Ok, so I’m here or somewhere close:
If you’ve never been to Lake Tahoe, put it on your bucket list! It is just one of the most beautiful places in the world. That water is cold. All snow melt. But its so sunny and warm up there this time of year that the water doesn’t feel so bad after the first shock.
I won’t try to anticipate the future here – we’re on Trump Time so what was OMG!!!! today is “remember the Old Times?” in a few days. Confident Trump will continue to confound his opponents.
Blogs For Victory 
Last September, when I drove from Indiana to Placerville, CA, to visit the woman who is now living with me, I had figured I take I-80 all the way to the closest point to Placerville, which is about 25 miles, but my GPS routed me around Sparks and Reno, and up the mountain and around Lake Tahoe. I can testify how beautiful it is. Still, I couldn’t help but believe that I-80 through the Donner Pass was a lot shorter and faster, so I went home that way. It was only 10 miles and 10 minutes shorter, and not nearly as pretty a drive.
Tahoe is definitely one of the most gorgeous places in the country, but then we have so many. I once considered buying a ranch on the California side of the border between Nevada and California, very near Tahoe and due to the proximity, but then stopped to rethink that: CALIFORNIA !!! and went back east to Wyoming.
A recent article about a NYC coach who proclaimed that he would die (DIE!!! I tell you!) to “protect” the kids he coaches has gotten some recent press, because of its inherent drama (“it’s about the KIDS!!!) and ability to be spun into anti-ICE actions, which we all know is really just anti-Trump rhetoric.
I agree that ICE agents should not be bothering kids, asking them where they are from. That puts a huge burden on those kids. And I agree that the whole deportation thing is going to be an awful experience for these children.
But the thing that the lapdog Agenda Media will ignore in their fury at Trump is that the real issue here is not the trauma these kids might be experiencing but the real reason for it. And that reason is not Trump, or ICE—it is the adults who brought their children here illegally, or came here illegally and then had children here. THEY are the ones responsible for this. THEY are the ones who gambled with the futures of their children.
I get it. I understand that this country, and its feckless “leaders”, contributed to this mess. First, they overlooked illegal immigration, allowing these illegal aliens to settle and have families and feel somewhat comfortable living here, albeit in defiance of the law. Second, we have routinely mischaracterized the meaning of the 14th Amendment, telling these people that although they are themselves here illegally their children born here will be citizens. Third, we have promoted the idea that if parents have children who are citizens then they have an inside track on being able to stay here.
In other words, I don’t really blame the people who have been here for years, even decades, because we did the next thing to inviting them and promising them citizenship to their children. While breaking our immigration laws was wrong, we sent the message that it was only a little bit wrong (the penalty is a misdemeanor, little more significant than a parking ticket) and we allowed them to settle here and put down roots and more important to have children who will end up paying the price for the sins of their parents are on us, as a nation.
And we are doing a HORRIBLE job of dealing with our guilt, our collusion, in this problem.
ICE should not be hassling kids about their parents or their national origin. They should be focusing on those who have come here in the past four or five years, first, and giving Congress time to come up with a humane and reasonable approach to those who have been here a long time, legally or illegally, because of our own ineptness and stupidity.
For years I have said we need a decent, humane and enforceable policy for dealing with people who have been here illegally for a long time. I came up with this during the Bush years and his stupid “immigration reform” ideas. The thing is, I have even had hardcore Leftists agree that it makes sense. I have modified it in the past year or so.
That is, to first establish a registry, and give people who have been here ten years or longer 60 to 90 days to register as illegal aliens. Merely by registering these people get a TEMPORARY pass to remain here while being investigated. Failing to register makes illegal aliens subject to immediate deportation when found. People who have come here more recently are not eligible for this program. (The time frame could be slightly different, but it should accommodate people who have put down roots here and eliminate those who just swarmed the border in blatant and flagrant defiance of the law, like those during the Biden years.)
Then these registrants would be investigated, for things like being self-sufficient, having jobs, not committing crimes, etc. When cleared, they would be given long-term visas, perhaps for ten or even fifteen years. This would give them time to start applying for legal permanent residency. (They would never be eligible for citizenship—after all, they broke our laws by coming here.) If they can’t be bothered to apply for permanent residency then they can just go back to their native lands when those visas expire.
