J.D. Vance In Munich: A Lesson To Elites
Posted By: Judy W., 2/14/2025 6:21:01 AM
Nearly one year ago, I met my friend at a table streetside at Andechser am Dom, a restaurant in the heart of Munich, for beer and conversation. (Snip) We had had dinner the night before. My friend, J.D., skipped out a dinner at the event he was in town attending — the Munich Security Conference, the annual gathering of military heavyweights that bills itself as the “world’s leading forum” to discuss security policy. What was the point, he had told me? He was a first-term US Senator from Ohio who was getting cold-shouldered by the Good and the Great at the conference. Why? His views on the Ukraine War
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The Zen Stage of Populism
3 replies
The other side liked to say that they were ‘the adults in the room’. For a long time we have known what a laughable inversion of reality that is, as divorced from objective reality as many of the sickest sexual fetishes they also support.
If there was anything ‘adult’ about them it wasn’t the adult that means mature, experienced, responsible and informed. It was the ‘adult’ used in the porn shop sense. What they invoked to convey that they were more responsible, more informed, more wise than the rest of us, was actually a flickering neon light in a seedy backstreet.
But for some people this didn’t fully register.
What the hell is this? I get why Ohio Democrats are doing this, trying to be cute with the whole ‘regulate our bodies’ narrative that no one cared about in 2024. Abortion and female voters did not save Democrats, who obsess over the weirdest issues that will keep this party in the political wilderness.
(Snip) A bill proposed to the Ohio statehouse will make male ejaculation without intent to have a baby, a fineable offense of up to $10,000.
The bill has been proposed by State Representatives Anita Somani and Tristan Rader, who wrote it to point out what they see as the absurdity of rules that control women's bodies
The dismantling of a malevolent empire
7 replies
In the past couple of weeks, devastating information has erupted into the public domain detailing the malign activities of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
The Trump administration has effectively shut USAID down by freezing its existing foreign assistance programs (Snip)
Far more alarming information has now surfaced suggesting that USAID has been a major contributor to extremist and subversive activity. The Washington Free Beacon reports current and former US officials who worked closely with the aid group, saying they watched for years as it funnelled millions of dollars to bodies engaged in anti-Israel advocacy and that were linked to terrorism.
J.D. Vance In Munich: A Lesson To Elites
2 replies
Nearly one year ago, I met my friend at a table streetside at Andechser am Dom, a restaurant in the heart of Munich, for beer and conversation. (Snip)
We had had dinner the night before. My friend, J.D., skipped out a dinner at the event he was in town attending — the Munich Security Conference, the annual gathering of military heavyweights that bills itself as the “world’s leading forum” to discuss security policy. What was the point, he had told me? He was a first-term US Senator from Ohio who was getting cold-shouldered by the Good and the Great at the conference. Why? His views on the Ukraine War
Swamp Apocalypse
7 replies
The Trump Team fooled everybody, including me. As last week’s various lawsuits sprouted restraining orders like early buds emerging all over the willow trees in springtime, most commenters expected Trump to take a necessary pause for defensive retrenchment.Surely, we all thought, it would take Trump’s anti-bureaucrats some time to clear the judicial logjam. (Snip)
Instead, yesterday Trump tripled down, jamming the battle tank’s accelerator into overdrive and smashing ahead in a whole different direction.His new battlefield banner unfurled yesterday afternoon in the form of one executive order plus three separate press conferences, which together sent a just-relaxing Deep State enemy racing for the bunkers with its trousers still half off.
Who Judges The Judges?
15 replies
Let us start by saying that the US Constitution is very clear on the role of judges. A judge is not there to assume the powers of the executive. The US system is designed with a separation of the powers which is there to prevent tyranny and arbitrary and unaccountable rule.
Separation of powers is designed to prevent a Presidential tyranny. But it’s also designed to prevent a judicial tyranny, or an administrative or a bureaucratic tyranny. It exists so that nobody can be in the position of making up the rules as they go along and that nobody is drafting the law, enforcing the law, judging the law all
President Trump, according to reports, wants to go to Beijing in his first hundred days and reach a bargain with China. Unfortunately, an enduring accommodation with the Chinese regime is not possible.
China is not done killing with disease.
