This is so great

 

Drudge version:

RUBIO MAY NEED TO SURRENDER PASSPORT; Neither parent was citizen at time of his birth...

 

Actual version:

 

Trump’s Own Cabinet Would Have Been Harmed by Birthright Citizenship Move

... Rubio, who was born to Cuban parents who were not American citizens at the time of his birth ...

 

 

The Newsweek story simply omits the crux interpretum involved in "and subject to" in the 14th Amendment.

Rubio's parents were subject to the jurisdiction of Cuba, and therefore so was he, making none of them citizens.

Same was true of Native Americans, none of whom were made citizens by the 14th Amendment. They were subject to The Nations, which the federal government recognized by treaties as nations within the American nation. Native Americans received citizenship by law passed in 1924.  

14th Amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens ...                                               

It is high time that "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" be treated seriously and not superfluously.  

 

Is NATO allowed to use U.S. bases within the United States, say, to help Ukraine against Russia?

 Rubio: Why Are We In NATO When They Won't Allow U.S. To Use Their Bases?

The best thing about Pete Hegseth is that he's not wearing the clown's Florsheims like Rubio is

 

The Mar-a-Lago donor class overwhelmingly prefers Marco Rubio over J. D. Vance

 

What happens to people?

 

The dopes around Trump thought the Cartel de los Soles was a real entity, including Marco Rubio to this day

 Pam Bondi forced to admit Trump's Maduro claim is a complete fiction

... Cartel de los Soles is actually a slang term invented by Venezuelan media in the 1990s to describe officials who take drug money as bribes.

The revised indictment against Maduro now concedes that point against the now deposed dictator.

The old indictment refers to the Cartel de los Soles 32 times and claims Maduro is the leader of the organization. The revised document now only claims Maduro upheld the patronage system along with his predecessor and mentor, President Hugo Chávez. ...

Marco Rubio continued referring to Cartel de los Soles as an actual organization during a Sunday interview on NBC's show Meet the Press.

'We will continue to reserve the right to take strikes against drug boats that are bringing drugs toward the United States that are being operated by transnational criminal organizations, including the Cartel de los Soles,' Rubio claimed.

'Of course, their leader, the leader of that cartel, is now in U.S. custody and facing US justice in the Southern District of New York. And that's Nicolas Maduro.' ...

 

Sounds like the universal blowback against the Trump-Russia plan being jammed down Ukraine's throat has Trump and the administration trying to walk it back and failing miserably

Maybe AXIOS released the plan in the first place to sabotage the whole thing, to which I say Hurrah!

 

 Ukraine peace plan in chaos after Marco Rubio 'told senators Russia had authored proposal'

Marco Rubio was forced on the defensive last night after a bipartisan group of senators claimed he told them the US's peace plan for Ukraine was authored by Russia.

The US Secretary of State denied their account, with a spokesman calling it "blatantly false", but the dispute threatens to derail President Trump's push for a peace deal to be achieved this week.

Rubio took the extraordinary step of suggesting online that the senators were mistaken, even though they said he was their source for the information. 

The secretary of state doubled down on the assertion that Washington was responsible for a proposal, which has faced push back in Europe for being so favorable to Moscow.

The widely leaked 28-point US-backed peace plan was, according to the White House, the result of a month of work between Rubio and Trump envoy Steve Witkoff along with input from what it said was both Ukrainians and Russians. 

The plan accepts many Russian demands that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has categorically rejected on dozens of occasions, including giving up large pieces of territory. 

Trump says he wants Ukraine to accept the plan by late next week.

"This administration was not responsible for this release in its current form," said Republican Mike Rounds from South Dakota, speaking at a security conference in Canada. "They want to utilize it as a starting point."

Rounds said "it looked more like it was written in Russian to begin with." ...

Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesperson, said the senators' account was "blatantly false." ...

More:

U.S. senators say Rubio told them Trump’s Ukraine peace plan is Russia’s ‘wish list.’ Rubio denies it

 

Who needs to run if elections are suspended in yet another phony national emergency?

Trump is not allowed to stop spending money which was lawfully appropriated by the Congress for specific purposes, or to spend it on other things, but that's exactly what he's doing anyway.

He's illegally taxing every American with his tariffs under a phony emergency power granted him by our servile Congress. 

He's not allowed to shake down and detain citizens on the pretext that they may be illegally present, but that's exactly what he's done. He's made a mockery of citizenship.

