Is it productive for Trump to push legal limits?
Posted By: Big Bopper, 3/18/2025 8:29:06 PM
I won’t leave you in suspense. I’m a lawyer, so the answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no. If you’re in the tribe that thinks whatever Trump does is wrong, or the opposite tribe that thinks whatever Trump does is right, then read no further. Just skip the analysis and instead warm up your cheers or your jeers for the Comments below, as your tribe dictates. But if you’re in neither tribe, but are just a political partisan (which is different than being in a tribe) or a political neutral (are there any these days?) then read on.
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I won’t leave you in suspense. I’m a lawyer, so the answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no.
If you’re in the tribe that thinks whatever Trump does is wrong, or the opposite tribe that thinks whatever Trump does is right, then read no further. Just skip the analysis and instead warm up your cheers or your jeers for the Comments below, as your tribe dictates.
But if you’re in neither tribe, but are just a political partisan (which is different than being in a tribe) or a political neutral (are there any these days?) then read on.
Liberals lost their “cool”
3 replies
Tesla electric cars were cool a few years ago. They signaled all the virtue of a Toyota Prius, but without the ugly body shape and C-O-E-X-I-S-T bumper sticker. And they were a lot faster.
Electric vehicle devotees – you probably know some – hailed the immigrant behind Tesla as an engineering genius and good green guy. His immigration to the United States was not illegal, but even that wasn’t held against him. He was the liberals’ favorite African-American since the Hawaiian dude.
That’s all so 2023.
Chief Justice Roberts isn’t your hired gun
11 replies
The Republican-appointed Justices on the Supreme Court are now six of the nine. Unsurprisingly, the ideological tilt of the Court is more conservative than it’s been in two or three generations.
It shows. Last year, the Court took the conservative side in reducing deference to administrative agencies; deciding expansively in favor of presidential immunity (which of course benefits both liberal presidents and conservative ones, but the particular case that was decided benefited a conservative one, namely Donald Trump);
One summer day in 1924, a train stopped at a station on Long Island. A man carrying a harmless-looking package ran to catch it. He struggled to board the train as it departed. One of the train employees on board reached for his hand as another on the platform gave him a boost from behind.
The package fell onto the tracks. It turned out to be a package of fireworks. The fireworks exploded.
So, the exploding fireworks injured someone, right?
Not exactly.
Have you seen the Denver restaurant scene? Me neither. It’s dead and gone.
In a one-year period, the number of restaurants in Denver declined by 183. Of all the restaurant closures in Colorado last year, 82% were in Denver – a place that has only about 12% of the population of Colorado.
Average profits at the few surviving Denver restaurants are only 3-5%. Anyone who dines out knows that this isn’t because prices are down. It’s because costs are up. Restaurant wages in Denver are up 89% since 2019.
The main reason is Denver’s minimum wage of $18.81/hour for ordinary workers and $15.79 for tipped workers. For comparison, in New York City
Trump v. Zelensky cage match: Whaaaat?
14 replies
The White House event “Trump and Zelensky Meeting Staged for Media” somehow turned into “Trump v. Zelensky Cage Match.”
How did that happen? My theory is that it wasn’t exactly an accident, but it didn’t play out the way either side intended.
Bear in mind that both leaders are experienced actors – Trump as a reality TV host and Zelensky as a stand-up comedian. (Yes, Trump really was a reality TV host!) Both saw the meeting as a stage. They intended to communicate not with one another – that could have been done better in private – but with millions of viewers.
It’s amusing to see them pose the question to themselves. It’s not really a question; rather, it’s rhetorical. Posing the question, “Why aren’t we marching in the streets?” is their way of saying that they really should be.
But even after considerable angst, self-incrimination, and rhetorical excesses about not marching, they’re still not marching.
As for why, there’s a simple answer and a complicated one. The simple answer is, because it’s cold outside.
Remember the “protest era” of the 60s and early 70s? College kids would organize protests and sometimes riots with two goals in mind:
Ending the Vietnam War (or, really, just ending the draft); and
Ending Spring finals.
