Pam Bondi, Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general, told lawmakers on Wednesday that she would maintain the justice department’s traditional independence from the White House at her confirmation hearing before the Senate judiciary committee. The consensus across the committee was that Bondi, the former Florida attorney general and longtime state prosecutor, was sufficiently qualified and experienced to lead the department in Trump’s second term.

CIA Director-designate John Ratcliffe vowed in his Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday that he would excise “political or personal biases” and make the spy agency “the ultimate meritocracy” — while refocusing its energy on China as the “top national security threat” to the US. Ratcliffe, who served as director of national intelligence in the first Donald Trump administration, announced before the Senate Intelligence Committee he would return the Company to its “core mission” of...

Sen. Marco Rubio used his confirmation hearing Wednesday to warn a Senate panel that China might move against Taiwan before the decade is over and that a potential ceasefire agreement between Russia and Ukraine must provide the Ukrainians with sufficient leverage to deter a repeat invasion in the future. Rubio, R-Fla., President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to become secretary of State, testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he is expected to receive bipartisan...

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I’ve been saying for a while that Pete Hegseth’s confirmation process was going to mark a major change in American politics that was facilitated and caused by the election of Donald Trump on Nov. 5. It’s pretty clear that the Democrats in the Senate haven’t been listening. Which is fine — they and their ideological bed-buddies can stay out of touch and in the political wilderness as long as they’d like, and the rest of us won’t mind a bit. In a previous column, I talked about what I call The Old Game, which is what you saw a great deal of at Hegseth’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday. The Old Game, which could also be defined as the “politics of personal destruction” in the verbiage of one Hillary Clinton, who had a lot of nerve decrying it when it was literally her political stock in trade, is what you play when you can’t win a real, substantial political argument with somebody. Instead, you attack them on “character” issues as a means of distracting from the substance of the argument. They played the Old Game against Hegseth. In previous year,s it would have been a no-brainer of a way to stop his confirmation. Sex sells, of course, and Hegseth spent his younger years (and some of his middle-aged years) as a bit of a philanderer. He busted up a pair of marriages because he had trouble turning down the strange, and he has something of a reputation — whether earned or not — as a guy who likes to tie one on from time to time. The idea that a penchant for strong drink is disqualifying from government service in Washington, D.C., is of course quite laughable. That marital fidelity is a non-negotiable standard for public officials at the federal level is also a knee-slapper. The people professing offense at Hegseth’s occasional bouts of moral turpitude have very little room to talk, as Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin pointed out to their faces Tuesday: HILARIOUS! Sen Markwayne Mullen CALLS OUT Senators for Cheating on Their Wives and Showing up to Vote Drunk While Attacking Pete Hegseth for Alleged Affairs and Alcohol Use pic.twitter.com/zimCWJMa5T — Jordan Conradson (@ConradsonJordan) January 14, 2025 Mullin’s riposte to the screeching Democrats who attempted to turn Hegseth’s confirmation hearing into a Chinese Cultural Revolution-style struggle session was the internet’s overwhelming favorite moment of the spectacle, and for a reason: Mullin discussed Hegseth as a man in full, containing flaws but also the spirit and fight America must have in its leaders if we’re to restore the country to its deserved glory, and he pointed out the flaming hypocrisy of those people who would declare Hegseth unworthy of his sought position by applying a standard none of them could ever meet. They made his job easy. Here is the slovenly Tammy Duckworth thundering away at Hegseth from a prepared script and making an ass of herself in the process: Nauseating meltdowns, down to the prepared remarks and sighs that come off like stage cues from Illinois Democrat Senator Tammy Duckworth, arguing he's somehow not emblematic of the Soldier's Creed (unlike her b/c of her own service and war injuries) Disgusting. pic.twitter.com/IGJGLyUw5V — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) January 14, 2025 Among her bones to pick with Hegseth were that he couldn’t remember offhand the nations of the ASEAN treaty, which she claimed is a military alliance the Defense Secretary must manage. Except ASEAN is an economic alliance, not a military one, and Duckworth, who as RedState’s Bonchie noted came off even dumber than Mazie Hirono, failed to realize that. Which makes her no more qualified to hold the position for which Hegseth has been nominated than he is. Again, the standards these people attempt to impose on a Pete Hegseth aren’t remotely realistic given their