It is bad enough that President Joe Biden has pardoned hundreds of drug dealers, embezzlers, thieves, and other dangerous criminals; commuted the death sentences of dozens of murderers; released ruthless terrorists from Guantanamo Bay so they can unleash more brutality into the world; and to top it all off, given his son a “get-out-of-jail-free card” in one of the most corrupt, personal abuses of the pardon power by any president in U.S. history.  But now he is apparently considering clemency for Charles Littlejohn, who stole the private, confidential tax returns of thousands of Americans, including President-elect Donald Trump, in the biggest theft ever at the IRS, and leaked them to The New York Times and other media outlets. To the everlasting shame of the law schools that employ them (Emory, Indiana, Michigan, and Missouri), four law professors (along with other liberal groups) have nothing but praise for this convicted felon and are petitioning Biden to reduce Littlejohn’s sentence from five years to only ten months.  The letter the professors, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, David Gamage, Goldburn P. Maynard, Jr., and Alex Zhang, wrote to Biden reads like a Marxist screed about the “superrich” and how they “control” too great a share of America’s wealth. They claim the public “has a right to know” what is in the tax returns of Trump and other wealthy Americans, although they don’t limit their “sincere belief” in this lack of privacy to the rich. No, they laud “countries with a stronger sense of egalitarianism” than America like Finland, Norway, and Sweden where “most tax information is public.” In other words, these ivory tower academics think that the personal financial information contained in tax filings that Americans overwhelmingly consider to be highly confidential and private and no one’s business but their own (and unfortunately the IRS’s), should not be confidential. It should be available to every Tom, Dick, and Harry – and their neighbors – to peruse and talk about. By the way, “egalitarianism” is left-wing code for wealth redistribution and confiscatory taxes by an all-powerful government that makes sure we are all equally poor – except for those who are the favored members of the party in control of that government. All of us normal people want our tax returns to be confidential, which is why it is a felony under 26 U.S.C. §7213(a)(1) for any federal employee to disclose tax returns or “return information.” Each violation is punishable by up to five years in prison.  That is exactly what Littlejohn got from Judge Ana Reyes, who was appointed to the bench by Joe Biden in 2023.  But only getting five years was quite a deal for Littlejohn because the Justice Department allowed him to plead guilty to a single felony of stealing and disclosing one tax return, despite the fact that he stole literally thousands of returns. It is not just taxpayers who demand privacy and have a right to it. Such confidentiality, as the liberal U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held in U.S. v. Richey (1991), is essential to “maintaining a workable tax system.” None other than Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg (before her ascension to the Supreme Court) wrote on behalf of the D.C. Circuit in National Treasury Employees Union v. FLRA (1986) that taxpayer privacy is “fundamental to a tax system that relies on self-reporting” since it protects “sensitive or otherwise personal information.” Littlejohn was lucky that he only got five years. He could have been punished far more severely given the number of tax returns he stole. He doesn’t deserve clemency or a pardon from Joe Biden. Any such grant that lets him out of prison or reduces his sentence, on top of Biden’s egregious pardon of Hunter Biden, will just be another sign of Biden’s contempt for the rule of law and, in this case, the privacy of Americans’ financial and tax information. In fact, as Paul Sperry at RealClearInvestigations reports, the IRS is still dealing with the aftermath of Littlejohn’s misdeeds, having sent literally thousands of letters to taxpayers telling them that “the full scope of what he disclosed is still unknown.” Booz Allen Hamilton, the IRS contractor that Littlejohn was working for when he committed his crimes, is also dealing with lawsuits filed by taxpayers. The last thing we need is another shameful abuse of the pardon power by this president. Littlejohn-LetterDownload The post The Shameful Call for Clemency of a Tax Return-Stealing Felon appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion has damaged the effectiveness of the U.S. military and hurt recruitment numbers. Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee grilled President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, on Tuesday. One exchange in particular highlighted the wrongheaded thinking that infects some in the current U.S. leadership and how it addresses the military’s challenges. Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking member of the panel, said in hostile questioning of Hegseth that the military is “more diverse than it has ever been” and that it is more lethal. Sen. Jack Reed claims that the military is more lethal than ever because it's more diverse than ever pic.twitter.com/RgyItLVOtC— Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 14, 2025 The military may be more “diverse” than it has ever been. However, it’s also getting smaller and faces severe readiness challenges. As Vice President-elect JD Vance noted on X during the questioning, the military has suffered through an ongoing recruitment crisis. I find this grandstanding from Senate Democrats over the Hegseth confirmation perplexing. We haven't won a war in three decades and we have a major recruitment challenge. Hegseth is assuredly NOT more of the same, and that's good!— JD Vance (@JDVance) January 14, 2025 The Pentagon, especially under the Biden administration, has made diversity, equity, and inclusion a priority for the military. The justification was that to bring in new people, the military needed to “look like” the country. Alex Wagner, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for manpower and reserve affairs, explained the administration’s reasoning at a 2023 House Armed Services Committee Hearing. “Intentional diversity and inclusion efforts allow us to tap into the full talents of the American people and then leverage those talents to defend the nation,” Wagner said. He said that the focus on DEI was “informed by science and business best practices, congressional mandates, data-focused policy reviews and assessments.” The most prominent pro-DEI business study has been debunked, however. But it’s no surprise that the military continued to have abysmal recruitment records throughout President Joe Biden’s tenure despite the claims of DEI proponents. The diversity efforts seem to have done little to bring in a flood of recruits from previously underrepresented backgrounds. Worse, there has been a collapse of recruitment from demographics that disproportionately served in the past. According to a report by the Daily Caller News Foundation, there has been a serious decline in white recruits since 2018. That shouldn’t be a surprise, because as Daily Caller further reported, the Air Force in 2022 made reducing the number of white male officers a priority. Racial quotas not only damage the ability of the military to promote the best and brightest to the highest ranks, but they also demoralize those who either didn’t get a promotion and those who serve under commanders who they may now wonder whether or not they got their positions on their merits. It’s no wonder retainment is also down in the military. Most ominously for the U.S. all-volunteer military, the armed forces saw a severe downturn in recruitment from military families, many of whom have expressed extreme disenchantment with military service. Veterans also increasingly tell people not to sign up. “Pew surveys in 2011 and again in 2019 found approximately 80% of veterans would advise young people to join the military,” the Wall Street Journal reported in October. “We recently commissioned a demographically representative YouGov survey of 2,100 veterans. Our data show the share of veterans recommending military service plunged 20 percentage points in five years, to just 62%.” According to the Journal’s survey, “only 14% of veterans want the military to pay more attention to DEI.” How can the United States continue to have the world’s most “lethal” army as its pool of warfighters dries up? Those who defend DEI practices and insist that the military’s recruiting woes have nothing to do with DEI are in denial. At a time in which the number and scale of foreign conflicts is escalating, it’s alarming that the U.S. military appears increasingly unprepared to meet its challenges. It shouldn’t be forgotten that even in the age of drones and other kinds of advanced military hardware, the backbone of any military is still a man with a rifle. What’s happened under Biden is that previous recruiting challenges became acute. The administration focused on divisive DEI programs while hiding behind the mantra that for the military, “diversity is our strength.” We now have a glut of four-star generals, but too few rank-and-file troops, as Hegseth noted at Tuesday’s hearing. Hegseth: “We won World War II with seven 4-star generals. Today, we have forty-four 4-star generals. There’s an inverse relationship between the size of staffs and victory on the battlefield. We don’t need more bureaucracy at the top. We need more warfighters empowered at the…— Lucas Tomlinson (@LucasFoxNews) January 14, 2025 “The military exists to be lethal and to kill our enemies,” former Army Ranger Will Thibeau explained in a recent interview on “The Daily Signal Podcast.” “It’s a purpose that puts the military at odds with the values of our liberal society. … And what’s happened, certainly in the last decade or so, is that the military has become just another institution that reflects the values of our civil society. Those are values that are incompatible with an organization committed to lethality.” A change is leadership and direction is desperately needed. Perhaps in a sign of things to