And from the Land of Progress, this:

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Oh, he's figured that out, has he?

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no need for an AI-generated photo for this post: that’s an actual photo of butt’ncheeks taking a selfie

Pete Buttigieg Says It's Too Hard to Build Things in America Because of Excessive Regulations

Twitchy:

“When Pete Buttigieg was the Secretary of Transportation under President Biden (and whoever was actually making the calls at the White House during that time), one of the more glaring examples of bloated bureaucracy came in the form of what was required in order to qualify for government grants for infrastructure projects:”

Shortly after taking office, the president signed an executive order mandating that the beneficiaries of 40 percent of all federal climate and environmental programs should come from "underserved communities." The order also established the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, which monitors agencies such as the Department of Transportation to ensure the "voices, perspectives, and lived realities of communities with environmental justice concerns are heard in the White House and reflected in federal policies, investments, and decisions."

In order to qualify for a grant, applicants must "demonstrate how meaningful public involvement, inclusive of disadvantaged communities, will occur throughout a project’s life cycle." What "public involvement" means is unclear. But the Department of Transportation notes it should involve "intentional outreach to underserved communities."

That outreach, the Department of Transportation states, can take the form of "games and contests," "visual preference surveys," or "neighborhood block parties" so long as the grant recipient provides "multilingual staff or interpreters to interact with community members who use languages other than English."

Oh, for crissake, could Trump really be this stupid? We'll barely be able to run Canada and Greenland, without getting mired in another Middle Eastern war

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Uh Oh: US Proposing to Run Gaza?

Ed Morrisey:

“There are big ideas. There are bad ideas. And then there big, bad ideas ... like inserting American troops into the Palestinians' conflicts. That's a lesson we learned the hard way in Lebanon over 40 years ago.

“And yet, now it appears we may go out of our way to learn it again in Gaza. Reuters reports that the US and Israel are discussing an American administration of Gaza after the end of the war as a transition to 'responsible' Palestinian leadership:

The United States and Israel have discussed the possibility of Washington leading a temporary post-war administration of Gaza, according to five people familiar with the matter.

The "high-level" consultations have centered around a transitional government headed by a U.S. official that would oversee Gaza until it had been demilitarized and stabilized, and a viable Palestinian administration had emerged, the sources said.

“In other words, it would fall on the US to achieve said demilitarization. That would take a major deployment of armed forces to occupy and administer Gaza, which the Israelis attempted to do between 1967 and 2005 to little success. And in fact it's something we ourselves attempted to do in Iraq to mixed success, and Afghanistan with no success at all.

“The Times of Israel even notes that the plans would follow the Iraq model, for some reason:

According to the discussions, which remain preliminary, there would be no fixed timeline for how long such a US-led administration would last, and it would depend on the situation on the ground, the five sources say.

The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to discuss the talks publicly, compare the proposal to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq that Washington established in 2003, shortly after the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

The authority was perceived by many Iraqis as an occupying force and it transferred power to an interim Iraqi government in 2004 after failing to contain a growing insurgency.

“No kidding. We ended up conducting combat operations for years, bugged out early, and then had to return when al-Qaeda in Iraq transformed into ISIS. We're still fighting ISIS in Syria and western Iraq. And that insurgency was the product of conflict between two versions of Islam, both of which have radical Islamist subgroups, and not the more pitched battle between Muslims and Jews. 

“Presumably, the idea would be to take over only after Hamas gets driven out of Gaza. At that point, we would come in and stand up a native government oriented toward peaceful coexistence and modern governance. How did that work out in Afghanistan when Joe Biden started cutting support for Afghan security services? Did the Taliban disappear, or did they just bide their time and wait for the US to lose interest in peace?”

This is my shocked face

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Well, no, it’s actually that of one Mathieu Zahul, just one of the many parasites who’s been hiding within the layers of federal bureaucracy and gorging himself on other people’s — that would be yours and my — money for decades. If you wonder why the opposition to DOGE by Democrats and Republicans alike has been focused on Elon Musk, rather than the fraud he’s been exposing, wonder no more; Mr. Zahul is just one of (hundreds of?) thousands.