Driven by these beliefs [replacing the Westphalian order of sovereign states with the Chinese imperial-era system], the Chinese regime has always thought it had the right to do whatever it wanted to others.
Try as Americans might, they will never have amicable relations with China as long as it is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. There can be only one survivor, either the People's Republic
Temp’s Sovereign Wealth Fund seems like a good idea, depending on who controls it. Trump says the U.S. will, but does that devolve to bureaucrats?
We can’t do anything without a sucker-bureaucrat supervising every move. (Snip)
So to me, right now, the Rothschilds are more an exemplar of how Big Big Money behaves. And that is very very Lizardy. Or Reptilian. Not Human. When I use the term Rothschild, I mean also BlackRock, Larry Fink, Gates, the European families, the Black Nobility, the Windsors, etc.
It is the nature of Big Money to loot. To steal from the weak. It’s almost impossible for it to act ethically.
This article is intended as a response to the recent article by Dan Hoffman in the Washington Times entitled “Some Leadership Lessons for New CIA Chief Ratcliffe to Ponder”.
The premise of that article appears to be that a change of leadership at the top of CIA will be sufficient to put it on the right track. With all due respect for Mr. Hoffman, who I know personally, he is wrong. CIA needs major reform from top to bottom. The twin cancers of politicization and bureaucratization have rendered it effectively incapable of doing its job.
(Snip)Long ago senior leaders at CIA began to involve themselves inappropriately in American domestic politics.
Donald Trump, the libertarian president?
4 replies
Trump the libertarian? Yes. And how.
(Snip) It’s true that Trump’s instincts, particularly in his first term, weren’t especially libertarian. Oh, the claims that he was an authoritarian, possibly a Fascist, maybe even a Nazi, were obvious bullshit from the beginning. But he showed no particular enthusiasm for limited government.
Still, by that point I saw the government apparat as deeply corrupt and dysfunctional, and dangerously close to making its position so entrenched as to be unassailable through ordinary politics. Anyone promising to shake it up looked good to me, and in 2016 Trump had the added advantage of not being Hillary Clinton. I knew what her instincts were.
Trump lived up to his word on Sunday and slapped 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, which were to begin today. He had vowed to slap them with tariffs because they refused to stop illegal aliens and fentanyl from entering the United States of America.
The reaction of the media and economists was panic and fearmongering. They immediately pounced from their towers of ivory into the abyss of failure.
The New York Times reported, “President Trump’s move this weekend to slap sweeping tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China is threatening to fracture the global trading system and a world economic order that once revolved around a U.S. economy that prized
This Will Be A Long War - DOGE Looks Under
The Hood To Find Out Where Your Money
Is Going 16 replies
The Hood To Find Out Where Your Money
Is Going 16 replies
All over America supporters of Donald Trump are riding high. (Snip) This is a long war, and the guys on the other side have no intention of simply packing up and going home. David A. Lebryk was until yesterday the Fiscal Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. He was a “non-political” civil servant who controlled the computerized payment system the government uses to pay out $6 trillion a year. He was the guy who actually controlled all the money the federal government spent, where it went, and to whom. Donald Trump directed Lebryk to give the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) headed by Elon Musk access to the payment system.
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Russia is preparing to attack Nato states next year and Donald Trump does not have a plan to end the war in Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky warned yesterday. The Ukrainian leader led a backlash against the White House alongside Sir Keir Starmer over concessions the US President made as part of a proposed Ukraine-Russia peace deal.
His comments came after it emerged that on Wednesday Mr Trump had spoken to Russian president Vladimir Putin for an hour and a half about the conflict, sparking horror.
A bombshell report has exposed that more than $151 million meant to feed soldiers at 11 of the Army’s largest bases was repurposed for undisclosed uses.
This revelation, first reported by Steve Beynon of Military.com, comes as junior enlisted soldiers struggle to access nutritious food on base, with some being forced to survive on substandard meals.
The funds in question are deducted directly from service members’ Basic Allowance for Subsistence (BAS), a monthly $460 allotment meant to cover food costs for soldiers living in barracks.
Denver Public Schools has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem over a policy allowing ICE immigration agents to enter schools.
The federal lawsuit claims that the policy has caused attendance to plummet due to the amount of illegal aliens in the district.
