I suppose it's better that they spend their time doing this sort of thing than working to destroy our economy, our culture, and our country (Bad link before: fixed)

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Finger on the Pulse: Amy Klobuchar Passes Vital Legislation to Make the Bald Eagle Our National Bird

Amy Curtis:

This writer will make an embarrassing confession: she never knew the bald eagle wasn't the official national bird until today (more on that in a second. Yeah, she knows about how Benjamin Franklin proposed making the turkey the national bird [a myth — didn’t happen — Ed] , but she had always just assumed whatever the government needed to do to make the bald eagle our mascot was done ages ago.

Guess not.

On one hand, this writer is fine with Congress passing stupid bills like this. It shouldn't spend any tax money, and it's not some nanny state policy that attempts to run her life.

On the other hand, if this is what Congress is doing, maybe they need to spend even less time in D.C.

One commenter added “reader context”:

The commenter goes on to ask “What else is in that bill?” showing a cynical distrust of of our leaders. Sad.

(You can find a history of the 1784 designation of the eagle as our national bird and the reaffirmation of that resolution on August 26 1916 here.)

Here's a good place for the DOGE Boyz to start (UPDATED — that's billions, not millions)

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Waste Watch: Federal government spends billions on empty office space

Over $81 million is wasted every year for the underutilized government office space
alone, the report states. Furthermore, billions of additional dollars have gone toward buying brand-new furnishings for the abandoned offices. Though federal employees worked from home during the COVID emergency, Open the Books found that agencies continued to spend upward of $3 billion on furniture.

UPDATE: Convinced that no governmental body could possibly limit its losses to a mere $81 million, FWIW’s fact checker (that would be Gideon) went to Open Book’s actual report and found this:

“The government owns 7,697 vacant buildings and another 2,265 partially empty buildings. Maintaining and leasing government office buildings costs $8 billion every year, and another $7.7 billion is spent on the energy to keep them running.”

HotAir:

It turns out that the DoE is one of the biggest offenders when it comes to wasting fossil fuels and energy itself, exemplified by that very building. Built for a capacity of almost 4900 people every day with nearly a million square feet of usable square footage, the average daily number of folks utilizing that massive structure in 2023 was?

8

As in eight.

...The Department of Energy is the least utilized building, with just eight employees counted for the daily average in 2023, though office management reportedly refuted the attendance estimate. Other agencies with the emptiest office spaces include the Agency for Global Media, the US Department of Agriculture, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Land sale on Round Hill Road

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549 Round Hill Road, 7.42 acres, has sold direct for $3 million.

Why reinvent the wheel? Here’s what I had to say about this property back in September:

After 188 days, a price cut on Rogues Hill

549 Round Hill Road, from $4.5 to $3.9 million. 7.42-acres, 2.62 of which has been deeded to the Land Trust/Conservation group, but no fear: according to the listing, you can still build the 20,000 sq.ft. weekend cottage of your dreams.

The acreage is listed as land — there was a 1775 house here when these owners bought the property for $4.5 million in 2009, but that’s apparently since been confined to the dustbin of history.

gone

Sick times

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It’s not just Greenwich’s Taylor Lorenz who wants to see CEO’s assassinated. Every proper leftist from Elizabeth Warren to that crazed racist on The View have expressed support for the killing of Brian Thompson, and that’s to be expected, but the rot has metastasized downward into the lowest ranks of the wokists. Here are just three examples:

The founder of a high-end backpack company has been bombarded with vicious online abuse and death threats after providing police with a tip about murder suspect Luigi Mangione.

Peter Dering, CEO of Peak Design, said he and his employees have been targeted with terrifying messages after he contacted law enforcement about recognizing his company's bag in surveillance footage of the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Online trolls branded him a 'snitch,' some even calling for his execution and the downfall of his company after he admitted in a December 5 New York Times article that he contacted police immediately after seeing his product in images of the alleged shooter.

The bag, found stuffed with Monopoly money in Central Park, was linked to Mangione, the suspect in Thompson's killing.

Shocking online messages revealed the extent of the vitriol directed at Dering. 

One X user warned: 'All CEOs are the same and deserve the same fate as Brian Thompson.'

Another made a chilling joke about a 'Closing sale event coming soon' for his company.

'Don't buy @peakdesignltd their CEO @dering_peter is a rat. #FreeLuigi,' yet another user chimed in. 

The founder of a “socialist apparel” brand who has called online for the death of corporate executives is planning to sell a deck of cards of “most wanted CEOs” — complete with names and faces and decorated with illustrations of gun range targets.

Comrade Workwear founder James Harr announced the disturbing project just days after UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was executed on the streets of Midtown Manhattan.

He said it was inspired by the “most-wanted Iraqi” playing card decks famously distributed to US and coalition forces during the 2003 invasion of Iraq to help identify key targets in Saddam Hussein’s circle.

That deck helped soldiers “find and do what they needed to do” to those depicted, said Harr, whose social accounts are loaded with anti-capitalism posts and images including one reading “the CEO must die.”

He then blithely rattles off numerous A-list CEOs — whom The Post is choosing not to name — to be included in the deck, asking his combined 109,000 followers between Instagram and TikTok to help come up with more.

The comment thread below the Instagram post was flooded with praise from followers, who threw out scores of suggestions for other potential targets to feature in the deck, with many pledging to buy it as soon as it’s available for purchase.

Does it include addresses?” asked one commenter inquiring what information would be available on the cards.

“We need cards for good guys like Luigi [Mangione] too,” wrote another in reference to Thompson’s accused killer.

In a follow-up post on TikTok, Harr gleefully shows off preliminary design mock-ups of the deck, which he said will be separated into suits representing different industries.

Clubs, for instance, will include CEOs of pharmaceutical and chemical companies, Harr says in the video. Hearts will represent “things you need to survive” like retail and real estate; Diamonds will feature CEOs in “tech, finance and media” while spades will depict chief executives of companies involved in “oil and war.”

The reverse side of each card includes the words “most-wanted CEOs playing cards” and an image of a red human silhouette gun range target.

UnitedHealthcare and a number of other corporations have scrubbed the names of their top executives from their websites or marked their Wikipedia pages for deletion in the wake of Thompson’s murder.

The cards’ obverse sides feature a black-and-white close-up of each CEO’s face, with their name and affiliation, along with QR codes under the heading “why they’re evil,” which Harr says will lead to dedicated web pages outlining their apparent sins.