One thing I’ve learned in my 65-odd spins around the sun is that, if a guy is a thoroughgoing prick, he will find a way to be a thoroughgoing prick even when he seems to be doing something right. From The Hill:

Of the $136 million the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) plans to transfer from other health programs to bolster the coronavirus response, $37 million will come from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, according to a notice sent to Congress Tuesday night by the agency and obtained by The Hill. HHS will make several other transfers, including $63 million from the National Institutes of Health and $4.9 million from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which funds mental health and substance abuse treatment and prevention.

The LIHEAP program makes sure that the poor and the elderly neither freeze in the winter nor broil in the summer. It saves any number of lives every year. Now, because this administration* is mainly comprised of ambulatory sacks of greed and stupid in its upper echelons, the program is being looted so a disease doesn’t make the stock market appear to be tanking on the president*’s watch. So far, the winter’s been fairly mild but, if this disease hangs on into the summer—and it might, despite the assurances of the noted epidemiologist in the White House—life is going to be hell for sick people when the heatwaves come. Luckily, the president* knows who’s really to blame. From The Wrap:

He tweeted an attack on MSNBC and CNN that misspelled “coronavirus” Wednesday morning: “Low Ratings Fake News MSDNC (Comcast) & @CNN are doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible. Likewise their incompetent Do Nothing Democrat comrades are all talk, no action. USA in great shape! @CDCgov...



Couldn’t the government find the money to deal with the crisis somewhere else in the budget instead of making the lives of the poor and elderly more precarious? Maybe, but there are other priorities, after all, as the Department of Justice tells us.

The Department of Justice today announced the creation of a section dedicated to investigating and litigating revocation of naturalization. The Denaturalization Section will join the existing sections within the Civil Division’s Office of Immigration Litigation—the District Court Section and the Appellate Section. This move underscores the Department’s commitment to bring justice to terrorists, war criminals, sex offenders, and other fraudsters who illegally obtained naturalization. While the Office of Immigration Litigation already has achieved great success in the denaturalization cases it has brought, winning 95 percent of the time, the growing number of referrals anticipated from law enforcement agencies motivated the creation of a standalone section dedicated to this important work.

Denaturalization cases require the government to show that a defendant’s naturalization was “illegally procured” or “procured by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation . . . .” 8 U.S.C. § 1451. Civil denaturalization cases have no statute of limitations, and the Department has successfully denaturalized numerous categories of individuals who have illegally obtained citizenship, including terrorists and other national security threats, war criminals, human rights violators, sex offenders, and other fraudsters.

A special section of Bill Barr’s chop shop to take citizenship away from people? This must be the bestest wedding present Stephen Miller ever got.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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