News Predator: Killer of Killers The Animated Predator: Killer of Killers Is Coming to Hulu The new film is from the director of Prey. By Molly Templeton | Published on April 8, 2025 Screenshot: Hulu Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Hulu Surprise! Hulu has a new Predator movie coming—and it’s … animated? Yep, gory cartoon deaths for all, courtesy of Prey director Dan Trachtenberg. Predator: Killer of Killers, according to Deadline, is: … an anthology story following three of the fiercest warriors in human history: a Viking raider guiding her young son on a bloody quest for revenge, a ninja in feudal Japan who turns against his Samurai brother in a brutal battle for succession, and a WWII pilot who takes to the sky to investigate an otherworldly threat to the Allied cause. While all these warriors are killers in their own right, they are merely prey for their new opponent — the ultimate killer of killers. I don’t really get “fiercest warrior in human history” from the pilot unfolding his draft notice in this trailer, but it is just a very brief trailer. Plenty of time for at least one person to get cut in half, though. Killer of Killers is co-directed by Josh Wassung, from the animation company The Third Floor. Wassung has done visual effects work on everything from Battleship to Lovecraft Country to Masters of the Air. The story was Trachtenberg’s idea; Micho Robert Rutare (Z Nation) is the screenwriter. (Jim Thomas and John Thomas created the whole Predator thing.) The Predators invade history on June 6th when Killer of Killers arrives on Hulu.[end-mark] The post The Animated <i>Predator: Killer of Killers</i> Is Coming to Hulu appeared first on Reactor.

Books Dissecting The Dark Descent Gotta Get Out of My Head Tonight: “Clara Militch” by Ivan Turgenev The story of two people who really need to touch grass. By Sam Reader | Published on April 8, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For an in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post. Despite his massive personal flaws (the entire section of his Wikipedia labeled “antisemitism,” for example), Turgenev is an influential name in not just Russian literature but literature in general. He was a translator and literary critic whose full-throated opinions on Russian literature were censored by the government, and whose social critiques of Russian society took on all comers (and caused fights with both Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the latter of whom once challenged him to a duel), and who managed to explore an interesting interplay between cynicism and idealism in his own work. This interplay is clearly present in his novella “Clara Militch,” a work that sets a narrow-minded and repressed cynic against a romantic idealist dangerously out of touch with reality in a dark satire of intellectualism and star-crossed lovers. In bringing all his literary talents to bear, Turgenev skewers young romance and crafts a story of two people who really need to get out of their own heads before someone gets hurt—one that resonates centuries after its publication. Yakov Aratov is a young man with issues. Having spent most of his childhood at the whims of his “sorcerer” father, who believed he was curing his son’s ills with quack medicine, Aratov has grown into a sickly young man who walls himself off from the world, content to while away countless hours with his books and photography while dependent on his aunt Platusha. His only friend in this barely-a-life, Kupfer, takes it upon himself to start inviting Aratov to salons in an attempt to get his emotionally repressed and retiring friend out of his own head for a night. It is here that Aratov meets Clara Militch, a haunting and arresting beauty who takes an interest in him. Things take a dark turn when, some months after a clandestine meeting where Clara declares her feelings and Aratov responds in a confused and aloof manner, Clara kills herself. Suddenly, Aratov is haunted by a presence that suggests Clara is contacting him from beyond the grave. Is it love transcending death, or merely his own madness and guilt? Either way, his haunting may prove fatal. Aratov has locked himself away from the world. He depends on his aunt and whatever family money he can access; he dropped out of school because he believed there would be nothing for him to learn that he couldn’t learn on his own, and mostly keeps to his room and his vast, ever-growing library. While he has his friend Kupfer for social companionship, he’s essentially walled himself off, denying himself human experiences and connection because he just can’t be bothered. He’s a textbook masculine introvert—walled off from the world, cut off from most forms of human expression, mostly nonverbal, and focused mainly on his own pursuits. He has no need for the world around him, and the world around him is largely unconcerned with his presence. While Aratov can repress his emotions, that doesn’t mean those emotions don’t slip out in incredibly strange ways. Upon hearing