The court orders against Trump are simply absurd. If they aren’t quickly disposed of on the appellate level, then Trump should start to ignore them. Perhaps first by quietly informing Chief Justice Roberts that he’d better put his judges on a leash or he’ll make it a pure Executive vs Judiciary conflict…such a conflict the Judiciary, being un-elected, is bound to lose. That is, if Roberts wants to retain Executive deference to Judicial rulings, then this nonsense of one federal judge issuing a nation-wide TRO simply has to stop. Forever. Side note: the Constitution gives Congress the right to regulate how cases are brought before the Courts…I recommend we enact legislation stating that only a Supreme Court Justice can issue a nation-wide TRO…and that TRO can be voided if three Justices decide to do so.
Do keep in mind why the Left is fighting Trump tooth and nail rather than picking it’s fights: it has to. It can’t concede an inch here. My Mrs – mostly non-political – asked me why don’t the Democrats just get on board with stopping the worst of the waste? Answer: because the worst of the waste is why Democrats get into power. Its why we see people entering the system poor and quickly getting rich far beyond what their official salary can justify. I’m not talking about the ideologically committed – they only make up a small percentage of all Democrats (though they rule absolutely as far as policy and messaging go): I’m talking about 90% of the Democrats from Senator down to associate professor at your community college. Its all about stealing – about getting well paid for doing nothing useful. While one individual $5 million grant might seem to you and me like something not worth fighting for, the people who were getting paid with it are up in arms…as is everyone else who lives off such grift. If one part of it goes down, all of it will go down…so they fight for each part of it, no matter how stupid and corrupt it looks.
Here’s my view: Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot. It is highly likely that all of the laws which restrict Executive discretion over personnel and discretionary spending are unconstitutional…and we do have a Court which may very well rule exactly that way. Democrats might be setting themselves up for a catastrophe. After all:
The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.
Article II, section 1, paragraph one. There are no modifiers here. There is one person – and one person, alone – who has executive power, and that is the President. The President, and only the President, can give orders and/or delegate executive power. To say that some part of the Executive branch, or some executive function, is outside the control of the President is a clear violation of the Constitution. The Congress does not have the power to reach into the Executive and make it do things – the Congress’ power here is of the purse: the means to make the Executive bend to Legislative wishes is by refusing to appropriate funds for the Executive. This concept that the Legislative can tell the Executive whom can be hired and fired – that is, who the President may delegate authority to – flies in the face of the Constitution. So, too, does the concept that the Judiciary can interfere in Executive actions.
The Pope issued a statement which is being hailed by the global Left as an assertion that Trump is evil for his deportation program. It is always, however, necessary that one read statements of Pope Francis rather than blindly accept what someone says he said. In the statement:
…one must recognize the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival.
To be sure, the Pope clearly doesn’t like the idea of mass deportations based solely on the fact of immigration status. But after he goes on a bit on that subject, he is forced (because Catholicism requires it) to concede:
This does not impede the development of a policy that regulates orderly and legal immigration.
So, if you really want to sum up the Pope’s views:
Nations must remain open to immigrants.
Immigration should be orderly and legal.
Criminals must be controlled.
Deportation should not be based simply on the legal status of the foreigner in country.
The last bit most Americans are going to disagree with – the Pope is getting into a little bit of a gray area here in saying we can develop an orderly and legal immigration system but if someone jumps the line we can’t send them back into the line just based on that. The schizophrenia required to take any Left position rears its head here. In my view, I am not in any way in violation of the Pope’s statement – even though I favor a 20 year moratorium on all immigration (as per usual, unless an actual life is at stake). You see, to have an orderly and legal immigration system, I first must gain control of the situation – and this means I better not let anyone else in for a while as I sort out those who have come in over the past few years. Essentially, in order to be compliant with Church teaching on the matter of welcoming the stranger, I have to go through a process to ensure that I may welcome the stranger. The Pope might take exception and get very angry with me, but nothing I would do on immigration – and nothing Trump is doing – actually violates the inherent dignity of the migrants.
Blogs For Victory 
I had a knee-jerk reaction in the previous thread, saying, if I were in charge I’d ignore blatantly unconstitutional court orders, injunctions, etc. Jeff Childers has a more reasoned take this morning.
I understand this reasoning, and respect that it comes from an experienced trial lawyer. I also remember the successes of passive resistance.
BTW, is this the only source for the title of “Admiral” for “Rachel” Levine? That is, no actual military service?
“For more than 200 years, men and women have served US public health in what is today called the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service. These commissioned officers wear uniforms and have ranks similar to those of US Navy officers. For example, Dr. Rachel Levine holds a commission as a USPHS Admiral. These military titles, uniforms, and trappings of authority confer unwarranted legitimacy to these career PHS bureaucrats.“
Mark, just wanted to make you aware of a glitch, maybe internal, maybe WordPress. When you start typing the comment block goes blank and won’t accept anything.
Yeah. What he said. I can reply to an existing post but not initiate one.
I got that too using a copy/paste from my word doc, but it seems even though the post looked blank I was able to submit it. One post came through w/o any bold or italics.
Thanks – I’ll have to have Matt look into it. I have no idea how all that works!