own fitness for them, and the American public sees this as plain as day. There is only so much of being ruled by cretins like Joe Biden and Tim Kaine and Elizabeth Warren anyone can stand before none of this stuff works anymore. Particularly when it’s patently obvious none of them want to debate the substance and reality of what Hegseth represents — which is the leaner, more lethal, less corrupt, less woke, and much more efficient killing machine that the U.S. military would become under a bold, innovative, no-nonsense leader not hostage to the corrupt status quo. If the Department of Defense is no longer a laboratory for social experimentation and an ATM machine for grasping government contractors but instead the unchallenged master of geopolitical land, sea, and air that taxpayers are paying for, the power behind their thrones would certainly diminish. And any amount of transparency to these questions and antics would suss this out. Not to the benefit of Jack Reed and Kirstin Gillibrand, I might add. So it’s the Old Game. But it doesn’t fool anybody. Americans are through with woke pieties. So when Hirono offers up her own stupid questions for Hegseth to effortlessly bat away, she’s brutally and accurately satirized on the internet: OK, who made this?? pic.twitter.com/OfCox6IQVm — Community Notes & Violations (@CNviolations) January 14, 2025 That didn’t stop Hirono from asking Pam Bondi, the nominee for attorney general, whether she had ever sexually assaulted anyone. Because when all you have is a hammer… The days of woke cancellations serving as weapons of mass distraction are over. Hegseth’s confirmation process, which at this point is virtually assured of going through to completion, signals this fact quite loudly. The public, even including lots of people who didn’t vote for Trump, is demanding that his nominees be confirmed, and those demands grow louder by the day. And it isn’t because they’re all such charming, charismatic people, though many of them are just that. It’s because they represent an agenda the public wants. They want the swamp drained. They want the budget balanced. They want the border controlled. They want an end to declining life expectancies, poor public health, overweening government, incompetent emergency management, an overextended, poorly led military, a weaponized justice system and a poisonous, propagandistic media that spins lie after lie into their living rooms. And the purveyors of the Old Game, the people who became experts at discrediting their opponents for failing to meet their woke pieties, simply don’t have an answer for these demands. The Republican purveyors of the Old Game at first slowly, and now with breakneck speed, are retreating from its use. The Democrats don’t have much else in their arsenal. And so these hearings will be disastrous for them. What they’ll signify is that everything changed on Nov. 5 of last year. Those changes were overdue, but they’re here. And when real reform hits Washington as a result of Trump’s cabinet being seated and getting to work, the old matrix of sex scandals, petty innuendo, and cancellations simply won’t save the Swamp. It’s a feast for the eyes. More, please. READ MORE from Scott McKay: The Spectacle Ep. 181: Democrat Women Whine for Toxic Femininity at Pete Hegseth’s Confirmation Hearing BlackRock and American Airlines: Is Larry Fink the New Sam Bankman-Fried? Five Quick Things: The Sum of All Frauds in Los Angeles The post Woke Has Gone Broke at the Confirmation Hearings appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The American Spectator might not be at the top of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s reading list, but had it been, he would have known that California’s teetering insurance system was just one particularly bad wildfire away from disaster. Sure, he knew that insurers were fleeing the state in the face of its absurd price-control system that doesn’t allow them to price policies to reflect their actual risk, but that knowledge didn’t spur him to make the matter a priority. In September 2023, I wrote the following on these pages after lawmakers decided to punt on insurance reform rather than take on their anti-corporate allies: Newsom said the legislative deal “unfortunately fell through and, I say unfortunately, because time is of the essence.” Yet timing wasn’t essential enough for the Legislature, which does have the knack for punting on the state’s truly pressing problems (homelessness, pension debt, failing public schools, etc.) It’s unclear what Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, who has been chastened for his inaction by some media sources, plans to do about a crisis that he continues to blame on climate change, inflation and everything other than the state’s price controls and inefficient rate-approval system. Well, over a year later, Lara finally implemented some reasonable reforms that allow insurers to use forward-looking catastrophe models in determining rates rather than relying primarily on past claims. That should have been a no-brainer many years ago for our climate-change-obsessed policymakers. If the future climate is warming, then insurance companies ought to be able to include such warming — and its fire-related risks because of dryness and drought — in their rate making. The reforms also let insurers factor rising reinsurance rates