Watch here.
Stephen Miller Offers a Strongman’s View of the World
... “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Mr. Miller told Jake Tapper of CNN on Monday, during a combative appearance in which he was pressed on Mr. Trump’s long-held desire to control Greenland. ...
Brown and MIT prof shooter suspect Neves Valente is found dead, authorities say
... Authorities said he is believed to have originally been in the United States on a student visa and obtained lawful permanent resident status in 2017.
Trump immediately tries to cover his ass:
U.S. green card lottery suspended after Brown University shooting
... Noem said that Valente entered the U.S. through the DV1 program in 2017 and was granted a green card.
“In 2017, President Trump fought to end this program, following the devastating NYC truck ramming by an ISIS terrorist, who entered under the DV1 program, and murdered eight people,” she wrote on X.
The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program (DV Program) allocates up to 50,000 immigrant visas every year, according to the USCIS website.
The program is a lottery. Visas are randomly allocated to individuals from countries with low rates of immigration to the U.S.
Bush didn't keep us safe on 911, and Trump didn't keep us safe in 2025. A young, talented College Republican is dead because of him.
If Trump can simply suspend the program in 2025, he could have done it in 2017 when he was president the first time, but he didn't.
... Here's a reform that would change everything: You can only donate to candidates and political organizations in the state where you are registered to vote.
Not where you own property. Not where you have business interests. Not where you "care deeply" about the issues. Where you are registered to vote – the place where you've committed to being a citizen and living with the consequences of governance.
This single rule would fundamentally reshape American politics.
... Change the incentives by changing where the money comes from, and you change what kind of people can succeed in politics – and what kind of Congress they create.
It's time to return politics to the people who actually have to live with the results.
Lindsay Mark Lewis, here.
Maybe that all-volunteer-army idea wasn't such a great one after all.
A "large standing Army in time of Peace hath ever been considered dangerous to the liberties of a Country". -- George Washington
The "means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home". -- James Madison
"When once a standing army is established in any country, the people lose their liberty". -- George Mason
Trump Says He Is Prepared to Send ‘More Than the National Guard’ Into U.S. Cities
... “We have cities that are troubled, we can’t have cities that are troubled,” Mr. Trump said. “And we’re sending in our National Guard, and if we need more than the National Guard, we’ll send more than the National Guard, because we’re going to have safe cities.” ...
The president delivered his speech on the U.S.S. George Washington, an aircraft carrier docked south of Tokyo, at an American military base in Japan that was set up in the aftermath of World War II. It was an unsubtle show of force as Mr. Trump prepares to meet China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, this week, for talks that hold great stakes for the global economy. ...
The climate alarmist New York Times isn't having it, here:
... In a lengthy memo released Tuesday, Mr. Gates sought to tamp down the alarmism he said many people use to describe the effects of rising temperatures. Instead, he called for redirecting efforts toward improving lives in the developing world. ...
While he called climate change “a very important problem” that needs to be solved, he said that “the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals.” And that was “diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world,” he wrote.
The world is warming faster than at any point in recorded history. Last year was the hottest on record. Scientists warn that unless countries make a rapid shift away from burning fossil fuels, the planet is likely to experience extreme weather and other changes faster than humans can adapt. Low-lying island nations are already seeing their land disappearing under rising seas caused by melting glaciers and polar ice sheets. An estimated 62,775 people died from heat in Europe last year. ...
The Times, true to its MO of lying by omission, ignores the science, which shows that in this age of supposedly extreme global warming cold still kills for more people than heat ever does, nine cold deaths for every one heat death:
... In most epidemiological studies, excess cold deaths far outnumber heat deaths. In that same global analysis, of the 9·4% attributable temperature-related deaths, 8·5% (range 6·2–10·5%) were cold-related and only 0·9% (range 0·6–1·4%) were heat-related,2 which corresponds to approximately 4·6 million deaths from cold and about 489 000 from heat, a ratio of roughly 9:1 of cold versus heat. ...
They're wasting their time, energy, and taxpayer billion$ tracking down individuals when they should be cracking down on the employers, but that would take a native intelligence which Trump administration morons like Stephen Miller do not possess.
They're also alienating and energizing the opposition at the grass roots all across the country to turn out and vote against them in November 2026, which is one of the most politically stupid moves of these dunderheads to date.
It's almost like they're being paid by George Soros to do it.
Reported here:
... The Department of Homeland Security says that it has deported more than 400,000 people since Mr. Trump took office, and that it expects to deport 600,000 in total by the end of Mr. Trump’s first year in office.
Left, right, and in between in this country is completely warped.