come, the Army recently had a massive surge in recruitment that it hasn’t experienced in many years. That’s curious timing. Hopefully, it’s a sign of things to come under the incoming new executive management. The post Hegseth Is Right About DEI: US Military Faces Historic Recruiting Crisis Because of It appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Learn how to make felted soap from home! You can create an array of personal designs with all sorts of different kinds of soaps. Aside from making personalized and handcrafted soap bars, felted soaps has quite a few other added benefits. It helps your soap last longer. The felt helps clean your skin better by removing more dead skins cells, like a washcloth or loofa. And the wood is also fast drying hypoallergenic, anti-fungal, and anti-microbial Our step by step instructions show you just how easy it is to make felted soap. It is also a fun project that makes a great gift! Materials Bar of soap – any kind you want Wool Felting pen Bowl of hot water Towel Supplies you will need to make felted soap   Step 1 Stretch your wool. Lay out your base wool color. Pull out two long wide pieces of wool and over lap them in the shape of an x. After you have stretched it, your wool should look like this. Step 2 Cover soap. Lay your soap on top of the wool. Wrap your wool around your soap. Lay your bar of soap on top of the wool, placing it in the center. Wrap the wool around the soap. Then, wrap the wool around your soap like this Finally, wrap the wool around your soap like this to make your felted soap Step 3 Dip in water. Dip the wool covered soap into your bowl of hot water and start rubbing the water into the wool. Dip the wool covered soap in the hot water to start felting soap Rub the soap like this to get the wool to felt and stick to it. Step 4 Felt and lather. Continue rubbing the wool together on all sides of the soap. You will start lathering the soap pretty well. Keep lathering! This is how you felt the wool together to stay around the soap. Step 5 Keep up the lather; rinse and dry off. Just keep lathering and felting your soap! You will start to feel it some together. Once you feel your soap is fully felted and doesn't want to fall off, rinse the suds off and dry with a light pat it dry with a towel. You will dry the soap with a paper towel or towel Step 7 Add your designs. At this point, you soap is pretty much finished. Now you can take it and felt any kind of design you want into the outside. This is fairly simple. Just take whatever color you want to use, a felting pen, and start pressing the wool into the felted soap with the pen. Your soap has been felted, now it is time to make a design on it You will make a pattern on your soap. We chose to make a moon. Using your felting tool, push the design into the soap. Step 8 Enjoy your newly felted soap! Try out your soap, or give it away to your friends and family for gifts.   Your felted soap is finished and ready to use or give as a gift  

For Pete's Sake - Can Anything Shame These Democratic Senators?

Nearly Half of Trans Women Held in Federal Women's Prisons Are Sex Offenders

The 2020 U.S. census results indicated not only a decline in the white population but a massive spike in the multiracial population over the previous 10 years, stating that Americans identifying as more than one race accounted for 10.2% of the population, up from 2.9% in 2010. While bureaucrats patted themselves on the back, expressing confidence in their findings and methodology, various academics, pundits, and liberal publications made hay of the results, sounding off about the "multiracial boom" and the "nation's changing mosaic." In some cases, there was outright celebration of the decline in the white population, euphemistically referred to as an increase in diversity — 24% of Democrats and Democratic leaners told Pew Research pollsters that this alleged demographic shift was a good thing. It turns out the boom, still a crutch for liberal arguments years later, was likely bogus. A pair of Princeton University sociologists noted in a December paper in the journal Sociological Science that "the boom was largely a statistical illusion resulting from methodological changes that confounded ancestry with identity and mistakenly equated national origin with race." Original claims Several months after releasing race-ethnic population estimates, the U.S. Census Bureau announced in August 2021: The white population remained the largest race or ethnicity group in the country, with 204.3 million solely identifying on the census as white; however, that cohort had decreased by 8.6% since 2010. Another 31.1 million people identified as white in combination with another race group. The Hispanic or Latino population grew from 50.5 million or 16.3% of the population in 2010 to 62.1 million, 18.7%, in 2020. The population of Americans solely identifying as American Indian or Alaska Native increased from 2.9 million in 2010 to 3.7 million in 2020. The population of Americans solely identifying as Asian increased from 14.7 million to 19.9 people over the 10-year period. The population of Americans solely identifying as black grew from 38.9 million in 2010 to 41.1 million in 2020. The multiracial population shot up from 9 million people in 2010 to 33.8 million people in 2020, representing a 276% increase. The bureaucrats concluded that "nearly all groups saw population gains this decade and the increase in the Two or More Races population was especially large. The white alone population declined." 