Go China

At least on car safety, where China has announced a ban on hidden car door handles.

This is not a surprise.

They make it difficult for first responders to make a rescue, and, in the case of Teslas at least, they do not function if electrical power is lost.

There is talk about similar regulations in the United States, but I'm not holding my breath, since they have allowed the pedestrian box grater known as the Cybertruck on the roads.

China will soon ban concealed door handles on electric vehicles (EVs), becoming the first country to do so after several deadly incidents triggered global scrutiny of the controversial design first popularised by Tesla.

According to regulations announced on Monday by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, cars sold in China will now be required to have a mechanical release on both the inside and outside of every door except the boot.

The new regulations will “improve the level of automotive safety design”, it said.

Due to take effect on 1 January next year, the regulations stipulate every car should provide hand-operable space measuring at least 6cm by 2cm by 2.5cm in order to manually release the door. Within the vehicle, there must also be signs showing occupants how to open the door.

The flush-mounted pop-out door handle was first popularised by Elon Musk’s Tesla Model S, released in 2012. The design integrates the handle into the door and uses electrical signals to activate the latch. Such door handles provide a slight boost to efficiency by reducing drag.

 

Snark of the Day

According to a new puff profile in Politico, the senator has “main character energy.” Of course, so did Gilligan and Mr. Ed.

—The Indispensable Charlie Pierce in Esquire about the soft ball piece from Tiger Beat on the Potomac.

Oh, Wilbur! 

An Unexpected Outburst of Honesty

Musical Accompaniment

With a majority of the lawyers for the US Attorney resigning because they believe that the actions of ICE and CBP, the remaining lawyers are overworked and starting to crack.

I give you the case of Julie Le, who completely lost it in the court room.

She was fired, of course.

At least 3,000 federal agents have spent the last several months roving through Minneapolis-area neighborhoods, abducting anyone they accuse of being an immigrant, and brutalizing anyone who gets in the way. And as arrests have surged, so too have court cases that aim to get detainees released. But as of January 28, the administration has violated at least 96 court orders in at least 74 of these cases. On Tuesday, federal district court judge Jerry Blackwell held a hearing to remind the government that following court orders is not optional, and to demand that the Trump administration answer for its noncompliance.

The lawyer representing the administration, Julie Le, responded by telling Blackwell that she is very tired. “The system sucks, this job sucks,” she said. “Sometimes I wish you would just hold me in contempt, Your Honor, so that I can have a full 24 hours sleep.”

Le went on to explain that she was new to the job: An ICE attorney within the Department of Homeland Security, she had decided to volunteer—“stupidly,” she told Blackwell—to work with the local U.S. Attorney’s Office because they were “overwhelmed” by habeas cases, and she wanted to help. As Chris Geidner reported at Law Dork, this past January, there were 253 federal habeas petitions filed in Minnesota’s federal district court. Last year, in January 2025, there were six.

But since volunteering in early January, Le said, she had received “no guidance or direction” from the Justice Department on litigating in federal court. She was nevertheless assigned to more than 80 cases in the past month, according to NBC News. “When you showed up, they just throw you in the well, and then here we go,” she told Blackwell.

Blackwell did not grant Le’s request for a nap, and noted that, as overwhelmed as she may be, the detainees have it worse. “On the other side of this is someone who should not have been arrested in some instances, who’s being held in jail, put in shackles for days if not a week after they’ve been ordered released,” he said. (The transcript was originally posted online by Minneapolis attorney Daniel Suitor.)

Le’s courtroom breakdown reflects a Justice Department that is coming apart at the seams, hemorrhaging attorneys at the same time as Trump’s immigration policies are causing caseloads to explode. Six federal prosecutors resigned from the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office in mid-January in response to the administration’s immigration directives, including instructions to block a state investigation of the immigration officer who killed Renee Good, and to open a federal investigation into Good’s widow instead.

Another eight prosecutors left that office just a couple weeks later, when the Trump administration again asked them to stymie an investigation—this time, into the immigration officer who killed Alex Pretti—and again asked them to file criminal charges against protesters without evidence of any crimes. There are usually at least 50 lawyers working on criminal cases in the office, according to The Minnesota Star Tribune. Now there are fewer than 20.

Well, this is what you get when the US government demands that its lawyers aggressively support criminal acts. 

I do hope that Ms.Le lands on her feet. 

Another Blue Circle Fighter Jet

If you are not a plane nerd who remembers British procurement in the 1980s, I will mention a rather peculiar moment in British procurement history, when the British variant of the Tornado strike fighter was delivered without radar because it was not ready.

Instead, it was delivered with concrete ballast in the nose.

The aircraft, or its radar depending on contemporaneous accounts, was nicknamed, "Blue Circle," after a popular brand of concrete at the time. 

Well it appears that the latest configuration of the F-35 is being delivered with ballast in place of radar.

This is not because the new APG-85 radar is not ready, but rather because these aircraft were made with mounts for the older APG-81 radar.

The whole JSF program really is a complete cluster-f%$#:

Radar mountings in the nose of the Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter are different for the current AN/APG-81 by Northrop Grumman and the future AN/APG-85 radar, also by Northrop Grumman–a difference which has helped complicate fielding of the new radar which was to deliver with F-35 Lot 17 but may now instead deliver later, possibly in Lot 20 in the next two years.

“The APG-81 is different than the APG-85, and therefore delivering the aircraft, as currently configured, with an APG-85 radar versus an APG-81 radar is challenging,” Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.) said in an interview off the House floor on Feb. 3.

“The bulkhead configuration is key because for both of the radars, they are very different,” he said. “Remember, the bulkhead configuration allows the placement of the radar towards the attitude of the array, and the attitude of the array makes all the difference in the world about how the radar operates.”

A dual mount to accommodate either the APG-85 or the APG-81 would take two years to field, a source told sister publication Defense Daily.


“I know all about it, but the delivery of the aircraft is classified,” Wittman said when asked whether he knew if it were true that Lockheed Martin has been delivering F-35s to the military services since last June without radars, including all F-35As. “I can’t speak to the condition of the aircraft so you’ll have to go to the Air Force, the customer, and ask them about that.”

 To say that this is f%$#ed up and sh%$ is an understatement.

 

Buck Fezos

The Washington Post just laid off 30% of its reporters, shuttering its sports desk, it's Middle East offices, it's Silly Con Valley offices.

Amazon Bezos never wanted the paper as anything beyond a political bargaining chip that would allow him to generate legislation to facilitate his rent seeking at Amazon. 

If you recall the story of the frog and the scorpion, the question as to why he would do this is simple, it is his nature.

In August of 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders faced negative coverage of his Presidential campaign by a vaunted national newspaper, the Washington Post. This publication was revered in D.C., having broken the Watergate scandals and brought down Richard Nixon in the 1970s. It had delivered a host of important stories over the decades since, seen as a public trust so important that Steven Spielberg made a movie about the publisher’s decision to help publish the Pentagon Papers. But like most newspapers, it had stumbled in the early 2010s.

………

In 2013, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million. Local elites in D.C. were immensely grateful to Bezos. The paper adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” and took on a sharp edge against Donald Trump. Bezos had deep pockets, and had saved the town’s pride.

