Posts on Saturday, February 15, 2025
French President Emmanuel Macron has summoned Europe’s leaders to Paris on Monday for an emergency summit, where President Trump will be on the agenda
Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski revealed Macron’s plans while attending the Munich Security Conference Saturday, Politico reported.
“I’m very glad that President Macron has called our leaders to Paris,” Sikorski said, adding he expects the European leaders to discuss, “in a very serious fashion,” the new Trump administration. “President Trump has a method of operating which the Russians call razvedka boyem — reconnaissance through battle,” said Sikorski, according to Politico.
“You push and you see what happens, and then you change your position. … And we need to respond.”
The Gaza strip is still home to “hundreds of miles” of Hamas terror tunnels — and it could take years to eliminate them and vanquish the terrorist organization, Israel’s consul-general revealed to The Post. “It will take time,” Ofir Akunis said during a sitdown this week. “We can stop [the war] after Hamas is not there — maybe it will take another year or two years.”
“It took six years, six years for the Western world, to defeat Germany,’ Akunis noted. Should hostilities resume, the war would “look different” than the last 15 months of fighting, Akunis said, declining to elaborate.
President Trump’s Justice Department fired 20 immigration judges in its latest move to cut waste and downsize the government.
According to ABC News, 13 judges and 5 assistant chief immigration judges were axed without explanation.
The immigration courts are completely overwhelmed with millions of cases.
ABC News reported:
The Trump administration fired 20 immigration judges without explanation, a union official said Saturday amid sweeping moves to shrink the size of the federal government.
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.
When Barack Obama won the 2008 election, some wondered if this signaled the end of conservatism. Democrats knew how to connect with a winning coalition; they knew how voters felt about the issues. Now, that coalition is dead, with the younger voters, working-class families, and healthy shares of the union rank-and-file becoming Trump supporters. What happened? That’s a long discussion for another time, but it shows that nothing is permanent in politics.
Judge Gone Wild: Obama Judge Considers
Forbidding Trump From Accessing Federal
Data or Firing People replies
Forbidding Trump From Accessing Federal
Data or Firing People replies
Federal District Judge Tanya Chutkan is poised to issue a temporary restraining order that would block nearly everyone in the Trump administration from accessing any data produced by any federal agency or dismissing any federal or contract workers. The order comes in response to a suit filed by 13 states — New Mexico, Arizona, Michigan, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington — claiming "that President Trump has violated the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution by creating a new federal Department without Congressional approval and by granting Musk sweeping powers over the entire federal government without seeking the advice and consent of the Senate."
President Donald Trump’s decision to put one of New York’s own, ex-Long Island Rep. Lee Zeldin, in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency is already paying off — literally.
Zeldin last week announced that his team rooted out roughly $20 billion in taxpayer money that the Biden administration had squirreled away at an unnamed outside financial institution.
The plan, per Zeldin, was to park that cash to be passed out to far-left climate groups in “a rush job with reduced oversight,” as it was “awarded to just eight entities that were then responsible for doling out your money to NGOs and others at their discretion with far less transparency.”
A transgender (biological male) illegal alien was arrested for raping a child in a public bathroom in New York on Saturday.
Nicol Suarez, an illegal from Colombia, allegedly stalked the 14-year-old boy before following him into a public restroom in East Harlem and sexually assaulting him.
The child victim ran out of the restroom and flagged down a witness.
According to The New York Post, Suarez was wanted in Massachusetts and New Jersey for unknown crimes.
The Army is repurposing more than half of the money it collects from junior enlisted soldiers for food, according to data reviewed by Military.com. The numbers suggest that a large portion of those funds are not going toward feeding soldiers, a diversion of resources coming at a time when troops increasingly struggle to find nutritious food on base. The money is collected in what amounts to a tax on troops -- taken from their Basic Allowance for Subsistence (BAS) payments, roughly $460 per month that is automatically deducted from the paychecks of service members who live in barracks and is intended to help cover food costs.
At the Munich Security Conference, the "shared values" so frequently invoked by Europeans were called into question by US Vice President JD Vance. So do the US and Europe still speak the same language? Silence fell and the tension in the room was almost palpable as US Vice President JD Vance walked to the podium at the Munich Security Conference. Just 48 hours earlier, the world had felt like a different place. Europeans knew, of course, how difficult things might get with Donald Trump, and that his second US presidency would seriously test the transatlantic relationship. Nonetheless, the phone call between Trump and the Russian leader Vladimir Putin
Feeding Our Future boss Aimee Bock called an all-hands meeting and told her accomplices to stop “flaunting” their wealth as a federal investigation zeroed in on their alleged fraud, FBI Special Agent Jared Kary told a jury Thursday.