Clara’s name, he immediately makes leaps to poetry he’s read inspired by a Walter Scott heroine with a similar name, conflating Clara Militch with the fictional Clara Mowbray. He’s obsessed with her based on a single glance they shared, bungling their eventual meeting because he’s so closed-off that he doesn’t understand what she’s trying to say to him and is mostly unresponsive to her. He’s obsessed with the idea of Clara, but the reality, the actual person, is something he doesn’t even begin to reckon with, opting to be enraptured in private and completely ignoring Clara in public despite her interest and advances towards him. It could be argued that Clara has the same limitations. It’s not clear whether her planned romantic encounter with Aratov was what catalyzed her suicide, but she spends most of the story as a posthumous presence and it’s very difficult to assign motives in that case. Her planned meeting has all the hallmarks of a traditional clandestine romance—the only issue is that her intended target has absolutely no head for glamor or romance whatsoever. Clara lived her life like she was in a novel, one filled with whirlwind romances, grand gestures, and dramatic deaths. She’s the opposite extreme from Aratov—he lives his life as an introverted monk, and she lives her life like she’s the heroine of a romantic epic. Neither of them is living healthily, instead choosing to be wrapped up in their own fantasies to their detriment. While her avowed determination to capture a suitor even after ending her life seems in line with the idea that Aratov’s tormentor is Clara haunting him, it remains deeply unclear what the entity terrorizing Aratov really is. There’s very little evidence the entity is really a ghostly Clara. Her presence, beyond simply being a fixed idea in Aratov’s head, is only felt after he learns enough to flesh out her image. It’s more likely that either Aratov’s guilt and his obsessive fixation on Clara pushes him to his hallucination and eventual death, or that the strong emotions spawned a kind of tulpa that then tormented him into the beyond. Either way, the root cause lies in the fact that Aratov is forced to reckon with his emotions and being socially cut off from the world, and it causes him to snap. No matter how much Aratov tries to keep himself detached, the light always streams in through the cracks. In Aratov’s case, that means psychedelic dreams of Clara, a deep obsession over a woman he only met twice, and driving himself insane with guilt over someone he never really loved that much (by his own admission) to begin with. It’s the emotions—guilt, obsession, and even love—and his inability to process them that eventually undo him. These twin points turn “Clara Militch” from a story of obsession to a vicious satire of star-crossed lovers. Turgenev’s repeated references to Romeo and Juliet further drive this point home, as Shakespeare did plenty of his own skewering of the tropes surrounding “young romance” throughout that work. It’s easy enough to see Aratov as the emotionally repressed young man trudging through life and Clara as a free spirit with filled with romance and passion—a classic formula—the difference is that Clara is dramatic to the point of emotional instability and takes her own life because a man she shared a glance with didn’t immediately live up to her expectations, and Aratov is so walled off that experiencing emotions for another human being literally kills him. It’s the “repressed man/manic pixie dream girl” trope played out to its most grotesque conclusion. If the haunting aspect is taken literally, Clara even tries to love Aratov from beyond the grave, only to snap his brain in half so thoroughly that he dies feverish and spouting nonsense. This story is driven by gothic romance tropes played for horror, with two people so wrapped up in their own minds that their inability to grasp anything outside their own narrow understanding causes them to indirectly kill each other. It’s dark, sure, but there’s an odd humor to that. Most satires of romance take the stance that having one’s head wrapped up in sentimentality is the issue, but in Turgenev’s twisted little gothic romance, not even the detached and unsentimental are safe if they’re not in touch enough with reality and their own emotions to process their own feelings. At the end of things, both Clara and Aratov just needed to get out of their own heads and interact with the world in a more realistic way. It’s a pity that neither of them could. And now to turn it over to you. Were the two lovers always doomed? Is “Clara Militch” the earliest deconstruction of the manic pixie dream girl character? Is Clara actually a ghost? And what’s your favorite work of romantic deconstructive horror? Please join us in two weeks when we visit one of the primordial ancestors of psychedelic and cosmic horror with Robert W. Chambers and “The Repairer of Reputations.”[end-mark] The post Gotta Get Out of My Head Tonight: “Clara Militch” by Ivan Turgenev appeared first on Reactor.