Six years later, Sanders, running for President against what he called the billionaire class, did something unusual in polite liberal society. He said Bezos had an incentive to shade coverage of politicians he didn’t like. Sanders had been discussing how Amazon doesn’t pay enough in taxes.

………

And that comment created a bitter reaction within D.C. towards the populist politician. The executive editor of the Washington Post, a deeply respected man named Marty Baron (played by Liev Schreiber in the 2015 film “Spotlight”), responded the way all of D.C. felt. He called Sanders a conspiracy theorist.

………

What a difference six years makes.

Yesterday, the Washington Post engaged in layoffs across the organization, getting rid of the Middle East team, war correspondents, its entire sports department, and everyone in the West coast office who covers big tech. Local coverage will be cut to just 12 people. Overall, Bezos is firing 300 out of 800 reporters, decimating what is widely regarded as a key newspaper covering government in America. “It’s an absolute bloodbath,” said one employee.

Importantly, the paper also fired the reporter tracking Amazon. The stated reason is that the company is losing money due to a loss of local market power, falling ad revenue, and generative AI. 

………

As Louis Brandeis once said, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.”

That is a lesson Jeff Bezos is helping to impart to all of us, once again. 

The power of these people needs to be broken, period, full stop.

Well, This Is a First

In Oregon, Federal Judge Mustafa Kasubhai threw out a lawsuit by the Federal government demanding that Oregon turn over their voter roles.

At the core of his reasoning is that the DoJ no longer has the, "Presumption of regularity,"which is another way of saying that they are lying through their teeth.

A federal judge in Oregon issued a sweeping rebuke of the Justice Department’s nationwide push to seize state voter rolls, ruling that the department can no longer be presumed to be acting in good faith and warning that its conduct threatens voters and states’ rights.

And the judge cited a recent letter sent by Attorney General Pam Bondi linking the voter roll crusade to the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota as one reason to doubt the department’s truthfulness.

In a sharply worded opinion released Thursday, U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai concluded that the department’s public statements and actions stripped it of the trust courts typically afford federal law enforcement agencies.

Kasubhai had already announced from the bench — on two separate occasions — that the DOJ’s lawsuit seeking Oregon’s unredacted voter registration data would be dismissed.

“The presumption of regularity that has been previously extended to Plaintiff that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds,” Kasubhai wrote. “When Plaintiff, in this case, conveys assurances that any private and sensitive data will remain private and used only for a declared and limited purpose, it must be thoroughly scrutinized and squared with its open and public statements to the contrary.”

The short version is that Attorney General Bondi's letter to Minnesota demanding complete voter rolls in exchange for ICE thugs standing down shows them to be dishonest.

………

Kasubhai pointed specifically to the letter to Minnesota from Bondi that tied federal immigration enforcement to demands for voter data as the smoking gun, saying it cast doubt on the DOJ’s stated motives.

“The context of this demand within a letter about immigration enforcement casts serious doubt as to the true purposes for which Plaintiff is seeking voter registration lists in this and other cases, and what it intends to do with that data,” he wrote.

While the judge was explicit that the case could be dismissed on the law alone and had already planned to dismiss the case before the Minnesota letter was drafted, he went out of his way to say DOJ’s public conduct now undermines the “presumption of regularity” it has long enjoyed.

So basically, he said that they could not be trusted, and also noted that even if they did, their case was complete bullsh%$.

His ruling is already being cited in other jurisdictions. 

 

Well Played, The Nation, Well Played

That journal of progressive politics has announced that they are nominating the city of Minneapolis for the Nobel Peace Prize| The Nation.

You have to appreciate the quality of the trolling that they are throwing at Donald Trump here. 

The editors of The Nation magazine are in the process of formally nominating the city of Minneapolis and its people for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. The following nomination statement, which is addressed to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, the five-member body that is charged by the Parliament of Norway with selecting the recipient of the Peace Prize, has been prepared for submission on Friday.

TO: The distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee

As longtime observers of struggles to establish peace and justice in the United States and around the world, and as the editors of a magazine that is proud to have included several Nobel laureates on our editorial board and masthead—including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—we are honored to nominate the city of Minneapolis and its people for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.

While individuals and organizations have been granted this prize since its inception in 1901, no municipality has ever been recognized. But, in these unprecedented times, we strongly believe that the case can be made that Minneapolis, the largest city in Minnesota, has met and exceeded the committee’s standard of promoting “democracy and human rights, and work aimed at creating a better organized and more peaceful world.”

In December 2025, President Donald Trump and his administration deployed thousands of armed and masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement and United States Border Patrol agents to Minneapolis, a beautifully multiracial and multiethnic city of nearly 430,000 people. These agents have targeted the city’s diverse immigrant communities and struck fear into all of its residents. As Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said in late January, the campaign has been “more about tragically terrorizing people than it is about safety” and has been guilty of “discriminating only on the basis of race.”

The people of Minneapolis have suffered countless abuses, including harassment, detention, deportation, and injury. And, in incidents that shocked the world, federal agents have killed multiple residents, including poet and mother of three Renee Nicole Good and intensive care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti.

In response to these horrific developments, elected officials, clergy, and labor leaders in Minneapolis and Minnesota have called for nonviolent protest, in accordance with the US Constitution’s promise that Americans have a right to assemble and petition for the redress of grievances. The people of Minneapolis and neighboring communities have answered that call with peaceful mass demonstrations that have drawn tens of thousands of protesters to the streets in frigid weather. They have coupled their cry for federal agents to withdraw from Minneapolis with chants that declare, “No hate, no fear… immigrants are welcome here!”

The people of Minneapolis have also engaged in mutual support and care for neighbors who have been targeted because of the color of their skin or the language they speak. They have delivered groceries to residents who are afraid to leave their homes and provided financial support to neighbors who haven’t been able to go to their places of work because of the federal assault on their rights and humanity. 

(emphasis original)

You can read the rest at the link.

According to Snopes, the submitter was made, and it met all the requirements for an official nomination, and was accepted by the committee.

If they get it, Trump's head will explode.

Well, You Don’t Have to Spell It Out

I guess actually, you do, when you are writing in the snow with your urine.  To snaps up to Gus Kenworthy, Olympic athelete for the UK team and, exemplar of penmanship for his comment on ICE.

Team GB skier Gus Kenworthy has launched a blistering attack on US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers by urinating the words “Fuck Ice” on the snow just before the start of the Winter Olympics.

In a post on Instagram the 34-year-old, who will compete for Team GB in the free-ski half-pipe in Milano Cortina, also urged Americans to write to their senators to “rein in” ICE and border patrol.

………

“Innocent people have been murdered, and enough is enough,” said Kenworthy. “We can’t wait around while ICE continues to operate with unchecked power in our communities. 

In what will probably my last Olympic related post for a while, I will also note note that VP, and couch f%$#er, JD Vance, was booed by most of the stadium when his picture appeared on the Jumbotron.

Maybe there is something about the spirit of the games after all. 

This is a Complete Mind-F%$#

I saw this on Zuck's monster.



I saw this movie with my pre-teen kids.

It's kind of shocking, and then I remember the specifics of the unexpurgated versions of Grimms' Fairy Tales, Snow White's stepmother is made to dance in red hot iron shoes until she drops dead, for example, and I realize that this is the norm, not the exception.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We have a few bits of news, first unemployment numbers where, initial claims jumped by 22,000 to 231,000, and continuing claims rose from 1.82 million to 1.84 million, which is obviously bad news.