He's not allowed to search without a warrant, but he's doing it anyway. You let him do it every time you fly, so what's the big deal if now he's invading homes and businesses without warrants in search of illegal aliens? You don't care.

He uses his bully pulpit literally to bully people, to suppress their speech. He threatens investigations of his opponents, and makes good on them with actual probes and charges. Some in Congress admit they are afraid of him.   

No one made him the judge, jury, and executioner, but that's who he thinks he is. He is in fact murdering non-combatants pure and simple every day, and Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio are his accomplices, as is the U.S. military, to its everlasting shame.

Trump is the greatest . . . violator of civil rights and the rule of law since Lincoln.

He's made an ass of the law.

He's flooded the zone with illegality, impropriety, personal corruption, crime, and ugliness. 

And Congress just lets him. The courts just let him. The people just let him.

They all just shrug. They're the French, and he's their Napoleon. 

 

Trump: "It's Pretty Clear, I'm Not Allowed To Run" For Third Term

This is classic, the Trump administration breaks the law left and right, day in and day out, and his Little Dog Marco Rubio yaps about the rule of law in Brazil

 

The Rule of Law Is Breaking Down in Brazil

Marco Rubio, Department of State

Uniparty Trump hides behind the skirts of the 2001 anti-terror legislation to murder so-called terrorists near Venezuela after cutting and running from the Houthis in the Red Sea

<insert tough guy image here>

MEXICO CITY — U.S. forces could have stopped the boat that officials say was carrying illegal drugs from Venezuela to the United States on Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, but President Donald Trump chose instead to destroy it, killing 11 people on board, to send a deterrent message to traffickers. ...

The action was a dramatic escalation for the U.S. in its fight against drug traffickers. Lawmakers and legal analysts questioned the legality of launching a lethal strike against civilians in international waters outside of an armed conflict.

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement that the strike was “conducted against the operations of a designated terrorist organization and was taken in defense of vital U.S. national interests and in the collective self-defense of other nations,” an apparent reference to the 2001 authorization for the use of military force enacted by Congress after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that year. It authorizes the use of force against the perpetrators of the al-Qaeda attacks and to prevent “future acts of international terrorism.” Various lawmakers have tried unsuccessfully for years to repeal the measure, including Vice President JD Vance, who as a senator in 2023 co-sponsored the End Endless Wars Act. ...

The U.S. Coast Guard sometimes shoots out the engines of go-fast boats during maritime interdictions, the former agent said, but killing the crew is new for the United States. ...

Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, said the strike violated international law. The U.S. is not in armed conflict with Venezuela or its criminal elements, she noted, which means it violated the suspects’ right to life. ...

Colombian President Gustavo Petro called the attack “murder.”

“We have been capturing civilians transporting drugs for decades without killing them,” Petro said. “Those who transport drugs are not the big drug lords, but very poor young people from the Caribbean and the Pacific. ...

 More. 

In education news, the once great Indiana University has turned its back on Western civilization and purged its traditional degree programs because the children of the barbarians don't enroll in them anymore

 A victory for the mouth breather, Marco Rubio, fellow servant of Mammon.

 

 

Mouth-breather Marco: By the time we left we were already gone lol

 He could be our Yogi Berra redivivus, but just hasn't got the C H A R M.

 

Populism means speaking fifty words of English: Pete Hegseth joins Marco Rubio in his own more welders, less philosophers moment

Take courage people!

You too can become populists just like Pete and Little Marco. Just get your degrees from Princeton and Harvard and the Universities of Florida and Miami.

 

 

Because no one competent wants the stink on them

 Rubio Now Serving as Sec of State, National Security Adviser, U.S. Archivist and Head of USAID -- All at Once!

Marco Rubio did stop

 

Marco Rubio and his fellow barbarians are shredding and burning USAID classified documents and personnel records

 

U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) employees and outside groups are fighting an order from the agency’s leadership to shred and burn its classified documents as well as personnel records.

An email obtained by The Hill sent by USAID’s acting executive secretary instructs remaining employees at the dismantled agencies to “shred as many documents as possible first, and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break.” ...

More.

Marco Rubio changes his forehead for Ash Wednesday

 

A Russian "Grad" rocket launcher crosses the Kakhovka dam in March 2023

Lindsey Grahamnesty epitomizes everything that's gone wrong with the GOP and America generally: America's interests abroad are purely about money, not at all about freedom

 

John McCain would not be happy with his old friend. McCain was a main agitator for freedom in Ukraine and its alliance with the West. The policy wisdom of that was controversial, but it wasn't framed as purely economic.