NYT: President Trump On Brink of Major Diplomatic Accomplishment
Trump ‘Determined’ the U.S. Is Now in a War With Drug Cartels, Congress Is Told
... In this case, the Trump administration is conflating the trafficking of an illicit consumer product and associated crime with an armed attack, asserting in the notice that cartels “illegally and directly cause the deaths of tens of thousands of American citizens each year.” But it has not explained how selling a dangerous substance constitutes a use of force, and Congress has not authorized the use of any type of military force against cartels. ...
Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, accused Mr. Trump of deciding that he could wage “secret wars against anyone he calls an enemy.” The president “offered no credible legal justification, evidence or intelligence” for the strikes, Mr. Reed said.
“Drug cartels are despicable and must be dealt with by law enforcement,” he said. “But now, by the president’s own words, the U.S. military is engaged in armed conflict with undefined enemies he has unilaterally labeled ‘unlawful combatants,’ and he has deployed thousands of troops, ships and aircraft against them. Yet he has refused to inform Congress or the public.” ...
The Trump Department of Injustice dropped the case.
So where's the money then? In Bob Menendez' closet?
We're getting more like China everyday.
Push for More Organ Transplants Putting Donors at Risk...
... Circulatory death donation is different. These patients are on life support, often in a coma. Their prognoses are more of a medical judgment call.
They are alive, with some brain activity, but doctors have determined that they are near death and won’t recover. If relatives agree to donation, doctors withdraw life support and wait for the patient’s heart to stop. This has to happen within an hour or two for the organs to be considered viable. After the person is declared dead, surgeons go in.
The Times found that some organ procurement organizations — the nonprofits in each state that have federal contracts to coordinate transplants — are aggressively pursuing circulatory death donors and pushing families and doctors toward surgery. Hospitals are responsible for patients up to the moment of death, but some are allowing procurement organizations to influence treatment decisions.
Fifty-five medical workers in 19 states told The Times they had witnessed at least one disturbing case of donation after circulatory death.
Workers in several states said they had seen coordinators persuading hospital clinicians to administer morphine, propofol and other drugs to hasten the death of potential donors. ...
Circulatory death donation used to be largely forbidden. That began to change in the 1990s, when a dying patient asked the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to remove her life support and donate her organs. The hospital honored her wishes, then spent two years creating guidelines for future cases. Use of the practice gradually spread. ...
... Years later, he expressed contempt for President-elect Donald J. Trump. “A bully — mean, nasty and disrespectful of anyone in his way,” he wrote in a 2021 column for CNN. ...
Mr. Gergen wore his 6-foot-5 frame comfortably and was graced with an easygoing manner, verbal quickness and a ready laugh that made him popular with many White House reporters. He also leaked information often enough to be labeled “the Sieve” by some of them.
That reputation fed speculation that he was Deep Throat, the shadowy figure who provided The Washington Post with insights into the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s. That source, however, was confirmed in 2005 to have been W. Mark Felt, the No. 2 official at the F.B.I. ...
The spin “had nothing to do with ideas,” Mr. Gergen said. “It had nothing to do with anything that was real. Eventually, it became selling the sizzle without the steak. There was nothing connected to it. It was all cellophane. It was all packaging.” ...
Mr. Gergen was the author of a best-selling book, “Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership, Nixon to Clinton” (2000). The book offered lessons for would-be leaders that tended to be little more than bromides, advising them to develop “a capacity to persuade” and “an ability to work within the system.” He revisited the topic in a 2022 book, “Hearts Touched With Fire: How Great Leaders Are Made.” ...
More.
Republican David Gergen was on the wrong side, you see, even if he was a centrist.
... I’m always anti-boomer ...
In The New York Times, here.
... As the “No Kings” resistance among Democrats bristles, and as President Trump continues to defy limits on executive power, it is instructive to examine comparisons of President Trump to George III. ...
Atkinson said that the only similarity between the pious monarch and the impious monarch manqué is “the use of the military against their own people to enforce the king’s will. There are incidents, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party.”
He added: “This proclivity for using armed forces for domestic suppression of dissent. That’s a slippery slope in this country. It led to an eight-year war when George did it, and Lord knows where it’s going to lead this time.” ...
“The fact that we’re looking for a monarch to draw parallels to him is telling in and of itself, because that’s not what we do. That’s what the whole shooting match was about in the 1770s.”
Stephen Miller most hurt.
On Wednesday morning, President Trump took a call from Brooke Rollins, his secretary of agriculture, who relayed a growing sense of alarm from the heartland.
But the decision had been made. Later on Thursday, a senior official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Tatum King, sent an email to regional leaders at the agency informing them of new guidance. Agents were to “hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.” ...
More.
Observe again how quickly Trump is to turn on a dime. The policy changed in less than 48 hours. The last person he talked to can be the most influential, which is not what you want from the leader of the free world. Sometimes he stumbles into the right decision, to be sure, but he can always stumble the wrong way. The tyrant's soul resembles the state which he rules, full of chaos and conflicting desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy.