Just words: It's been 20 days and the war he said he'd settle before he even became president is still going strong

 

Trump says he has spoken to Putin about ending the Ukraine war

 

 

 

Trump's deportation fantasies hit the big brick wall of reality

 Meanwhile at ICE, Vitello told agents in January to aim to meet a daily quota of 1,200-1,400 arrests. According to numbers ICE has posted on X, the highest single day total since Trump was inaugurated was just 1,100, and the number has fallen since that day. On Tuesday of this week, arrests of immigrants were over 800, according to a source familiar with the numbers. But last weekend, there were only about 300 arrests, another source told NBC News.

In order to fulfill Trump’s Inauguration Day promise of “millions and millions” of deportations, the Trump administration would have to be deporting over 2,700 immigrants every day to reach 1 million in a year. 

And, as NBC News has reported, arrests do not always equal immediate detentions, much less deportations. Of the more than 8,000 immigrants arrested in the first two weeks of the Trump administration, 461 were released, according to the White House. 

More.

They were supposed to end catch and release on day one. They can't do even that.

 

 

RFK Jr gets a nicotine fix during Senate testimony

Yeah, that's what we want to see in our next Secretary of Health.

Ciga-reetes, and heroin, and wild, wild Olivia Nuzzis, they'll drive you crazy, they'll drive you insane.

 

In the Golden Age of Trump, will all ships be arisen in the rising of the tide, or all voices undesired simply drown without goodbye?

 

Eaton fire 91% contained, Palisades fire 68% contained, new Hughes wildfire blows up overnight to 2/3 the size of the Eaton

 The Hughes fire is north of LA, Eaton to the east, Palisades to the west.

New wildfire near Los Angeles explodes to 9,400 acres, forces evacuations

. . . The Eaton Fire that scorched 14,021 acres (57 square km) east of Los Angeles was 91% contained, while the larger Palisades Fire, which has consumed 23,448 acres (95 square km) on the west side of Los Angeles, stood at 68% contained. . . .

Burnin' ring of fire.

David Brooks is not a serious person

 

David Brooks: Donald Trump Is The Most Consequential American Politician Since Ronald Reagan:

 

And the fact that he's reelected and now about to take office and use executive orders to wipe out a lot of things, including the civil service potentially, or parts of it, that's just a gigantic pivot in American history. 

A president who must resort to executive orders is not consequential. The next president can wipe those out, by executive orders.

 

More importantly, there is nothing consequential about presidents who must pass major legislation through reconciliation rules, as Trump had to in 2017, which means the legislation is temporary by definition. Trump must now spend precious second term months on this same issue. He aims to extend his tax cuts for another period under reconciliation rules, which is fine, but that will also be temporary, not consequential.

 

Boehner and Obama made the Bush tax cuts, originally passed through reconciliation, permanent after Obama was re-elected in 2012. That was consequential.

The Bush tax regime is consequential. It makes Trump step and fetch it, just like Obama.

Senator Tim Kaine v Pete Hegseth

 

It's the National Day of Mourning for Jimmy Carter

 Please keep it down or you'll wake the baby.

 

I'm gonna miss this Kamala

 

Buh bye Mitt Romney

 Romney stands by as Utah Senator Curtis (blocked in the photo by Kamala Harris) is sworn in today.

Watch here.

 

Donald J. Trump was against the H-1B Visa Program before he was for it lol

Donald J. Frankenstein is the GOP's version of Boltneck, who was for the use of force in Iraq and Afghanistan before he was against paying for it. 

Elon Musk has that effect on people lol.

Don't get the Neuralink from the mad scientist or it could happen to you, too!

 

Wow, I don't imagine ABC News will be broadcasting this story

 

Now that Democrats have lost everything, The New York Times has nothing to lose by telling the truth about their illegal immigration tsunami under Joe Biden

 

 The numbers in the Times analysis include both legal and illegal immigration. About 60 percent of immigrants who have entered the country since 2021 have done so without legal authorization, according to a Goldman Sachs report based on government data.

The combined increases of legal and illegal immigration have caused the share of the U.S. population born in another country to reach a new high, 15.2 percent in 2023, up from 13.6 percent in 2020. The previous high was 14.8 percent, in 1890.

Story here.

People should give Joe Biden more credit. He promised this immigration disaster, and boy did we get it, good and hard. Nothing sucks like success.

Joe defended it during the Democrat debates in 2019, and invited it during the final 2020 debate with Trump, and America voted for it.

 

 

 

Kevin Dowd: close the border, eliminate regulations, end the war on fossil fuels, cancel electric vehicle mandates, do a little dance

 

 

 Kevin Dowd takes over for Maureen Dowd on Thanksgiving, here:

 

Trump promises a return to common sense and has been given the tools to accomplish it with an electoral mandate and all three branches of government on his side. He cannot squander it. He must not get bogged down in petty disputes and perceived slights. ...