Lindsey used to be for freedom in Ukraine like McCain. Lindsey used to be an immigration liberal who advocated for amnesty. Now he's a suck-up to Trump as bad as Marco Rubio, who also used to talk about the old American values preached by Ronald Reagan.

They are shapeshifters all, just like the formerly NeverTrump J. D. Vance.

You cannot trust any of these people any more than we can trust Vladimir Putin. 

Lindsey Graham here:

I told Zelensky we'll talk about security guarantees. We'll talk about ceasefires and how the war ends. This is a process. You have a new relationship with America, a 500 billion, half trillion, dollar deal that President Trump is proud of that gives us an interest worth defending.      

In other words, if it's not about money it's not worth defending.

 

Thy money perish with thee.

-- Acts 8:20

Nutball worlds in collision: Trumpism defends freedom in Europe with its right hand, stabs it in the back in Ukraine with its left, Biden defended freedom in Ukraine with his right, attacked it in America with his left

 

 But The Federalist has its blinders on. Biden baaaaaaad! Trump gooooood!

"Let's see if we can find some naive kid to write a story about it!" 

By Defending Free Speech Worldwide, Team Trump Reclaims America’s Global Moral High Ground:

Under President Donald Trump, the suppression of natural rights by Western powers will no longer be ignored by the United States.

Yep, J. D. Vance goes to Europe to beat up on our friends. But suppression of freedom will be ignored, in places like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and China. And above all in Ukraine.

This is the essence of libertarianism: Make the good the enemy of the perfect.

But defending freedom where it really counts would take some courage, and they don't have it. 

The author of this article, who graduated from college in 2022 with a BA in political "science", ends it touting the execrable Darren Beattie at Marco Rubio's State Department, a Taiwan surrender monkey. 

 

The article is the second in the queue at Real Clear Politics this morning. One goes there looking for some serious editorial judgment and gets this.

Trump/Vance don't have the moral high ground. They are just the cowardly other side of the same old hypocritical American coin.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: To watch our ally of 80 years, the USA, turn on us with ferocity and blithely team up with our declared enemy really is the end of days

 

Trump’s embrace of Putin is a Molotov-Ribbentrop crisis for Europe:

The new regime in Washington is testing pro-American sympathies to breaking point

 

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard20 February 2025 6:50pm GMT

We are at that moment in Animal Farm when the gentle carthorse Clover looks through the window to see the pigs playing cards and drinking a toast with men.

The pigs are all perfectly at ease and sitting back in chairs around a table, no doubt a rougher surface than the luxurious polished table used to host America’s Marco Rubio and Russia’s Sergei Lavrov in Saudi Arabia this week. The Russian press reports that the meeting was a love-fest of jokes and bonhomie, with a “very tasty lunch”.

George Orwell’s scene was an allegory of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, when Europe’s great power alignment suddenly and violently shifted. The liberal democracies woke up on Aug 23 1939 to discover that the Soviet Union had reached a non-aggression deal with Nazi Germany. Days later, Hitler and Stalin carved up Eastern Europe between them. The Nazis could then turn their concentrated fury on France and Britain without having to worry about a second front.

Britain had started to re-arm as early as 1935. Neville Chamberlain hurled money at the Royal Air Force in the late 1930s, with Spitfire squadrons arriving just in time. Defence spending had risen to 9pc of GDP by 1939.

This time, Europe’s democracies have indulged the same pacifist illusions as they did in the run up to 1939 but have milked the peace dividend even longer. Military spending by EU states was 1.9pc of GDP in 2024, a full 17 years after Vladimir Putin declared political war on liberal civilisation and all its works at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 – “a good speech” said one Angela Merkel, audibly, in the front row.

He then set about restoring the tsarist empire to the borders of Catherine the Great with an unswerving consistency. Austria is not even part of Nato and behaves accordingly.

Some are rising to the challenge. Denmark has given its stock of munitions to Ukraine and even the trade unions back a war tax to raise defence spending to 4pc of GDP. “We are in a very, very critical period in world history,” said Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the Danish foreign minister.

Poland’s military budget is already up to 4.7pc. “We’re that afraid,” said his Polish counterpart Radosław Sikorski at last week’s Munich forum.

