an agreement,” said Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-OK). “The plan is to put a bill on the floor that we think is a reasonable step forward.”

🚨 BREAKING: SPENDING DEAL RELEASED

It moves the debt ceiling out to Jan. 30, 2027. pic.twitter.com/gYjbSzfoTm

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) December 19, 2024

The new package is just 116 pages, down from 1,547 in the original draft.

Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), who was also in Johnson’s office, didn’t say whether congressional Democrats or the White House had agreed to it, however Bloomberg reports that it has Trump’s blessing.

Late Wednesday afternoon, President-elect Trump demanded Johnson abandon the previous revision he’d worked out with Democratic congressional leaders.

Meanwhile, Trump is now gunning for… Chip Roy?

*  *  *

‘With Friday’s government shutdown looming – and odds spiking after everyone figured out that the 1,547-page Continuing Resolution (CR) was full of Orwellian bullshit and other malarkey, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has gone to Donald Trumps team with hat in hand.

The new plan will be a federal funding stopgap plan that includes disaster aid, pushing off the debt limit fight for two years, and a one-year farm bill extension, Politico reports, citing Republicans familiar with the discussions.

No word on how close this comes to a “clean” bill, or how much of the aforementioned bullshit is gone – such as funding the Global Engagement Center, shielding the Jan. 6 committee from subpoenas, and funding new biolabs, but we guess we’ll find out.

Also unknown is whether Democrats will support the plan.

But Trump had made an 11th hour public demand that any stopgap bill should deal with the debt limit. Trump’s team is pushing for at least a commitment to lift the debt limit before Jan. 20.

The level of disaster aid and whether it’s completely paid for is still unclear. The package would also likely include some additional economic aid for farmers, amid threats from rural Republicans to oppose any stopgap that doesn’t include the funding. -Politico

In a closed door meeting on Thursday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told Democratic lawmakers: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate,” citing JFK.

Polymarkets odds of a government shutdown went from 15% yesterday to 49% this morning.

According to Punchbowl News, here’s what happened, and what’s next;

At some point today, House Republicans and Democrats will likely have separate party meetings to chart their path forward. Democrats have announced their meeting for 9 a.m. We’ll talk more about them below.

But make no mistake — this is Johnson and Trump’s mess to solve. And we’re inching toward a shutdown as government funding runs out at midnight Friday.

Johnson was mostly MIA Wednesday, holed up in his Capitol office for hours without showing his face. Even the House GOP leadership team felt like they were being kept in the dark about what was happening.

Late in the evening, Johnson met with Vance, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) and Rules Committee Chair Michael Burgess (R-Texas). Jordan and Roy are conservative hardliners. Diaz-Balart is a senior appropriator.

As Scalise left around 10 p.m., he told reporters “We’re not there yet” when asked whether the debt-limit boost would be part of any new government-funding plan. “A lot of things have come up,” Scalise added.

A somewhat obvious play may be a funding bill with a two-year debt-limit extension. Why? Because Trump supports increasing the debt limit now. Given how volatile Trump was during his first term, there’s no guarantee he’ll do this again. (For what it’s worth, Biden administration officials estimate the debt limit won’t be reached until sometime next summer. GOP leaders were planning to handle it in a reconciliation bill).

Trump is giving Johnson cover for the time being. It’s limited, however. Because Trump, once again, has put his party in a bind. There are probably dozens of Republicans who have never voted for raising the debt ceiling. Now Trump is forcing them to do so.

Check back for updates.

Authored by Connor O’Keefe via The Mises Institute,

In the years leading up to the 2024 presidential election, the Democrats and establishment Republicans who wanted to see Joe Biden, and later Kamala Harris, remain in office went all in on one overarching narrative above all: that Donald Trump represented an existential threat to American democracy.

Biden’s team and their allies in politics and media repeated this claim day after day, essentially trying to convince millions of Americans that elections would literally stop happening in this country if Trump won.

Taking a step back, Trump was framed as the domestic enemy in a broader international fight that saw “autocratic” leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and others facing down a coalition of “democratic” governments.

Democracy versus autocracy was meant to be the defining dynamic of the day. Meaning everything from the war in Ukraine to the fight over climate change was framed as one big battle where the “good guys” were defined purely by their commitment to the democratic process.

And, in that global fight, no effort was more important—we were told—than keeping Trump out of the White House.

But then he won.

Despite the establishment’s efforts, a majority of American voters were not swayed by the “democracy-versus-autocracy” narrative. Or, at least, they demonstrated that they preferred the candidate who promised to close the border, wind down the war in Ukraine, cut down the extremely bloated federal bureaucracy, investigate the weaponization of the DOJ in recent years, and roll back federal climate policies while celebrating and vowing to continue the appointment of conservative judges and justices—among other campaign promises.

