The Frankish Reich

Funny how Paul Ryan's budget bill passed then (budget reconciliation is not subject to the filibuster) without any "make Mexico pay" funding mechanism. It was campaign b.s. Trump will now no doubt blame all the "RINOs" for ruining his half-baked ideas. The truth is he didn't seriously pursue them. So ... how was Mexico going to be made to pay? And how does reprogramming U.S. taxpayer money to building the wall cause Mexico to pay? There was a way to do it if he had really meant what he said. It was campaign silliness, not a serious policy proposal.

Well, I gotta hand it to Poyer for doubling down here. I had not idea what the new sponsor - "PublicSq." - was, so I checked. It's an attempt to create an alterna-Amazon that vets merchants for their adherence to "conservative" principles. Apparently Donald Trump Jr. is an investor. You now know the facts. Support him, decry him, or ignore his politics (my choice; he's a football player, I watch him play football and really don't care about his politics).

The Wall/Mexico will pay for it: this is one of the strangest things about Trump's presidency. Of course Mexico wasn't going to take its own government funds to build a wall. I always understood this to mean that the Trump Administration - which had control of Congress! - would enact tariffs or probably a special excise tax on remittances to Mexico to create a dedicated fund to pay for "border security," i.e., a wall. And then ... no such tax (which could have been sold as a tax on Mexicans) was ever proposed, not even in Paul Ryan's huge tax package. Instead they tried the shady repurposing of U.S. taxpayer money, which was shot down as it was initially proposed, and that would have clearly been United States taxpayers paying for it anyway. A lot of people get so worked up about Trump's abuses that they forget how inept the Trump Administration was in getting things done.

Isn't anyone going to give us a visual assessment of Dawkins weight and conditioning just 71 days before opening game kickoff?

Exactly. The Executive Branch is a colossus. Not even the best organized, smartest workaholic President could be personally involved in all decisionmaking. The President-by-Committee is what we have. So I care a lot about the competence and judgement of that committee. Maybe even more than the competence of the President himself?

I certainly agree with that. There are a lot of fantastic public school programs even in our big city school districts. The problem I see: there's an obsessive focus by the bureaucrats with making the numbers look better than they are. In Denver, we had a new high school they called the Denver School of Science and Technology (DSST). You didn't test in, but it attracted high achieving students and it always at least equaled the performance of our best private schools. So what does the school board do? They water it down! First, they start trying to improve access for kids who aren't as well prepared and standards start to slip. Then they realize they have a successful brand, so they start relabeling existing schools - what was once an ordinary school become "DSST West Campus" or something like that. They create something valuable, then try to spread the high test scores a little more broadly, start destroying the brand, and lose a lot of the value of what they created. And then we have the removal of "school resource officers" (school cops) in one of those social justice pushes, and then we have shootings at our best public high school with the best AP programs, and the high-performing kids' families start pulling their kids out. It is the constant meddling of the bureaucrats that is our main problem here, and the main reason we went the private route, even after moving into the city and intending to send our kids to public schools.

I know some folks read Ann Althouse's blog - retired law professor. I remember her saying the same thing about the BB - she just doesn't find it funny, even when it is attempting to skewer something she thinks deserves to be skewered. Maybe a little too obvious? That was what (used to be) fun about The Onion. Here is one that keeps coming to mind whenever I see one of those "first ever disabled gender neutral to do [blank] stories: https://www.theonion.com/area-teen-quickly-running-out-of-chances-to-be-first-op-1819575437 Maybe it's the longer format rather than the Twitter-friendly headline only? Or just more clever writers.

No, it's a thing. Audi had a little fun with it a few years ago in one of the best SB commercials that year:

"...stop hallucinating that the President has the Constitutional power to spend $400 billion without their approval." Since we're on a "get the holding correct" kick here, that should be: "without their unambiguous approval." If Biden wants to push it (he won't ... he's made his point, he can run on being the guy who really, really tried to hand over money to young indebted people, urging them to come out to vote), there's a big opening here: he presumably still has the authority to suspend payments due, maybe to tinker with the interest rates, and do all other kinds of mischief. The Court said Congress only failed to authorize canceling debt.

