A quote to ponder from John Hinderaker of Power Line:
Congressional Democrats are nearly all on the far left, the difference is whether they conceal the extent of their leftism to be electable in moderate districts. Swing-district Democrats are angry at safe-district Democrats for blowing their cover.
Not kidding. One thing the "far-" anything folks have in common is a lack of common sense, which may well emerge as the label historians someday hang on the current era.
Steve Hayward is the charts guy at Power Line He has posted the chart below produced by CBS News/YouGov, which is certainly no ally of Donald J. Trump.
For extra enjoyment, imagine the angst it produced at CBS as you absorb what the chart shows - a very positive public response to the President's speech to Congress and the nation last night.
The other DrC and I were reflecting about our reactions to the Trump/Zelensky dust-up. Neither of us are comfortable with Trump saying he sees equivalence between the two sides in the Russia vs. Ukraine war. We certainly don’t.
We independently have concluded we hope Trump is playing 3-D chess, while others are playing checkers. That he has a grand plan and is working a sophisticated bargaining scheme.
The alternative is ugly and we hope unfolding events will prove supportive of the clever bargaining hypothesis. Getting the warring parties to the table is the first step. For a deal to be successful both parties need to end up feeling somewhat okay with the outcome. This sometimes requires people to say things they don’t entirely believe.
Red State reports a consortium headed by US pension investor BlackRock is buying the port operations of Hong Kong firm CK Hutchison. Be clear, the selling firm is under CCP control.
These facilities include the two ports at either end of the Panama Canal, an issue about which President Trump has expressed national security concerns. Count this as another win for the Trump administration.
If someone told you a drug based on vitamin B9 aka folic acid - used to help chemotherapy patients deal with side effects - has been found to help children with autism improve their speech, or even speak for the first time, would you think it a joke? It could be true.
The Daily Mail (U.K.) reports preliminary research suggesting many children with autism have a genetic defect that makes it difficult to uptake folic acid from the diet, and somehow that lack interferes with the brain's speech center.
The "why" of all this is only imperfectly understood at this point, and those being so treated are doing it "off label." I hope future double blind studies show this inexpensive drug to be efficacious for at least some subset of autistic children. Speech, after all, is a big part of what makes us human.
One more link, this time to an Atlantic column, about the Zelensky vs. Trump and Vance dust up in the Oval Office, echoed at msn.com. This one keys off the fact both Z and T were successful television personalities with curated but quite different images.
It captures something real yet performative about both men, and suggests they may not be able to agree about much. It is worth your while.
You see the occasional reference to comments attributed to Elon Musk saying that there are "phantom" civil servants and people with no particular work assignments in the federal civil service. He is probably correct in this allegation.
Congress in its less-than-infinite wisdom has made firing a civil servant who has been on-payroll for over a year, and thus not probationary, very difficult. In the normal run of things, relatively few such are fired.
As my supervisor told me decades ago when I worked in DC for a couple of years as a temp consultant, "Many of us will fire one loser in our managerial career. Almost nobody ever fires a second one, the process is designed to be too punishing to the firing boss."
It takes a boss many hours per week over perhaps 3 years to finally get rid of someone, presuming they haven't been caught red-handed committing a gross felony at work. During this multi-year period the loser continues to sit in the outer office fomenting ill-will and drawing pay. Plus not every attempt to fire someone succeeds, some win their cases constituting a total loss for the boss.
How do managers cope with a set of constraints like these? Sometimes by parking the offending person in a cubby and giving them no work, or only make-work assignments of no importance. I remember hearing of an office in the Ag Building where several guys sat around all day reading the newspapers. I presume they'd been moved out of the chain of command and left to serve out their time till retirement.
I betcha some such were sent home to do, effectively, nothing during Covid and in some cases have moved out of the DC area and basically just get their paycheck for doing nothing. The hope with the buyout offer that some 70,000 took was to get such individuals off the payroll without firing.
The presumption of the DOGE effort is that layoffs do not claim the individuals being fired are bad workers. Rather that the Government no longer needs the services they were hired to provide.
If you find the above reprehensible, you are of course correct. The blame lies with Congress which has over-protected non-probationary employees. They've done this because our elected officials do not like dealing with irate constituents who are also civil servants under threat of dismissal.
The Pentagon recently announced transgender troops will be separated from the military, and no new trans individuals will be recruited. Breitbart reports.
The establishment media have touted advocates’ claims that 15,000 transgender people are serving in the U.S. military. But this week, President Donald Trump’s Pentagon revealed the transgender population is just 4,240 service members.
That adds up to one transgender person for every 500 service members in the United States military of 2.1 million active and reserve members. That transgender share is just 0.2 percent, or one-fifth of one percent, of the military.
