Here We Go: Trump Admin Considering Criminal Referrals For USAID

I was wondering if this was going to happen, because USAID and their employees, along with so many federal agencies, plays fast and loose with taxpayer money

Trump administration considering criminal referrals in USAID fight

The Trump administration is signaling it may bring criminal referrals against employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) or grantee recipients over allegations of misuse of foreign assistance, which would mark an extraordinary next step in the administration’s push to gut the agency.

Peter Marocco, who is serving as acting deputy administrator for USAID, told lawmakers in a closed-door briefing Wednesday that he and his staff are looking at making criminal referrals to the Department of Justice, according to two people familiar with the conversations.

It’s unclear if Marocco will follow through on the threat, said one person who was in the room during the briefing, but they saw it as a significant signal, coming up in a meeting with members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

A January memo from the USAID Office of Inspector General (OIG) laid out resistance from some aid grantees over sharing information that officials say is needed for oversight and accountability. The OIG memo highlighted $8 billion that was primarily distributed to United Nations agencies and multilateral development banks which they criticized as being shielded from scrutiny.

This is government money. Taxpayer money. This is not a case “you do not have to prove you didn’t do anything wrong.” It’s a case of “you took the money, you need to show accountability with it. What did you do with it? Was it used for the intended purpose? How much was skimmed off the top? Did the project come to fruition?”

Criminal referrals would further escalate tensions between the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department Of Government Efficiency team on one side, and government employees, foreign aid recipients and Democrats on the other. Some Republicans have privately advocated for certain programs and spending priorities behind the scenes.

Yeah, well, if they weren’t doing, let’s say generously, stupid things with the money, they would have nothing to worry about, right?

What criminal referrals would do would be to put every federal employee and every monetary recipient on notice that Bad Conduct will not be tolerated, and everything best be on the up and up, because you might not be caught for past or future Bad Behavior, but, you might! And you might well be looking at felony charges and a nice jail stay.

Democrats complained the briefing occurred behind closed doors and not publicly, lasted only one hour and permitted each lawmaker 30 seconds to ask questions, with few if any follow-ups allowed. Marocco was given two minutes to answer each question.

Perhaps the FBI should be looking at if those Democrats are getting money from these projects. Anyhow, if Democrats want to keep protecting the Bad Behavior from federal employees and the groups they give money to, keep at it!

Read: Here We Go: Trump Admin Considering Criminal Referrals For USAID »

Climate Tears: Trump’s EPA Nominee Pushes Adaption, Not Mitigation

Adaption is all about government controlling the lives of the peasants, while the people forcing this down the throats of the peasants refuse to make changes in their own lives

EPA nominee says US should adapt to, not mitigate, climate change

President Trump’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) office in charge of climate change and air pollution said Wednesday that the U.S. should “adapt to” rather than try to minimize climate change.

Aaron Szabo’s comment came during questions from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday.

“What are key climate tipping points that you would watch in your position to try to avoid?” Whitehouse asked.

“I believe that the climate is changing. I believe that it is important for us to adapt to any change, including those that occur with respect to climate,” said Szabo, who, if confirmed, will lead the EPA’s Air and Radiation office.

“Not to mitigate to prevent it, just to adapt to it?” Whitehouse asked.

“I’m currently — and if confirmed and — bound by the laws that Congress has established,” Szabo replied.

Szabo continued on when he asked Whitehouse how he’s mitigated it in his own life. If he’s replaced his fossil fueled vehicles with an EV. If he takes the train to D.C. instead of flying. If he takes the D.C. metro or the bus. Stopped eating meat……oh, wait, that’s just what I would say, but, as long as I’ve watched politics, I still do not speak diplomatically. Seeing Sheldon’s face go beat red would be worth it.

The phrase “climate adaptation” typically refers to actions that stem the impacts, but not the causes of climate change, such as building infrastructure to withstand flooding or other climate-change-related extreme weather. Scientists have expressed that both adaptation and a reduction in planet-warming emissions need to occur in order to prevent the worst impacts.

Even adaptation can cause too much Big Government, but, it’s a damned sight better. Because regardless of causation, it never hurts to do things to reduce how the slightly increased temperatures of the Modern Warm Period are felt. Especially when we are talking about land use and the Urban Heat Island effect.

Read: Climate Tears: Trump’s EPA Nominee Pushes Adaption, Not Mitigation »

If All You See…

…is a field that is perfect for a solar farm, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is 357 Magnum, with a post on health care become a government bureaucracy.