Foreign Aid Official Who Resisted DOGE Took Secret Payments After Steering Africa Money To Friend

A foreign aid official who refused the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to his agency’s financial records may have had a reason to keep auditors out: he steered illicit contracts to a friend who sent him secret payments, according to a law enforcement affidavit obtained by The Daily Wire.

Mathieu Zahui, chief financial officer of the African Development Foundation, refused to grant DOGE access to its books and told the White House that the agency would not acknowledge President Donald Trump’s appointee as chairman of the board. After a dramatic showdown in March, DOGE physically took over the building with U.S. Marshals, but control of the agency is now the subject of a lawsuit objecting to “swooping in with DOGE staff, demanding access to sensitive information systems” — an objection that reads differently in light of the criminal probe.

For years, workers at the small, USAID-adjacent federal agency focused on Africa have told oversight bodies about allegations of self-dealing, procurement violations, and mysterious offshore bank accounts, many of them involving Zahui. But little was done about it, several told The Daily Wire.

One action that raised eyebrows was Zahui’s insistence on directing both grants and contracts to a company in Kenya called Ganiam Ltd. According to spending records, it was awarded nearly $800,000 in contracts without competition. For example, a one-year, $350,000 contract for “transport, travel, relocation” services was executed in March 2020, when few people were traveling or holding conferences because of coronavirus.

According to a search warrant application uncovered by The Daily Wire, USAID’s inspector general established by August 2024 that the company’s owner had secretly wired money to Zahui’s personal bank account at times that matched up with the federal contracts. To date, the Department of Justice has not charged either man with a crime.

Ganiam Ltd. is owned by Maina Gakure, whom Zahui has known for decades. Both worked at the Department of Veterans Affairs in San Diego and later moved to Fairfax, Virginia. Gakure had been in charge of awarding contracts at the VA, then created his own company designed to get government construction contracts by taking advantage of a minority preference program. It was called Ganiam LLC and was based out of a house in Virginia. Gakure similarly created a company based in Kenya called Gakure Ltd. The African Development Foundation is permitted by law to give grants only to African entities.

In January 2024, inspector general agents interviewed Zahui about the Ganiam contracts, and he acknowledged having known Gakure personally since 1999, and having been to his apartment. He “could not explain why the contract with Ganiam was sole-sourced instead of being competitively bid,” the agents wrote.

Zahui was named chief financial officer of the federal agency after he declared bankruptcy and had his house foreclosed on. He acknowledged to investigators that the travel contract was executed after COVID had already shut down travel. He told them the contract was actually used for IT services, but since Ganiam had no expertise in IT, it subcontracted it to a different company. A Department of the Treasury contracting official told the agents that was not allowed.

Zahui continued to give more contracts to Ganiam without competition, which he justified by saying he was “lazy” and didn’t want to find a new vendor. “Zahui stated that he did not receive any direct or indirect benefits from Gakure,” agents wrote.

But in February 2024, the agents seized Zahui’s work phone and examined a subset of the data.

“Agents found text messages showing at least eight instances of wire transfers or electronic payments from Gakure to Zahui’s Bank of America account, totaling over $10,000. These payments coincide with USADF’s awarding of sole-source contracts to Ganiam,” they wrote.

…. This February, President Trump fired the African Development Foundation’s board members, and its CEO, Travis Adkins, resigned. A three-person committee, including Zahui, took over the duties of CEO.

On February 21, DOGE “demanded immediate access to USADF systems including financial records and payment and human resources systems,” but Zahui stalled them. On February 28, the White House emailed Zahui that Pete Marocco, the Trump operative tasked with dismantling USAID, had become acting chairman of the African Development Foundation. Zahui told the White House that agency staff would not honor the appointment because Marocco had not been confirmed by the Senate.

When DOGE returned, staff locked the doors and refused to let them in, creating a dramatic showdown, according to a lawsuit filed against DOGE by the now-fired board. DOGE eventually gained access to the building using U.S. Marshals, and put the staff on leave.