'Thus, many Hispanics who would have checked off white alone in 2010 may have checked "white" and "some other race" in 2020.' The bureau reached these conclusions on the basis of a modified questionnaire that asked respondents who checked off white or black to also list their "origins." Based on their stated origins, respondents were frequently and automatically flagged as multiracial. Early doubts There were a handful of critics who indicated at the outset that this supposed boom was the result of a statistical sleight of hand. John Judis, editor at large at Talking Points Memo, noted in the Wall Street Journal, for instance, that "contrary to Democratic hopes and right-wing anxieties, America’s white population didn’t shrink much between 2010 and 2020 and might actually have grown." Judis pointed out: The census asked respondents who checked off "white" to specify their nationality: "Print, for example, German, Irish, Italian, Lebanese, Egyptian, etc." No Spanish-speaking nationality was listed. That likely created the impression that Hispanic was another race, notwithstanding the previous question's disclaimer that "Hispanic origins are not races." Thus, many Hispanics who would have checked off white alone in 2010 may have checked "white" and "some other race" in 2020. The number of Hispanics checking two or more boxes increased by 567% from 2010 and make up about two-thirds of those who checked both boxes. "One takeaway that we saw in the media a lot was about the alleged decline of the white population and certain rises in the 'mark one or more' [races] multiracial or biracial population," Ellis Monk, a sociology professor at Harvard University, told the campus paper in September 2021. "My main reaction is really to the way that the questions, the forms on the census itself are actually produced." 'Population size determines, to some degree, the power you wield.' Monk also suggested that the way the questions were worded "could have played into the rise of the number of people who feel compelled to mark one or more categories on the census." Others who were content with the bureau's final figures proved willing to dismiss or ignore such doubts about the accuracy or meaning of the census findings. True believers MSNBC political analyst Charles Blow noted in an August 2021 piece for the New York Times titled "It was a terrifying census for white nationalists" that "white power acolytes saw this train approaching from a distance — the browning of America, the shrinking of the white population and the explosion of the nonwhite — and they did everything they could to head it off." Blow suggested that pro-life activism, protections for the Second Amendment, and efforts to clamp down on illegal immigration were part of a grand white supremacist campaign that apparently failed and that a comeuppance was on the horizon. "Population size determines, to some degree, the power you wield," wrote Blow. "The passage of power is not a polite and gentle affair like passing the salt at a dinner table. People with power fight — sometimes to the end — to maintain it. There's going to be a shift, but not without strife." Others were more delicate when insinuating that American citizens were competing along racial lines or when suggesting that ascendant racial groups should be assigned greater priority and care. "The unanticipated decline in the country's white population means that other racial and ethnic groups are responsible for generating overall growth," William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said of the Census Bureau's early estimates. "One fact is already clear: As the nation becomes even more racially diverse from the 'bottom up' of the age structure, more attention needs to be given to the needs and opportunities for America's highly diverse younger generations." "The mixing of all sorts [of races] is really a new force in 21st-century America," Richard Alba, a demographer and professor emeritus at the City University of New York, told the Washington Post. "We're talking about a big, powerful phenomenon." While some leftists and race obsessives salivated over the prospect of fewer white Americans and the supposed power shift that would entail, others complained about the pace of the alleged change. Sarah Gaither, an associate professor at Duke University, told CNN, "Even if the white individuals in our country are decreasing numerically, it doesn't necessarily suggest that they're losing any of their power. These power structures are built into our systems, historically, and will still be built pretty strongly going forward." While it's unclear whether anyone stands to lose power, the U.S. Census Bureau has certainly lost credibility. Bureaucratic