Applications for US unemployment benefits rose by more than forecast last week, when severe winter weather gripped much of the country.

Initial claims increased by 22,000 to 231,000 in the final week of January, according to Labor Department data released Thursday. Claims exceeded all estimates in a Bloomberg survey of economists.

Continuing claims, a proxy for the number of people receiving benefits, increased to 1.84 million in the previous week.

Business disruptions tied to severe winter weather may have prompted more Americans to seek unemployment assistance. Initial claims figures have generally showed that companies are largely reluctant to reduce headcount amid solid economic growth.

………

Those reductions contributed to more than a doubling in the number of US announced job cuts in January from a year earlier, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. Hiring intentions also softened, the outplacement firm’s data showed earlier on Thursday.

Also we have the largest number of job cuts in a January since 2009, at the the height of the great recession. 

US companies announced the largest number of job cuts for any January since the depths of the Great Recession in 2009, according to data from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.

Companies last month announced 108,435 job cuts, a 118% increase from a year earlier. The report on Thursday also showed hiring intentions slid 13% from a year earlier to 5,306 — marking the weakest total for any January in the firm’s records back to 2009.

“Generally, we see a high number of job cuts in the first quarter, but this is a high total for January,” said Andy Challenger, the company’s chief revenue officer. “It means most of these plans were set at the end of 2025, signaling employers are less-than-optimistic about the outlook for 2026.”

Finally, US job openings hit a 5 year low in December.

US job openings dropped to the lowest level in more than five years in December and data for the prior month was revised lower amid a softening in labor market conditions at the end of 2025.

Job openings, a measure of labor demand, decreased by 386,000 to 6.542m by the last day of December, the lowest level since September 2020, the labor department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said in its Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or Jolts report, on Thursday.

Data for November was revised down to show 6.928m job openings instead of the previously reported 7.146m. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 7.20m unfilled jobs. Hiring increased by 172,000 positions to a still-low 5.293m in December.

If I hadn't called recession a few months back, I'd be calling it now. 

I Had Not Considered This

When one looks at the whole Jeffrey Epstein affair, one thing is clear:  He had a very specific role among the moneyed elites, he was their pimp.

That role did not die with him.

So, who is their new pimp?

As sometime contributor DanfromTo points out, Epstein performed “necessary” tasks for the elite: control thru blackmail and the provision of experiences many of them genuinely want to have. Power is allowed to people who can be trusted with it by other members of the elite, who will do what the elites want: whether that be bailing out rich people or committing genocide.

………

Epstein wasn’t the first pimp to rich people and he won’t be the last. Almost no one who fucked under-age women (or performed worse acts, there are indications of murder and cannibalism in the files) has actually suffered any consequences. There’s no real reason for American elites to stop and Israel, certainly, needs collars on new members of the elite. 

Cui bono?

This is Not Going to End Well

The Trump administration has decided to roll back environmental regulations on new nuclear power plant designs.

Considering that some of these plants use an explosive material (molten sodium) as a coolant, this decision concerns me.

The Department of Energy says advanced nuclear reactor designs - many of which have so far existed mainly at the experimental, testing, or demonstration stage - generally pose limited environmental risk and can qualify for a streamlined environmental review for future projects.

The DoE announced the "categorical exclusion" for advanced nuclear reactors (ANRs) in a Federal Register filing on Monday, establishing a pathway that can allow ANR projects to proceed without a full environmental assessment or environmental impact statement under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), provided specific conditions are met. The move follows Trump's executive orders directing agencies to streamline environmental reviews for nuclear reactors in order to accelerate their deployment.

A categorical exclusion means that a covered category of actions "normally does not significantly affect the quality of the human environment and therefore does not require preparation of an environmental assessment or environmental impact statement," the filing says. In this case, that's referring to ANRs, which include Generation III+ reactors, small modular reactors, microreactors, and stationary and mobile reactors.

Authorization, siting, construction, operation, reauthorization, and decommissioning of ANRs are all included in the categorical exclusion.

BTW, did I mention that the sodium cooled reactor is founded by Bill "Blue Screen of Death" Gates? 

Absolute nightmare fuel this is. 

Good News Everyone!

I invented a device that makes you read this in your head using my voice!

It appears that despite their best efforts, the Supreme Court could not find an adequate bit of hypocritical mental/legal gymnastics to shut down California's redistricting while approving the Texas redrawing of Congressional boundaries, so California's redistricting stands.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed for now a new California voting map that could help Democrats gain up to five seats in Congress, the latest twist in a national fight between liberals and conservatives seeking advantage in this year’s midterm elections.

The justices cleared the state to use a map pushed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and approved by voters that was intended to offset a redistricting effort by Republicans in Texas sought by President Donald Trump. The Texas map could net the GOP up to five additional seats.

The high court’s ruling will remain in effect while a lawsuit challenging California’s map works its way through the courts. The Supreme Court ruled in December that the Texas map was constitutional, so many legal experts expected the justices to approve the California map as well.

The justices did not provide a rationale for their decision in the brief order. There were no noted dissents.

The corrupt 6 right wing Justices could not figure out a way to pit a fog leaf on the naked partisanship involved with making different decisions based on party affiliation,

At least they haven't so far. 

History Rhyming

The delinquency rate for commercial mortgage-backed securities has hit 12.3%, almost 1 in 8.

This is higher than it was in the worst parts of the Great Recession. 

Fasten your seat-belts, we are in for a bumpy ride. 

The delinquency rate of office mortgages that have been securitized into commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) spiked by over a percentage point in January to 12.3%, once again the worst ever, and 1.6 percentage point above the worst moments of the Financial Crisis, according to data by Trepp , which tracks and analyzes CMBS.

The CMBS were sold to institutional investors around the world, such as pension funds, bond funds, insurers, etc. The banks that originated the loans are off the hook.

High vacancy rates in new fancy office towers allow companies to move from an old tower to a new tower when the lease expires, thereby upgrading and downsizing at the same time. This “flight to quality” is pulling the rug out from under older office buildings.

 This game of musical chairs is about fail catastrophically.

Today in Good Governance

The Minneapolis City Council has decided to postpone the issuance of liquor licenses to the Canopy by Hilton in the Mill District and Depot Renaissance Hotel for a month in order to get public comment.

In case you are wondering, these are hotels loaded to the gills with ICE and CBP agents, so I rather expect that they will be getting a LOT of public comment on this.

A Minneapolis City Council committee delayed action Tuesday on renewing liquor licenses for two Minneapolis hotels that have housed federal immigration officers.

The committee, made up of all the council members, voted 8-5 to delay a decision on the licenses for Canopy by Hilton in the Mill District and Depot Renaissance Hotel until the next meeting on Feb. 17. The council also voted to schedule a public hearing so residents can weigh in on the matter.

The hotels have been the targets of protests because federal agents were believed to be staying in them during the immigration enforcement surge that has brought 3,000 of them to the state. Two days after an ICE agent killed Renee Good in south Minneapolis, about a thousand people converged outside the two hotels, blowing whistles and banging drums to disrupt agents’ rest.