Correct. It's annoying when the media (and here we go: both sides! depends on who won/lost an individual case) consistently misrepresent what they really said.

Some. Not me ... just a lot of groans at the BB, not indignation

OK, now that's a stupid hot take. I mean, the Supreme Court term has ended on June 30 since forever. If they had issued it in May he would've said "they just wanted to spoil everyone's upcoming Pride Month.

British quality control. We used to be able to say that American made cars, but thankfully those days are long over. But the British are sticking to their ways!

This one drove a now-exiled poster into a he-doth-protesteth-too-much rage: https://www.theonion.com/man-knows-unsettling-amount-about-nationwide-age-of-con-1819565878 We have some current posters who similarly know an unsettling amount about various practices of the fringiest parts of the LGBT community. The power to throw a nutcase into a rage is usually a sign that the humor is on point ...

Yeah, but not just any British comedian; a heroin addict British comedian. So special insight. They already tried that.

Yep. That's Audi. Or even Porsche. But not BMW. Now, Mini Cooper = BMW. With really bad quality control, that is.

I haven't read the whole Sotomayor dissent. But here's something to be aware of: this is how appeals court arguments go! Justice Breyer was famous for asking long hypotheticals, sometimes with fact patterns this bizarre. What they're trying to do is to get the other side to concede that under some circumstances their view (that complete loan forgiveness is authorized) may be acceptable. That shoots down the argument that under the language Congress used, loan forgiveness is never authorized. If the other side (or another Justice) says, yeah, well, we're not talking about that, then you've made your point. [Granted, this is a silly hypothetical. But still, appellate lawyers are used to this kind of thing]

Yeah, right. Drew Allen, AKA ‘the Millennial Minister of Truth,’ is the host of the ‘Drew Allen Show’ podcast. He is an author, columnist, and political analyst. His voice has been heard on radio stations all across the country and his columns published at American Greatness, PJ Media, Bizpac Review, Townhall, Human Events, to name a few. I wouldn't mind if he presented himself as a reporter/journalist, the kind of "I spoke with [blank], a constitutional and national security law specialist at [blank], and he told me that ... ." But these guys act like they themselves have some expertise. No degrees or even areas of expertise - just the self-appointed "Millennial Minister of Truth." And those are the "sources" people who post here rely on. Are they lazy? Uninterested in actually learning or understanding the issues? Simply trolling? Self-deluding? You tell me. It's just a stupid way to live.

He's a bit young, but yes, he seems bright, seems sane, and seems to be an actual Republican.

At the peak of his powers! The Dementia Derby. "In the later stages, memory loss becomes far more severe. A person may not recognize family members, may forget relationships, call family members by other names, or become confused about the location of home or the passage of time."

You mean, actual Republicans?

So ... you disagree with another poster who quoted an article saying that we need to eliminate all these "buy American" things, and you favor a "buy American" thing?

I'm not "offended" by the Babylon Bee. It is just consistently unfunny. I mean, just a pale imitation of peak Onion.

This is why people should be careful of what they wish for. This is why we should wish for a Supreme Court that doesn't just see the "liberal" or "conservative" side of the moment, but thinks about the implications of its decisions when the tables are turned. Example: Dobbs (abortion). Roe rested on the same amorphous "right to privacy" that Griswold ("right to contraception") rested on. Now, no state seems interested in banning contraception, so presumably that won't happen. But logically, if one (Roe) was incorrectly decided, the other one (Griswold) was too. Example: many progressives are upset about the student loan forgiveness decision. The Court found that Congress needs to be explicit about granting the President some authority that is really Congress's authority - the spending power here. But the shoe can be on the other foot: Trump used Title 42 to summarily deport thousands of people based on the same public health emergency. And Biden continued to do it. I think that was also an abuse of the limited authority Congress gave the President. If you read these delegations of authority too expansively, you wind up with Presidents declaring national emergencies ("climate emergency," anyone? or can I interest you in "border security and drug trafficking emergency" if you're on the other side?) and then taking all kinds of executive actions in response. A bad and un-American thing in general.

Oh, you mean the CONTINUATION of the Trump tariffs that drove up the cost of my new fridge? Is there a free trader anywhere among the Republican candidates?? Please find me one.