There are things he can do right away to make a difference: close the border, eliminate regulations, end the war on fossil fuels and cancel EV mandates. ...

He should move forward without rancour or grievance, fuelled by the joy of the Trump Shuffle, his robot-like dance that has broken out at UFC fights and across the NFL. I’m going to have the younger members of the family teach it to Maureen on Thanksgiving.

Kamala Harris is the 2028 Democrat frontrunner lol

 

The advice Republicans, and Democrats, never seem to internalize

It's a feature of a libertarian country, not a bug.

 

Donald Trump and George W. Bush are the exact same person

 

No, Matt Gaetz will not be in the 119th Congress lol

 

Mark Levin thinks Senate Republicans should be just like Democrats and confirm all Trump's lunatic nominees same as the Democrats confirmed Biden's instead of running their mouths all the time but doing nothing

 Here.

Levin argues the Senators owe their elections to Trump's coattails, and therefore their unqualified support.

Of fifteen Republicans elected to the US Senate in 2024, that might be true of eleven.

But in four cases it's not: Wicker in Mississippi, Curtis in Utah, Barrasso in Wyoming, and Ricketts in Nebraska were all more popular than Donald Trump, each garnering more votes than Trump did in their states.

Levin often talks about "constitutionalism" on his show, you know, like the separation of powers, where the Congress isn't simply the president's rubber stamp machine.

You might say Levin runs his mouth about it.

Some US Senators actually doing their jobs and voting not to confirm the worst of Trump's appointments is a good thing.

 

 

Meanwhile for the annals of dead American conservatism, meathead Mark Levin laughably eulogizes Ted Olson as the "late, great"

 

 Mostly because of Olson's role in Bush v Gore in 2000.

Levin never mentions that Olson himself, a thorough-going amoral libertarian who worshiped freedom above all other things, thought his greatest legacy was overturning California's same-sex marriage ban, glowingly covered by WaPo:

Mr. Olson said he considered his greatest legal legacy to be his role in invalidating California’s Proposition 8, a measure banning same-sex marriage that had passed in 2008 with 52 percent of the vote after the state’s Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage.

He had come to the case in a most unlikely way, through Rob Reiner, the film director and liberal activist who was among those intent on reversing the recently approved proposition.

Reiner had a decidedly low opinion of Mr. Olson, stemming from what he regarded as Bush’s ill-gotten 2000 election win. But Mr. Olson told Reiner that he found Prop 8 “wrong, morally and legally,” and Reiner was convinced that the lawyer could appeal to conservatives.

“It is a conservative value to respect the relationship that people seek to have with one another, a stable, committed relationship that provides a backbone for our community, for our economy,” Mr. Olson later told the Los Angeles Times. “I think conservatives should value that.”

Mr. Olson endured taunts from former supporters on the hard right, some of whom unleashed homophobic vitriol. Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh denounced him on the radio. Others declined invitations to dine at his home near the Potomac River.

Mr. Olson also said he wasn’t trusted by gay rights advocates who feared that Americans were not ready for same-sex marriage and that challenging the ban in court might backfire and set back the cause for years. Some marriage-equality supporters said they feared that Mr. Olson took the case intending to throw it, a notion he dismissed. “I don’t take cases to lose,” he declared.

In part to allay those suspicions, Mr. Olson asked David Boies — an impeccably credentialed trial lawyer and a registered Democrat who had argued Gore’s case in 2000 — to take the marriage case with him. To the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Olson explained that the case was not a partisan matter but rather one about “human rights and human decency and constitutional law.”

Mr. Olson delivered the opening statement on Jan. 11, 2010, in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

“In California,” he said, “convicted murderers and child molesters enjoyed the freedom to marry,” he said. “What Prop 8 does is label gay and lesbian persons as different, inferior, unequal and disfavored. It says to gays and lesbians, ‘Your relationship is not the same.’ … It stigmatizes them. It classifies them as outcasts. It causes needless and unrelenting pain and isolation and humiliation.”

Judge Vaughn R. Walker, who heard the case without a jury, ultimately found Prop 8 violated the guarantee of equal protection under the law. Although the decision had an immediate effect only in California, it was a major rallying point nationally for gay rights proponents.

In 2013, the Supreme Court avoided ruling on the merits of same-sex marriage, although it affirmed Walker’s decision, finding that opponents of same-sex marriage lacked standing to defend Prop 8 in court.

Still, the win was credited with paving the way for the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which extended marriage equality nationally. 

      

In the 2020 United States census, same-sex married couples accounted for 0.5% of all U.S. households and unmarried same-sex couples accounted for 0.4% of all U.S. households.