bogus In their paper, recently highlighted by the Associated Press, Princeton sociologists Paul Starr and Christina Pao suggested that the new question design and recoding algorithm used in the 2020 census were "largely responsible for the multiracial increase." "The example of the individual from Argentina who checked only 'white' but was coded as multiracial is typical of what happened with both whites and blacks with any Latin American heritage," wrote the researchers. "The census algorithm did not recognize Latin American national origins or ethnicities as a race. When anyone who checked off 'white' or 'black' alone indicated a Latin American origin, they were reclassified as multiracial." Apparently the illusion of a multiracial boom was driven also by Americans going the route taken by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Berkeley professor Elizabeth Hoover. "The reclassification of whites as multiracial was not limited to self-identified whites with Latin American origins," continued the paper. "Among non-Hispanics, the biggest jump in the multiracial population was in the 'white and American Indian' category — an increase of 2.3 million." The researchers concluded that while there has been an upward trend in multiracial identity, "it has been a much more slowly growing trend than recent data and the [New York] Times suggest." "In short, the various steps the Census Bureau has already undertaken (using 'origins' for recoding) or has used in its tests (displaying racial data without the two-or-more category) raise the multiracial complication to a new level of perplexity," added the sociologists. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Nearly every House Democrat voted to block the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act on Tuesday. Despite the overwhelming opposition from Democrats, the bill passed the House with Republican support. This landmark legislation amends Title IX so that protections are recognized based on sex rather than the gender identity an individual claims to adopt. The bill was brought forth to confront the increasing concern surrounding male athletes who identify as transgender and then compete in women's sports. 'Men are men, women are women, and men cannot become women. ... It’s just that simple.'The bill states that any federally funded sports program "designated for women or girls" that allows "a person whose sex is male to participate" will be in violation of the law. The legislation goes on to clarify that "sex shall be recognized based solely on a person's reproductive biology and genetics at birth." The bill passed with the support of 216 Republicans and just two Democrats, Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez. There were 206 Democrats who voted against the bill. U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) speaks at a news conference following the House of Representatives vote on H.R. 28, "Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act" at the U.S. Capitol on January 14, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images."This is a great day for women in America," Speaker Mike Johnson said following the bill's passage. "House Republicans have yet again stood up for women. This is a commitment we have made because it comports with what is right and what is common sense." "Men are men, women are women, and men cannot become women," Johnson said. "It’s just that simple."Johnson had also addressed the issue when freshman Democratic Rep. Sarah McBride of Delaware, a man who identifies as a woman, became the first transgender member of Congress. Following his election, Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced a provision prohibiting men from using women's facilities on Capitol grounds. “All single-sex facilities in the Capitol and House Office Buildings — such as restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms — are reserved for individuals of that biological sex,” Johnson said, backing Mace's provision. "It is important to note that each Member office has its own private restroom, and unisex restrooms are available throughout the Capitol," Johnson added. "Women deserve women's only spaces." Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

The wildfires around Los Angeles are a historic disaster. Los Angeles officials believe the number of dead is higher than reported, and thousands of homes have been destroyed in the flames. Over 130,000 people are under evacuation orders. But that all raises the question: Why was California so unprepared? Right as the firefighters were attempting to contain the breakout, the fire hydrants ran dry. “This sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it happened,” Glenn Beck of “The Glenn Beck Program” comments, noting that when Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) was asked about why the fire hydrants ran dry, he told reporters that “local folks are going to have to try to figure that out.” “Wait a minute. Hang on just a second. So the guy who holds the highest political office in California, who is constantly meddling in every single person's personal