UPDATE: But I did have a look at it – no changes to the formatting and function from post to post…I’m going to assume its a system issue on the platform which hopefully will go away. But I’ll still ask Matt to look into it.
I thought Musk was funny when he adopted the screen name “Harry Bolz” to make Dana Bash, et al, say this out loud. But then I saw his true genius when he posted this:
“Judicial dicktatorship is wrong!” – Harry Bōlz”
I’m hoping now for a new screen name of Big Harry Bolz—let’s make Dana keep saying this.
The glitch seems to have resolved itself.
That’s my approach to technical problems—-ignore them and hope for some magical correction.
Either that or hit the buttons harder.
Unless your fingers don’t always want to hit the correct buttons; then hitting them harder doesn’t help.
I know that is a theory, but I find it less than compelling
Glenn Beck opened his radio show this morning with the following statement:
Google search for “criminal defense attorney” is 3 times higher in Washington, D.C. than anywhere else in the country.
I’m hoping that Bondi is going stealthy on this – I want the indictments to be a surprise.
As Jeff Childers concludes:
They’re just not very bright…we are dealing with some very dumb people. Now that it is all being exposed, we can see that the Left has two sources of power:
1. Taxpayer funds.
2. GOP cowardice.
Bush II could have done this in 2003. He had a trifecta. He had popularity. We needed to reform a lot of things given the failures of 9/11. He either didn’t even realize it, or overtly decided to save it. In either case, it was a total fail.
I am reminded of the phrase “the banality of evil” though in this case the word “stupidity” could be substituted for “banality”.
In writing about Eichmann during the Nuremburg trials, Hannah Arendt described the
This is a parallel to my observations of most Democrats—that they have “drifted into the Democrat Party, in search of purpose and direction, not out of deep ideological belief.” And a result has made them responsible for great harm, “evil”, though not necessarily because of purposeful agendas of evil but just through being “merely shallow and clueless, ‘joiners’”.
We have to remember that the Nazi Party was always a Leftist construct, in spite of frantic efforts to rebrand it as “right-wing”, and the Left has always substituted the sense of offering “purpose and direction” (and what I refer to as the “shortcut to the Higher Moral Ground) in lieu of true political ideology.
There is a bit of that in humanity – when you review Eichmann’s career, you see he was sort of drifting around after turning a very poor record as a student. Family friend Ernst Kaltenbrunner advised him to join the SS and the course was set…naturally he got the propaganda and could repeat it back on demand but the most important lesson he learned in Himmler’s organization was that if you did precisely what was ordered, you’d rise up. To him, the order for the Holocaust was just another in a series of orders given and he just carried it out, not for a moment considering just what he was doing. That is, that there might come a non-Nazi day when people would ask just what the hell he thought he was doing?
The unease we all feel these days is because we now know that our government and institutions are largely staffed by Eichmanns. For every one who is actually malevolent and knows precisely what he’s doing (like Kaltenbrunner in Eichmann’s case), there are ninety nine Eichmann’s just waiting to fill out the forms. “Oh, here’s an order to arrest a person for praying at an abortion clinic: I’ll type that up and then go to lunch. Pizza ok with you guys?”
We really dodged a bullet on 11/5 – and we still have to dodge it a few more times before we’re in the clear.
Anna is going to declassify all the Epstein documents. Catch all those Congress critters who contributed to child sex trafficking.
I wonder how many Democrats are enraged by this.
Or this.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13325745/Mike-Waltz-bushings-air-force-military-overspending.html
Here is another rock turned over by Donald Trump, exposing a possibility which is resulting in even more of the wholly predictable Leftist defense of the indefensible—in this case, the possibility that lives were lost due to FAA adherence to DEI directives. Victor Davis Hansen comments: emphasis mine
Tulsi Gabbard has been confirmed. Can’t wait to see what she digs into and how much more turmoil she causes the left. Still waiting on the Kennedy and Patel confirmations. No matter. Every new confirmation will be another pile of trouble for the left such that their disarray will build. Defunding them is huge but exposing the most evil criminals among them and prosecuting them will send the rest of the rats scurrying.
YCMTSU
The Department of Government Efficiency is shining a light on the antiquated way federal employee retirements are processed in the digital age.
“Federal employee retirements are processed using paper, by hand, in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania,” the DOGE account wrote on X, sharing images of the mine. “700+ mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process ~10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes. The retirement process takes multiple months.”
While DOGE brought the unusual process into the spotlight as an example of the need for modernization, efforts to automate the system have been unsuccessfully going on for decades.
Musk emphasized the need for reform during a press conference in the Oval Office on Tuesday.
Musk: I’ve asked Google and all the AI’s, how many US government agencies are there? The best estimates were between 420-450. It appears no one really knows for sure. He then goes on to ask with great doubt, if there’s anyone who could even name 99 of them., let alone 400 plus. This is much the same with the US DOD annual budget of around $890 billion, for which the Pentagon has failed its 7th annual mandated audit. The DOGE train is coming through. It would have interesting to see both Musk and Ramaswamy working toward the same end, attacking different sectors at the same time. Perhaps Trump should create a second team where the leftist would be in greater disarray. No matter. It seems Musk has assembled a brilliant team. What are the chances of ending 300 government agencies? How much money would that save? How much clearer would the transparency be? How much easier and economical would it be to use shared resources, eliminating duplicity? For the first time in modern history, I think a good many US citizens are anxious to find out and are beginning to believe we can actually make inroads to these questions.