into their policy charges. Reinsurance is the insurance that insurance companies buy, which protects their financial reserves and lets them write additional policies. Everyone in Sacramento agrees that the state needs more underwriting. But Lara unveiled the belated reforms and then, lo and behold, this tragic wildfire swept across Los Angeles, causing perhaps $150 billion in damage. As Newsweek reports, “The wildfires ravaging Southern California for over seven days could exacerbate the ongoing property insurance sector crisis in the state, leading to further premium hikes and coverage cuts from major companies, according to experts.” That’s a rather understated take on the size of the disaster. Basically, the commissioner’s long-awaited reforms will be incinerated along with the 12,000 or so structures that vanished in the fires. And Lara couldn’t help himself from falling back on his progressive instincts, as he issued an edict forbidding insurers from cancelling or not renewing policies in the Los Angeles-area neighborhoods most affected by the fires. Forcing companies to provide such coverage will only cause them to cut back elsewhere — and high-tail it out of state as soon as the moratorium is lifted. I understand the instinct here, but such rules are at the root of California’s insurance crisis. Insurers are in business to write policies, so if the state has to force them to do so, it suggests a deeper problem. In my April 2021 American Spectator column, I likewise offered warnings about a coming crisis: There are some obvious steps that policymakers can take beyond blathering about the need to rejigger the Earth’s climate. California could step up its inadequate forest-thinning activities and incentivize electrical utilities to better deal with fire-sparking transmission lines. From an insurance standpoint, the state needs to allow a competitive marketplace.  If insurers were free to price their policies to reflect their risk, they would be more apt to write them in riskier areas — and competition would eventually reduce the cost of premiums. Over that time, Newsom has A) promised to boost forest-thinning efforts, but only oversaw the clearing of a small portion of the promised amount; B) talked about the need for more water supplies, but his Coastal Commission appointees rejected an Orange County desalination plant; C) done little to tackle the transmission-line issue; D) done little beyond Lara’s latest minor reforms to incentivize insurers to step up their policy writing. In the ensuing years, companies have increasingly headed for the exit doors. (READ MORE: Blame Newsom, Not Climate Change, for Los Angeles Wildfires) Other disaster-prone states, such as Florida, have major insurance problems, but the causes vary. In California, the cause is tied to our prior-approval system of insurance regulation. Wildfires exacerbate that problem. Climate change might intensify the wildfires. But the issue is California makes it inordinately difficult for insurers to price their policies accordingly. Price controls always lead to shortages. Instead of risking their financial health, insurers quietly leave. Our controls came in 1988 when voters approved Proposition 103. It made the insurance commissioner an elected official. Elected officials have a political incentive not to raise rates for obvious reasons. It instituted a prior-approval system (similar systems exist in 12 states), whereby the commissioner must approve any rate increases. It created a Byzantine rate-review process that’s costly and time-consuming. It gave consumer attorneys (“intervenors”) standing to oppose rate hikes. It even rolled back rates. The state can enact reforms within the Prop. 103 framework (mainly through expediting the rate-review process and allowing use of those catastrophe models), but it won’t have a healthy insurance market until it ditches price controls. To make matters worse, the state’s FAIR (Fair Access to Insurance Requirements) Plan is in deep trouble, as increasing numbers of property owners rely on this bare-bones state-created insurer of last resort. If that fails, what exactly will people do? Regarding Lara’s moratorium, I quote from letter insurance industry trade groups sent to legislators when they were considering a bill that would have forbidden insurers from cancelling or non-renewing policies in high-risk wildfire areas (along with another regulatory bill):  The combination of inadequate rates and unmanageable risk would present significant solvency issues for California insurers. The undersigned trade associations oppose both AB 1439 and AB 1522 because they would impose immense risks that threaten the ability of homeowner’s insurers to continue to function in California. That was in 2021 following years of losses spurred by wildfires less devastating than the current one. One final note: Perhaps Newsom and the Legislature might put on hold their performative emergency efforts to stand up against Big Oil and the incoming Trump administration and, you know, actually tackle a problem that threatens our economic future. Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org. READ MORE: A Tale of Two Democrat Cities Facebook Ends Dubious Fact-Checking. Biden Objects. The post California Incinerated Its Insurance Market appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