As for the children born here, they should be given automatic permanent residency. Not citizenship. They can apply for citizenship, or qualify by honorable military service, but citizenship is not conveyed through birth here. And they will never qualify as natural born citizens, as their parents were not citizens when they were born.
This all leads to the obvious question of how to deal with the bureaucratic aspect of such a law. And the answer is there in front of us—those people removed from current agency positions. Not all of them, obviously, as so many have been dead weight. But we have a lot of people who will be looking for jobs, who have spent their lives working in different areas of the government. So shift them to Immigration. Put some to work on the backlog of applications for permanent residency and citizenship, and get those records up to date.
Long before DOGE I had the idea of making Immigration Reform tie in with Tax Reform, and in a giddy fantasy thought of eliminating the income tax by going to the Fair Tax and then moving all those recently out-of-work IRS employees over to Immigration.
As for the howling bleeding hearts who object on moral grounds to having or enforcing laws, they could actually put down their signs and DO something—like start helping people navigate the immigration application system.
And the system is a hot mess. I knew a man who had worked, legally, in the United States for 12 years. His green card (permanent residency) application had been held up for years because of a single letter in a name.
His mother had been born in a tiny Andes village, so remote that to get there one had to walk all day from where a bus dropped people off. She was given a name by her parents, and then when she was several months old they made it to the nearest town that had any record-keeping and recorded her birth. Well, the name got spelled two different ways—I don’t remember who used which spelling. But the name was Ermalinda, also spelled as Hermalinda. The chances are that the clerk who recorded the birth wrote it with the “H” which is, of course, silent in Spanish, so the name sounded the same no matter how it was spelled.
I think this is typical of the bureaucratic paralysis of the immigration system. In this case an illiterate peasant back in the 1930s in a remote Andes village spoke a name to a semi-literate clerk who wrote it with a single letter difference that did not change the name or how it was pronounced and some 80 years later a grandchild found his future held hostage in a massive and barely functional bureaucratic swamp. This man had to return home and wait a full year till he could get another work permit after his original permit and extensions expired to return to his job in the United States, costing him a fortune in lost income and legal fees.
This incompetence and paralysis is the reason often given for just bypassing the system entirely. While that is not a valid excuse, I can understand it.
OK…time for Epstein. What a great opportunity for psy-ops, propaganda, political smears, weaving webs of intrigue and lies, etc!
I understand the idea that the so-called “Epstein files” contain names of prominent people, and that these were allegedly/possibly “clients” of his in a nefarious sex ring. The speculated details of this sex ring are numerous, in and of themselves, as are the speculations of what a name on his “client list” might mean.
But one little squeak pops up in the background every now and then, and then disappears, but it intrigues me. That is the question of where did Epstein come from? There is nothing to indicate great financial acumen, or anything to explain his rather sudden wealth, but all of a sudden there is this guy, charming and rich, hanging out with the rich and famous, and offering them all sorts of perks, like plane trips and stays at gorgeous homes.
It seems pretty well established that there was a lot of kink going on, but one of my questions, aside from that of just how did this guy just appear on the social and financial scene, is how many of those he courted, schmoozed, flattered and did favors for were also involved in the sex stuff.
I never thought I would say this, but this seems to call for a Venn Diagram, as I am very sure that not all who were associated with Epstein in one way were also involved with his dark smutty side as well and I am curious about who would fall into the “both” category.
Maybe it is my love of spy novels and espionage tales, but the more I see of Epstein the less I see of him, if you get my drift. In other words, much like Obama, he seems to have been created, backed, and then presented to us. Which leads my mind to a couple of questions.
One is whether he was set up by a government agency to run a “honey trap” to get as many prominent people as possible as compromised as possible. One repeated statement falls into this arena of guesswork—what I saw as the weasel words that there is no evidence that EPSTEIN intended to blackmail anyone. But as an agent, HE would not be the one doing the blackmailing—it would be his bosses, who could use the incriminating information to control people in business and even more important in politics. It’s an implied denial that really doesn’t deny anything.