With a hat tip to Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado, "They'd none of 'em be missed."
At Power Line three viewpoints on the Zelensky vs. Trump and Vance blow-up in the Oval Office yesterday, on live TV no less, posted by Steve Hayward. One cites the views of a Polish diplomat and the other cites the comments of Victor Davis Hanson and of David Goldman, both often noted here.
All of this helpful in understanding what went down and how it is viewed in various quarters. What follows are some of my insights.
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While we've dumped a sh*tload of money into Ukraine, they've been bombed all to hell and lost dead and wounded maybe a million people in a war they didn't start. And we've given them just enough arms to fight to a standoff.
We never meant Ukraine to win because, if it looked like they were winning, the Russians would probably go nuclear. Nobody knows where that ends, maybe with most of us dead?
I think Zelensky believes we don't accept that they were fighting a war we would have had to fight later somewhere in NATO with our troops and arms, and all it cost us was the billions we paid to "rent" the Ukraine military.
In return Ukraine has ground up most of Russia's armor, and many of its best troops. NATO can breathe easier for maybe the better part of a decade until Russia can rebuild their military.
Trump says Russia would never have attacked Ukraine had he been president. Whether he actually believes this or it's his usual braggadocio is another question. So he claims the whole war is Biden's fault for being a wuss and Ukraine is just collateral damage.
In the international game of chess, our main worry is China, Russia is more of a European problem. Trump is trying to pry Russia loose from China. That will require him to find a way to "ally" with Russia even though Russia is a black hat led by a dictator.
If that requires him to claim a false equivalence between Ukraine and Russia, he appears to be willing to go there. Zelensky can't accept that Ukraine is merely "roadkill" in the larger geopolitics, Trump's realpolitik is a bridge too far for Z to accept.
The Virgin River begins somewhere in the snowy high mountains of southern Utah, and cuts the spectacular canyon that became Zion National Park. It is the reason the booming city of St. George is located where it is.
Any river that runs year round through a desert is an amazing thing, A big one - the Nile - created Egypt. The much smaller Virgin cuts another amazing canyon south of the Utah plateau down into far northwestern Arizona, a canyon it shares with I-15 via some really amazing civil engineering.
The Virgin then exits AZ and enters Nevada where it wanders south and eventually empties into Lake Mead's northern Overton Arm. Tiny communities dot its banks, places like Beaver Dam, Overton and Bunkerville, also Hurricane, La Verkin and Springdale.
These were founded in many cases by hardy Mormon pioneers hoping to use its water to irrigate some bankside croplands. It was tough going in an unforgiving landscape of rock, sand, and scrub chaparral. Summers are hot enough to kill a person who can't find shade.
They took land nobody much wanted and with back-breaking effort made it support extended polygamous families whose many descendants are often still here, though most no longer farm and only a few are still polygamous.
Ukraine President Zelensky met President Trump and VP Vance in the Oval Office and, with cameras and mikes hot, got into a spat with Vance and Trump. Bonchie at RedState has a detailed report of what went down ... it wasn't pretty.
Apparently Zelensky believed Trump wanted a deal badly enough to be bulldozed into giving up something while on TV. If so, he was wrong. Zelensky left without signing the deal.
Trump has to be angry. My guess is that Trump will give Ukraine no more aid, at least while Zelensky remains President. If the Europeans want to bail out Ukraine they are free to do so.
Where this leaves Ukraine is unknown, if they now cut a deal with Russia to suspend hostilities the deal will be less favorable without the US as a bargaining partner.
Histrionics in the Oval Office on live TV, don't we live in interesting times?
Issues & Insights has a chart produced by U.S. Customs and Border Protection showing illegal border crossings since Trump first took office in 2017.
Power Line's John Hinderaker drops a one-liner as he reacts to Dems' calling whatever the GOP does Nazi behavior.
Democrats don’t really mean the things they say; they just blurt them out like Tourette’s sufferers to relieve the pain they are suffering.
Truly, they do act quite deranged.
I have questions, for which I think I have answers. As I'm no attorney I may be wrong.
My first question is this. Most illegal entrants are economic migrants. How is someone coming here illegally and being supported by my tax dollars different than someone stealing my property? In both cases, that individual is taking something that is mine - to which they have no right - because they want it, not because they've earned it.
And my second question. How is it that NGOs assisting illegal immigrants isn't them knowingly and intentionally aiding and abetting federal crime? What's worse, according to DOGE, many of these NGOs are funded at least in part with taxpayer dollars from our government.
Talk about the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. ICE is trying to keep illegals out while USAID and other fed-funded sources are paying NGOs to help them get here and stay in country illegally.