Kary took the stand for a second day as he explained how he helped uncover Bock’s alleged facilitation of a scheme to defraud the federal government of $250 million in child nutrition funds.
On trial with Bock is Salim Said, who co-owned Safari Restaurant in Minneapolis and ASA Limited, which operated a food site out of a deli in St. Paul.
Quickly, just for clarity. Narrative engineers from Reuters News Agency are kicking up dust about Elon Musk firing a dozen members of the U.S. Digital Services Office. However, what Reuters does not say is that the “USDS” is the agency vehicle that was renamed “DOGE” during the Trump Executive Order [SEE HERE].
That’s right, Musk fired the preexisting staff within his own agency. (snip) Now see Section Three DOGE Structure (emphasis mine): “Sec. 3. DOGE Structure. (a) Reorganization and Renaming of the United States Digital Service. The United States Digital Service is hereby publicly renamed as the United States DOGE Service (USDS)
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service is preparing to fire thousands of workers in the coming days, a move that could squeeze resources at the tax-collecting agency during the critical tax-filing season, )snip)
Officials from the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees federal hiring, ordered all agencies on Thursday to dismiss their probationary employees, workers who are newer to their positions and do not enjoy full job protections.
It was unclear how many thousands of employees would be fired at the IRS, whose workforce grew under(snip) President Joe Biden to reach 100,000 people, (snip)Biden had sought to bolster the agency's operations, including its ability to audit corporations and wealthy taxpayers.
Curiouser and curiouser - on Thursday, hours after the swearing-in of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as director of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Planned Parenthood apparently scrubbed their institutional Instagram posts. As in, all of them:
Planned Parenthood caught the internet’s attention on Thursday after all of its Instagram posts were deleted within hours of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary RFK Jr.’s swearing in.
The organization, in an apparent nod to this move, posted a pair of eyes on a black background on its Instagram story with no explanation.
Ric Grenell, a former top aide to President Donald Trump, is making waves in California politics as he threatens to challenge former Vice President Kamala Harris in the race for governor. Known for his outspoken conservative views and leadership in the Trump administration, Grenell positions himself as a strong alternative to the liberal policies that have dominated the state under Harris’s influence. With California facing mounting issues, from skyrocketing homelessness to rising crime rates, Grenell’s potential candidacy signals a bold effort to bring pragmatic, conservative leadership to a state increasingly disillusioned with its far-left agenda.
N.J. got $104M to add fast EV chargers
but none were installed. Now Trump’s
freezing the money. replies
but none were installed. Now Trump’s
freezing the money. replies
It’s no secret the rollout of a federal program to expand electric vehicle fast charger access has been, well, rocky.
It just got rockier.
More than $104 million was allocated for new fast EV chargers in New Jersey via the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure, or NEVI, program.
To date, the program has resulted in zero chargers for New Jersey. And at the start of February, in one of several executive moves, President Donald Trump announced he was freezing the NEVI program funds.
New guidance has to be issued and states have to be approved in order for new program funds to be disbursed.
Hundreds of people have been charged with online “speech crimes” amid claims from the Trump administration that civil liberties are under threat in Britain.
Almost 300 people have been charged with spreading illegal “fake news” or sending “threatening communications” since the Online Safety Act came into force in 2023. Dozens have received convictions under the act.
Multiple people were charged under the law following last summer’s rioting in the wake of the Southport stabbings.
The opening sentence of Article II of the U.S. Constitution is straightforward and grants one person, the president, broad powers: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Nineteen rebellious states are now attempting to usurp that executive power, which the Constitution vests solely in the president. (snip)New York’s anti-Trump Attorney General Letitia James and 18 other rogue state AGs, in concert with low-level New York federal Judge Paul Engelmayer, have tried to usurp this executive power by prohibiting Trump and Bessent from effectively reviewing Treasury records to eradicate waste and fraud in federal spending.
Wall Street's diversity dilemma deepens
as JPMorgan's Dimon sounds off on 'stupid'
DEI expenses replies
as JPMorgan's Dimon sounds off on 'stupid'
DEI expenses replies
Wall Street’s defense of its DEI initiatives suddenly got a lot more complicated.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, a longtime advocate of diversity and using bank resources to aid minority communities, told employees this past week during a town hall that he "was never a firm believer in bias training" and had questions about money being spent on certain DEI programs.
"I saw how we were spending money on some of this stupid *, and it really * me off," Dimon said, according to a recording of the town hall obtained by Yahoo Finance. "I’m just going to cancel them. I don’t like wasted money in bureaucracy."
Bloomberg first reported on those comments.
A CHILD has been killed and four other people have been injured after a man went on a random stabbing spree attacking passersby in Austria.
The suspect, said to be a Syrian asylum seeker, was arrested near the central square of Villach town. The victim is said to be a 14-year-old boy.