The Supreme Court stayed a lower court judge’s order forcing the Trump administration to reinstate more than 16,000 probationary federal employees. The Supreme Court move will keep the employees off the payroll while lower courts resolve the underlying question of the firings’ legality. In the case, the American Federation of Government Employees—the largest public sector union in the federal government—sued the Office of Personnel Management over a memo informing other federal agencies that they can fire probationary employees. AFGE, a member of the AFL-CIO, has filed many lawsuits challenging Trump administration policies. The union and other plaintiffs claimed that the Office of Personnel Management had violated the Administrative Procedure Act. Judge William Alsup, a Bill Clinton appointee in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, issued a preliminary injunction on March 13 directing the re-hiring of federal bureaucrats. The Supreme Court ruled that the injunction “was based solely on the allegations of the nine non-profit-organization plaintiffs in this case” and that those allegations “are presently insufficient to support the organization’s standing.” “Standing” refers to a party’s ability to bring a lawsuit. A party must demonstrate a sufficient connection to and harm from an action or law in order to challenge that action or law in court. U.S. District Judge George O’Toole, a Clinton appointee, ruled in a similar case in February that AFGE and other unions “cannot manufacture standing through self-inflicted harms.” “Standing requires the plaintiffs to be more than ‘mere bystander[s]’ and instead requires a ‘personal stake in the dispute,’” he wrote, citing a 2024 Supreme Court case. “Further, the Supreme Court recently held that an organization that is not directly affected by an agency’s actions cannot establish standing simply by ‘divert[ing] its resources in response to a defendant’s actions.” Two Democrat-appointed justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, would have denied the government’s application for a stay. The Supreme Court’s order does not explicitly involve federal employees in another case. A federal judge in Maryland earlier this month issued a preliminary injunction reinstating some of the employees not covered in the Office of Personnel Management v. AFGE case. The move comes amid a slew of judges issuing nationwide injunctions purporting to tie the president’s hands on a wide range of issues. 24a904-orderDownload The post BREAKING: Supreme Court Blocks Order Forcing Trump to Rehire 16,000 Bureaucrats appeared first on The Daily Signal.

“If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” is a proverb that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has apparently taken to heart when it comes to the rich in the United States. The New York congresswoman was caught lounging in a first-class seat on a JetBlue flight March 19 to a rally dubbed “Fighting Oligarchy” and headlined by millionaire Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. The New York congresswoman who has identified in the past as a Democratic socialist likely dropped more than $1,000 for the flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City to Las Vegas, Nevada. A first-class JetBlue seat on the same route, weekday and time later this month costs as much as $1,100, The New York Post reported Monday. Ocasio-Cortez previously became famous on social media for her self-proclaimed advocacy for the poor even as she attended such pricey exclusive events as the Met Gala in 2021.  It seems fair to say that taking a first-class flight across the country is not the behavior people expect to see from a member of Congress who claims to be a “representative of an actual working-class movement.” Indeed, the move caused at least one fellow passenger on the flight to cry foul. “AOC is fighting the system one first-class mimosa at a time,” a fellow traveler on the flight remarked to the New York Post.  “Nothing says ‘Power to the people’ like ignoring voters looking to say hello and reclining in first class while tweeting about income inequality,” the passenger continued. Fellow Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., reacted to the news by noting that she was “surprised [Ocasio-Cortez] didn’t take a private jet like most of her comrades.” For that, Ocasio-Cortez would have to catch a ride with any number of Democrat billionaire donors, from George Soros to Reid Hoffman to Illinois Gov, JB Pritzker.  Indeed, the New York congresswoman’s preferred style of flying likely reflects the financial state of many of the voters of the Democratic Party, which has in recent years increasingly become the party of wealthy Americans. A near-supermajority of voters, 65%, with incomes of $500,000 or more identified with the party in 2020. That’s an almost complete inverse from where the parties were in 1993, when the typical Republican congressional district was 14% wealthier than the Democrat alternative.  The 35-year-old congresswoman trounced fellow New York Democrat Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in a recent hypothetical 2028 primary matchup for his Senate seat. And regardless of the discrepancy between Sanders’ own net worth and his anti-rich rhetoric, the Vermont senator also holds an impressive popularity rating among Democrats. The post AOC Hitched First-Class Ride to ‘Fighting Anti-Oligarchy’ Rally appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. Ben Cline (R-Va.) introduced companion versions of the No Union Time on Taxpayers’ Dime Act on April 7. This bill, which calls for eliminating taxpayer funding of federal employees working for their unions, is more relevant now than when first introduced in 2024.    That’s because the Trump administration not only reinstated agency requirements to measure and report what’s called official time; it also signed an executive order precluding wide swaths of federal agencies and offices from engaging in collective bargaining agreements with unions and preventing federal workers in those agencies from engaging in official time.   Official time is Work-for-a-Union time on the taxpayer’s dime Official time is essentially unlimited paid union leave.   Under the banner of official time, federal employees are dismissed from their jobs—sometimes, up to 100% of their paid time—to work for their union instead of doing the jobs they were hired to perform.   With the average federal employee receiving almost $163,000 in total compensation (including $106,400 in pay?and?$56,600 in benefits), the time federal employees spend working for their union can add up quickly.   The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability?discovered?that 1,030 Social Security Administration employees spent a total of 242,237 hours on official time in Fiscal Year 2023. This cost taxpayers $15.1 million, including $1.43 million to pay 14 employees who spent 100% of their time working for their union. Meanwhile, senior citizens across the country were struggling to get in touch with Social Security Administration employees and unable to get in-person appointments at their local Social Security Administration offices.  VA nurses working for unions, not the vets  The Veterans Administration, or VA, is another frequent user of official time, including nurses who spent 100% of their time working for their union instead of treating veterans. The?Institute for the America Worker?sought a Freedom of Information Act request on the VA’s use of official time, but the “Department of Veterans Affairs responded in part with a ‘no records’ response and refused to provide additional records responsive to the FOIA request.”   As of 2019—the last data available—the VA had 1,895 employees?spend a total of 324,105 hours on official time—the equivalent of about 175 full-time employees. The actual figure is almost certainly much higher today as the Biden administration reversed the first Trump administration’s executive order preventing federal employees from spending more than 25% of their work hours on official time. Meanwhile, Senator Ernst’s?Out of Office Report?found that, “[t]housands of calls from veterans seeking mental health care go unanswered.”?  The equivalent of 2,000 full-time employees?  We don’t know how many federal employees, hours, and taxpayer dollars went towards official time during the Biden-Harris administration, but if it’s anything close to that of the Obama-Biden administration, it was likely the equivalent of about 2,000 full-time equivalent employees at a cost of about $320 million per year.  President Trump’s executive order will, dependent on legal challenges, prevent the use of official time for roughly half of federal employees, but as an executive order, it is only assured through the end of Trump’s term in January 2029.   The No Union Time on Taxpayers’ Dime Act would codify an end to official time across the entire federal workforce, requiring federal employees who want to work for their unions to do so on their own time and own expense.   Sen. Ernst’s approach: make the unions pay  Sen. Ernst’s (R-Iowa) similar bill, Protecting Taxpayers’ Wallets Act of 2025, would require federal employee unions to reimburse the federal government for federal employees’ time spent working for their union, as well as for federal resources (such as office buildings and equipment) provided for union activities.   By generating new revenues to the government, as opposed to restricting government spending on federal unions, Sen. Ernst’s version could potentially be included in the reconciliation bill that Congress hopes to pass this year.   Both approaches protect taxpayers  Neither of these bills would change the activities that federal employees’ unions can engage in. They would just require the unions—instead of taxpayers—to foot the bill for their activities.   Both bills would, however, help limit the unions’ practice of protecting from disciplinary action federal employees who cannot or will not do their jobs, and of bargaining for tedious things like the height of cubicle panels and the right to wear spandex at work. That’s because, when faced with having to fund their own payrolls and operations, federal employee unions would have to limit their activities to things their members are willing to pay full price to receive.  The post Bill Prohibiting Union Time on Taxpayers’ Dime Would Extend Trump EO to Entire Federal Workforce appeared first on The Daily Signal.