Even back in the early days of the Trump era, when I was adamantly against a Trump candidacy, I appreciated the potential value of having a businessman as president. He had a lot of problems merging his purely business-oriented approach with the demands of a system governed by political ground rules mixed with political gamesmanship, but he seems to have spent his four years in the desert learning how to do this, and it’s really exciting to finally be able to believe changes will be made.
While the American Left is still using its weasel words like “diversity” to cover its true agenda of destroying the American culture and by extension our national identity, European Leftists have evidently decided it is now safe to come right out and admit to their true agenda.
French Far-Left Leader Mélenchon Openly Calls For Great Replacement In Shock Speech
The Leftist goal of “Globalization” would mean that we, too, would be just like the France envisioned here—a nation with no history, no tradition, no unity of identity, and a mishmash of cultures not only with no allegiance to the nation as it has existed for so long but with antipathy toward it.
Deranged Maxine Waters badgers Jerome Powell about DOGE; lets the real worry slip: “We don’t know what all they have on us.”
I hope it’s enough to put a lot of them away for a very long time.
Lee Zeldin is looking like a great choice to head the EPA and he’s getting off to a good start:
BTW, that is 20 billion-with-a-B dollars laundered through an agency allegedly formed to deal with pollution.
A good amount of DOGE’s activity & US taxpayer fund recovery has been through removing DEI, CRT and their perspective departments. I’m guessing there will be similar savings in the many areas dealing with climate change. This article is an excellent example of theft hidden in the climate change agenda. No doubt there is so much more to be found.
@Oilfield_Rando on X has been on this – all of it sent out so that for the next 4 years, these environmental NGOs could both stay in business and hamstring Trump as much as possible. Do give Rando a follow: prior to DOGE, he was the only guy around going line by line through it all, telling us what was being spent on what.
What would happen to the money if the NGO is dismantled or effectively so much reduced in size and what it can do that it is pretty much the same as dismantled? I mean, I don’t think actual cash has been deposited in actual accounts, not yet anyway—just funds earmarked for them. I’m betting that the AGs (Algorithm Guys) are already on this and if there are big bank accounts they can be frozen and allotments can be canceled.
Kennedy is confirmed to HHS. Sen. Mitch McConnell voted against confirming RFK Jr. and Gabbard and was the only Republican to do so. I anxiously await the 2 of them to take a wrecking ball to their perspective departments and further thwart the lefts hold on these institutions. I’m especially anxious to see Kennedy transform the CDC, NIH and FDA, in part by removing external self-serving influences like big pharma and in part by make drastic changes to things like fluoridated water & health destroying food additives.
If this trend continues we will have Patel running the FBI and then we will see a flurry of activity that will make the last month (seriously? Not even a month!) seem glacial by comparison. Although a lot of the big targets have already taken major hits, there is a lot of clean-up left to do, a lot of grift and graft and outright fraud to uncover, a lot of money to be clawed back, a lot of housecleaning to get rid of clinging parasites, a lot of indicting and filing and firing to do.
I’d like to see if we can cancel Presumed Felon Fauci’s huge government pension, for one thing. Biden covered his a** regarding criminal actions, but he still has his money (well, government money..) and his beloved reputation on the line and I am looking forward to Kennedy savaging both.
I anxiously await the 2 of them to take a wrecking ball to their perspective departments and further thwart the lefts hold on these institutions.
I’d love to see them take that wrecking ball to Mitch McConnell while they’re at it. His “service” to this country can’t end soon enough.
Yep – we can see now that, just like Murkowski, he is only GOP because that is the easiest path to power in his State. He only ever did just enough to prevent a revolt (ie, a serious primary challenger). He’s in a Trump +30 State and it is absolute that the majority of his State’s citizens wanted all of Trump’s nominees approved…and these votes against come after he gave votes for people like Garland. Given this, it is obviously not a worry about honesty or competence…its just an insult to MAGA as he heads out the door.
As McConnell has already announced he won’t run for reelection in 2026, making him kind of a lame duck who seems to see his role in his remaining years as a mere speed bump, perhaps enough pressure can be put on him to leave earlier. After all, an appointed replacement could run as an incumbent with some experience under his belt, possibly an argument more agreeable to McConnell than ” we can’t stand you and wish you would just go away”.
He’s leaving anyway, he is despised, his health is bad–there is no reason to cling to the office other than sheer bullheadedness. He and his wife still have all their millions and her Chinese contacts to keep them wealthy and Elon, et. al are going to make grifting a lot harder than it has been. Best just to quietly quit while there is still a chance he might get a nice going-away party that is not a blatant celebration of his departure.
I can imagine a little surreptitious whisper in his ear that if he leaves fast enough there might be an agreement to not investigate him and his wealth (and his wife’s contacts with China), while other Congresscritters go under the lights.