Source: Independent Institute
by David Iglesias
“A bombshell report was released in December of 2024 by the House Judiciary Committee, revealing that a massive and constitutionally dubious surveillance operation has been underway by the federal government against countless Americans. … its key findings demonstrate that the FBI and the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) have been working together to undermine the 4th Amendment and conduct widespread warrantless surveillance on the financial transactions of innocent U.S. citizens engaging in constitutionally protected behavior. How do they do this? It’s simple: the federal government turns financial institutions into de facto arms of law enforcement to do their dirty work for them.” (01/14/25)
https://blog.independent.org/2025/01/14/banking-surveillance-industrial-complex/
Source: Reason
by Nick Gillespie
“‘If you vote for me, on day one, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht,’ proclaimed Trump last May while addressing the Libertarian National Convention. The request was on a list of 10 demands the Libertarian Party shared with Trump before he spoke. If Trump has failed to follow through on his other memorable promise from the convention — he said he would ‘put a Libertarian in my cabinet’ — this one is still in play. It would right a small but potent wrong when it comes to the carceral state, the deep state, the drug war, and a host of related bastions of state overreach. By most accounts a model prisoner who has been behind bars for almost a dozen years, Ulbricht deserves his freedom.” (01/14/25)
https://reason.com/2025/01/14/reminder-donald-trump-promised-to-free-ross-ulbricht-on-day-one/
Source: United Press International
“The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments Wednesday over a Texas law that requires online pornography sites verify the ages of users before providing access. Free Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxton is seeking to overturn the Texas law on the grounds it violates free speech as it requires adults to submit personal data to view pornography sites. Some sites, including Pornhub, have cut off access to Texas. … Under the law, users are required to provide a government-issued ID to prove their age. Pornography websites that fail to verify the age of their users face a $10,000 fine per violation or a $250,000 fine, if the violation involves a minor.” (01/14/25)
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2025/01/14/supreme-court-texas-law-age-verification-porn/1611736892852/
Source: Politics Politics Politics
“Dems Bumble Hegseth Hearing. Kamala Harris 24 is STILL Fundraising? (with Jen Briney and Dave Levinthal).” (01/14/25)
https://www.politicspoliticspolitics.com/p/dems-bumble-hegseth-hearing-kamala
Source: Brownstone Institute
by Debbie Lerman
“In previous articles, I analyzed government documents showing that the Covid pandemic response in the US was not designed or led by the public health agencies. Rather, it was a biodefense lockdown-until-vaccine response, led by the National Security Council and FEMA/Department of Homeland Security (DHS). I showed that the same pattern was repeated in the UK. And I posited that this was a globally planned and executed response – overseen by what I call the Biodefense Global Public-Private Partnership (GPPP). The lockstep in which nearly all Western countries responded to the “novel coronavirus” in early 2020 suggested that national governments were not in charge. Rather, a global plan was being executed on behalf of a larger and more powerful entity, or entities.” (01/14/25)
https://brownstone.org/articles/in-holland-and-germany-pandemic-response-was-biodefense-not-public-health/
Source: BBC News [UK state media]
“Yoon Suk Yeol has become South Korea’s first sitting president to be arrested after investigators scaled barricades and cut through barbed wire to take him into custody. Yoon, 64, is being investigated on charges of insurrection for a failed martial law order on 3 December that plunged the country into turmoil. He has also been impeached by parliament and suspended — but will only be removed from office if the Constitutional Court upholds the impeachment. Yoon’s dramatic arrest on Wednesday, however, brings to an end a weeks-long standoff between investigators and his presidential security team.” (01/15/25)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg45zqz225vo
Source: The Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp
“Popular perceptions of Trump tend toward the superlative. To his supporters, he’s a fearless, iconoclastic, possibly even divinely ordained, leader figure, disrupting the establishment to Make America Great Again. To his opponents, he’s a whiny, self-dealing criminal in terms of personality, literally Hitler reincarnate and possibly even the Antichrist in terms of politics. In my opinion, he’s just another politician, albeit one with a flair for the dramatic and a firm grasp of what H.L. Mencken called ‘the whole aim of practical politics …. to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.'” (01/14/25)
https://thegarrisoncenter.org/archives/19294
Source: The Hill
“Robby Soave delivers radar on Jennifer Rubin’s resignation from the Washington Post.” (01/14/25)
https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/5084549-rising-january-14-2025/
Source: NBC News
“Russia launched a massive aerial attack against Ukraine on Wednesday, forcing the country to introduce preventive power cuts, the Ukrainian energy minister said. … Moscow launched more than 40 missiles, and at least 30 were shot down, said Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, adding about 70 strike drones were involved in the attack. It remains unclear how many were intercepted. The state energy company Ukrenergo reported emergency power outages in the Kharkiv, Sumy, Poltava, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kirovohrad regions. The attack comes a day after the Russian Defense Ministry accused Ukraine of firing multiple Western-made missiles at Russia’s Bryansk region on the border with Ukraine, claiming in an online statement that the attack ‘will not go unanswered.'” (01/15/25)
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russian-missile-attack-forces-ukraine-shut-power-grid-rcna187744
Source: Reason
by Eric Boehm
“Several proposed election reforms on the 2024 ballot offered promising solutions: Reduce the power of partisan primaries, ensure more robust competition in general elections, and increase the likelihood that winning campaigns represent the median voter rather than a lesser-of-two-evils result. But it seems voters aren’t interested in all that.” (for publication 02/25)
https://reason.com/2025/01/14/election-reforms-blocked-by-elections/