Why can't we prosecute NGO employees doing this aiding and abetting? How is this not a criminal conspiracy?
An article in Foreign Affairs notes two sequential trends since 1989. Hat tip to RealClearWorld for the link.
In the two decades that followed the Cold War’s end, globalism gained ground over nationalism. Simultaneously, the rise of increasingly complex systems and networks—institutional, financial, and technological—overshadowed the role of the individual in politics. But in the early 2010s, a profound shift began. By learning to harness the tools of this century, a cadre of charismatic figures revived the archetypes of the previous one: the strong leader, the great nation, the proud civilization.
The "strong leaders" referred to above are Russia's Putin, China's Xi, Turkey's Erdogan, India's Modi, and our Trump, all are nationalists. It is the zeitgeist. I'd add that in a minor way Argentina's Milei and El Salvador's Bukele are having success with the same playbook.
Trump and comparable tribunes of national greatness are now setting the global agenda. They are self-styled strongmen who place little stock in rules-based systems, alliances, or multinational forums.
In the process, all of these men are demonstrating that individuals can still make a difference in the fate of nations. Seen in this light, perhaps Trump is less of an anomaly than many here have believed.
In this era, the Davos World Economic Forum is a dinosaur en route to extinction. The United Nations is merely an excuse for third world elites to leave home and experience the pleasures and perils of first world life on an expense account.
Afterthought ... I suppose we should be glad the modern Germans haven't come up with their own charismatic leader. Their last one was a disaster for the world, whereas Merkel was merely a disaster for Germany.
FL Gov. Ron DeSantis is termed-limited out in 2026. President Trump has endorsed Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) who has expressed interest in running to replace DeSantis.
Meanwhile, DeSantis has let friends know he hopes to convince his wife Casey to be a candidate for the Republican nomination for governor. Politico writes it believes Trump basically can give the nomination to Donalds.
I am less certain than Politico that Trump's endorsement makes Donalds a sure thing. DeSantis has developed a strong "brand" in Florida. The popularity of his governing is, I believe, somewhat independent of his voters' fondness for Trump.
In addition, I would not be surprised if the Bradley effect reared its head in Florida. Rep. Donalds is black, most GOP primary voters are not, and FL is a southern state, at least in part.
Instapundit links to a preliminary report of a study finding a highly suspicious link between Alzheimer's and the bacterium behind chronic periodontitis, Porphyromonas gingivalis.
In separate experiments with mice, oral infection with the pathogen led to brain colonization by the bacteria, together with increased production of amyloid beta (Aβ), the sticky proteins commonly associated with Alzheimer's.
P. gingivalis has been found in the brains of people who have died from AD. Presuming we know antibiotics which kill the gingivitis bacterium, physicians could begin off-label treatment "on spec" with people showing the early stages of AD.
A scholar with a deep understanding of the feelings and needs of both sides lays out for RealClearPolitics why a settlement of the Palestinian question is unlikely. Azar Gat of Tel Aviv University argues that the Palestinians show no signs of giving up their demand for a "right of return" whereas the Israelis cannot grant that and survive.
If he is correct, Israel has only one option and that is some version of the present day Whack-a-Mole situation. In it, Israel lives continuously on guard alongside a hostile population and periodically has to pummel them back into a temporary quiescence.
People will continue to die on both sides. It is unlikely that the "Gaza Beach" developer's solution proposed by Trump will work.
Since neither side will give in and neither is willing to move elsewhere, it appears peace will only arrive hand in hand with genocide. Genocide is something of which Israel is "able but unwilling" to do; on the other hand the Palestinian Arabs are "willing but unable." So ... no peace in the foreseeable future.
Word on the street is that Musk/DOGE has today sent an email to all Federal employees requiring them to report what they got done last week, with up to five bullet points, copy to their supervisor. Supposedly anyone who does not respond by end-of-business Monday will have resigned.
Hard to know how this will affect someone on sick or annual leave, or on travel status. Wondering how an air traffic controller would answer, perhaps with five flights landed safely? I’m imagining some mid-level bureaucrat listing five meetings attended where he/she represented his/her unit on another interagency task force.
I know a woman who works for a county government who spends her day watching 30+ CCTV monitors in a courthouse/jail complex. Could she identify five key things she did, if it was a quiet week? Absent a jail break, riot, or VIP visit, likely not.
This is a creative writing assignment. I wonder how many will ask AI to concoct their responses? This will be an uneasy weekend for career Feds.
Instapundit reposts the comments of Aaron MacIntyre regarding the suboptimizing behavior of Europe in the 80 year post-war period. It is a concise statement of what hindsight shows has happened.
Europeans abandoned the defense necessary for their own sovereignty so they could finance welfare states, which they then destroyed with mass immigration.