The move to delay action on the liquor licenses was controversial, with some council members saying denying the licenses would set the city up to be sued and lose. Representatives of the hotels were not immediately available to respond to a request for comment.

Committee Chair Aurin Chowdhury said she felt it was important for the council to have more discussion of the licenses and give the public the chance to share their stories, noting her sister lives on the University of Minnesota campus near two hotels that have housed federal agents, disrupting the lives of neighbors.

………

Council President Elliott Payne said it’s fairly routine for the council to evaluate whether there should be conditions added to licenses. He said the council is holding the renewal so it can have a “fact-based conversation.”

Here's a potential condition, no booze for anyone who carries a gun as a part of their job, like ICE and CBP agents.  They need a clear head. 

Proof of the Divine

French police have raided the offices of the child pornography distribution network formerly known as Twitter.

It would be nice if authorities in the US enforced the law. 

French police raided Elon Musk's X offices in Paris this morning as part of a criminal investigation into alleged algorithmic manipulation by foreign powers.

The Paris prosecutor's office (Parquet de Paris) announced [PDF] the action on Tuesday. The investigation, which began in January 2025, stems from two complaints - one from a French parliament member and another from a senior official at an unnamed public institution.

Prosecutors are investigating allegations of organized disruption of automated data processing systems and fraudulent data extraction, in essence, whether X allowed foreign powers to manipulate its algorithm.

Parquet de Paris handed the case to the national police in July. The probe later expanded to include X's Grok AI chatbot, which prosecutors claim disseminated Holocaust denial content and sexually explicit deepfakes. As the investigation involves organized crime allegations, French police have enhanced powers including wiretapping and surveillance of X executives.

………

Parquet de Paris said it has summoned Elon Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino to voluntary interviews on April 20, 2026, with other X employees summoned throughout that week. Authorities want to give the current and former social media execs the opportunity to present their case as prosecutors pursue criminal charges.

In addition to organized crime concerns, potential charges facing X include the possession and dissemination of child pornography, infringing people's rights through the creation of sexual deepfakes, and the denial of crimes against humanity.

(emphasis mine)

President Macron?  I suggest that you re-open Devil's Island just for Elon.

Eric Arthur Blair ⃰ Is Spinning in His Grave Fast Enough to Power All of Dubuque, Iowa

At the latest reporting of (obscene) profits for the cyber-stalking as a service company Palantir, its CEO declared the company a, "Guardian of Americans' rights."

Mad as a Panrovian monk, he is.

Palantir had a whopper of a Q4, showing accelerating revenue growth, beating Wall Street's profit estimates, and enjoying a share price jump of as much as 11% during pre-market trading on Tuesday before coming back down to earth.

At such a triumphal moment, it was striking that the company was forced on the defensive, not least for its involvement with the controversial US agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which began in 2011. ICE has drawn criticism for its activities in Minnesota over the last month after its agents shot and killed two American citizens while bystanders captured the events on video.

As it announced its booming financial results, Palantir was prepared. CEO Alex Karp told CNBC: "If you are critical of ICE, you should be out there protesting for more Palantir. Our product, actually, in its core, requires people to conform with Fourth Amendment data protection."

The technical term for the above term is bullsh%$.  (I miss January so much right now)

………

On an earnings call, Karp said the company's software inherently instills the protection of individual rights.

"From the beginning, we have stuck to our very strong values of expanding what we believe is the noble side of the West ... meaning domestic institutions, intelligence institutions [are] essentially taking an incatenation of the Fourth Amendment, which is completely represented by our pipelining, Foundry, and impregnating institutions with it so that every institution that uses our product is doing it within conformity of the law and the ethics of America," he said.

………

"The construction of such a platform, one that reflects our ethical commitments, should, of course, be a rallying cry for progressives and critical thinkers across the political spectrum who profess to be interested in advancing the values of the Fourth Amendment," he said.

To correct the late, great, Douglas Adams, the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks will not be the first against the wall when the revolution comes, they have to wait in line until this guy is done.

 

^*Better known by his pen name, George Orwell.

Funny That

Even using Tesla's own highly suspect numbers, their Robotaxi is three times more likely to crash than a human driver, and this applies even when there is a safety driver behind the wheel.

I would note that Tesla's so-called full self driving would not be any more capable for a passenger car, which makes it, "Unsafe at any speed." 

Tesla’s nascent robotaxi program is off to a rough start. New NHTSA crash data, combined with Tesla’s new disclosure of robotaxi mileage, reveals Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers, and that’s with a safety monitor in every car.

The data

According to NHTSA’s Standing General Order crash reports, Tesla has reported 9 crashes involving its robotaxi fleet in Austin, Texas between July and November 2025: November 2025: Right turn collision

• October 2025: Incident at 18 mph
• September 2025: Hit an animal at 27 mph
• September 2025: Collision with cyclist
• September 2025: Rear collision while backing (6 mph)
• September 2025: Hit a fixed object in parking lot
• July 2025: Collision with SUV in construction zone
• July 2025: Hit fixed object, causing minor injury (8 mph)
• July 2025: Right turn collision with SUV

According to a chart in Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings report showing cumulative robotaxi miles, the fleet has traveled approximately 500,000 miles as of November 2025. That works out to roughly one crash every 55,000 miles.

For comparison, human drivers in the United States average approximately one police-reported crash every 500,000 miles, according to NHTSA data.

That means Tesla’s robotaxis are crashing at a rate 9 times higher than the average human driver.

However, that figure doesn’t include non-police-reported incidents. When adding those, or rather an estimate of those, humans are closer to 200,000 miles between crashes, which is still a lot better than Tesla’s robotaxi in Austin.

I am of the opinion that self-driving cars remain more humbug than anything else, but even by the standards of this reality challenged endeavor, Tesla appears to be particularly bad at its execution as a result of Elon Musk's insistence that it eschew technologies such as radar and lidar, and instead rely entirely on cameras..

Just How Small is Donald Trump's Penis Anyway?

It appears that Donald Trump is so upset that people and performers are avoiding the Kennedy Center like the plague that he has announced plans to "refurbish" the complex which would result in it being closed for 2 years.

To be clear here, he's talking about knocking it down, and erecting another gold plated monstrosity in yet another example of architectural self-aggrandizement and bad taste.

We need to burn down everything that he built when he is gone.

President Donald Trump said Sunday that he plans to close the Kennedy Center for roughly two years for the facility to undergo construction. The proposal comes amid a series of cancellations and internal upheaval since he took over the arts institution and presidential memorial nearly a year ago and remade it in his name and image.

“I have determined that The Trump Kennedy Center, if temporarily closed for Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding, can be, without question, the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “In other words, if we don’t close, the quality of Construction will not be nearly as good, and the time to completion, because of interruptions with Audiences from the many Events using the Facility, will be much longer.”

Under Trump’s proposal, which he said is subject to board approval, the Kennedy Center could close on July 4, coinciding with America’s 250th anniversary, with construction beginning immediately.

“Financing is completed, and fully in place!,” Trump wrote. “This important decision, based on input from many Highly Respected Experts, will take a tired, broken, and dilapidated Center … and turn it into a World Class Bastion of Arts, Music, and Entertainment, far better than it has ever been before.”

Needless to say, anyone with any connection to the Kennedy Center, including members of the Kennedy family.

