No doubt those employees are already on the street, armed with screwdrivers and molotovs and looking for Teslas (Bumped and updated with additional information from by someone who was there)

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Inside The Now-Shuttered Federal Agency Where Employees Lived ‘Like Reigning Kings’

Employees of DOGE's latest target spent taxpayer money on exotic vacations, portraits, and more.

Luke Rosiak from The Daily Wire

One of the seven small federal agencies that President Donald Trump ordered downsized or eliminated on Friday was rife with corruption, with its employees hiring friends and relatives, commissioning paintings of themselves, and using government credit cards to indulge in constant luxuries.

The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) occupied a nine-story office tower on D.C.’s K Street for only 60 employees, many of whom actually worked from home, prior to the pandemic. Its managers had luxury suites with full bathrooms; one manager would often be “in the shower” when she was needed, while another used her bathroom as a cigarette lounge. FMCS recorded its director as being on a years-long business trip to D.C. so he could have all of his meals and living expenses covered by taxpayers, simply for showing up to the office.

FMCS is a 230-employee agency that exists to serve as a voluntary mediator between unions and businesses. As an “independent agency,” its director nominally reports to the president, but the agency is so small that in effect, there is no oversight at all — and it showed, becoming a real-life caricature of all the excesses that the Department of Government Efficiency has alleged take place in government.

This reporter spent a year investigating the agency a decade ago, and I found egregious and self-serving violations of hiring, pay, contracting, and purchase card rules. One thing I could not discover is why the agency actually existed, other than to provide luxurious lifestyles for its employees. Endless junkets to resort destinations, which employees openly used to facilitate personal vacations, were justified as building awareness of the agency in the hopes that someone would actually want to use its voluntary services.

FMCS seemed, quite clearly, to exist for the benefit of those on its payroll, and not much else. One employee told me: “Let me give you the honest truth: A lot of FMCS employees don’t do a hell of a lot, including myself. Personally, the reason that I’ve stayed is that I just don’t feel like working that hard, plus the location on K Street is great, plus we all have these oversized offices with windows, plus management doesn’t seem to care if we stay out at lunch a long time. Can you blame me?”

“Recreation and reception fund.”

Top FMCS official George Cohen used a “recreation and reception fund” to order champagne and $200 coasters for his office, and to purchase artwork painted by his wife. The tiny agency commissioned paintings of its top employees — as one employee told me, “like they were reigning kings or something…I’ve never seen anything like it before.” It spent $2,402 retouching the portrait of someone who briefly held the top job in an acting capacity.

FMCS employees “unblocked” their government credit cards to turn off typical abuse protections, then used them to apparently fund personal expenses and simply bill anything they’d like to the government. One employee leased a BMW; another (IT director James Donnen) billed the government for his wife’s cell phone, cable TV at both his home and his vacation home, and even his subscription to USA Today.

UPDATE:

A local reader writes,

The Federal Mediation Council reminds me of CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act). Although Nixon started CETA, Carter expanded it. A LOT! I

In the summer of 1975, I was working as a political intern near City Hall. We and the other interns used to order pizza from a place next to CETA HQ. One of the interns was heavily into drugs. I knew he had a connection nearby. But, I found out it was in CETA when, one lovely summer day, we went on our normal pizza run, and the guy said, "Hold on. We gotta go in here." CETA HQ

We went upstairs. Not one single employee was actually working, except for the guy selling cocaine. In fact, the intern -- who was a low level Dem Party operative (Long story.)-- had a couple of other friends at CETA. Spacious offices. Closed doors. Without exception, as we walked in, they whispered, "Hey! Shut the door." I can only guess they didn't want to make it too obvious that they weren't working.

Much, much more on the abuses and theft of taxpayer money over on Twitchy. Here’s one example out of many:

How odd — or is it? Mentally ill people are, well, mentally ill. (Updated, with further proof)

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And this:

Two fun tweets in just one post! (Updated to a include a third, but it's a head-scratcher/hmmm post, rather than happy news. Unless something comes of it)

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UPDATE: Make of this what you will.

Pending in (sort of) Old Greenwich

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55 Richmond Drive, $1.490 million, 7 days from listing to pending. Have I mentioned that there’s no inventory? Would-be sellers, although it’s still possible to overprice a house and see it stall, so it’s not quite an “ask anything you want” market, it is certainly a propitious time to stretch a bit. Best advice though, is still to obtain a solid price opinion from an experienced agent and go with that; an underestimate will do no harm, because the buyers in the market will quickly correct your error.

Because they're stupid, and believe their voters are too

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Not that centerists have any role to play in the new Democratic Party, but they’re whining anyway; fortunately, their former comrades aren’t listening.

Politico:

Why some centrist Dems fear David Hogg could ‘do more harm than good.’

