Government & Politics

• House GOP scrambles with stopgap bill: In 16 days, the 119th Congress will be sworn in, but there’s plenty of work yet to be done for the 118th as it tries to pass another one of those routinely repugnant stopgap spending bills before a looming Friday government shutdown. Said Speaker Mike Johnson in an understatement, “This is the sausage-making process.” Missouri Republican Eric Burlison was less charitable, calling it “garbage.” The bloated bill would fund the government until March 14, and nestled within its 1,547 pages is roughly $100 million for disaster relief, nearly $30 billion for the Trump-haters at FEMA, $10 billion in economic aid for farmers, and 500 pages of healthcare provisions — as if our healthcare system weren’t already complicated enough. It’s unclear whether the bill will pass, and Johnson is once again bearing the blame for this seemingly broken process. Kevin McCarthy was yanked from the speakership last year over a similar stopgap bill, and Johnson will need near-unanimous support from his Republican colleagues if he’s to retain the gavel in 2025.

• AOC loses Oversight bid: Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may be currently rehabbing a hip replacement, but she showed that she still has much more political muscle within the party than upstart Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The “Squad” member lost her bid to replace Jamie Raskin as the top Democrat on the influential House Oversight Committee. Democrats instead voted 131-84 for Virginia’s Gerry Connelly, who was backed by Pelosi. AOC had pursued the post by arguing that Democrats need younger leadership within the party. But that won’t happen yet, as the old guard is loathe to give up power, despite the fact that last month Connolly, who is 74, announced that he has cancer of the esophagus. He pledged to carry on, noting that he had not experienced any symptoms.

• Did Reuters target Musk using White House cash? It’s no secret that the Biden administration hates Elon Musk’s guts — both for supporting Donald Trump and for turning Twitter into a relatively unfettered free-speech marketplace. It’s against this backdrop that we consider whether Team Biden targeted Musk and his businesses by funneling hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to the Reuters conglomerate, whose “news” bureau happened to investigate Musk’s businesses. As former Trump administration cyber staffer Mike Benz chronicles, “The Biden Admin paid Reuters over $300 million in government contracts. 11 different Biden government agencies targeted Elon’s businesses. All 11 agencies paid millions to Reuters. Reuters then won the Pulitzer Prize for ‘their work on Elon Musk and misconduct at his businesses.’” This chart, which shows the relationships between Biden agencies and Musk-related investigations, is downright dizzying. Benz also asks the most relevant question of all: “Reuters — between its newswire services, its network intelligence services & its data services — has received over $1.56 billion dollars in US government contracts. Does Reuters’ customer relationship with government agencies taint its news coverage of government actions?” Indeed, how could it not?

• Bureaucracy’s DEI hiring binge: With the election of Donald Trump, the woke ethic of diversity, equity, and inclusion was rejected by the American public, and it is on the chopping block in many corporations and other organizations. Despite this reality, the Biden administration and the Washington bureaucratic class are digging in, as the federal government is working to hire upwards of 1,200 DEI employees to embed in the government. Some of these individuals will pull annual salaries upwards of $310,000. Following Trump’s election, the Biden administration posted 33 DEI positions. These DEI posts will effectively exist to work against the Trump administration, slowing the ability of Trump to move forward on his draining of The Swamp. To put it bluntly, the Biden administration is seeking to sabotage Trump’s agenda by littering the government with DEI hires, along with many other monkey wrenches.

• Trump says federal workers who don’t want to return to the office are “going to be dismissed” (CBS News)

• Biden calls for congressional stock trading ban (Just the News)

• Judge broke rules by criticizing Justice Alito during flag flap (WSJ)

• House Ethics Committee secretly votes to release Matt Gaetz files on alleged sex misconduct probe (NY Post)

Security

• A massive arrest of Venezuelan mobsters in Aurora: Remember during the height of the presidential campaign when ABC News’s Martha Raddatz tried to dismiss then-candidate JD Vance’s concerns about the takeover of an Aurora, Colorado, apartment complex by the Venezuelan mob known as Tren de Aragua? Vance ultimately schooled Raddatz, and yesterday, we got more evidence that the problem he called attention to is still very real. As the Denver Post reports, “Aurora police detained 15 people early Tuesday and said they expected to take more into custody following a gang-related home invasion and violent kidnapping at the troubled and soon-to-close Edge of Lowry apartments. Investigators believe all the people involved — including the two victims, one of whom was stabbed — are Venezuelan immigrants and most are undocumented.” According to Aurora Police Chief Todd Chamberlain, “There is a high assumption” that the suspects are affiliated with Tren de Aragua. But there’s no need to worry, Martha. After all, “it’s only a handful” of apartment complexes that are being terrorized here. And so far as we know, only one guy got stabbed, and only one woman got her fingernails ripped out.

