The Associated Press reported last week that federal officials are preparing to deploy state-employed hunters to kill nearly half a million owls across the Pacific Northwest in the name of “conservation.”

“U.S. wildlife officials are embracing a contentious plan to deploy trained shooters into dense West Coast forests to kill almost a half-million barred owls that are crowding out their cousins,” the AP reported. “Documents released by the agency show up to about 450,000 barred owls would be shot over three decades after the birds from the eastern U.S. encroached into the West Coast territory of two owls: northern spotted owls and California spotted owls.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service is targeting owls across Oregon, Washington, and California. According to an agency press release, no public hunting of the barred owls will be permitted while the government carries out the mass execution of roughly half a million birds. Only certain indigenous tribes, government agencies, and select companies and landowners will be granted permission to “implement barred owl management” under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

“Barred owl removal, like all invasive species management, is not something the Service takes lightly,” said Service Oregon Office state supervisor Kessina Lee. “The Service has a legal responsibility to do all it can to prevent the extinction of the federally listed northern spotted owl and support its recovery, while also addressing significant threats to California spotted owls.”

“The notion of killing one bird species to save another has divided wildlife advocates and conservationists,” the AP

There’s a debate right now about what the news media were doing before Joe Biden’s walking-dead debate performance versus after: Were they covering for the president? Were they in denial? Were they lying? Are they stupid?

Puffy media person Brian Stelter last week pretended to embark on a fact-finding expedition in search of answers, claiming that “the real story is far more complicated — and more interesting.”

No it’s not.

Democrats and the media work together, savagely, all of the time, and toward the same goal, which is at any moment some variation of “destroy the American middle class and the nuclear family.” Contrary to popular belief, the media don’t slavishly follow the orders of Democrat leaders or work solely to protect them from criticism. That’s only part of the work, and it can rapidly change when the goal is threatened. It’s a mutually beneficial partnership. Democrats give their media cohorts guidance on coverage. Simultaneously, the media steer Democrats with that coverage. So long as they’re all going in the same direction — toward their shared goal — they all get along.

The blackout coverage and cable news dialogue related to Biden’s plainly depleted mental acuity before the debate, followed by an immediate, hysterical week-long news cycle (and still going) on the topic, isn’t complex or something that anyone in Washington is seriously pursuing answers for. Everyone in the White House gets it and so does everyone in the media. They understand the swift change well, and there wouldn’t have been

Ignoring off-year elections produces its consequences — and Republicans are finding that lesson out the hard way.

On the same day Joe Biden made a campaign appearance in Madison, Wisconsin, the Badger State’s leftist-controlled Supreme Court arbitrarily authorized the use of ballot drop boxes in November’s election. The Friday decision reverses a 2022 ruling by the court’s then-conservative majority that determined the deployment of drop boxes in the 2020 election violated Wisconsin law and prohibited them from further use.

The leftist majority’s ruling — while contradictory to state law — is a big win for Democrats, who used the presumably “Zuckbucks“-funded boxes to push Biden across the finish line during the 2020 contest. While Wisconsin voters have since prohibited the use of “Zuckbucks” in elections, the high court’s reauthorization of drop boxes will undoubtedly be used by Democrat ballot traffickers during the November elections.

But it didn’t have to be this way.

While Republicans and conservative influencers were distracted in spring 2023 with the 2024 GOP presidential primary — months before candidates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis jumped in the race — Democrats made flipping control of Wisconsin’s highest court a top priority.

As my colleague Matt Kittle recently reported, Democrat Janet Protasiewicz raised $14 million ahead of the April 2023 election, most of which came from the Wisconsin Democrat Party and out-of-state leftist mega-donors. Republican Dan Kelly raised a mere $2.6 million. This funding discrepancy doesn’t even take into account the major get-out-the-vote operations leftist groups conducted on