It's Monday, Jeffrey Epstein Day

Which is kind of like the worst, "Prince Spaghetti Day," ever.

In the past week, I have saved 19(!) articles for potential discussions.  Some are duplicative, so I will not be using them all. 

The lede here, as it is the most surprising, and perhaps important revelation, was that Trump's nominee to head the Federal Reserve was repeatedly on the list.

The new Jeffrey Epstein files released on Friday include "nauseating" details about President Donald Trump's pick to lead the Federal Reserve, according to one GOP analyst.

Rick Wilson, co-founder of The Lincoln Project, wrote in a new Substack essay on Sunday that the January 30 Epstein files dump included details about Kevin Warsh, who Trump recently announced as his pick to replace Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell in May. Wilson argued that Warsh's name appeared in the files "like a bad penny."

"It is a bit of timing so on-the-nose it would be rejected by a mediocre political thriller," Wilson wrote. "Warsh, a man whose resume reads like a checklist for the Davos-and-Hamptons set, isn’t just a “Wall Street veteran” or an Estée Lauder heir by marriage; he is now a recurring character in the Epstein ledger."

I'm pretty sure that someone in the White House is looking for another Trump toady to nominate, just in case.

 

Ghislaine Maxwell has filed papers saying that there are at least 29 other co-conspirators that the Department of Justice let walk away.

Ghislaine Maxwell may be locked up in the Club Med version of a Texas prison, but she just lobbed a rhetorical grenade straight into the middle of Washington’s most awkward silence.

Buried in a habeas petition that Maxwell recently filed in court, hoping to void her conviction, the convicted associate of Jeffrey Epstein references four potential “co-conspirators” and “25 men” who allegedly reached “secret settlements” connected to Epstein’s abuse—and were never indicted.

Which immediately raises the question Pam Bondi and her Department of Justice desperately want to avoid answering: Who are these men, and why are they still being protected?

(emphasis original)

The answer here is easy: No one was pursued beyond Epstein ecause, to quote the composer (not the political scientist) Frank Wilhoit, "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

If there is anything in the Trump administration that even remotely approaches a deeply held belief, it is that rich white guys should suffer no consequences, ever.

Did you know that Elon Musk is so pathetic that he  begged for an invite to Epstein Island?

This was years after Epstein was convicted of sex crimes. 

What a miserable excuse for a human being.

Somehow, Elon Musk’s infamous outburst accusing Donald Trump of being in the Epstein files has managed to age both incredibly well and incredibly poorly.

Trump, as you’re probably well aware by now, has featured quite a bit in the DOJ’s ongoing releases of documents from its investigation into the deceased sex criminal and billionaire financier.

But now so does Musk, after the government released a new batch of millions of more files on Friday. They show that Musk had more than a few email exchanges with Epstein, including one correspondence where he asks to visit the convicted sex trafficker’s notorious island, where he allegedly brought dozens of underage girls to be abused.

“Will be in the BVI/St Bart’s area over the holidays,” Musk wrote in an email sent to Epstein in December 2013, referring to the region near Epstein’s Caribbean island. “Is there a good time to visit?”

“Anytime I will be there 28-7th,” Epstein responded the same day, with his characteristically thick layer of typographic errors.

“I will send heli for you,” he later added.

“Thanks,” Musk said.

The exchanges — which took place years after Epstein was first convicted of sex crimes against underage girls in 2008 — clearly contradict Musk’s claims about his relationship with Epstein in the past, which he has spent years downplaying. In 2019, he told Vanity Fair that he visited Epstein’s Manhattan house only on a single occasion, and just for half an hour. And the way he tells it, that was that. “He tried repeatedly to get me to visit his island. I declined,” Musk insisted.

Musk has firmly held that line ever since. For that matter, so has his chatbot Grok. But according to the newly released emails, Musk wasn’t declining Epstein’s invitations: he was inviting himself over.

………

Even more damningly in December 2012, Musk sent an email practically begging Epstein for an invitation to some debauchery.

“Do you have any parties planned? I’ve been working to the edge of sanity this year and so, once my kids head home after Christmas, I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose,” Musk wrote. He added that “a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I’m looking for.”

………

Those were far from the only times the pair made plans. In April 2013, Epstein asked Musk if he’d be around to have “dinner with woody allen and crowd at my house,” referring to the influential filmmaker and actor who’s also been accused of child sex abuse. Musk replied that he “might be in town.”

Epstein also invited Musk to his island in September 2012, recommending he “bring your friend or friends.”

“Sounds good,” Musk wrote, “I will try to make it.”

And at least one email suggests the two had actually gotten together at one point. In September 2014, Epstein asked Elon, “are=you planning to do st barth again for xmas?” (St. Barth is Saint Barthélemy, where Musk has reportedly vacationed in the past.) 

I would be remiss if I did not quote the head in a Gizmodo article, "Don’t You Dare ‘Misinterpret’ Elon Musk’s Epstein Emails. Just the Facts Are Bad Enough."

In addition to the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™, we have numerous reports of rich and powerful people who continued to party with Epstein after his conviction, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (former Prince Andrew), Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, NY Giants Owner Steve Tisch, Sergey Brin, white shoe Wall Street Lawyer Brad Karp, private equity mogul Leon Black, recently hired CBS contributor and health influencer Peter Attia, 2028 LA Olympic Chairman Casey Wasserman, NY real estate magnate (and major Andrew Cumo donor) Andrew Farkas 

And of course, literal vampire Peter Thiel plotted with Epstein for various purposes, including his ultimately attempt to extract his revenge on Gawker.

Meanwhile, why the Department of Justice did their best to protect Donald Trump and the rest of the rich white guys, they somehow managed to include the names, and in some cases nude pictures, of Epstein's victims.

The Justice Department published dozens of unredacted nude images on its website, showing young women or possibly teenagers whose photos were contained in files related to the wealthy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

As part of its required disclosure of the Epstein files, the federal government was tasked with redacting both sexually explicit imagery and information that could be used to identify victims.

But in the process of reviewing more than three million pages uploaded to the Justice Department’s website on Friday, The New York Times came across nearly 40 unredacted images that appeared to be part of a personal photo collection, showing both nude bodies and the faces of the people portrayed. 

………

Other victims have expressed outrage that their names and other identifying information have been found in the files. Brittany Henderson, a lawyer for one woman who was identified in the files even though she had not previously been linked publicly to Mr. Epstein, called the redaction failures “abhorrent.” 

……… 

The redactions at times appear haphazard and contradictory, with some files shielding someone’s name and a duplicate file elsewhere making the name public. One email described an “Epstein victim list” but then left dozens of subsequent names exposed, except for one that was redacted. 

I do not believe that this was an accident.  I believe that this was an attempt by the Trump Administration to frighten and silence Epstein's victims. 

I wish that I had the guillotine concession for the lot of them.

Anyone Know of Any Good Recipes for Groundhog?

It's Groundhog Day………

After hearing that pretty much all of the rodent pests predicted a late spring, I want to roast Punxsutawney Phil and the rest of his ilk on a spit.

In other Groundhog Day news, this being of the Harold Ramis/Bill Murray version, I have another Epstein post that I am working on.

It's Groundhog Day………

Oh crap. 

How Scary are the MAGAts?