• Canada reveals border security plan to avert Trump’s tariff pledge (WSJ)

• Assad’s mass grave: A mass grave outside Damascus, Syria, has been uncovered that contains the bodies of at least 100,000 people. These individuals were tortured and killed under the brutal dictatorship of ousted President Bashar al-Assad. “One hundred thousand is the most conservative estimate,” said Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF). “It’s a very, very extremely, almost unfairly conservative estimate.” The size of this mass grave is the largest since the Stalin era in the Soviet Union. The site is located roughly 25 miles from Damascus and has a series of trenches over 20 feet deep and 10 feet wide that are filled with bodies. Moustafa explained that the Syrian air force was “in charge of bodies going from military hospitals — where bodies were collected after they’d been tortured to death — to different intelligence branches, and then they would be sent to a mass grave location.” The site was literally used as a landfill for human bodies, with bulldozers crushing down bodies to fit them into trenches. Even worse, there are reportedly seven additional mass graves sites.

Culture

• A disturbing poll about young Americans and the healthcare CEO hit: It’s hard not to shake one’s head and fear for the future upon considering a recent Emerson poll finding that 41% of adults under 30 consider the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson acceptable. In total, 68% think the killer’s actions are unacceptable, with 17% saying the actions are acceptable and 16% unsure. Unsure? Of the premeditated murder of a productive and law-abiding American citizen? As Emerson’s Spencer Kimball notes, “Younger voters and Democrats are more split — 41% of voters aged 18-29 find the killer’s actions acceptable (24% somewhat acceptable and 17% completely acceptable), while 40% find them unacceptable; 22% of Democrats find them acceptable, while 59% find them unacceptable, this compares to 12% of Republicans and 16% of independents who find the actions acceptable.” It seems perverse to have to say it, but regardless of what one thinks of the spiraling cost of healthcare in this country, murder isn’t the answer.

• Luigi Mangione indicted for murder in New York, faces terrorism charges (Daily Wire)

• Ex-trans patient sues doc who refuses to release transgender study: Thanks to Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, Kaya Clementine Breen received a double mastectomy at age 14. Breen is now suing Olson-Kennedy for diagnosing her with gender dysphoria at age 12 and pushing her and her parents into agreeing to gender-mutilating treatments euphemistically dubbed “gender-affirming care.” In her case, this included receiving puberty blockers, testosterone, and the removal of her breasts. The lawsuit states that Olson-Kennedy “represented that if Clementine got a double mastectomy at an early age, the healing process would be easier and that if she waited any longer, it would be impossible to do it right.” Olson-Kennedy allegedly responded to Breen’s parents’ objection by asking “if they would rather have a living son or a dead daughter,” implying the likelihood of suicide even though Breen had never expressed such thoughts. With the lawsuit, Breen hopes to force Olson-Kennedy to publicly release the result of a government-funded study on the Impact of Early Medical Treatment in Transgender Youth. Olson-Kennedy received $9.7 million from the National Institutes of Health to conduct her research but has argued against releasing the results over fears that it could be “weaponized” against “gender-affirming care.”

• Josh Hawley confronts NCAA president over trans athletes playing sports (Newsweek)

• 14 school districts in blue state of Washington propose ban on boys in girls' sports (Daily Wire)

• Disney pulls transgender storyline from Pixar’s “Win or Lose” series (Hollywood Reporter)

• Study finds pain from abortion pills worse than women expected (Washington Times)

Misc.

• Dow logs longest losing streak since 1978 (Yahoo)

• Unionized Starbucks workers vote to authorize a strike (Fox Business)

• Jill Biden retires from teaching position at Virginia community college (Washington Examiner)

• Jordan Peterson moves to the U.S. to escape “totalitarian hell hole” (Christian Post)

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