With over 3 million followers between his Instagram “shorts” videos and his “Making the Argument” podcast, other than Virginia’s governor, state Del. Nick Freitas may be the most well-known member of Virginia’s government.   On March 27, while a crowd of anti-Donald Trump/anti-DOGE/anti-Elon Musk protesters were marching and chanting outside of a town hall he was hosting, Freitas shocked the commonwealth by announcing that he was not going to seek reelection to the Virginia House of Delegates seat he’s represented for 10 years. The Daily Signal caught up with him and asked him what went into that decision and what’s next for him. Here is a lightly edited transcript from an excerpt of our discussion: Freitas: It’s something my wife and I have talked about for a little while now, and honestly, we weren’t entirely sure exactly what we were going to do until fairly recently. But essentially, we’ve looked at it a lot. It has been an honor to serve for the last 10 years in the General Assembly. It really has been. It’s not lost on me that I had an opportunity to represent James Madison’s district in the Virginia House of Delegates. By the same token, I’ve always said that I don’t think people should stay in politics forever. I think it’s a good idea to at least take a break, get away from it for a while. And if you get called back into it, that’s fine, but just making it a steady career, I think, is something that I’ve always been a little bit skeptical of. And the second part was, as we looked at these two battles that we were facing, you know, that we were fighting, we started asking ourselves, OK, we’re having a hard time, the tempo is picking up. We’re at such a decisive point in our country’s history right now, with the things that are going on politically and culturally, that we wanted to be the most effective that we possibly could be. I want to be able to fight for the sort of culture which will create the sort of electorate which will elect the sort of people that we need to preserve what I think the common fundamentals and principles that make the United States special and unique, and it’s not all about government. Thomas: I think that’s the Andrew Breitbart paradigm: “Politics is downstream from culture.” I see young people and I’m seeing 20-somethings flip away from collectivism and the woke ideology a lot faster than the people who have been indoctrinating them in the public school systems expected. Am I wrong? Freitas: No, you’re not. Tomorrow, we’re dedicating an entire podcast where we’re actually looking at that. We’re taking a very detailed look into the data, the polls, the surveys that have been done recently, in order to try to conclude what does the future look like, especially with respect to how young men feel about their society and their country and what they plan to do next. It’s fascinating, because I think young men feel like they’ve just almost been automatically called oppressors yet they have never done anything wrong. They didn’t oppress anybody. They didn’t keep women from voting. They didn’t enslave anybody. They didn’t do any of this. And yet they’re somehow responsible for it all. They’re absolutely fed up with being kind of the target of all this, and they are the target. They’re starting to revolt against it. And the real question now is going to be, what direction do they take in the midst of a rejection of “woke” ideology? Thomas: So, is Chris Ruddy [the CEO of Newsmax] giving you a slot on Newsmax TV? Because you said you wanted to keep busy. Or are you literally going to just become a gentleman farmer for a little while and decompress? Freitas: No, no, I wish we could decompress. That’s not going to happen. I mean, first things first, is we need to get [Republican] Karen Hamilton elected [as Freitas’ replacement] here in the 62nd District. So, I’ll be working. I’ll be helping her with everything I can, and then, we’ll be working to try to make sure that we take back the House, we keep the governor, the attorney general, and the lieutenant governor seats. I’ve gotten some offers to do some things, but honestly, one of the things I love most about what we’re doing is that it allows us to be independent from any of the other influences. I managed to maintain that through 10 years in the General Assembly, and I want to maintain that as we move into this next chapter. Listen to the full interview: The post After His Shocking Exit From Politics, Nick Freitas Hints at What’s Next appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Justice Department’s effort to sweep up phone and email information from congressional staffers during a 2017 investigation into the leak of classified information to the media likely also identified whistleblowers who were reporting problems within the DOJ to congressional overseers.  And a federal judge involved in a case where a watchdog group is suing to get information out of the Justice Department pertaining to that investigation is the same judge who recently made headlines for trying to stop the Trump administration from deporting criminal illegal aliens.  