So now they have infinite migrants, bankrupt social programs, and a complete lack of security.
Assessment: They find themselves near the headwaters of a polluted river with no means of propulsion. Meanwhile night is falling and the wolves gather.
Fifty-seven percent of voters support President Trump's executive order recognizing only two sexes, male and female, in the United States, while 38 percent oppose it.
Republicans (96 - 4 percent) and independents (59 - 35 percent) support the order, while Democrats (77 - 14 percent) oppose the order.
Independents split 59% in favor, 35% opposed. And men support the policy 68%, oppose 27%; while women oppose it 50% vs. 45% in favor. Another example of "common sense" policy-making.
Columnist Henry Olsen has written an appraisal of where US relations with the EU and Europe more broadly stand today. "Tough love from the US" would be a fair summary. He writes the following for the Brussels Signal:
Europe now knows where it stands. If it wants a relationship with America, it must have a relationship with all of America, not just the half that it prefers to invite to cocktail parties.
If it wants a seat at the table to form a united front with the United States even in its backyard, it needs to develop the hard military power that commands respect.
If it wants respect from Washington, it must show respect to Alabama, Kansas, and the places in flyover country that elect Republicans. And it must also show respect to their own citizens, often from their own rural and forgotten communities, who feel and vote the same way.
European elites may decide they don’t want a relationship on those terms. That’s certainly one option, and an understandable, if regrettable, one.
But then that’s their choice, not Trump’s. And they will then need to sleep in the bed they have made.
And alas, there is a fair chance they'll find themselves sharing that bed with a rapacious Russian while we get ready to face down China. Hat tip to Ed Driscoll, posting at Instapundit, for the link.
Ruy Teixeira has a new Liberal Patriot essay which suggests a test for all Democratic Party platform planks: WWWCS. What Would the Working Class Say? His key observation - our politics have become based on social class. It is a good read and some good graphics like the following.
The Biblical story of Jonah being swallowed by a whale has been eliciting eye-rolls among the skeptical since basically forever. Now at least we have evidence it could have actually happened, see video here.
Hats off to both Jonah and the intrepid kayaker in the video.
Power Line’s John Hinderaker posts a quote from a new book by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who now chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. Cotton (no relation) writes:
As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I’m often asked if the threat from China is as bad as it seems. My answer is no — it’s worse than you can imagine.
Which is to say, dire, unless the lingering effects of its “one child” policy cripple it from within, a real possibility.
Last week in Munich Vice President JD Vance told the other members of NATO the US "gravy train" was fast approaching the end of the line. He made clear that we weren't very impressed with their free-riding delegation of their defense to the US military. Canada is an especially egregious offender.
Trump isn't even slightly worried about hurting their feelings. Every president since Reagan has told them the same thing, but they seem to have heard it at long last.
This realism shock is long overdue. It is far from clear if the political will exists in the EU to enable them to step up their game and protect themselves.
Many people are going nuts over an opinion expressed by CBS’s Margaret Brennan who claimed too much free speech was responsible for the rise of the Nazis in Germany. There was, of course, no free speech under the Nazis, once in office - a point most critics make.
However you could argue if the Weimar government had refused to allow Hitler to hold his rallies, own a newspaper, and to speak on radio - basically censored him - maybe Germany might have taken a different direction in the 1930s. That is merely a speculation Hitler caused the rise of the right.
The issue is do “great men” create history, or do historical forces create the leaders they need? I can argue it either way, perhaps it is some of both. Maybe Hitler really did create the Nazi movement. In which case Brennan has a point.
It is equally plausible the German right was fueled by the Versailles Treaty ending World War I, and Hitler was who emerged to lead the reaction to it. Perhaps something like the Nazi movement was inevitable given the Weimar inflation, the worldwide depression, and the treaty’s punishing provisions.
Later … About whether Hitler flourished in an environment of free speech, it appears he flourished in spite of considerable attempts to shut him up. See an Ed Driscoll post at Instapundit for details. Thus making the criticism of Brennan valid.
At COTTonLINE we don't have to be deadly serious all the time, here's a link to a fun article with a catchy title.
The Typical Man Disgusts the Typical Woman
The title is cute, nearly a thirst trap. The column is more serious, introducing the reader to the somewhat exotic concept of hypergamy. That is serious evolutionary stuff indeed.
Still, the author treats it as less of a tragedy and more as the basis for some really common sense recommendations. If you struggled through the dating minefield long ago and can look back on it with some perspective, what's he has written will likely ring true.
If you are still in the process of finding "the one" and having a tough time, at least you'll gain some perspective on the reason it is hard and can be nasty. Like growing old, dating is not for cowards.