There is a certain intoxication with winning that tends to border on insanity. A sports team, for instance, is much more likely to run risky plays if it has won the last five games; a politician is much more likely to adopt risky proposals if he has won the last several elections; and a political party is much more likely to feel comfortable dominating the cultural and political space if it feels that it has that thing political commentators like to refer as a “mandate” from the people to enact its agenda. The Republican Party and, more broadly, the conservative movement are on the edge of that insanity — if they haven’t already entered into it. In many ways, it’s a good kind of insanity. It’s the kind that pushes sports teams to win against impossible odds, inspires tiny armies to defeat colossal forces, and puts men on the moon. Unfortunately, it also tends to breed a lazy mental state. There is less introspection among the winners and a general lack of critical thinking. Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement last week that he is ending strict censorship policies at Meta was very good news, but it should not have come as a surprise to anyone. He spent a good number of hours in a congressional hearing room being grilled by Jim Jordan a year and a half ago, and in November, the entire country had turned decidedly red. To be blunt, he didn’t have a lot of options. (READ MORE: Facebook Ends Dubious Fact-Checking. Biden Objects.) He did the obvious thing. His five-minute-long video blamed Meta’s onerous speech policies on “complex systems” implemented when “governments and legacy media” pushed to “censor more and more.” He promised to simplify those systems, reduce and weaken content filters, replace fact-checkers with community notes (yes, he stole that from X), and move his content moderation team to Texas (also an idea he stole from Elon Musk). The goal, Zuckerberg informed the nearly 3.2 billion people who use his platforms daily, is to “get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram.” For many of us, his announcement was another piece of good news in a wave of good news. Zuckerberg then went on Joe Rogan’s podcast in a two-hour-long episode that aired last Friday to offer an explanation of his actions and to claim victimhood. The Biden administration, Zuckerberg complained, called his employees, bullied them over the phone (evidently those employees never thought to record those conversations), and pressured them in emails in order to censor memes, satire, and any dissenting voices. He claims the company tried to push back, although it eventually caved, for which Zuckerberg apologized. As Jordan Boyd pointed out at the Federalist, that’s not exactly how it all went down. The Facebook Files, which Zuckerberg continually invokes in his interview, reveal that while Meta was certainly bullied by the government, it didn’t push back all that hard. It certainly had no inclination to admit it was being bullied. It wasn’t until Jim Jordan threatened Zuckerberg by announcing his committee’s intention to hold him in contempt that the company turned over emails proving “that government pressure was directly responsible for censorship on Facebook.” (READ MORE: Farewell Mr. Waugh: Political Correctness and Censorship Continue to Wreak Havoc) Zuckerberg seems to have been particularly susceptible to being pushed around by the Biden administration. If the government wanted fewer Americans to see posts about potential vaccine side effects, Meta complied. If the Babylon Bee’s satire or internet memes were a bit too on-point, Meta took them down. Now that the incoming government is composed of the same people Meta once censored, Zuckerberg is eager to give them what they want. The insane feeling of winning makes us want to welcome Zuckerberg to our side with open arms. A more critical — although pessimistic — approach might recognize that he and his social media platforms will be on their best behavior until the next time the cultural winds shift away from conservatives. Like it or not, economy, culture, and politics are intertwined. Business owners — especially those in the entertainment and social media industries — have a tendency to keep one eye on the way the cultural and political tides are moving. You can’t totally blame them, either. They’re simply implementing best business practices to make the most money. That’s what businesses do in a capitalist economy. What this means is that when the government shuts down an entire country and Americans dutifully go along with it, social media companies aren’t going to put up a fuss. They’ll censor the voices the government says ought to be censored and promote the voices the government says ought to be promoted. They become one with the herd, and in doing so, they amplify the herd. (READ MORE: Grilling Hegseth: Democrats Expose Their Spiteful Hypocrisy) But there’s a positive flip side to it, too. When the conservative movement makes the kinds of wins it’s making, and when the entire nation (with the exception of a few counties) flips red, so do these companies. They apologize for past flubs and get in line with the new agenda. They hire people like Dana White and profess to love free speech once again. Zuckerberg’s flip-flop is good news for now, but if we’re going to solidify these kinds of wins, we have to hold on to the cultural and political