In a case with ramifications for the First Amendment and the separation of powers between the executive branch and Congress, that watchdog group, Empower Oversight, is appealing the ruling of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who allowed the Justice Department to keep secret certain internal documents justifying its methods in the controversial investigation. In March, Boasberg drew fire from President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans after he ordered the administration to return to the United States hundreds of criminal illegal aliens who had been deported and sent to an El Salvadoran detention center. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration in allowing it to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act as a justification for the deportations.  Empower Oversight filed an appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Friday challenging a September opinion from Boasberg that maintains the secrecy of most of the Justice Department’s justification for obtaining six years of nondisclosure orders that prevented Google from informing the congressional staffers under investigation that their data was targeted by a Justice Department subpoena.  The Justice Department subpoenaed Google to get the information on the staffers. It secretly obtained the nondisclosure orders from the court to prevent Google and other service providers from notifying these staffers that the providers had disclosed their records.  Empower Oversight is suing for the public release of the arguments the Justice Department made to the court over the six years for imposing and renewing the gag order on Google and other providers. The DOJ’s arguments for renewing the gag orders have been kept under seal by the court.  The DOJ should not have put a gag order on Google, as grand jury secrecy applies to the government, generally not to private entities or to the target of a subpoena, Empower Oversight founder Jason Foster, told The Daily Signal.  “In America, in a free society, normally, the public is allowed to view court filings, unless there is a good reason,” Foster said. “The justifiable reason for the secrecy is long gone because the case was closed.”  It was closed when former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer James Wolfe pled guilty in 2018 to lying to the FBI about disclosing classified information to a reporter. Wolfe had been indicted in the leak investigation.  Foster, of Empower Oversight, was previously the chief investigative counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. In 2023, when the gag orders expired, Google notified him the Justice Department had subpoenaed his email address and two Google Voice telephone numbers as well during the investigation.  In its sweep of information, the Justice Department subpoenaed activity logs of the personal phone and email accounts of members of Congress and more than 40 staff members of congressional committees, Empower Oversight pointed out. In its new appeal, Empower Oversights argues Boasberg wrongly denied its initial request to unseal the Justice Department’s applications to the court for nondisclosure orders because the applications are judicial records subject to First Amendment and rights of access, not secret grand jury materials. Those applications contain the justifications the DOJ gave the court for requesting the orders. The appeal also states that if DOJ whistleblowers were providing information to the Senate Judiciary Committee as it exercised its oversight over the DOJ, then the identities of those whistleblowers could have been swept up with the phone and email records of the congressional staffers.  “Given Mr. Foster’s role as chief investigative counsel [for the Senate Judiciary Committee], this meant DOJ compelled Google to provide it with information that would easily enable DOJ to identify confidential whistleblowers who were providing Congress with information about government misconduct,” the Friday court filing says.  In December 2024, the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General issued a report that said the department “relied on general assertions about the need for nondisclosure rather than on case-specific justifications.”  As the inspector general report explains, the DOJ’s “decision to compel the production of non-content communications records of members of Congress and congressional staffers implicated the constitutional rights and authorities of a co-equal branch of government.”  The surveillance of both Republican and Democrat congressional staffers stemmed in part from the Justice Department’s probe into allegations that the Donald Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government to win the 2016 election.  Specifically, the DOJ was collecting the information on congressional staffers as part of its leak investigation to find out who disclosed information to the press about the surveillance warrant of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. It could be of interest to the new Trump Justice Department to change course on the case and turn over the documents explaining the DOJ’s justifications for the surveillance of staffers and its order telling Google to keep quiet about it, Foster said.  “I’m doing everything in my power to ensure that [DOJ] leadership is aware of the controversy and the issue,” Foster told The Daily Signal. “There is no reason the new Justice Department can’t make a change.” Empower Oversight is only seeking the applications and renewal applications for the nondisclosure orders—not the actual data that the DOJ collected.  Last August, Boasberg issued an opinion in the case that was mixed. He first agreed that the nondisclosure orders, or NDOs, for Google should be in part unsealed. Then, after privately reviewing all the DOJ applications and renewals, Boasberg allowed the government to keep most applications secret.  Boasberg also allowed the DOJ to redact the government’s factual claims in the applications that justified the need for secrecy, revealing only a generic discussion of the legal standards that govern nondisclosure orders in the two documents partially unsealed. “The court will grant Empower’s request to intervene, and it will grant in part and deny in part its attempt to unseal,” Boasberg’s opinion said. “The application for the NDO and initial application for an extension to the NDO shall be unsealed in relevant part and filed on the public docket.”  The post Watchdog Presses DOJ to Lift Secrecy on Congressional Spying Documents appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Republican leadership in the House has its hands full this week. House Speaker Mike Johnson is trying to get about a dozen fiscally conservative Republicans to sign off on the Senate’s budget plan by the end of the week. President Donald Trump has urged the House to “quickly” pass the plan that the Senate approved on a party-line vote after 2:30 a.m. Saturday morning. Eager to calm turbulent markets, extend Trump’s expiring 2017 tax cuts, and provide funding to secure the border, House leadership is working to get potential GOP rebels in line. What’s leadership’s argument to GOP budget hawks? Namely, that members of Congress should not worry too much about the plan’s implications for the budget deficit, because it isn’t binding. “Look, the resolution is not the law itself,” Johnson told The Daily Signal at the Capitol. .@SpeakerJohnson says that the resolution is not the law itself.He and leadership are making the case to possible freedom caucus holdouts that now is not the time to fret about the joint budget resolution. pic.twitter.com/WKTwhC3tni— George Caldwell (@GCaldwell_news) April 8, 2025 “The resolution continues the process; it’s a necessary step. So, the real deliberation and the consensus has to be built around the bill itself, and that’s what I’ve told everybody.” The resolution has met plenty of opposition.  Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., who chairs the conservative House Freedom Caucus, has said he would probably “vote against it” at this point, as he thinks its framework would lead to excess spending and, as a result, higher taxes. His remarks have been echoed by several other Freedom Caucus members.  If the Senate can deliver real deficit reduction in line with or greater than the House goals, I can support the Senate budget resolution. However, by the Senate setting committee instructions so low at $4 billion compared to the House’s $1.5-2 trillion, I am unconvinced that…— Rep. Andy Harris, MD (@RepAndyHarrisMD) April 5, 2025 House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Jody Arrington, R-Texas, has also criticized the plan as “unserious and disappointing.” It creates “a mere $4 billion in enforceable cuts, less than one day’s worth of borrowing by the federal government,” Arrington wrote in his response to the plan. At Tuesday’s press conference, House leadership called on skeptics to sign off on the plan in order to not stall progress. They implied that concerns would be satisfied when the actual legislation came into consideration. “Remember, the Senate version of the budget resolution does not prevent the House from achieving the goals we set for ourselves earlier in this process, said House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn. “In fact, it doesn’t mean a thing to the House. We will continue to advocate for the final [budget] reconciliation bill to include historic spending reductions while protecting essential programs. But we must act now.” The post Johnson Seeks to Quell Conservatives’ Mutiny Against Budget Plan appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A federal judge has granted actress Gina Carano partial discovery in her high-profile free speech lawsuit against The Walt Disney Company, marking a pivotal moment in her legal battle over her dismissal from the hit Disney+ series The Mandalorian. Carano, who played Cara Dune on the Star Wars show, alleges she was wrongfully terminated in February 2021 for expressing political opinions on social media. Her lawsuit, which has been allowed to continue, claims Disney violated her free speech rights and cost her significant career opportunities. In an order filed on April 3, Magistrate Judge Steve Kim ruled that Disney must turn over specific compensation data for several Star Wars actors, including Pedro Pascal, Rosario Dawson, Carl Weathers, Amandla