Now, President Biden – and, really, all the people around him who are actually running things – are in their so-called lame-duck period. And what are they doing as they wait to hand power over to the next administration? They’re doing whatever they can to make it harder for Trump’s team to implement the very policies voters just sent them to the White House to carry out.

Last week, we learned that the Biden administration is moving unassembled border wall material away from the southern border and selling it at an auction. Groups allied with the president are also calling on him to close immigration and customs enforcement detention facilities before leaving office to hamper Trump’s plans to deport illegal immigrants.

After losing the election last month, the Biden administration escalated the war in Ukraine by helping Ukrainian forces shoot long-range American missiles further into Russia. Now, the president’s team is rushing to send another $725 million to Ukraine before Trump is sworn in on January 20.

Earlier this year, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued a ruling that makes it much harder for Trump’s team to overhaul the federal workforce. While Trump could still carry out this campaign promise, he now cannot do so through executive order. He is required to propose a new rule, which will likely bring years of legal battles.

Biden pardoned his son Hunter after he was facing prison sentences for federal felony gun and tax convictions. Now, the president is reportedly considering “preemptive pardons” for numerous allies that his team expects to be investigated by Trump’s DOJ.

Members of the president’s cabinet are rushing to spend as much money as possible in the various departments they oversee, EPA officials are hurrying to implement as many new environmental and climate policies as they can, and the president and Senate Democrats are racing to fill as many federal judicial positions as they’re able to before losing the White House and Senate.

Depending on where you stand on Trump’s agenda, you could see these efforts as heroic or disgraceful. But because the president and political establishment are ramming through policies that a majority of Americans just voted against, it’s impossible to seriously label these actions as anything other than explicitly undemocratic.

As someone who does not believe democracy is an ethical system or the best way to organize society, this alone does not bother me. But the hypocrisy is still important to call out.

Because, with their actions, the political class has again revealed that they do not actually care about democracy. They only use the fact that much of the public does care about democracy to try and serve their own ends.

The same goes for human rights abuses and crackdowns on dissent carried out by foreign governments that Washington wants to overthrow. When true, these are totally legitimate criticisms to level at these state leaders. But our government officials have demonstrated a complete willingness to ignore, support, and even partake in the same abuses when it’s useful to them. So, again, they are only using the fact that decent people care about these issues to serve their own agenda.

It is important to have principles. But it’s also important to recognize when people who do not share your principles are using your commitment to those principles to manipulate you. The political establishment in recent weeks has shown, yet again, that they do this. It’s time we stop falling for it.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is facing a mounting political crisis within his own Liberal Party, with an increasing number of party members voicing their desire for his resignation ahead of the scheduled 2025 election. This internal discontent has gained momentum after the shock resignation of Chrystia Freeland, Trudeau’s finance minister and a key ally.

Jenica Atwin, a Liberal parliamentary secretary from New Brunswick, openly stated that Trudeau should step down, and says she won’t run for reelection if Trudeau remains in leadership. Atwin’s call was echoed by Chad Collins, a Liberal MP from Ontario, who revealed that around 50 Liberal MPs are part of a faction pushing for Trudeau’s resignation. This represents about one-third of the Liberal representatives in the House of Commons.

“I don’t know who’s giving him advice. I can guess. It’s not good advice,” Collins said. “But the buck stops with him with the decisions he makes, and we’re now seeing the fallout that’s come with what many would consider a very poor decision.”

Monday’s resignation of Chrystia Freeland, Trudeau’s powerful finance minister and his longtime deputy, was a massive shock that has irreparably damaged the prime minister, Collins said in an interview.

Freeland said she quit after being told she would be moved to a different role in the cabinet. Trudeau delivered that news on Friday, she said — just three days before she was due for a major speech that would update the country on its fiscal and economic situation. -Bloomberg

“In terms of who the successor is, I don’t know at this point whether or not we could do much worse,” Collins continued.

Meanwhile, Trudeau has canceled his customary year-end media appearances, only making limited public comments at Liberal Party events. And at a recent press conference, Justice Minister Arif Virani avoided direct questions about Trudeau’s leadership, instead focusing on his role and expressing confidence in the prime minister.

“Decisions will be taken by the parties that are involved,” said Virani, trying to bring the discussion back to an announcement about wrongful convictions. “I have absolute confidence in the prime minister in terms of what he has asked me to do. That is serve as a minister of justice who defends people’s rights.”

According to polling data, Canada’s Conservative Party, under the leadership of Pierre Poilievre, is likely to secure a majority in the next general election. Wayne Long, another Liberal MP from New Brunswick, stressed the urgency of the situation in an open letter, suggesting that the party must act to prevent a historic electoral defeat.

Collins warned that continued support for Trudeau might lead to a significant exodus of experienced politicians from the party, potentially leaving it with a “skeleton crew” of seasoned representatives.