Images of the arrest show the suspect smiling with his index finger raised as police officers surround him with weapons.
A 42-year-old man who works for a food delivery company witnessed the incident from his car.
He drove toward the suspect and helped to prevent things from getting worse, police spokesperson Rainer Dionisio told Austria's public broadcaster ORF.
Trump posts quote attributed to Napoleon
on social media: 'He who saves his country
violates no law' replies
on social media: 'He who saves his country
violates no law' replies
President Donald Trump posted a quote that has been attributed to emperor Napoleon Bonaparte on social media Saturday.
"He who saves his country violates no law," Trump wrote, without elaborating on what he was referring to with the post.
Trump's post comes amid some rulings from a federal judge limiting the authority of the new Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, to access payment systems in the Treasury Department.
DOGE is currently able to access the payment records at the departments of Labor and of Health and Human Services
It also comes amid Trump's interest in acquiring Greenland and making Canada the 51st state of the U.S.
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."
The UK military is "so run down" it could not lead any future peacekeeping mission in Ukraine, the former head of the army has said.
Lord Dannatt told the BBC that up to 40,000 UK troops would be needed for such a mission and "we just haven't got that number available". It comes after prime minister Keir Starmer said the UK would "play its part" in guaranteeing Ukraine's security after he was asked this week if he was open to sending British troops as peacekeepers. A former Nato chief told the BBC that Britain and France should lead a force of up to 100,000 troops as part of a long-term peacekeeping
One of the main themes of resistance to the not-yet-1-month-old administration of President Donald Trump is the reliance on lawsuits (often filed with friendly judges) as the president’s adversaries try to kneecap his policy initiatives. So far, the court strategy has had a lot of at least temporary success because we have seen one injunction after another ordering the Trump administration to stop doing this or that.
Now Trump is fighting back with some lawsuits of his own on the critical issue of illegal immigration. In the past week, the Justice Department has filed suits against the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois
With the Trump Administration poised to make good on its pledge to remake the federal government, higher education is entering a period of immense uncertainty. From aggressive proposals to tax university endowments and calculated efforts to dismantle DE&I programs on campuses to rumors of a sweeping executive order designed to gut the federal education agency entirely, President Trump and his team have made their intentions clear: they plan to upend the status quo with precision. But while the future remains uncertain, this moment also presents an opportunity to reevaluate and strengthen a system long overdue for reform.
A Canadian man faces several charges after federal prosecutors say he used an unmanned drone to photograph sensitive military sites in Brevard, including Patrick Space Force Base, a submarine wharf and a space launch complex at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base.
Xiao Guang Pan — whose Instagram page describes him as photographer and licensed drone pilot — was charged earlier this week with three counts of using an unmanned aircraft to photograph the Brevard-based defense installations without authorization from federal officials. Taking unauthorized photos of defense installations is prohibited by federal law.
Well, well, well—looks like Revolver was right again. While other conservative outlets turned a blind eye to NewsGuard or, some even played along with their “media literacy” scam, we were out in front, boldly calling them out for exactly what they were—a tool of the regime, designed to blacklist and silence conservative media under the phony guise of fact-checking. So, how were we right? Well, as we speak, Microsoft, one of their biggest backers, is now scrambling to distance itself from the fake fact-checking group. Also, this probably won’t come as a shock, but the infamous USAID was also backing NewsGuard.
there’s one thing that has sent the Dems into a full-blown meltdown, it’s DOGE investigating waste and fraud. And now, we’re getting a crystal-clear picture of how Dems have managed to keep their wildly unpopular agenda alive—by treating government programs like their own personal piggy bank. (snip)
And nowhere is the panic more obvious than in the dark, hooded eyes of Maxine Waters, who has suddenly crawled back into the spotlight after four years of blissful silence. Mad Max is so spooked by Elon and DOGE exposing fraud that she accidentally let the cat out of the bag—giving Americans a front-row seat to what a cornered criminal really sounds like.
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.
American-Israeli hostage Sagui Dekel-Chen embraced his wife after being apart from her for nearly 500 days in heartwarming photos and video taken Saturday following his release by Hamas. The scenes captured at a reception point in Israel show the 36-year-old hugging and kissing Avital Dekel-Chen, who gave birth to their third daughter two months after he was seized by the Palestinian terrorist group during their Oct. 7, 2023, attack on the country. Dekel-Chen's parents are also seen welcoming him home.
You might want to watch this brief video a few times, once with the sound low or off and pay attention to the body language of the participants as the remarks to the media are delivered. Vice-(snip)
Marco Rubio is stone cold focused (perf). JD Vance is personable and pragmatic. Zelenskyy is deferring and at the very end the Ukrainian officials exhibit the attitude they are known for within Eastern Europe. Perhaps Americans don’t know (snip), but the scope of corruption within the Ukrainian government is so well known, most Eastern Europeans view current Ukranian govt officials as mere financial beneficiaries to the indulgences of war.