Read: If All You See… »

NY Times Says That Trump Was Right, Biden Was Wrong On The Border

Well, obviously, the NY Times won’t actually say that Trump was right and Biden was wrong, or that Democrats were full of bat guano when they said the only way to secure the border was the terrible “bipartisan” bill

On Mexico’s Once-Packed Border, Few Migrants Remain

On the eve of President Trump’s deadline to impose tariffs on Mexico, one thing is hard to miss on the Mexican side of the border: The migrants are gone.

In what were once some of the busiest sections along the border — Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana, Matamoros — shelters that used to overflow now hold just a few families. The parks, hotels and vacant buildings that once teemed with people from all over the world stand empty.

And on the border itself, where migrants once slept in camps within feet of the 30-foot wall, only dust-caked clothes and shoes, rolled-up toothpaste tubes and water bottles remain.

“All that is over,” said the Rev. William Morton, a missionary at a Ciudad Juárez cathedral that serves migrants free meals. “Nobody can cross.”

Last week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, announced that Customs and Border Protection had apprehended only 200 people at the southern border the Saturday before — the lowest single-day number in over 15 years.

Mr. Trump has credited his crackdown on illegal immigration for the plunging numbers, even as he has also announced he will send thousands more combat forces to the border to stop what he calls an invasion.

Why couldn’t Biden have done all this?

But according to analysts, Mexico’s own moves to restrict migration in the last year — not just at the border but throughout the country — have yielded undeniable results. In February, the Trump administration said it would pause for a month the imposition of 25-percent tariffs on Mexican exports, challenging the government to further reduce migration and the flow of fentanyl across the border.

Yes, and they did this because of Trump’s policies. Obviously, the Times wants to give Mexico credit. And to Biden, after he implemented measures in order to look tough and that he was Doing Something as election season was hitting. It’s a long, long piece, and they work hard to not give Trump credit and call him mean, all while

I mentioned this a week or so ago, and, now we have the final numbers. Can you imagine how bad 2024 would have been if Biden hadn’t played some games?

Read: NY Times Says That Trump Was Right, Biden Was Wrong On The Border »

Good News: Antarctic Circumpolar Current Is Doomed Within 20 Years

Remember how they were saying that the Atlantic Current was doomed, and then not doomed? I guess they moved their scaremongering to the Antarctic

Earth’s Strongest Ocean Current Could Slow 20 Percent by 2050 Because of Climate Change, Study Finds

Five times stronger than the Gulf Stream and more than 100 times stronger than the Amazon River, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) is the most powerful ocean current on Earth. As it flows around Antarctica, it connects the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans and distributes nutrients around the world.

In short, the ACC is a complex marine “conveyor belt” involved in everything from absorbing heat and atmospheric carbon dioxide into the oceans to guarding against invasive marine species—but because of climate change, scientists now say it might slow down by as much as 20 percent by 2050.

“Might”? I thought this was supposed to be a scientific study, not reading a crystal ball.

Researchers used a climate simulator on Australia’s fastest supercomputer to model changes in the ACC given the projected ice melting and ocean warming under different carbon emission scenarios, as detailed in a new study published Monday in the journal Environmental Research Letters. While natural phenomena also release the planet-warming gas, humans have increased atmospheric carbon dioxide by 50 percent in less than two centuries due to burning fossil fuels, according to NASA.

And there we go, a computer model. So, this is all shite.

“The ocean is extremely complex and finely balanced. If this current ‘engine’ breaks down, there could be severe consequences, including more climate variability, with greater extremes in certain regions and accelerated global warming due to a reduction in the ocean’s capacity to act as a carbon sink,” Gayen says in the statement.

Yes, it is complex, and things are always changing on planet Earth. Climate cultists think things are always supposed to stay the same.

Read: Good News: Antarctic Circumpolar Current Is Doomed Within 20 Years »

Democrats Want To Probe Musk And DOGE

They’re still working on dying on the hill of protecting bloated, incompetent, wasteful government

Democrats seek to probe Musk conflicts and DOGE firings with resolutions of inquiry in the House

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee are introducing a pair of resolutions demanding the Trump administration turn over documents and information about billionaire adviser Elon Musk’s potential conflicts of interest and the firings of federal workers, The Associated Press has learned.

It’s the most aggressive move yet by Democrats trying to confront President Donald Trump’s actions. The top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Gerald Connolly of Virginia, and Rep. Rep. Kweisi Mfume of Maryland are leading the effort as the party mounts a resistance against the Trump-Musk dismantling of government.

The resolutions of inquiry would launch investigations into Trump’s Republican administration and Musk through the Oversight panel. If the Republican-led committee fails to act, which is likely, the Democrats could push the resolutions to a House floor vote in a matter of weeks.