Light-skinned Neanderthal Europe was conquered
by dark-skinned modern humans 40,000 years ago 8 replies
by dark-skinned modern humans 40,000 years ago 8 replies
When fossilized Neanderthals (or “Neandertals” if you prefer) were discovered in caves in Europe back in the mid-1800s, it was assumed that they were stupid, ape-like brutes. Indeed, they did possess compact, muscular bodies with short legs.
We’ve learned in the past few decades that our stereotype of Neanderthals was wrong. These were fully human creatures who hunted with spears, created art, made boats, fished, ceremonially buried their dead, and almost certainly spoke to one another. They were as advanced as any other hominid of the time period.
Trump is thinking outside the Ukrainian box
12 replies
Inside the box, and the Beltway, the thinking all along has been that we must draw a line at Ukraine, else Putin and the barbarians will soon be on the steps of Warsaw and then Berlin and Paris.
Besides, Russian aggression and aggressors are morally bad. We owe it to posterity and civilization not to crumble before them.
Those are valid points. On the other hand:
We are where we are. Where we are, is Vladimir Putin make some understandable miscalculations.
One, he miscalculated America’s willingness to support foreign countries. After all, he had witnessed Joe Biden’s Afghanistan surrender debacle.
Wolves roamed Colorado for millions of years. At the end of the last ice age, they managed to survive the mass extinctions of megafauna such as mammoths, mastodons, sabertooth tigers, giant cave bears, and huge sloths, an extinction event that was probably caused in part by the arrival of humans from Asia at about the same time.
Until the much later arrival of Europeans, those early Americans were living in the stone age. Their weapons were stone-tipped spears and arrows. They didn’t even have horses. But they hunted in a way that was deadly to large herding animals and the predators of the herds: They used fire.
In determining citizenship, the United States has a very unusual approach. You’re a citizen if you were born here. (You’re also a citizen if you were born abroad under certain circumstances, but that’s a different issue.)
That’s a bit crazy, because it means that if a woman (aren’t you glad we don’t have to refer to them as “child-birthing persons” anymore?) makes it into the United States, legally or illegally, in time to give birth – right on the north bank of the Rio Grande, for example – her baby is an American citizen.
The mother doesn’t magically become an American citizen by giving birth in America,
The Trump-is-Hitler crowd dismisses the 77 million Americans who elected Donald Trump to the Presidency, for the second time, as a cult.
They aren’t suggesting that these 77 million people are a cult because they were opposed to another four years of Joe Biden’s drooling corruption. Rather, they’re suggesting that these people are card-carrying, Kool Aid-drinking Trump worshippers.
Let’s put this in context. One of the defining characteristics of cults is that they idolize a charismatic, authoritarian leader. Such leaders get away with a lot.
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A federal judge has indefinitely blocked President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender service members, dealing a major defeat to a controversial policy the president resurrected from his first term.
In a scathing ruling, US District Judge Ana Reyes said the administration cannot enforce the ban — which was set to take effect later this month.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said Tuesday on CNN’s “The Source” that every American should be frightened because President Donald Trump did not “respect our Constitution.”
Sanders said, “Look, you know, the guys who wrote the Constitution back in the 1790s when nobody’s fools, what they wanted to do is have a separation of powers between the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary so that one person could not assume enormous power. And what you are seeing right now is a president who is authoritarian. He just attacked the media the other day. I think he called CNN illegal because I gather that now and then, you criticize him.
In a poor neighbourhood of the Venezuelan city of Maracay, the mother of 24-year-old Francisco José García Casique was waiting for him on Saturday.
It had been 18 months since he had migrated to the US to begin a new life but he had told her that he was now being deported back to Caracas, Venezuela's capital, for being in the US illegally. They had spoken that morning, just before he was due to depart.
"I thought it was a good sign that he was being deported [to Caracas]," Myrelis Casique López recalled. She had missed her son deeply since he left home.