Joe Biden’s time as president was truly a sleeper.
Biden, 82, took more time off than any other US president in modern history, spending 577 of his 1,463 days in office – or 39% of his presidency — on vacation, according to shocking new data compiled by the Republican National Committee.
The average American — who gets 11 paid vacation days a year — would have to work 52 years to rack up as much down time as Biden scored in his four years. (Photo) “Considering how awful his misguided policies were and the various crises they created, from the border to inflation, imagine the damage he would have done
Is This Why Biden Failed?
replies
Nate Silver has been a thorn in the side of both Republicans and Democrats. The former didn’t appreciate his liberal bias, while the latter was incensed that his projections were mostly bearish on Democratic chances of victory in 2024. What united both sides was Silver’s lengthy and, at times, elliptical language when describing why he came to his decisions, especially when it showed Trump was going to lose the popular vote but clinch the Electoral College. Many saw this as a cop-out.
With the 2024 election over, Silver listed a few reasons why Joe Biden lost, most of which you already know. Yes, he sprinkled in his leftish commentary,
The strategist who ran former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign appears to have a new foreign lobbying gig, according to documents filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). David Plouffe, a former senior political adviser to Barack Obama who was brought on as a senior adviser to Harris, registered on Feb. 9 to be a consultant with Precision Strategies, LLC. to work with an Indonesian group, according to the FARA documents. The group title, per the documents, is Yayasan Berbakti Semangat Indonesia.
The Zen Stage of Populism
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.
Trump Puts the Squeeze on Iran
replies
As anticipated, President Donald Trump has ramped up his maximum pressure sanctions campaign on the Iranian regime. Trump was concerned that the Biden administration had softened the American approach to the oppressive theocratic regime, enabling it to increase its oil production revenues. Tehran’s oil exports brought in $53 billion in 2023 and $54 billion in 2022, according to US Energy Information Administration estimates, and output during 2024 was reckoned to be running at its highest level since 2018, based on OPEC data.
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.
TEL AVIV — In a ceremony surrounded by masked Palestinian militants and rubble from the Gaza war, Hamas released three Israeli hostages holding U.S., Russian and Argentinian citizenships on Saturday.
It was the sixth group of hostages freed as part of a fragile ceasefire deal that nearly collapsed this week between the Palestinian militant group and Israel. In exchange for the released hostages, Palestinian authorities expect Israel to release 369 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.
The three male civilian hostages released are Sagui Dekel-Chen, a 36-year-old dual U.S.-Israeli citizen, Alexander Trupanov, a 29-year-old dual Russian-Israeli citizen, and Yair Horn, a 46-year-old dual Argentinian-Israeli.
Democratic Party strategist James Carville admitted that the pace at which President Trump is fulfilling his executive duties is throwing his party off balance.
In the latest episode of the “Politics War Room” podcast, Carville lamented how Democratic lawmakers are floundering in trying to stop the president’s second term agenda.
“We’re getting overwhelmed,” he told podcast co-host Al Hunt.
“Things that we thought that would kill a political career, would be poisonous for whatever reason, this guy keeps chugging along.”
Former Special Counsel Jack Smith received $140,000 in pro bono legal services from high-profile DC firm Covington and Burling last month, shortly before he resigned from the Justice Department.
The legal services were labeled as a ‘gift’ on Jack Smith’s financial disclosure obtained by Politico.
The reason for the legal services was not immediately clear. However, it was previously reported that Jack Smith’s prosecutors sought legal counsel from high-powered DC law firms as Trump’s new DOJ was set to take over.
It was previously reported that Jack Smith’s investigators were fielding calls with lawyers in DC.
Has morning really dawned in America? More Americans certainly believe so than they have in years -- even though it may not be twenty years.
That claim came from Rasmussen Reports' Mark Mitchell, based on its own latest survey. Donald Trump has a 10-point advantage now in job approval as well as a three-point advantage in the passion positions, both remarkably different than in his first term. However, the real change is in the right/wrong direction tracker, which went positive in Rasmussen's series for the first time in two decades, according to Mitchell:
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency can continue to access sensitive records from at least three federal agencies after a federal judge in Washington denied a request to block Musk's budget-slashing team from the Department of Labor, Department of Health and Human Services and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
U.S. District Judge John Bates, in a late-night ruling, denied a request made by a group of unions and nonprofits to issue a temporary order blocking DOGE from the sensitive records maintained by the three agencies.
Elon Musk has repeatedly targeted Bates over the last week on X – including calling for the judge's impeachment – after Bates issued a decision