Move aside 8

Follow-up to these posts

Welcome to the week of celebrating Independence Day (4th of July). We start with an excellent ruling coming down last week from the Supreme Court: 

Parents are the authority in choosing what is best for their children. Schools cannot take that authority away from them. 

In a post from 2022, I reported that Muslim, Jewish and Christian parents tried to "opt out" their kids from classes promoting LGBTQ. School administrators would not cooperate, saying that parents have no right to "opt out" their kids. The Supreme Court decided with the parents that they do have that right. 

Many schools are trying to subvert the choices of parents, trying to get parents to "move aside" and let them take control (image generated by Grok). With this SC decision, that will end -- or should. When school teachers or administrators in the future try to re-assert dominance, a lawful judge will have to decide with the parents.

Europe≠USA 3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Vice President J. D. Vance's  address to the Munich Security Conference about "our shared values" is worth taking a closer look.

It starts out with a foundational principle of democracy. Including himself among the audience members who have a position in government, he says "Now it's time for all of us (who have been fortunate enough to be given political power by our respective peoples) to use it wisely to improve their lives."

America's Declaration of Independence states the principle: government gets its just (fair and right) powers from the consent of the citizens who are governed. 

Then VP Vance tells them that Americans are shocked when they hear that the Romanian election was "annulled," that Germany was also threatened with the same thing if things don't go "correctly." He reminds them that tyrannical forces in Europe once "censored dissidents, closed churches, cancelled elections" . . and they were not the good guys.

NPR & PBS 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Public radio/TV must be non-partisan to qualify for government funds. So the question is, are we sure that the Corp. for Public Broadcasting (NPR & PBS) is biased in favor of the left? The NPR head testified before Congress on this question (photo).

 

You may remember that a veteran of NPR (25 years) became a whistleblower, even though he leaned left himself. In his article for The Free Press, he details several major stories in which NPR intentionally took the side of the progressive left without giving the opposing views any consideration.

Research shows that far more interviews and guests are from the left. In a four-month period, the non-left political party was referred to as "far right" or "hard right" extremists. No such terms were applied to the progressive left.

As one journalist used to say, "There's no such thing as neutrality in journalism. There's only transparency." 

NPR & PBS should transparently admit they are not neutral. They can continue their progressive leftist slant, but should give up demanding that taxpayers foot the bill.

 from "NPR and PBS Dug Their Own Graves"

DOGE discovers 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post) 

Embedded and hidden corruption discovered by the DOGE team continues from yesterday's video of their staff meeting.

At the "U.S. Institute of Peace" they found a contract (for unknown services) with an ex-Taliban for $130k, and found loaded firearms as well. 

 

Their chief accountant had deleted over a terabyte of accounting records, financial data which the team was able to recover. Since hiding or destroying records is illegal, this coverup was referred to the DOJ and FBI.

The agency had received $55 million/year from congress. Any unspent funds were swept into a private bank account having no congressional oversight, which funded events and private jets.

Asked whether DOGE would be ongoing, Elon answered: "If we drop the ball, fraud and waste will come roaring back." But by ending contracts and fraudulent practices now, it will be harder to get it going again in the future.

DOGE discovers

DOGE leader Elon Musk gets some staff together once a week at 10 p.m. They each answer the question, "what did you get done this week?" A media guy got to sit in on one of these meetings and discovered more absurdities that our taxes have been paying for:

• Investigation found that a $4 billion covid fund was used to rent stadiums for parties, with no explanation. Correction: now any drawdown must be identified as to purpose and receipts must be uploaded.
• Alpaca farming in Peru
• Marketing of peas in Guatamala
• GAO also found that only 10-15% of the money for these causes was actually getting to the stated destination. 
• So it's possible that "no one got a sex change in Guatemala" (a worthless expense discovered months ago)
• Grants may go to a cause that sounds good theoretically, like "save the baby pandas," but no evidence is forthcoming that any panda was actually saved. 

DOGE backlash 1

Americans were strongly in favor of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) earlier this year, of course. We don't want to pay for fraud, waste and abuse of this country's financial resources. It's been going on for decades and it's tough to rein in.

Now surveys seem to indicate more people disapprove. What happened? In addition to single "keying" events of random Teslas, there have been fire-bombings and protests (photo) of Tesla facilities. It's a way to sour public opinion and reduce Tesla's value, thereby inflicting pain on Elon Musk.

These events weren't spontaneous outbursts of outraged citizens. A few may have been inspired just by press reports ramping up fear, but there's also sophisticated organization. 

The nationwide protests were all posted and scheduled by Action Network. They originally identified The Disruption Project as the host or co-sponsor, which was founded by an experienced left-wing activist.

from City Journal

DOGE news

Here's some items from the list of DOGE savings that I took right off their website:

• "The @USGSA IT team just saved $1M per year by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70 yr old technology for information storage) to permanent modern digital records."

• "VA was previously paying ~$380,000/month for minor website modifications. That contract has not been renewed and the same work is now being executed by 1 internal VA software engineer spending ~10 hours/week."

•  "$265K for Queens College in New York to research “why BIPOC teens” read Japanese comic books"

• "Since January 20th, @USGSA has been working to right size the federal real estate portfolio, which is liable for more than $20+ billion in deferred maintenance. So far, the team has sold 13 buildings and listed an additional 68 (8.3M square feet)."

The problem with government buildings has been known for a long time, and it's not disputed. Last week at a subcommittee hearing, the chairwoman said "Here in DC, GAO found in 2023 that the vast majority of federal agency headquarters buildings were less than 25% occupied—some much less."

It's not a partisan issue, and everybody should be able to support cleaning up our expensive and under-used properties.