But he never arrived. And while watching a television
Tim Walz: Republicans Are Terrified of
My Masculinity, and I Can Beat Up Trump Supporters 19 replies
My Masculinity, and I Can Beat Up Trump Supporters 19 replies
Somehow, Tim Walz just keeps getting weirder. Since faceplanting as Kamala Harris' running mate, the Minnesota governor has been holding rallies and making the media rounds in a desperate attempt to boost his stock for a 2028 presidential run. How's that going? Not well, Bob. (Video) It's as if Walz was created in a lab by new DNC Vice Chair David Hogg to be the worst politician imaginable. With Harris still out there, presumably about to run for Governor of California, I understand that's a bold statement. She's a hard one to top, and maybe she'll hold onto the crown, but man is Walz an odd fellow who seemingly
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) took a shot at Senate Minority Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on Tuesday for his controversial vote with Republicans last week to avert a government shutdown.
Pelosi, during a press conference in San Francisco, affirmed that she had confidence in Schumer’s ability to lead the Democratic caucus in the Senate going forward, but argued that the Brooklyn Democrat made too many concessions to Republicans when he abruptly announced that he would vote to advance the GOP-crafted government funding bill.
“I myself don’t give away anything for nothing,” Pelosi said. “I think that’s what happened the other day.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) mocked so-called “greedy” Americans for wanting to keep more of their hard-earned money and wanting less government control over their lives.
During an episode on ABC’s The View on Tuesday, Schumer spoke about the recent government spending bill, which President Donald Trump recently signed. As Breitbart News previously reported, Schumer explained that he voted in favor of keeping the government open because a “Republican Senator told Democrats the plan was to ‘decimate the entire federal government.”
As aspects of President Donald Trump's agenda are stymied by judges amid legal challenges, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has suggested that Congress could strip federal courts of jurisdiction. "Congress has the authority to strip jurisdiction of the federal courts to decide these cases in the first place. The sabotaging of President Trump’s agenda by ‘resistance’ judges was predictable — why no jurisdiction-stripping bills tee’d up at the onset of this Congress?" DeSantis wrote in a Wednesday post on X.
Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) celebrated Tesla‘s declining stock while speaking to a Wisconsin crowd on Tuesday.
Walz was in the state for a campaign event on behalf of Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Susan Crawford. The event was in Eau Claire, which is Rep. Derrick Van Orden’s (R-WI) district. The winner will determine a liberal or conservative majority in the state’s highest court.
Crawford is running against Brad Schimel, who received campaign donations from PACs funded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. This connection, which became the main theme of Crawford’s recent campaign ad, prompted Walz to mention the company.
The West is facing an Islamic holy war
15 replies
A documentary film released this weekend in more than 100 movie theaters across America explores the processes by which antisemitism exploded across university campuses, in street demonstrations and on social media following the Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. It shows how throughout this vast uprising, Hamas have been celebrated as freedom fighters rather than terrorists. The film's director, Wendy Sachs, has also noted that this tsunami of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred wasn't a spontaneous eruption of feeling. It was orchestrated.
President Donald Trump ordered the release of approximately 1,123 PDF files of previously classified documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, fulfilling a long-standing promise to declassify all remaining records.
These files, part of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection, are accessible online at the National Archives (JFK Release 2025) or in person at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland.
Internet sleuths and researchers have been combing through these files, uncovering what they believe are significant revelations.
Congressional Democrats — who were hoping to blast Republicans over budget cuts — instead took incoming from their exasperated constituents when they traveled home to host town halls. In Arizona, Sens. Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly were confronted at a joint forum Monday by an attendee demanding to know if they “would support removing” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. In Oregon, an audience member told Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Janelle Bynum on Sunday that he is “so p----- off right now at the leadership in the United States Senate that they are not willing to step up and fight.”
An incident earlier this week has raised even more concerns regarding Senator Mitch McConnell (RINO-KY) and his health.
As WDRD reported, McConnell sat down with business leaders and answered multiple questions from the media during a visit to Elizabethtown on Tuesday. The topics covered during the event included tariffs, foreign policy, and his legacy.
Things then took an alarming turn when a reporter asked him about President Trump’s tariffs. During this sequence, one would think McConnell had suddenly gone deaf.