These are votes that the Republicans should allow, because, they will fail, and they will highlight Democrats as being the party of Big Government.

“President Trump, Elon Musk, and the DOGE team have been on a rampage to purge the government of non-partisan public servants and install political loyalists willing to turn a blind eye to corruption and grift,” said a fact-sheet accompanying the resolution from Mfume, the ranking Democrat on the panel’s subcommittee on Government Operations, probing the firing of federal workers.

They’re not so much installing loyalists (um, hey, Politics 101? Obama and Biden sure fired a lot of high end people and replaced them with loyalists) as just firing deadwood. Just wait till we get to the point where there are criminal investigations into defrauding the federal government.

The resolution seeking information about the firing of federal workers would require the administration to provide documents, meeting notes, phone, mail and text records, and other information regarding:

“Each Federal employee placed on administrative leave, removed due to a reduction in force action, terminated, transferred, or reassigned to another department on orders, advice, or recommendation of Elon Musk, any individual considered to be a member of a DOGE agency team, or any official or unofficial member of the United States DOGE Service.”

Say, wouldn’t that violate federal privacy laws for those terminated employees? These Democrat politicians are concerned about worker cut-backs and losing allies in the Perpetual, and unaccountable, Bureaucracy. But, their concerns are not over excessive government waste or patronage jobs, distributed like parade candy. Sending taxpayer money overseas for idiotic things while Americans are suffering. Or how a fraction of the money makes it for the stated purpose, instead, getting pocketed as it passes through the hands of all the NGOs and private groups.

Read: Democrats Want To Probe Musk And DOGE »

Your Fault: Warming Brings Heavy Snow To Greenland Or Something

I mean, really, seriously, these people are just full on cultists. They came up with a doomsday talking point years back to incorporate winter weather, cold snaps, etc, into their cult beliefs, and keep building on them

Warming Brings Heavy Snowfall to Greenland, Replenishing Some Lost Ice

A single storm in 2022 dumped enough snow on Greenland to replace 8 percent of ice lost that year. With warming, the Arctic is seeing stronger atmospheric rivers, which could deliver enough snow to slow the loss of ice, according to a new study.

Atmospheric rivers, which ferry water vapor from the tropics to the Arctic, are growing more frequent and intense as the Arctic warms, raising fears of more intense rainfall that will hasten the loss of ice. But as the new study shows, atmospheric rivers can also produce huge volumes of snow.

On the Norwegian island of Svalbard, the atmospheric river unleashed a torrent of rain that turned snow to slush. But in Greenland, it had the opposite effect.

When scientists from the University of Oulu in Finland traveled to Greenland to gauge the impact of the atmospheric river, they found it had left a thick layer of densely packed snow. The storm produced 16 billion tons of snow in total, they estimate, which may eventually harden into glacial ice.

See? You drove a fossil fueled vehicle to the steakhouse and like to drink cow milk with your cereal (have you have the strawberry banana Cheerios? My favorite), hence, it gets so warm that it snows enough to create massive amounts of ice.

Meanwhile, the intersection of the climate scam and government insanity

Fired NOAA Worker Decries DOGE Cuts After He Spent Millions Creating Cartoons About ‘Gender-Neutral’ Space Alien

A now-fired “public affairs specialist” who created a multimillion-dollar cartoon for his agency is now warning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) budget cuts could weaken disaster preparedness.

Tom Di Liberto, the ousted employee, called his termination from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) “ridiculous” in a Monday interview with CNN’s John Berman, adding that he expects DOGE’s reductions to hinder hurricane and disaster readiness. Di Liberto was the creator and star of “Teek and Tom Explore Planet Earth,” an animated series produced by NOAA at a cost exceeding $3 million, according to federal spending records. (snip)

The five-part series, intended to educate children about Earth’s weather and climate, stars Di Liberto as himself alongside Teek, an apparently androgynous, cyclopean extraterrestrial from the planet “Queloz.” Teek is addressed using they/them, or “gender-neutral” pronouns in transcripts provided on NOAA’s website. The series’ most popular installment, “Episode 4: An Ocean of Data From Cool Technology,” has amassed over 150 views on YouTube as of Monday.

Got that? $3 million dollars for a cartoon that delves into the climate scam and Woke. The comments for all the videos are turned off. Episode 1 has 147 views. #2 has 105. #3 has 134. #5 has 85. #4 is up to 572, I’d assume because of the above Daily Caller piece. Seriously, all the people whining about NOAA employees being fired, was this employee necessary for NOAA operations? How many more are doing unnecessary things?