So if any of this is credible, or possible, it would explain why the original response to the “Epstein files” was to make it all public, but then a deeper dive into it and acquisition of more information might make this a very bad idea for several reasons. One might be national security, if he was acting for one or more government agencies, and one might be simple fairness if people were caught up in the web of glamor and freebies without ever participating in the dark side. I could see why some extensive investigation of every name in his so-called “client list” would have to be vetted, to determine if this was just a celebrity courted for photo ops with some free luxury plane trips or if this is a degenerate who needs to be dealt with legally.
We saw how the Left pounced on every opportunity to link Trump with Epstein—the hysterical headlines that “Trump flew on Epstein’s private plane” turned into the reality that “the Trump campaign leased a plane that had once belonged to Epstein”.
Epstein created a foul and stinking mess, but the question is, did he do this on his own or by intent and with help from powerful people behind the scenes? And that leads to an even messier question: If he was acting as an agent of some government entity, to lure people into activities that would compromise them and make them easy to control, then was the government complicit in the illegal and immoral acts that were part of this?
And the poor Left is trying to juggle the opportunity to smear Trump by howling that he is hiding some dark and ugly information about himself by withholding the files, or is involved in some nefarious coverup, while knowing that a lot of big names on the Left are in those files and releasing them would be a disaster for them as well.
Every government has some ugly truths it needs to try to hide, but it looks like the United States has some deep cleaning to do in its own history to drag some things into the daylight and purge them. If the government was complicit in Epstein’s sexual crimes that has to be revealed, just as the government’s complicity in the entire Covid scheme from the development of the virus to the way its spread was handled and the millions of deaths worldwide to the denial of effective therapeutics to promote the bogus “vaccines” to the multi-pronged lies about the drugs foisted off, by force, on millions and the ongoing sinister effects of those drugs.
It looks like “draining the swamp” is a much bigger job than just clearing out the Bureaucratic State and getting back to constitutional governance by elected representatives and getting rid of financial waste and shenanigans, and may involve figuring out how to deal with some seriously damaging information on several fronts.
I saw a Venn Diagram I thought was great. One of the big circles was labeled “Strippers” and the other was “Cats” and the center, where they overlap, was “will sit on your lap but you can’t touch them”.
Best Trump/ Hitler comparison ever!
A good friend sent me this. I never realized just how much like the Nazis our current crop of Leftists are.
This is brilliant. Though I kind of expected the name of the painting to be “from the river to the sea”.
Elon is no dummy.
Jeff Childers has the most interesting (and logical) theory about the Epstein files that I’ve seen.
Childers never touches on the question I asked, which boils down to “where did Jeffrey Epstein come from?” or its corollary, “did Jeffrey Epstein have cover from a federal agency or agencies?” But he does use this phrase:
“Forget about predicting it; the Epstein story defies description. It isn’t just a scandal, it’s a whole genre; somewhere between political thriller, true crime, and cold war noir.”
I can’t help but think that while on the surface the revelation of the “Epstein files” might smear or even destroy a lot of very famous and powerful people the real damage would be to our national security, itself or in the form of further destroying confidence in our federal agencies. Because if Epstein was placed, financed, introduced and protected to set honey traps for the rich and powerful and politically important, that would mean that the alleged sex trafficking, child porn, etc. were all approved of and financed by Uncle Sam.
How do you prosecute people for heinous crimes if the evidence needed to prosecute and convict consists of admissions of guilt for those heinous crimes by our own government?
Not saying it is so, just saying it seems like a possibility given the nature of Epstein’s rapid rise to fame and fortune, with no history of prior financial success on a level that would explain the estates, the planes, the entry into the highest levels of Hollywood and Washington, etc.
It seems to me that Childers DID do a post a while back about Epstein’s origins. I know I read it somewhere.
that would mean that the alleged sex trafficking, child porn, etc. were all approved of and financed by Uncle Sam.
I think therein lies the rub.
I was thinking this might be the first place I heard about it. BTW I don’t get Childers or Malone newsletters any more and can’t get an answer about why.