“DPS is hindered in fulfilling its mission of providing education and life services to the students who are refraining from attending DPS schools for fear of immigration enforcement actions occurring on DPS school grounds,” the lawsuit states, according to a report from ABC News.
In a clear display of political bias, celebrities recently canceled multiple performances at the Kennedy Center in protest of President Donald Trump. Once celebrated for its commitment to artistic expression, this arts institution has allowed partisan politics to shape its programming decisions. Trump’s shakeup, in which he ousted 18 members of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts board and replaced them with a Trump-aligned majority, has made left-wing crybabies spiral into a black hole and flee the Washington, D.C. institution.
President Donald Trump has announced a reversal of energy efficiency standards from the Biden era that the Obama administration initially implemented. He intended to reinstate incandescent light bulbs and restore previous water pressure regulations. Trump has been vocal about opposing the ban on incandescent light bulbs, calling it "ridiculous" and arguing that it restricts consumer choice. The initiative seeks to provide consumers with more options and lessen government-imposed restrictions.
Would this explain a few things? You bet! As for me, though, I prefer Hanlon's Razor in these moments.
James Carville made some news last night on a podcast with Al Hunt, lamenting the inability of Democrats to organize any effective opposition to Donald Trump. Trump's flood-the-zone strategy for the first weeks back in the Oval Office has Democrats floundering, even someone as experienced as Carville. "We're getting overwhelmed," he told Hunt, and "it's all too incomprehensible."
Former President Barack Obama kicked off Valentine’s Day with a flirty message to his wife Michelle affirming she’s still the one after more than three decades together.
“Thirty-two years together and you still take my breath away,” the former president wrote in a post on X Friday.
“Happy Valentine’s Day, @MichelleObama,” Obama, 63, added, along with a selfie of the two beaming together. (Photo) Michelle Obama responded to her hubby with a sweet post of her own.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Elon Musk-led group tasked with eliminating wasteful spending, on Friday said it found $1.9 billion that was misplaced by the Biden administration.
The funds were from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and have been recovered.
"$1.9 billion of HUD money was just recovered after being misplaced during the Biden administration due to a broken process. These funds were earmarked for the administration of financial services, but were no longer needed," a DOGE post on X stated.
What the hell is this? I get why Ohio Democrats are doing this, trying to be cute with the whole ‘regulate our bodies’ narrative that no one cared about in 2024. Abortion and female voters did not save Democrats, who obsess over the weirdest issues that will keep this party in the political wilderness.
(Snip) A bill proposed to the Ohio statehouse will make male ejaculation without intent to have a baby, a fineable offense of up to $10,000.
The bill has been proposed by State Representatives Anita Somani and Tristan Rader, who wrote it to point out what they see as the absurdity of rules that control women's bodies
On Thursday night ICE Director Tom Homan joined Laura Ingraham on The Ingraham Angle on FOX News. During their discussion Homan announced that he had referred socialist open-borders Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to the Department of Justice.
This comes after AOC proudly announced that she was holding webinars to teach illegal aliens how to avoid ICE agents in New York City.
Homan is not playing around. It’s about time the immigration laws were followed in America – especially by elected lawmakers.
I Was Wrong About Trump
20 replies
No, I am not in love with Trump. He still makes me cringe sometimes, and I still don't understand the Canada/51st state thing at all, and want nothing to do with Gaza if he is serious about that.
But there are two vital things about him which I got completely, totally, and without question wrong.
Walter Kirn slapped me in the face (not literally) with a single tweet. Boom. At least it was a "boom" for me, because I was one of those people who was absolutely certain that Trump was too immature, too narcissistic, and too lacking in self-awareness to put his ego in check and hire
New York Attorney General Letitia James appeared outside of federal court in New York City on Friday to talk about a lawsuit that she and others Democrat attorneys general had filed against the Trump administration in regard to the actions of DOGE and access to information. James is trying to stand in the way of DOGE's effort to root out fraud, waste, and abuse. During her remarks, she spewed a bunch of things that weren't true. She claimed Elon Musk was a "private individual" who "no one elected," and "no one has allowed to have access" to this information.
Comments:
Everything I read about J.D. Vance makes me like him more. And I've liked him since I read Hillbilly Elegy years ago. We are doubly blessed with our president and vice-president.