life, who loves big government, more than comfortable with the phrase ‘trust us, we’re the government, we know better, we’re here to help,’” Glenn says, “he’s been doing all the deals with water, and he has the balls to look at the camera and go, ‘What do you want from me?’” “You people have set California up,” Glenn adds, before referring to a social media post from former liberal Ana Kasparian. “CA, and especially LA, is controlled by Democrats. THEY are responsible. No more passing the buck. Our Mayor, who was in Ghana as fires exploded in our city, cut the fire budget by $17 million. Endless amounts of money funneled to bullshit scammer homeless nonprofits. We’re the highest taxed yet we have encampments and squalor everywhere,” Kasparian wrote in a post on X. “Even worse, we don’t have enough firefighters to respond to the absolute disaster we’re experiencing right now. Rather than conserve the record rain we got last year, we just drained it into the ocean. We are a failing city run by a sick excuse for local government. You want to radicalize people against the modern Democratic Party? Send them to LA,” she concluded. Ana then quote-tweeted a video from an organization called More Perfect Union, which says, “One billionaire couple owns all the water in California. In 1994, the Resnicks secretly seized control of California’s public water supply. Now their companies use over 150 billion gallons every year while working class people suffer under drought conditions.” “Now, I’m not letting this California company off the hook, but this is the response that always happens from the left,” Glenn says, adding, “They treat corporations all across the spectrum the same way, and you see it in health care, food production, pharmaceuticals, on and on and on. It is never the government’s fault; it’s those damn corporations.” Want more from Glenn Beck?To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

The price of the advancement of technology lies in the risk of becoming enslaved to it. With so many voices advocating for different directions for the future of technology, it is sometimes hard to gauge the correct relationship humanity should have with tech. Technology, especially social media, is easily viewed as a scourge of modern society. However, it may also be one of the keys to saving America from a spiral into tyranny, as Michael Cernovich suggests. On “Zero Hour,” Michael Cernovich, an independent filmmaker and author of “Gorilla Mindset,” joins James Poulos to discuss the concepts of time, the West’s narrow understanding of history, and the benefits and drawbacks of technological advancement. Cernovich argues that we live in a peculiar historical period, which he calls the age of “tech,” in the sense of technology as we know it today, with communication and sharing information. In his view, technology is a key factor in deciding the trajectory of America today: “Trump doesn’t win 2016 without Twitter. America is a right-wing culture, so right-wing that the media had to lie to prop up these other people as moderates and centrists.” They talk about the transhumanist movement in which people seek to merge their consciousness with technology because they “hate their body and hate humanity as a result.” After dismissing these people as “kooks” and “weirdos,” Cernovich compares the current movement to some of the worst events in recent history, such as Mao’s crushing of China or the Soviet tyranny in Russia. Poulos adds that, in each case, these events were forced and “compulsory” for the entire population rather than being a fringe movement that left everyone else alone. To Cernovich’s point, all of these political movements and the destruction that followed occurred in “pre-tech” societies. In present-day America, we have a choice: “You had to live that way in Communist China before tech ... it’s not that we have to [live that way].” The question is “whether we’re going to submit ... is there a red line, or are we just going to cower and go along with it?”Technology has clearly advanced to unprecedented and almost unimaginable levels, but the temptation to “advance” humanity out of its present state remains all the same. Cernovich warns about this gnostic impulse to resist human nature and escape its bodily state, but he and Poulos agree that this is ultimately a movement that seeks to “escape responsibility,” both from God and his commandments and from the demands of normal human life. Clearly, the advancement of technology is a double-edged sword, with as many temptations as it has benefits. According to Cernovich, we are uniquely positioned to resist similar instances of tyranny like those that arose in the 20th century: “If we didn’t have these technological tools, we would have already been decimated.” Will America be able to navigate this treacherous landscape in the future? To hear more about what Michael Cernovich has to say about tyrannical regimes, technological advancement, transhumanism, and more, watch the full episode of “Zero Hour” with James Poulos.

No One Is Above the Law? Planned Parenthood Violated Federal Law by Giving Kamala Campaign Workspace