reins of power. That’s much easier said than done. The post Let’s Not Take Zuckerberg’s Free Speech Promises at Face Value appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Anthony Hopkins, and Jeff Bridges lost homes in the Los Angeles fires, and as Malibu resident Mel Gibson told reporters, “I have never seen a place so perfectly burned. You could put it in an urn.” As all fire victims recently learned, “[H]omes, businesses, churches, schools and other structures that have been destroyed by the recent fires are exempt from Coastal Act permitting requirements.” That is the ruling of the California Coastal Commission (CCC), a powerful state agency with a curious history in regard to celebrities, property owners, and fires alike. The CCC traces its origin to the 1969 oil spill off Santa Barbara, but an event in September 1970 had more lasting significance. As the New York Times reported, “[A] massive brush fire, fanned by strong winds off the Mojave Desert, spread out of control northwest of Los Angeles today, driving men and animals before it.” The flames were “swept along with almost explosive speed by the extremely dry northeast wind that Californians call a ‘Santa Ana,” in the region’s worst fire since 1961. The blaze forced evacuations in Topanga Canyon and threatened the Mullholland Canyon residence of Gov. Ronald Reagan, who declared a state of emergency. The blaze jumped the coast highway and “the flames burned to the Pacific Ocean.” The “Wright Fire” in Malibu Canyon killed ten people, destroyed 103 homes, and consumed 28,000 acres. Despite the death and destruction, state politicians continued to focus on the oil spill. Environmentalist Peter Douglas co-wrote Proposition 20, a 1972 ballot measure to create a temporary commission and authored the Coastal Act of 1976, which made the Commission permanent. The next year, Douglas became deputy director and in 1985 executive director of the agency he conceived. With this regulatory zealot at the helm, the unelected Commission rode roughshod over the property rights of coastal residents, who were not responsible for the oil spill. The CCC holds jurisdiction in an area extending up to five miles inland, “and including coastal mountains.” The commission can require “restoration of sites to native habitat” and opposes “removal of major vegetation.” Residents of the coastal zone were not free to clear brush in times of fire, but regulations were not the commission’s only imposition. Assembly Speaker Willie Brown appointed Mark Nathanson, a wealthy businessman who had raised money for Brown’s campaign. Commissioner Nathanson set about extorting money from coastal residents seeking permits to remodel their beachfront homes. Nathanson pedaled permits for up to $734,000 and demanded $1.34 million more from applicants who refused to pay. They included Sylvester Stallone (Rocky, First Blood), who helped the FBI investigate the case. Nathan pleaded guilty to racketeering and drew a sentence of five years in prison. This scandal prompted no effort to scale back or eliminate the CCC, and the coastal fires continued. According to the Malibu Times, the area has averaged two fires every decade since 1929. The 1993 “Old Topanga Fire” caused three deaths and destroyed 369 homes. The 2007 “Canyon Fire” consumed 4,565 acres, destroyed six homes, and forced the evacuation of 2,100 residents. The pattern continued into the current decade. Last December, Dick Van Dyke, Cher, and Barbra Streisand joined thousands of Malibu residents fleeing a raging brush fire. That blaze failed to serve as a warning, even as Santa Ana winds kicked up. In the central valley on Jan. 6, 2025, Gov. Gavin Newsom attended a track-laying ceremony for California’s vaunted bullet train, according to UCLA economist Lee Ohanian a fantasy from the beginning that has no path to completion. On Jan. 4, 2025, with meteorologists warning that fire could spread to Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass flew to Ghana to attend an inauguration. The fires raged on claiming countless houses and killing, at this writing, 24 people. As high winds continue that count is sure to rise, but the LA fires are not the most deadly in recent history. That claim belongs to the 2023 Lahaina fire in Hawaii, with at least 102 people killed, 2,207 structures damaged or destroyed — 86 percent residential — and property damage approaching $6 billion. Firebreaks had been left covered with dense and dry grasses, and overgrown vegetation made the whole area a tinderbox. Consistent action to reduce fire risk could have prevented the deadly blaze, but the lessons seem lost on California politicians and bureaucrats. For Jeff Bridges, Billy Crystal, Mel Gibson, and countless others, 2025 turned out to be The Year of Living Dangerously beyond all others. Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. READ MORE: Newsom’s Energy Czar Returns Dr. Fauci Doubles Down The post Action Could Have Prevented the Deadly Blaze in Los Angeles appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Y’all, sightings of high speed UFO UAPs flying all over the California fires have not gone unnoticed. #UFOTwitter #UAPTwitter #UFO #UAP #UFOSightings #UAPx #Drones #UFOx #UAPHearing #dronesightings #njdrone #NJDroneMystery #orb #ovni #californiafire pic.twitter.com/gsY2xvn5fi — Ezee (@EzeemmaCraic) January 14, 2025