There’s much, much more in the full article, including off-shore bank accounts and hidden assets, and,the article itself is just “part one of a series of investigative reports on the African Development Foundation, which gained notoriety for resisting the microscope of the Department of Government Efficiency.”

The African Development is just one of at least 400 agencies being run for the benefit of their participants and friends, so we can safely assume that whatever Zahui has been up to, his defalcations can be multiplied many, many times over. From Google’s new AI asistant:

The US government has numerous agencies, but it's difficult to pinpoint an exact number. The federal government consists of 15 executive departments, along with numerous other agencies and commissions. A comprehensive list includes around 400 federal agencies and sub-agencies, according to a post on Reddit. These agencies, including those within the 15 cabinet departments, are responsible for a wide range of functions. [1, 2, 3]

Here's a more detailed breakdown: [1, 4, 5]

  • Cabinet Departments: There are 15 executive departments, each headed by a cabinet secretary, who advises the President. [1, 4, 5]

  • Independent Agencies: These agencies operate independently of the cabinet departments and have specific missions. [1, 6]

  • Regulatory Agencies: These agencies oversee specific industries or activities, ensuring compliance with regulations, according to The Regulatory Group. [6, 7]

  • Government Corporations: These are government-owned businesses that perform specific functions, such as Amtrak. [6]

  • Other Agencies: There are also numerous other commissions, boards, and offices that perform various government functions. [1, 8]

Who doesn't like Deer Park? Well, as the Mickster points out, these owners don't — they’re moving to Husted Lane — but aside from them ...

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8 Woodside Road, a 1927 renovated beauty was listed seven days ago at $7.995 million, reports a contract today.

Given its short time on the market, I suspect this will be going for above-ask, just as it did in August 2021, when it had been listed at $5.395 million and sold to these owners for $5,856,000.

Fortunately, the 23 million illegals Biden invited into our country were all carefully screened and vetted before entry, and we know exactly where they are

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British Police Snatch Up Eight Men in Counter Terrorism Plots, Identifying Seven as Iranian Nationals

Two separate plots

…. What makes it even more interesting is that the normally reticent British government, which never speaks in terms of ethnicities or cultural identification even in the most notorious and heinous of circumstances, identified these two batches of arrestees immediately as Iranian. It also stated these men had been in the process of finishing up a plot for a terror attack on a specific target and only stopped in the nick of time.

…. What should truly terrify British residents is that while the units arrested both groups near simultaneously, authorities don't consider them 'linked.' 

This neatly sums up the situation over there:

Carefully and deliberately composed, it was the shot seen around the world, and it may have helped Trump win the election; naturally, the Pulitzer Prize went to a lesser photo, taken by accident

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Can’t have this

so we’ll go with this

The first picture was incredible and deliberately composed on the fly, the other was purely accidental. One inadvertently showed Trump at his essential best, the other said nothing about the man. So it’s no wonder the Pulitzer was awarded to the latter.

How it happened:

In my head, I just kept saying to myself, 'slow down, slow down. Compose, compose.' Okay, what's gonna happen next? What's going on here? What's going on there? Just trying to get every angle on it.[9]

Composition

Evan Vucci's photographs show Trump moments after he stood up after being shot in the ear during an assassination attempt. His right fist is raised into the air in defiance and blood is streaked across his face. He is surrounded by Secret Service agents on his security detail, one of whom, Sean M. Curran, stares at the camera. A large flag of the United States waves in the background of the photos, in front of a clear blue sky. Trump holds a red MAGA hat that reads "Make America Great Again"—his signature slogan—in his left hand.

In The Conversation, Sara Oscar described numerous elements she said made Vucci's work "such a powerful image": The agents form[ing] a triangular composition that places Trump at the vertex; ... The agent draw[ing] us into the image, he looks back at us, he sees the photographer and therefore, he seems to see us; ... Set against a blue sky, everything else in the image is red, white and navy blue. The trickles of blood falling down Trump's face are echoed in the red stripes of the American flag which aligns with the republican red of the podium."

