Sen. Rand Paul released a report on Monday outlining more than $1 trillion in government waste from the past year.

The 2024 “Festivus” report highlighted various instances of wasteful government spending from the federal government, including a pickleball complex in Las Vegas and a cabaret show on ice. This year marks Paul’s 10th annual report.

“This year, I am highlighting a whopping $1,008,313,329,626.12,” Paul, R-Ky., wrote in the report. “That’s over $1 trillion in government waste, including things like ice-skating drag queens, a $12 million Las Vegas pickleball complex, $4,840,082 on Ukrainian influencers, and more! No matter how much money the government has wasted, politicians keep demanding even more.”

The Department of the Interior spent $12 million on the Las Vegas pickleball complex, according to the report. Interior also spent $720,479 on wetland conservation projects for ducks in Mexico.

“I have a lot of problems with federal spending, and now it’s time to hear all about them,” Paul wrote in the report.

The National Endowment for the Arts awarded the Bearded Ladies Cabaret a $10,000 grant to support a cabaret show on ice skates focused on climate change, according to the report. The NEA also spent $365,000 to promote circuses in city parks, the report states.

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Bernard Hudson tells Tucker:

“If I was still in government, and two events happened on the same day, or within 24 hours of each other, that has sometimes been the hallmark of an organized terror attack… It’s worthwhile to at least look into it.”

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:  Eighty years ago, Germany’s former conquerors rejected wrecking the defeated nation as too harsh. But now Germany is willfully pastoralizing, disarming, deindustrializing—and destroying—itself.

Less than a year before the end of World War II, then-U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau drew up a nightmarish plan to punish postwar Germany.

After the serial 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II—along with the failed Versailles peace treaty of 1919—the Allies in World War II wanted to ensure there would never again be an aggressive Germany powerful enough to invade its neighbors.

When the so-called Morgenthau Plan was leaked to the press in September 1944, at first it was widely praised. After all, it would supposedly render Germany incapable of ever starting another world war in Europe.

Morgenthau certainly envisioned a Carthaginian peace, designed to ensure a permanently deindustrialized, unarmed, and pastoral Germany.

In 1071, Romanus IV Diogenes was the Emperor of the Christian Byzantine Empire. Despite the fall of Rome centuries before, the eastern portion of the Roman Empire, what we call Byzantium, lived on as a powerful and incredibly wealthy power in the eastern Mediterranean. In August 1071, the Byzantine army met an invading force of Seljuk Turks bent on conquest in the name of Allah and domination of the Middle East.

Diogenes was defeated. He knelt before the Turkish Sultan and kissed the ground. He paid a ransom for his release and agreed to formally become a Turkish vassal. Henceforth the Byzantines would pay an annual tribute of 360,000 gold coins to the Turks.

It was perhaps the greatest humiliation of the West by Islam in history.

Until now.

Joe Biden began his Presidency by ordering a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. In a matter of weeks, twenty years’ worth of effort was squandered. Our forces fled. Our allies were routed. The Taliban went house to house using our own security files and technology to identify those who had cooperated with us and haul them away to be tortured to death.

Biden and his minions assured us the Taliban were now our allies in fighting terrorism. To date, his administration has paid these jihadists $2 billion even as they harbor Al Qaida, ISIS, and other groups and provide them the platform they need to prepare fresh attacks on the United States and its allies.

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