International
Eastern Oregon Moves Closer to Joining Idaho
From Heartland Daily News
By Eileen Griffin
Eastern Oregon moves closer to joining Idaho with voters in Crook County approving a measure supporting Greater Idaho.
Another county supports the move away from Oregon to join the state of Idaho.
Voters in Crook County, Oregon passed a measure supporting the effort to move the Oregon/Idaho border such that Crook County would become part of Idaho, KTVZ reports.
Passing the measure makes Crook County the 13th Oregon County in favor of joining Idaho.
The Greater Idaho effort has been sweeping through eastern Oregon after years of being subjected to the far left policies driven by the population center of Portland, as Heartland Daily News previously reported. By March 2023, 11 counties had approved the Greater Idaho measure.
Although the measure is set to pass, the vote will not be certified until June, KREM reports. Approval of the measure does not mean the border will necessarily be moved. It means that the legislature is notified of the preference of voters in the eastern Oregon counties.
With 13 counties voting in support, it is clear the people of eastern Oregon would like to secede from western Oregon.
After the Crook County vote, Greater Idaho Executive Director Matt McCaw issued a statement on the organization’s website.
“The voters of eastern Oregon have spoken loudly and clearly about their desire to see border talks move forward,” McCaw said. “With this latest result in Crook County, there’s no excuse left for the Legislature and Governor to continue to ignore the people’s wishes.”
“We call on the Governor, Speaker of the House, and Senate President to sit down with us and discuss next steps toward changing governance for eastern Oregonians, as well as for the legislature to begin holding hearings on what a potential border change will look like,” McCaw said.
Greater Idaho President, Mike McCarter said, “For the last three years we’ve been going directly to voters and asking them what they want for their state government. What they’re telling us through these votes is that they want their leaders to move the border.”
If the border is moved, Oregon stands to lose a significant amount of land, including rural country, Newsweek reports. While the state would lose 2/3 of the land, it would only lose 10 percent of the population.
The far more populated areas in the western part of the state drive politics. When most people think of Oregon they think of Portland, not the rural eastern portion of the state. Oregon news stories are dominated by Portland’s problems with crime, lawlessness, and anarchy.
“The Greater Idaho Movement is an effort by those dissatisfied with lawmakers in Salem and are hoping to live under Idaho’s more conservative government,” write the news staff of Central Oregon Daily.
“Another right-leaning county in eastern Oregon has voted to secede from the Democrat-run state and join neighboring Idaho, according to reports,” writes Alex Oliveira for the New York Post.
“Backers of the plan argue the more conservative areas of eastern and central Oregon are currently dominated by liberal-leaning cities such as Portland and Salem and argue their interests would be better represented in traditionally Republican Idaho,” Jack Bickerton writes for Newsweek.
“Conservative residents in eastern Oregon have been ready to part ways with their liberal neighbors to the west, looking to secede from the state and join Idaho,” writes Devan Markham for News Nation. “Conflicting views on crime and social policies have created a large divide between the bigger cities and rural areas, sparking efforts to secede.”
Business
Trump’s Initial DOGE Executive Order Doesn’t Quite ‘Dismantle Government Bureaucracy’
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Thomas English
President Donald Trump’s Monday executive order establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) presents a more modest scope for the initiative, focusing primarily on “modernizing federal technology and software.”
The executive order refashions the Obama-era United States Digital Service (USDS) into the United States DOGE Service. Then-President Barack Obama created USDS in 2014 to enhance the reliability and usability of online federal services after the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov, an insurance exchange website created through the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Trump’s USDS will now prioritize “modernizing federal technology and software to maximize efficiency and productivity” under the order, which makes no mention of slashing the federal budget, workforce or regulations — DOGE’s originally advertised purpose.
“I am pleased to announce that the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency (‘DOGE’),” Trump said in his official announcement of the initiative in November. “Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess government regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
The order’s focus on streamlining federal technology and software stands in contrast to some of DOGE’s previously more expansive aims, including Elon Musk’s claim that “we can [cut the federal budget] by at least $2 trillion” at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in November. Musk now leads DOGE alone after Vivek Ramaswamy stepped down from the initiative Monday, apparently eying a 2026 gubernatorial run in Ohio.
The order says it serves to “advance the President’s 18-month DOGE agenda,” but omits many of the budget-cutting and workforce-slashing proposals during Trump’s campaign. Rather, the order positions DOGE as a technology modernization entity rather than an organization with direct authority to enact sweeping fiscal reforms. There is no mention, for instance, of trillions in budget cuts or a significant reduction in the federal workforce, though the president did separately enact a hiring freeze throughout the executive branch Monday.
“I can’t help but think that there’s more coming, that maybe more responsibilities will be added to it,” Susan Dudley, a public policy professor at George Washington University, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Dudley, who was also the top regulatory official in former President George W. Bush’s administration, said the structure of the new USDS could impact the recent lawsuits against the DOGE effort.
“I think it maybe moots the lawsuit that’s been brought for it not being FACA,” Dudley said. “So if this is how it’s organized — that it’s people in the government who bring in these special government employees on a temporary basis, that might mean that the lawsuit doesn’t really have any ground.”