Stenberg, and Diego Luna, among others. The information will help Carano establish the financial damages she claims to have suffered due to her termination. We obtained a copy of the order for you here. The court found that Carano is entitled to certain discovery materials relevant to “the amount of compensation she could have reasonably expected to earn from her employment with Walt Disney (in a but-for scenario) had Walt Disney not terminated her employment” from The Mandalorian. The order compels Disney to produce: Compensation summaries for key actors in The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, The Acolyte, Andor, and The Book of Boba Fett; Carl Weathers’ contracts for his appearances in The Mandalorian; A breakdown of actor compensation for those expected to appear in the upcoming film The Mandalorian & Grogu; And verified information about how Disney+ actors across the Star Wars series have been paid. These documents are to be produced within 20 days and may be shared on an attorneys-eyes-only basis with Carano’s expert witness for damages calculations. Carano’s attorney said the order is a “major step forward” in establishing that Disney’s actions had financial consequences. “These documents will provide key evidence that will help show the financial harm that Disney imposed on Gina when it unfairly and unlawfully terminated her,” he stated. However, Judge Kim stopped short of granting all of Carano’s discovery requests. He denied, for now, Carano’s bid to obtain broader actor contracts and budget or profit data from Disney’s Star Wars productions. Those requests may be renewed only after Carano discloses her damages expert and provides a “detailed proffer” justifying the need for such information. The judge emphasized that any sensitive financial data produced will not automatically be sealed if presented at trial or in motions, reminding both parties that “such designations are for fact and expert discovery purposes only.” The court also denied Disney’s request for discovery sanctions and vacated a previously scheduled hearing on the matter. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Judge Grants Gina Carano Partial Discovery in Free Speech Lawsuit Against Disney Over The Mandalorian Firing appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Both Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney – who last month also became the leader of the ruling Liberals – and opposition New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Jagmeet Singh are backing plans to sink more money into the public broadcaster CBC/Radio-Canada. The politicians made the pledges as they campaign for Canada’s general election, to be held in late April. The reasons for the policy are “the rise of misinformation,” and “foreign interference” – but also, fending off the perceived “assaults” on the country’s sovereignty coming from the Trump administration. Carney wants to give CBC $150 million from federal funds as an initial sum to help the broadcaster meet its “renewed mission.” He spoke about making sure CBC does not become “subject to the whims of a small group of people led by ideology” – to then assert that the media space is currently “a sea of misinformation and disinformation.” Critics would say that argument has at this point been seriously overused “by a small group of people led by ideology” hiding behind it while attempting to ensure control over public discourse, particularly via large legacy media outlets. But Carney and Singh are still pushing the narrative about dramatic dangers from allegedly unprecedented levels of “disinformation,” with Singh claiming this is “endangering democracy.” CBC’s funding should also be increased “significantly” to deal with what is now being framed as “Trump’s attacks on Canadian sovereignty.” The leader of the opposition and of the Conservatives, Pierre Poilievre, disagrees with this approach, arguing that Canada’s authorities “can’t go on spending money we don’t have on things we don’t need.” Such policies lead to the economy’s further descent into inflation, Poilievre suggested, and said that if given the opportunity to serve as prime minister, he would focus on “cutting waste, bureaucracy, consultants, foreign aid and other unnecessary expenses to reduce taxes, debt, and inflation.” In response to this, Carney labeled the Conservative leader as somebody who is also “attacking Canada’s institutions,” supposedly joining President Trump in this. Poilievre has previously said that rather than receiving more money, the CBC should be defunded, but in a way that does not affect Radio-Canada (the French language public service). That appears to be in line with the Liberal leader’s own statements about the need to “stay informed and tell our own stories in our own languages” – however, coming out of Poilievre’s mouth, the argument prompted Carney to accuse him of attempting to “split the baby,” and also, “attack Canada’s institutions” – à la Trump. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Canada: Liberal Leader Mark Carney Supports Major CBC/Radio-Canada Funding Increases to Combat “Misinformation” appeared first on Reclaim The Net.