Lithuania aims for 5pc to 6pc of GDP by next year, alarmed by intelligence warnings that Putin may seize the Suwalki Gap, which runs through its territory from Belarus to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

They all know that Putin has a narrow window of time to attack if the Ukraine war is quickly settled on Russian terms. His advantage is temporary: a greatly enlarged army heading for 1.5m by 2026 and an industrial war economy firing on all cylinders but untenable for much longer.

Fears are growing that Donald Trump will order the US military to pull its Nato tripwire forces out of the Baltics in order to seal the “deal of the century” with the Kremlin. Will he swallow the bait as the smooth McKinsey-trained head of Russia’s investment fund, Kirill Dmitriev, dangles the offer of hydrocarbon riches – real or imagined – in Russian Arctic waters?

The issue runs deeper in any case. Maga America has a greater natural affinity for Putin’s Right-wing cultural Weltanschauung than it does for the liberal democracies. After the battering of the last two weeks, some of us are forced to conclude that Britain and Europe are now the real enemies for this new Washington and, furthermore, that the US is anything but isolationist under Donald Trump.

He will not let us carry on being different. He will force-feed us his Maga ideology. His oil-fracking energy secretary was in London this week describing our renewables as “sinister”. Will we face sanctions for trying to do something about CO2 emissions? Perhaps, yes. Particularly for that.

I do not wish to dissect every post by Trump on Truth Social, or dwell on the speech by JD Vance. I think Britain should repeal all its hate legislation and stop misusing police resources on thought crimes. It should stop dividing us into categories and return to colour-blind liberalism. But one can agree with elements of Vance’s anti-woke critique while entirely rejecting the larger message behind it.

We are told repeatedly by Trump’s circle that he does not really mean what he says, or that we should not overreact to what he is very clearly doing. Let us hope they are right, but it is becoming harder by the day to have confidence in such assurances, or to believe that either Republicans or plutocrats will lift a finger to stop him – and I say this as a defender of Pax Americana for half a century.

Sir Keir Starmer is right to stay calm and try to defuse this terrifying inter-allied crisis on his visit to the White House. But we of The Telegraph parish, readers and writers alike, will all have to look into our souls if, as now seems painfully plausible, Britain is singled out for tariff warfare along with Europe on the pretext of our VAT taxes.

Worse yet if Trump does this while reaching a cosy commodity deal with Putin along with a grand bargain with Xi Jinping to protect Elon Musk’s interests in China. That would test one’s pro-American sympathies to breaking point.

Europe shares much of the blame for the disintegration of the Western alliance system. It failed to re-arm after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. Germany rewarded Putin months later by launching the Nord Stream 2 project, which had no purpose other than depriving Kyiv of strategic leverage by re-routing Siberian gas through Baltic pipelines. In return, Germany enjoyed a sweetheart gas deal at sub-market prices.

Britain could have rebuilt its military hardware at ultra-low borrowing costs during the secular stagnation of the 2010s, when it had ample spare capacity. It could have rebuilt its decaying infrastructure and revived its economy at the same time. The multiplier effect would have let us do these things without pushing the debt ratio any faster. Britain pursued austerity instead. Now it faces a greater task, in a hostile bond market.

Europe was even more destructive. Germany cut public investment and military spending to the bone for 15 years. It relied on mercantilist export surpluses of 8pc of GDP to drive growth, a policy that has left Germany in the cross-hairs of Trump’s trade warriors.

The eurozone debt crisis – self-inflicted because the European Central Bank did not then have political approval to back-stop debts – turned into a wider depression because Brussels over-egged austerity and used bailouts to impose drastic spending cuts. There was no exemption for military spending.

Defence as a share of GDP in 2015 was Hungary 0.5pc, Belgium 0.8pc, Germany 1.0pc, Spain 1.0pc, Italy 1.2pc, France 1.8pc –and that was after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Military budgets crept up slowly thereafter but not enough to prevent further disarmament.

Europe thought it could keep free-riding on Uncle Sucker forever, despite warnings that this would end badly. There was much talk along the way of a European army and endless euro-speak meetings about procedures, modalities and the architecture of EU defence, but never anything real. That is why Europe today finds itself utterly naked.

But nobody expected it to end this badly and this suddenly. To watch an ally of 80 years turn on us with ferocity and blithely team up with our declared enemy really is the end of days.