Three organizations — the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), National Security Counselors (NSC) and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) — separately filed lawsuits against DOGE within minutes of Trump signing the executive order. The suits primarily challenge DOGE’s compliance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), alleging the department operates without the required transparency, balanced representation and public accountability.
The order also emphasizes not “be construed to impair or otherwise affect … the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.”
“And the only mention of OMB [Office of Management and Budget] is some kind of boilerplate at the end — that it doesn’t affect that. But that’s kind of general stuff you often see in executive orders,” Dudley continued, adding she doesn’t “have an inside track” on whether further DOGE-related executive orders will follow.
“It’s certainly, certainly more modest than I think Musk was anticipating,” Dudley said.
Trump’s order also establishes “DOGE Teams” consisting of at least four employees: a team lead, a human resources specialist, an engineer and an attorney. Each team will be assigned an executive agency with which it will implement the president’s “DOGE agenda.”
It remains unclear whether Monday’s executive order comprehensively defines DOGE, or if additional orders will be forthcoming to broaden its mandate.
Crime
Former UK MP says ‘nothing was done’ with child trafficking information given to police, MI5
From LifeSiteNews
Andrew Bridgen says UK security agencies ignored detailed information about child trafficking, including names of people involved and where the children were being taken.
A former UK Member of Parliament says the top security agencies of Britain, including the police and MI5, are refusing to act on detailed information they’ve been given about child trafficking into the country.
Andrew Bridgen, who served as a popular Conservative MP for North West Leicestershire from 2010 until 2024, told Infowars founder Alex Jones in a Friday interview how he had raised concerns while in Parliament about “a number of individuals” who were evidently pedophiles.
“It was always passed to the police, to the National Crime Agency, and it involves senior politicians, very senior police officers, and nothing was ever done about it,” Bridgen told Jones.
He had explained that early in his career he had seen London police quash an investigation into child prostitution — and so this appeared to be a repeating pattern of cover-up of child sex crimes.
A former policeman named Jon Wedger had discovered that “children were being taken from children’s homes in the UK and prostituted on the weekend,” and were returning “under the influence of drugs and often with terrible venereal diseases, and the people at the homes were doing nothing about it.”
Upon further investigation, Wedger “wrote a report he sent to his superiors pointing out that child prostitution in London had not been investigated for decades.” However, instead of attempting to protect the children and stop the abuse, the police “threatened” Wedger, told him to retract the report, and fired him from the police force “on false pretenses,” according to Bridgen.
Later, Bridgen met a man who conducted a two-year investigation into sex abuse by pedophile and deceased Prime Minister Edward Heath. The police concluded that, were Heath alive, “he would have been arrested and charged with pedophilia.”
“If a former MP could have been a pedophile and it was covered up, then anything is possible,” Bridgen remarked.
He then told how last year a source approached him with “information about child trafficking into the UK,” including “detailed names of people involved on the ground; where the children were being brought in; where they were being taken; where their photographs were being taken; and the name of the company that was instrumental in laundering the money” used to buy these children.
The source had brought this information to the police, to the counter-intelligence agency MI5, and to the National Crime Agency, and “nothing was done” by any of these groups. Not only did they fail to act on the information, but “mysteriously, within two days of dropping the file with the National Crime Agency,” the source’s LinkedIn profile was “visited and investigated by someone who worked at the company who was named in the file.”
“Meaning they were tipped off,” Jones noted.
Bridgen told how the source had recorded all of his phone calls with MI5, the police force, and the National Crime Agency, and when they failed to act, Bridgen “sent a file with all the information to senior politicians.”
“Eventually, all I got back was, ‘Take it to the police.’ I pointed out this had already been to the police, and it had been to MI5. There actually was an MI5 officer who had been very sympathetic and realized how important this evidence was. And he tried to push it. He was removed from the service. That’s how deep the corruption runs.”
In a June 2024 interview on the Resistance Podcast, Bridgen elaborated, “And then when you see the names, you see why. They are known names.”
He shared further horrifying details about the final end of the children who are trafficked and abused.
“They use them in the sex trade for about three years and then when they’re worn out they organ harvest them,” Bridgen shared.
“No one’s interested. No one wants to talk about it. No one wants to talk about a lot of things.”
Bridgen believes this demand for child trafficking is an explanation for the drive to continue wars around the world, including the war in Ukraine, because the conflicts present “a huge opportunity for child trafficking.”
Jones pointed out it was publicly admitted that decades ago, sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein entered war zones in Kosovo and Serbia and bought “nine- and 10-year-old girls” in order to sell them into sex slavery in the U.S. The father of Epstein’s girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, was one of the main directors of the “blackmail pedophile operations” of “MI6 and Mossad,” according to Jones.
“Ultimately, I think it’s the glue that holds the self-proclaimed elites around the world together, because once they’re involved in pedophilia or profiting from child trafficking, it’s the ultimate blackmail,” Bridgen said. “There’s no way out of the club for them. They all have to go down together.”
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