Philip Kennicott, writing for The Washington Post, described Vucci's photographs as "Densely packed with markers of nationalism and authority" such as "the flag, the blood, the urgent faces of federal agents in dark suits". He described one of the closed-mouth photos as "strongly constructed, with aggressive angles that reflect the chaos and drama of the moment, and a powerful balance of color, all red, white and blue, including the azure sky above and the red-and-white decorative banner below. Trump seems to emerge from within a deconstructed version of its basic colors."

Reception and impact

The photographs of Trump … appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. Two days after the assassination attempt, Vucci's photos were called "already iconic" Patrick Witty, a former photo editor at Time, The New York Times, and National Geographic, said "Without question, Evan's photo will become the definitive photo from the [assassination] attempt" because it "captures a range of complex details and emotions in one still image".

Fraser Nelson of The Spectator wrote that "[any critic] would have instantly recognised" Vucci's photos as "a once-in-a-generation photograph—an image that will become one of the most potent in American politics and history" and "be remembered as one of the most important political photographs ever taken." He called Vucci's work photojournalism at its most powerful". In The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper said Vucci's photos "became immediately legendary", and that "However you feel about the man at its center, it is undeniably one of the great compositions in U.S. photographic history." He said that it was not "an exaggeration to say that the photo is nearly perfect, one captured under extreme duress and that distills the essence of a man in all his contradictions."

British journalist Piers Morgan wrote that Vucci's work was "Already one of the most iconic photographs in American history". Many other journalists expressed similar sentiments; Ashima Grover of Hindustan Times described one of the photos as a "legendary American photo for posterity", and in India Today, Yudhajit Shankar Das anticipated that Vucci's work would be considered a "defining photograph of U.S. history". The Washington Post writer Jeremy Barr also said Vucci's photos were "sure to go down in the pantheon of American photography", while Geordie Gray wrote in The Australian that the photos were "destined to become one of the defining images of our time". Writing for The New Yorker, Benjamin Wallace-Wells said the pictures were "already the indelible image of our era of political crisis and conflict." Discussing how the photographs depicted Trump, he concluded: "It is an image that captures him as he would like to be seen, so perfectly, in fact, that it may outlast all the rest."

Ah, and there’s the rub:

Axios writer Aïda Amer said that notable images by Vucci, Moneymaker, and Mills quickly became known in newsrooms as the "Evan photo", "Anna photo", and "the bullet photo", respectively.Amer also reported that …. "Multiple photographers worried privately that the images from the rally could turn into a kind of 'photoganda'" for Trump's campaign, and that one told her it was "dangerous" for the media to continue using the Vucci photo "despite how good it is", because it was "free P.R. for Trump" that made him a "martyr".

And the photograph the Pulitzer committee decided was the best picture of 2024?

Photographer wins Pulitzer for iconic photo of bullet speeding by Trump's head during assassination attempt

"I just happened to be down, shooting with a wide-angle lens just below the president when he was speaking. There was a huge flag waving right above his head, and I just happened to be taking pictures at the same time," he told "America's Newsroom" in Milwaukee at the time.

"Then, when I heard the pops, I guess I kept hitting on the shutter, and then I saw him reach for his [ear]. He grimaced and grabbed his hand and looked. It was blood, and then he went down, and I thought, 'Dear God, he's been shot,'" he continued.

Mills said the moment he discovered he had captured an image of the bullet whizzing past Trump was a "surprise" to him.

It happened after he was ushered into a tent and began sending photos of Trump's defiant fist pump to an editor.

"I was like, ‘Oh, hell. I remember taking pictures of him when this happened. Let me go back and look.’ I started looking at it. I started sending them right away, and I called one of the editors and said, ‘Please look at these really closely. This might have been near the moment where he was shot,’" he said. 

"She called me back like five minutes later and said, 'You won't believe this.' She goes, ‘We actually see a bullet flying behind his head, and I was like, ’Oh my gosh.'"