Inside the Democratic Party, Hogg’s election — and the resulting coverage — has been accompanied by frustration among centrists that a 24-year-old March for our Lives co-founder with a million followers could hurt the party’s brand, especially in swing districts. They vented that his ascension is representative of Democrats’ failure to grapple with some voters’ frustration that the party is overly concerned with diversity and appeals to the far left.

“The most worrying thing is if he carries into this new job a belief that saying what he was saying, but louder, is the way to prevail in red states,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of the center-left group Third Way. “Because it isn’t … If he believes that it is, that’s going to be a real problem for our candidates in those places.”

Bennett added, “He came up as an activist, but now he is a party leader, and that’s a very, very different role.”

Another Democratic strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly, complained that Hogg can now “go on TV as a vice chair for the DNC, speak on behalf of the Democratic Party, in a way that can do more harm than good.”

Hogg, who first rose to prominence after becoming a survivor of the 2018 school shooting at Parkland High School in Florida, pitched himself to DNC members as a solution to Democrats’ growing youth problem, calling for the party to make concrete efforts to include young people in party business — for example, by covering the costs of travel to meetings for people who make less than $100,000, a barrier for some hoping to participate. He argued in DNC candidate forums that Democrats shouldn’t be “afraid to talk about the hard-to-talk-about issues.”

“Our party failed to connect with voters this year because they felt like we ignored them. We need to listen again and have the tough conversations with people from across the political spectrum — and I’m committed to doing that work,” Hogg said in a statement to POLITICO.

“Better Storytellers” — mission accomplished.

During his DNC campaign, Hogg didn’t pitch himself as a hardcore ideologue. Rather, he urged the party to “become better storytellers” about what Democrats do because the “American people do not think we care about them” and they “don’t think we deliver for them.”

Fortunately for this new voice of the Democrats, he’s quickly absorbed the lessons and adopted the wealth-building strategies of those who’ve come before, and is on his way to becoming a very rich young man, one who will able to afford any house he chooses, even one (or three) in California:

Newly elected DNC vice chair David Hogg using platform to solicit donations for his own PAC, insiders say: ‘Doesn’t give an oink’

David Hogg is being a pig, according to Democratic National Committee insiders who are already slinging mud at the new party vice chairman.

Barely two weeks into his tenure, Hogg has been leveraging DNC contact lists to blast out messages soliciting donations to his own political action committee — from which he draws more than $100,000 in compensation a year, according to Federal Election Commission records.

“David Hogg here: I was just elected DNC Vice Chair! This is a huge win for our movement to make the Democratic Party more reflective of our base: youthful, energetic, and ready to win,” reads one of eight texts he sent out to the DNC’s vast database of phone numbers.

Solicitation texts include a link to Hogg’s “Leaders We Deserve” PAC.

Hogg co-founded “Leaders We Deserve” in August 2023 with the stated goal of electing young progressives to Congress and state legislatures across the country. It also provided him a six-figure income job right out of college.

Since the PAC was founded, Hogg has pocketed more than $175,000, records show, with more than $20,000 in salary payments coming in December alone, the most recent month for which public data is available.

While it’s not officially against the rules, personal PAC fundraising — instead of fundraising for the DNC — has rubbed some party brass the wrong way.

“It’s especially important for all Democratic national officials to focus on raising support for the party and not using their position to raise money for themselves or their personal political PACS,” groused a second senior Democratic Party official. “It’s a stunning lack of judgment that is concerning to many people.”

In fact, there are a lot of problems with this decision

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(Actual photo)

Col. Brian T. Donnelly (ret.) of INDOPACOM

Radical Judge Blocks Trump Admin's Military Transgender Ban - But There's a Problem

We’ll start with the one I see: Acting under his authority as Commander in Chief, Biden issues an executive order reversing former military regulations that barred them from serving and ordered that “transgenders” be permitted to join up, and remain. The next Commander in Chief, Trump, used the same executive power to rescind his predecessor’s order and restored the original bar. How can Biden’s actions be within the scope of his executive power, but not Trump’s? We don’t seem to demand much from the law these days, but applying the same principle to two identical actions would seem to be a minimal requirement if any sort of rule of law is to survive.

Is the readiness of troops a legitimate concern of a Commander in Chief of the military? Yes, yes it is*

Now here’s RedState’s Clark Ward’s take:

Another day, another activist judge. This time it's Judge Ana Reyes, of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, who has issued a preliminary injunction barring the Trump administration's new rules on transgender individuals serving in the armed forces.

There's a problem, though; the injunction relies on objectively false information and independent "research" done by Judge Reyes. Civil liberties attorney Laura Powell has details.

According to Ms. Powell, the judge not only relied on bad information, but she broke the rules.

Part of that responsibility is to ensure the readiness of those armed forces - and allowing "transgender" individuals to serve in the armed forces in no way enhances readiness. Indeed, it places logistical burdens on the military, due to the necessity of ongoing medical treatments that people undergoing transgender surgeries and therapies. 