So scary that it scares sovereign citizen nut-job Ammon Bundy.

Not so long ago, Ammon Bundy was the most famous right-wing militia leader in America. His two armed standoffs with federal agents had made him the face of the Patriot Movement: a loose assemblage of anti-government extremists, Second Amendment maximalists, and more than a few white nationalists. Even some mainstream elements of the Republican Party embraced him as a modern folk hero. But Bundy’s criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown now threatens to make him a pariah within his own community.

In November, Bundy self-published a long essay titled “The Stranger,” in which he labeled the Trump administration’s treatment of undocumented immigrants a “moral failure.” “To call such people criminals for lacking official permission” to be in the country, he wrote, “is to forget the moral law of God, the historical truth of our own founding, and the Constitutional ideals that continue to define justice.” On a recent livestream following the killing of Renee Good in Minnesota, Bundy told his audience that ICE’s conduct “clearly looks like tyranny.” If the government threatened his family, he said, he would fight back by whatever means necessary.

I did not have that on my bingo card. 

25% Lower All-Cause Mortality

Get your vaccines.

A new study covering 30 million Frenchmen shows that not only is there no increase in mortality from MRNA Covid vaccines, but mortality is significantly lower.

At a glance

• Among 28 million French adults aged 18–59, those who received an mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine were less likely to die in the subsequent four years than those who remained unvaccinated, corresponding to a 25% lower risk of death from all causes.
• Although vaccinated adults were 74% less likely to die from severe COVID-19, the reduced mortality risk persisted after COVID-19 deaths were excluded from the analysis.
• The study found no increase in the risk of deaths from cancer, heart disease, accidental injury or any other major category: in every case, vaccinated individuals had equal or lower rates of death.

For years, a lingering question has shadowed COVID-19 vaccination campaigns: are mRNA vaccines safe in the long run?

While many studies have established that COVID-19 vaccines prevent severe illness and death in the weeks and months after injection, sceptics have continued to ask whether any hidden harms might surface later on.

Now, one of the largest long-term vaccine safety studies ever undertaken – including data from more than 28 million adults aged 18 to 59 – offers the clearest answer yet.

Get your damn vaccine.  Covid f%$#s you up.  MRNA, adjuvant, it does not matter. 

H/t Dr. Eric Ding

We Have Names

The two CBP agents who shot Alex Pretti in the back were Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez.

Spread their names around:

The two federal immigration agents who fired on Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti are identified in government records as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez.

The records viewed by ProPublica list Ochoa, 43, and Gutierrez, 35, as the shooters during the deadly encounter last weekend that left Pretti dead and ignited massive protests and calls for criminal investigations.

Both men were assigned to Operation Metro Surge, an immigration enforcement dragnet launched in December that sent scores of armed and masked agents across the city.

CBP, which employs both men, has so far refused to release their names and has disclosed few other facts about the deadly incident, which came days after a different immigration agent shot and killed another Minneapolis protester, a 37-year-old mother of three named Renee Good.

Pretti’s killing, and the subsequent secrecy surrounding the agents involved, comes as the country confronts the consequences of President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown. The sweeps in cities across the country have been marked by scenes of violence, against immigrants and U.S. citizens, by agents allowed to hide their identities with masks — an almost unheard of practice in law enforcement. As a result, the public has been kept from one of the chief ways it has to hold officers involved in such altercations accountable: their identity.

………

Ochoa is a Border Patrol agent who joined CBP in 2018. Gutierrez joined in 2014 and works for CBP’s Office of Field Operations. He is assigned to a special response team, which conducts high-risk operations like those of police SWAT units. Records show both men are from South Texas. 

This information should have been made public by DHS, and ProPublica has done a real public service and some really good journalism.

A Plan So Cunning You Could Put a Tail on It and Call It Weasel

Get in. We're messing up Melania's Amazon search results
byu/mulcahey inesist

The Pitch

The Cover Art

The blurb.

Over on Reddit, someone has made a wonderful suggestion, that we all go to Amazon, and that we all, "Amplify the paranormal erotic thriller novel Melania: Devourer of Men so it ranks higher than her movie," on Amazon.

The eBook is free on kindle, so you can download it, and boost the algorithm, so that when someone searches for, Melania the documentary, they get this book instead.

This act is generally called, "Google Bombing," though in this case, it would be Amazon bombing.

Classic examples of Google bombing, are sucessful efforts to make the search for "Miserable failure," giving the result of George W. Bush, and the word, "Santorum," giving the result, "The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex." 

Surely we can do the same to Melania. 

With Great Sadness, I Must Announce

 The end of, "Say Fuck January."

I'm sorry, but we have eleven months of, "f%$#," and "sh%$," ahead of us.

I feel like I'm f%$#ing losing the ability to speak. 

Horrible Pun of the Day

Donald Trump has announced his choice for the next Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, whose meager qualifications appears to be that he is the son-in-law of cosmetics billionaire Ronald Lauder and that he has no integrity at all.

Paul Krugman calls this, "A Bad Heir Day at the Fed."

Heh.

So Kevin Warsh will be the next Fed chair. The silver lining to his appointment is that he shouldn’t be able to do much damage, although with one big caveat (see below). The Fed is a republic, not a dictatorship; key decisions are made by a committee in which the chairperson has only one vote. Fed chairs can only drive policy through persuasion — and Warsh lacks the intellectual and moral credibility to be effective on that score. But God help us if we enter a crisis that requires decisive Fed leadership, the kind Fed chair Ben Bernanke showed during the financial crisis, or Jay Powell is now showing against Trump’s attacks.

Absent a crisis, my prediction is that the majority of Warsh’s colleagues will largely ignore him, albeit without expressing their contempt openly. Even a coalition among the Trump appointees to the Board of Governors – Warsh, Bowman and Miran – won’t be enough to overturn the responsible monetary policy stewardship of the other governors.

But that’s a low bar, and it may be lower than is generally appreciated. For while I don’t think Warsh will do too much damage to monetary policy, he, along with his fellow Trumper Michelle Bowman, the vice chair for financial supervision, may well eviscerate the Fed’s role as a financial regulator.

………

What lies behind this contempt? Warsh’s most notable role in policy debate came in the years immediately following the global financial crisis, when he was a member of the Federal Reserve Board who argued strenuously against the Fed’s efforts to boost the economy. As I noted at the time, his arguments were confused and incoherent, but he implied (without saying so in clear language) that the Fed’s actions would be inflationary despite the depressed state of the economy.

He was completely wrong about that. Now, everyone makes bad predictions. But when you do, you’re supposed to admit your mistakes and learn from them. Warsh never did that. Instead, he kept inventing new reasons to call for higher interest rates — notably a bizarre claim that low rates were hurting business investment — as long as a Democrat was president.

So how does someone with that record end up in what is normally the most important economic post in the world (although I suspect that Warsh will be one of the least influential Fed chairs in history)? I would list five reasons, in no particular order.

First, Warsh married into great wealth. Specifically, he married the daughter of Ronald Lauder, the cosmetics billionaire — who, bizarrely, is a key figure behind Donald Trump’s obsession with Greenland.

Second, he has always been very good at ingratiating himself with influential people.