Read: Your Fault: Warming Brings Heavy Snow To Greenland Or Something »

If All You See…

…is an area flooded by carbon pollution driven rain, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Victory Girls Blog, with a post on the Left feeding the Ukraine death machine.

Read: If All You See… »

Democrats Scuttle Senate Bill Blocking Gender Confused From Women’s Sports

Well, of course they did. They have to patronize and kowtow to the tiny majority of Americans who are in on the trans scam

Bill to ban trans athletes from girls’ and women’s sports teams fails to advance in Senate

Legislation that aimed to bar transgender women and girls nationwide from participating in school athletic competitions designated for female athletes failed to advance Monday night in a divided Senate as Democrats stood united against an issue that Republicans leveraged in last year’s elections.

A test vote on the bill failed to gain the 60 votes needed to advance in the chamber as senators stuck to party lines in a 51-45 vote tally.

The bill sought to determine Title IX protections “based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.” The vote came as Republicans have homed in repeatedly on the social cause, casting it as an issue of ensuring athletic fairness for women and girls. President Donald Trump signed an executive order last month giving federal agencies wide latitude to ensure entities that receive federal funding abide by Title IX in alignment with the administration’s view, which interprets “sex” as the gender someone was assigned at birth.

Still, Republicans in Congress have set their sights on enshrining that policy into law by amending the 1972 Title IX law, which protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance.

Remember this poll from January 2025?

(NY Post) A recent New York Times/Ipsos survey found the vast majority of Americans, including a majority of Democrats, don’t think transgender athletes should be permitted to compete in women’s sports.

“Thinking about transgender female athletes — meaning athletes who were male at birth but who currently identify as female — do you think they should or should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports?” the survey asked.

Of the 2,128 people who participated, 79% said biological males who identify as women should not be allowed to participate in women’s sports.

Of the 1,025 people who identified as Democrats or leaning Democrat, 67% said transgender athletes should not be allowed to compete with women.

The Democrat Elites and their unhinged base do not care. They’ve decided that they want biological men in women’s sports, locker rooms, showers, and bathrooms, immediately on the back of having pushed #MeToo way too far. So, real women? They do not care about you. They do not care if you lose scholarships because of a man competing in your sport. They do not care if you get hurt. Back to first article

“What Republicans are doing today is inventing a problem to stir up a culture war and divide people against each other,” Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said in a floor speech.

Dividing, eh?

BTW, if Democrats are upset, maybe they should reconsider their belief that the federal government should run everything, in this case, education? That maybe funding should be state/local? Because now the federal government has the ability to dictate it.

Read: Democrats Scuttle Senate Bill Blocking Gender Confused From Women’s Sports »

Bummer: Ireland May Receive A $26 Billion Euro Climate (scam) Bill

Well, hey, the big wigs joined in the climate scam, so, no complaining when the money gets redistributed elsewhere instead of helping Irish citizens

Laggard Ireland may face 26 billion euro EU climate bill, watchdogs warn

Ireland may have to pay EU compliance costs of between 8 billion euros and 26 billion euros ($8.4 billion-$27.2 billion) if it does not swiftly implement its emissions-cutting plans by 2030, the country’s fiscal and climate watchdogs warned on Tuesday.

The estimate, equivalent to between 3% and 9% of Irish national income, far exceeds the most recent 2023 government estimate of 3.5 billion euros to 8.1 billion for falling short of the 2030 EU climate change targets.

The Irish fiscal and climate change advisory councils said the government could reduce the potential costs to between 3 billion and 12 billion euros if it follows through on plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions that have yet to be enacted.

“Allowing these costs to fall on the Irish state instead of meeting its agreed commitments to reduce emissions would be a colossal missed opportunity,” the two independent bodies said in a joint report.

As part of the EU’s legally binding target of a 55% cut in emissions by 2030, member states that fail to hit their goals are liable to effectively pay those that exceed their targets by purchasing their surplus emissions allowances.

Sucks when your cult beliefs suddenly hit you in the wallet, eh? It’s not like the government, ie, the taxpayers, are already having to shell out to 100% support all the 3rd world immigrants they’ve imported, who bring 3rd world culture to Ireland – rapes, sexual assault, harassing women, violence, pooping in the streets, and so much more – and try and force Ireland to change to their culture.

Maybe all the voters in Ireland should rethink who they are voting for. Otherwise, such it up, buttercups.

Read: Bummer: Ireland May Receive A $26 Billion Euro Climate (scam) Bill »

Pirate's Cove