The armed forces are not a jobs program. They are necessary for the survival of a free nation, and in recruiting service members, readiness should be - must be - the only consideration. Any service member must stand ready to close with and destroy the enemy by fire, maneuver, and shock effect. [Well, the shock of seeing a pack of soldiers in dog masks and furry costumes might satisfy Clark’s requirement in this particular aspect, but otherwise …. —ED]

*Question asked of Grok, and reply:

Q: do transgenders require regular medical attention after they have completed their transition? How about if they have had a vagina created?

  1. After completing a gender transition, the need for regular medical attention depends on the individual’s specific circumstances, including the type of transition (hormonal, surgical, or both) and any procedures they’ve undergone. For transgender individuals who have pursued hormone therapy—such as estrogen for trans women or testosterone for trans men—ongoing medical care is typically required. This involves regular checkups to monitor hormone levels, liver function, and other health markers to ensure the therapy remains safe and effective. Hormones are usually a lifelong commitment unless someone chooses to stop, and discontinuing them can lead to reversal of some changes (like fat distribution or muscle mass) while others (like voice deepening in trans men) are permanent.

  2. For those who’ve had gender-affirming surgeries, such as vaginoplasty (the creation of a vagina), postoperative care is critical in the short term, and some level of maintenance may be needed long-term. After vaginoplasty, initial recovery involves wound care, managing potential complications like infection or fistula, and dilation—a process where a medical dilator is used regularly to maintain the vaginal canal’s depth and width, as the body doesn’t naturally lubricate or sustain it like a cisgender vagina. Dilation is intense at first (daily or multiple times a day) but may taper off to once a week or less after a year or two, depending on the surgeon’s protocol and the individual’s healing. Studies suggest about 1-2% of vaginoplasty patients experience significant complications like rectal injury or prolapse, though rates vary by surgical technique and expertise.

  3. Beyond dilation, regular gynecological-like exams might be recommended to check for issues like granulation tissue (excess healing tissue) or, rarely, neoplastic changes in the neovagina, though cancer risk is considered extremely low. If the surgery involved using penile or scrotal tissue, hair growth in the vaginal canal could require management. For trans men who’ve had phalloplasty or metoidioplasty, follow-ups might focus on urinary function or implant maintenance if erectile devices were used.

  4. Not all transgender people opt for surgery—many stick to hormones or social transition alone—so their medical needs differ. Data from the 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey shows about 25% of trans respondents had undergone some form of gender-affirming surgery, with vaginoplasty being less common than top surgery (e.g., mastectomy). Regardless, most guidelines (like those from WPATH) recommend at least annual checkups with an endocrinologist or primary care provider familiar with trans health to monitor overall well-being, catch side effects, and adjust treatment as needed. Aging can also bring unique considerations, like prostate health in trans women or osteoporosis risk from long-term hormone use.

  5. So, yes, if a vagina was created, ongoing care is more involved due to dilation and potential complications, but even without surgery, hormone-based transitions still require regular medical oversight. It’s tailored to the person—some need more attention, some less.

Actual photo

Musk is clearly over the target

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Weird guy

Tim Walz Cheers Tesla's Falling Stock Prices

In view of the nationwide attacks on Tesla owners, dealers, and Tesla chargers (which are used by owners of many non-Tesla battery cars), Walz’s joining in the attacks and cheering a hoped-for demise of Tesla and its creator is really an endorsement of the arson and vandalism being committed by the Democratic Party’s base.

During a Tuesday speech in Wisconsin, Walz told the audience he checks to see how Tesla Motor Company’s stock price is doing to “give me a little boost during the day.”

He noted that the company’s stock was “$225 and dropping” referencing its closing share price on Tuesday. This represents a 50 percent decline from December, according to Forbes.

Walz posted the video clip on X with the caption: “If you need a little boost during the day, check out Tesla stock.”

Our boy Elon posted the right response:

As did author Carol Roth:

Pending in Riverside’s Harbor Point; no, not a lawsuit, a house sale

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7 Cherry Tree Lane, $3.495 million. From what I hear, all those neighbors who so liked suing one another over the years as a form of recreation have either moved away, died, or just lost their appeal; either way, you can probably erect a portable basketball hoop now, or a seasonal Halloween display, without too much concern that a summons-bearing constable will appear on your doorstep. I suppose that’s progress, but it does make life a little duller.

FWIW's New Mexican art correspondent sends along a mystery — mysterious to me, anyway.

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The mystery? I recognize the (original) club building, but what are the two structure to its right? Tod’s mansion, perhaps, but what’s that third one? 1898 was a little early to espy Stamford’s Landmark Tower (and it would have been to the northeast, to the left of the RYC), and Long Island was still potato fields back then, so … what? Artistic license? An inflatable bouncy castle? All you local historians are invited to chime in.