Third, he’s an effective bullshitter. Sorry for the technical language, but I can’t find another way to say it. Listen to Warsh on economic policy, and he throws around a lot of big words that presumably sound impressive to people who don’t know anything about the subject. But there’s no coherent argument behind the verbiage.

Fourth, he’s a Republican loyalist, who always wants to slam the economic brakes when Democrats are in power and step on the gas when Republicans rule.

There are some interesting facts about Mr. Warsh, but I will save this from Epstein Monday.

This Is the Worst Idea Since

Rather unsurprisingly, it does not come from the Trump administration.

It comes from one Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, who advocates that the Nordic countries should develop a nuclear arsenal.

This is unbelievably fucking stupid.

Despite the withdrawal of Donald Trump’s military and economic threats against Greenland and EU members, the US government’s willingness to publicly contemplate territorial expansion at the expense of a Nordic NATO member raises profound questions for this region, which already borders Russia.

Partly shielded from full retaliation by its existing nuclear arsenal, Russia has launched a predatory war against its non-nuclear neighbour, Ukraine. Such behaviour by the existing nuclear monopolists fundamentally undermines the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) framework and it is now imperative that stable, responsible and capable Nordic democracies make clear – not least to the US Congress – what challenging the US security and nuclear guarantee in NATO could lead to, namely, reluctant nuclear proliferation in the Nordic region.

Nordic countries are wealthy, well-functioning democratic societies: They hence have a lot to protect and lose, which brings the accompanying political responsibility to publicly discuss also “nuclear what-ifs”. Nordic governments must have the courage for this public debate precisely because they can afford to develop and maintain the independent nuclear deterrence needed in today’s world in a manner threatening only to would-be aggressors. No one would seriously consider the Nordic region using a nuclear bomb capacity for anything other than deterrence purposes.

Yes, the descendants of the fucking Vikings are to fucking peace loving to fucking use fucking nuclear weapons as an instrument of geopolitical influence.

Just like the French, British, Chinese, Indians, and Pakistanis? 

……… 

Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden should similarly and immediately announce their intention to withdraw from the NPT, which must instead be replaced by a new international nuclear framework facilitating responsible self-insurance by transparent democracies. Here, the Nordic region should take the lead.  

This guy is too stupid for the Trump administration.

BTW, this is his biography:

Jacob Funk Kirkegaard is a Senior Fellow at Bruegel and a on-resident Senior Fellow with the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE). He has also worked with the Danish Ministry of Defence, the United Nations in Iraq, and in the private financial sector.

I would suggest that my readers be extremely skeptical of anything that comes from either Bruegel or  the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

They employ this guy. 

My House Was Broken Into Last Night

Nothing was taken.

What was left were 4 tickets to the Melania documentary and a letter of apology.

It's not my joke, but I cannot figure out who said this first. 

Maybe It's Because You Are Evil Assholes?

People cannot wait to to put a boot in Comcast's ass.

It has abused their customers so badly for so long that they have no reservoir of good will to fall back on in the face of the cord cutting trend.

This is a company who made their brand so toxic that their consumer branch had to be changed to Xfinity.

In April 2025, Comcast President Mike Cavanagh bemoaned that the company’s cable broadband division was “not winning in the marketplace” amid increased competition from fiber and fixed wireless Internet service providers.

Cavanagh identified some problems that had been obvious to Comcast customers for many years: Its prices aren’t transparent enough and rise too frequently, and dealing with the company is too difficult. Comcast sought to fix the problems with a five-year price guarantee, one year of free Xfinity Mobile service for home Internet customers, and plans with unlimited data instead of punitive data caps. But the company is still losing broadband customers at a higher-than-expected rate.

In Q4 2025 earnings announced today, Comcast reported a net loss of 181,000 residential and business broadband customers in the US. The loss consists of 178,000 residential Internet customers and 3,000 business customers.

………

Armstrong said that average revenue per user grew 1.1 percent, “consistent with the deceleration that we had previewed reflecting our new go-to-market pricing, including lower everyday pricing and strong adoption of free wireless lines.” Armstrong expects average revenue per user to continue growing slowly “for the next couple of quarters, driven by the absence of a rate increase, the impact from free wireless lines, and the ongoing migration of our base to simplified pricing.”

The only thing that Comcast has is the fact that Charter is just as widely loathed.

I hope that the markets burn both of them to the ground. 

Headline of the Day

The Legal Academy’s Leading Originalists Remain Breathtakingly Full of Shit

—Balls and Strikes, commenting on what has been obvious since the Powell Memo, that Origanalism is just an excuse to put a stamp of approval on bigotry and greed.

It should be noted that the above is the title on the web page. The one in the metadata is, "The Originalists Are Getting the Birthright Citizenship Case Spectacularly Wrong."

In this case, we see their venal hypocrisy in the birthright citizenship case, which requires that one ignore the text of the 14th Amendment, as well as every bit of speech and debate in Congress and the various state legislatures in the process of its approval. 

Last month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear oral argument in Trump v. Barbara, a case that challenges the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s executive order purporting to redefine birthright citizenship. Although the Court has not yet put the case on the calendar, it will likely do so during this term, and issue an opinion before the justices adjourn for the summer.

The Fourteenth Amendment, which Congress adopted in the years following the Civil War, extended citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Yet Trump declared last January that going forward, persons born in the United States would not be citizens unless at least one parent is a citizen or a lawful permanent resident. If the Court allows the executive order to take effect, it would deny citizenship to hundreds of thousands of newborn babies every year, and recreate an antebellum caste system in which social disadvantage is passed down by law from parent to child.

So far, every federal court to assess the order’s legality has recognized it as flagrantly unconstitutional. A federal district court in Maryland, for instance, concluded that the order “flouts the plain language” of the Fourteenth Amendment and “runs counter to our nation’s 250-year history of citizenship by birth.” A federal district court in New Hampshire found that the order “contradicts the text of the Fourteenth Amendment and the century-old untouched precedent that interprets it.” A federal district court in Washington called the Trump administration’s view of the Fourteenth Amendment “untenable,” and criticized the government for rehashing “losing arguments from over a century ago.” 

………

Nevertheless, several Trump allies recently filed amicus briefs in Trump v. Barbara arguing that the order actually restores the original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment. Former Attorney General Edwin Meese III, for example, characterizes over 150 years of settled constitutional understanding as “longstanding and mistaken assumptions.” The conservative law professor Ilan Wurman contends that the historical rule of birthright citizenship “almost certainly excluded the children born to unlawfully present aliens,” and is “at best unsettled” with respect to the children of “temporary visitors.”

The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, submitted an amicus brief that positions its work at “the forefront of the scholarly research” which demonstrates that birthright citizenship was not originally understood to include children whose parents “owed allegiance to a foreign power,” and were in the United States “only temporarily or illegally.” Claremont’s brief is authored by John Eastman, who is most famous for orchestrating Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election. The State Bar of California recommended that Eastman be disbarred and banned him from practicing law in the state, but apparently he’s still welcome to file briefs at the Supreme Court.

What these authors have in common is their professed adherence to some form of originalism, the idea that the Constitution’s meaning was set in stone when its provisions were enacted. Meese, for example, made it the policy of President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department to “resurrect the original meaning of constitutional provisions and statutes as the only reliable guide for judgment.” In a speech before the American Bar Association in 1985, Meese gave away the game a little, presenting originalism as a principled way to ensure that the Court did not “drift back toward the radical egalitarianism and expansive civil libertarianism” of the Civil Rights Movement.

Yeah, that's Ed Meese, saying, "We want to keep the n*****s down, and originalism can help with this.

Fuck them all with Cheney's dead dick. 

I Like Bruce Springsteen, and I Like Bob Dylan

But I am profoundly unimpressed by Springsteen's latest, a protest song about ICE, where he seems to trying to sound as much like Bob Dylan as possible. 

I appreciate the sentiment, but Bruce Springsteen can do a protest song in his own voice and absolutely kill it.

Hell, Bruce Springsteen could do a song from his shopping list in his own voice and absolutely kill it.

Another Promise Kept

New York Mayor Zorhan Mamdani has promised to disband the NYPD's notorious Strategic Response Group (SCG), which has been repeatedly called out, and successfully sued, for its outrageous behavior and brutality directed toward peaceful protestors.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Wednesday he’s committed to disbanding an NYPD unit that responds to protests in the city – a day after officers from the unit arrested anti-ICE demonstrators for occupying a Manhattan hotel lobby.

In a statement, a Mamdani spokesperson said the mayor was pleased with the NYPD’s response to the protest. Nevertheless, on Wednesday, he renewed a campaign promise to disband the department's Strategic Response Group.

The SRG, which was established in 2015, responds to a number of emergency calls across the city, including protests. Their response to demonstrations has been widely criticized for years, including by elected officials, who have accused officers in the unit of racial bias and violence against protesters. When the city settled claims brought by Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, the NYPD agreed to limit how the officers could respond to demonstrations.

“We don't believe that there should be a unit that has both counterterrorism responsibilities and responsibilities to responding to protests,” Mamdani said of the SRG at an unrelated press conference on Wednesday.

Mamdani’s statement comes as demonstrators have repeatedly taken to the streets in the city in recent weeks to protest President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. On Wednesday, he said he’s had conversations with Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch on how best to disband the unit.

This is a very good thing. 

 

54°40' or Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Seriously, the fact that senior members of the Trump administration are having secret conversations with representatives of radical Albertan separatist organizations, with the quite obvious goal of creating civil disorder in Canada is a complete mind-fuck.

I guess that Trump was serious about wanting Canada, or at least the oil rich parts of it. 

The Trump administration has held covert meetings with fringe separatists from Canada’s oil-rich province of Alberta as a rift deepens between Washington and Ottawa.

Leaders of the Alberta Prosperity Project, a group of far-right separatists who want the western province to become independent, met US state department officials in Washington three times since April last year, according to people familiar with the talks.

They are seeking another meeting next month with state and Treasury officials to ask for a $500bn credit facility to help bankroll the province if an independence referendum — yet to be called — is passed.

“The US is extremely enthusiastic about a free and independent Alberta,” Jeff Rath, APP legal counsel, who attended the meetings, told the FT.

He claimed he had a “much stronger relationship” with the Trump administration than Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.

………

British Columbia premier David Eby described the FT’s report of the meeting as alarming because Trump is “not particularly respectful to Canada’s sovereignty”.

“To go to a foreign country and to ask for assistance in breaking up Canada, there’s an old-fashioned word for that. And that word is treason,” he told reporters in Ottawa on Thursday.

Seriously, these jamokes make the Bay of Pigs invasion look like an episode of Mission Impossible.

Today in Weird

A man claiming to be an FBI agent and wielding a barbecue fork and a pizza cutter attempted to bust Luigi Mangione out of jail.

To refresh your memory, Mr. Mangione is accused of  

As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know." 

A man claiming to be an FBI agent showed up at a Brooklyn jail with a barbecue fork and pizza cutter and tried to free Luigi Mangione on Wednesday night, according to a law enforcement official and a federal criminal complaint.

Prosecutors said Mark Anderson, 36, told employees at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center that he worked for the FBI and said he had a court order to release a detainee. A law enforcement source who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to share the information publicly said that the detainee was Luigi Mangione.

When jail staff asked Anderson to provide his credentials, prosecutors said, he gave them a Minnesota driver’s license.

He threw several documents at them related to filing claims against the U.S. Department of Justice, the criminal complaint said. He also told officials that he had weapons in his bag, and a search turned up the barbecue fork and a circular steel blade, according to the complaint.

………

In Brooklyn federal court on Thursday, defense attorney Michael Weil asked Magistrate Judge Taryn Merkl to release Anderson to a hospital for an evaluation instead of holding him in jail. He said claiming to be an FBI agent without a badge was “not a serious attempt to spring a federal inmate.”

“It seems like a case representing something else going on,” Weil said.

Gee, ya think? 

 

 

Too Toxic for Other Republicans

A candidate for the Republican nomination for Minnesota Governor has dropped out of the race, basically saying that the party has become too toxic for him to even bother.

A top Republican candidate for Minnesota governor has dropped out of the race, sharply criticizing what he called a “federal retribution on the citizens of our state” amid the Trump administration’s intensified immigration enforcement operations – which sparked public outrage after US agents’ killings ofAlex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis.

On Monday, the Minneapolis-based attorney Chris Madel made his announcement, saying in a video online: “I cannot support the … stated retribution on the citizens of our state, nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so.”

………

Madel had launched his gubernatorial bid in December and provided legal counsel to the ICE agent Jonathan Ross after he shot Good to death on 7 January while she drove away from an encounter with him.

His withdrawal comes as some Republicans in Minnesota and Washington have begun to distance themselves from the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

Madel said ICE’s Operation Metro Surge would hurt Republicans statewide after large street protests met the killings of Pretti and Good, along with widespread criticism beyond Minneapolis.

“National Republicans have made it nearly impossible for a Republican to win a statewide election in Minnesota,” he said.

Note what he is saying here.  Heis main point is not that it's wrong, it is complaining that it makes getting a Republican elected in Minnesota almost impossible. 

Another Right Wing Terrorist Attack

Some mook sprayed Representative Ilhan Omar with an unknown substance at her town hall last night. 

It is now believed to be apple cider vinegar.  I am surprised.  I would thought that he would have used Brawndo. (It's got what plants crave)

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was sprayed with an unidentified substance by a man with a syringe on Tuesday as she gave her first in-person town hall of the year in Minneapolis, during which she called for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to be abolished “for good” and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, Kristi Noem, to resign.

Omar had only been speaking for a few minutes when a man in the audience got up and began to shout while spraying her with the liquid. People at the meeting said the liquid had an acidic smell.

Omar walked toward the man after the alleged assault, but he was then swiftly tackled to the ground by a security guard. People inside the north Minneapolis community center gasped as the scene unfolded.

Some, such as the Minneapolis council member LaTrisha Vetaw, pleaded with Omar to end the town hall early to get examined, due to concerns for her safety because of the unidentified liquid. Omar refused to stop. “Ten minutes, I beg you … please don’t let them have the show,” she told the security team.

After the alleged attacker was subdued, there was applause from the room as he was escorted out. “Here is the reality that people like this ugly man don’t understand, is that we are Minnesota strong,” the congresswoman said.

“I learned at a young age that you don’t give in to threats.”

Pretty epic response from Omar. 

BTW, the guy's social media postings show him to be a major MAGAt.