Archive for 2025
February 22, 2025
THE AP’S GLEE IS PALPABLE: President Trump Criticizes Elon Musk.
READER FAVORITE: Alpha Grillers Meat Thermometer Digital. #CommissionEarned
I’M LOVING THIS.
"What would you say, you do here?" pic.twitter.com/aYrStVSHMk
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) February 22, 2025
Related:
It works https://t.co/TFkpHlJa7a
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 22, 2025
Also:
Kash talked about doing this before being nominated, and it's great to see it happening. Hunstville has a major FBI field training center at Redstone Arsenal. This seems to indicate he is getting them out of office cubicles and out there to doing forensics and tactical…
— Free To Speak (@FreeToSpeak71) February 22, 2025
Let them fight actual crime outside of DC, rather than commit crimes in DC. And Huntsville is hardly a place of exile; it’s a very nice university town and nowadays the largest city in Alabama, though that perhaps says as much about Birmingham’s urban decay as about Huntsville’s growth.
Also:
I FEEL LIKE THE LUXURY SEDAN MARKET ISN’T AS IMPORTANT AS IT USED TO BE: Mercedes Is Readying a Significant S-Class Update for 2026.
As I said when I looked at the Maybach sedan, it would be nice if I had a driver, but most of the luxury is in the back seat. I do like that you can still get a V8, though a friend of mine is hoarding his V12.
Plus: “Mercedes’ plan to retain gas engines is likely a smart move, as buyers have proven to be fickle when it comes to high-priced EVs, especially with performance models like those made and tuned by AMG.”
At present, EVs are a niche product.
WELL, YES:
This is precisely it: 99% of the criticisms of Trump consists of shock that he is presuming to be president. https://t.co/xtayPSbR8x
— Jeffrey A Tucker (@jeffreyatucker) February 22, 2025
THE LONG MARCH THROUGH THE INSTITUTIONS: Kash Patel Is Already Making Huge Changes at the FBI.
READER FAVORITE: 1,500 Sq.Ft Energy Star Dehumidifier for Basement. #CommissionEarned
MARK JUDGE: Justine Bateman and the return of the 1980s.
The New York Times is afraid that the 1980s are coming back.
In a recent column, “The 1980s are back, and not in a good way,” writer Elizabeth Spiers lamented that President Donald Trump has brought back the era of greed, when “being rich and preppy looked cool.” As in the Reagan era, young people are “rejecting the progressive politics of their elders.” Even fashion’s taken on “a slightly modernized 80s look.”
To which I say, awesome. The 1980s were not only fun — something that wokeness has tried to kill — but were also the first pushback against what historian James Piereson calls “punitive liberalism.” Punitive liberalism was hatched in the 1960s. It is the idea that America is a corrupt and sinful nation that needs to be punished.
Punitive liberalism fell out of favor in the 1980s, but crept back in the 1990s — and became a nasty contagion in the Obama years. Wokeness is nuclear-powered punitive liberalism. Everyone is racist, everyone is homophobic, capitalism is evil, shame, shame, shame.
Elizabeth Spiers exemplifies this negativity. She once admired the 80s as a young girl in rural Alabama, but now knows better: “for much of the world, the shining city on a hill [President Reagan evoked] appeared more like the distant compound of a Bond villain.
Read the whole thing.
IT’S NOT EASY TO BE A VIKING: Viking skulls inspected with CT scans reveal severe morbidity.
TRUMP FIRES CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF. Can You Guess Why?
Donald Trump is still draining the swamp, and this time, he has set his sights on the Pentagon. On Friday, Trump gave the boot to Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr., the woke warrior serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Brown is a cheerleader for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and that made his firing inevitable.
The ouster of Brown, only the second Black general to serve as chairman, is sure to send shock waves through the Pentagon. His 16 months in the job had been consumed with the war in Ukraine and the expanded conflict in the Middle East.
[…]
Brown’s public support of Black Lives Matter after the police killing of George Floyd had made him fodder for the administration’s wars against “wokeism” in the military. His ouster is the latest upheaval at the Pentagon, which plans to cut 5,400 civilian probationary workers starting next week and identify $50 billion in programs that could be cut next year to redirect those savings to fund Trump’s priorities.
“I want to thank General Charles ‘CQ’ Brown for his over 40 years of service to our country, including as our current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Trump said in a statement he posted on Truth Social. “He is a fine gentleman and an outstanding leader, and I wish a great future for him and his family.”
Trump is replacing Brown with Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, a no-nonsense pick who, fingers crossed, won’t spend his days fretting over pronouns or racial quotas.
“Today, I am honored to announce that I am nominating Air Force Lieutenant General Dan ‘Razin’ Caine to be the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Trump continued. “General Caine is an accomplished pilot, national security expert, successful entrepreneur, and a ‘warfighter’ with significant interagency and special operations experience.”
CNN and Susan Rice hardest hit: CNN Panelist Drops Reality Check on Susan Rice After She Has Meltdown Over Firing of Joint Chiefs Chair.
But replacing Brown wasn’t sitting well with Democrats like Susan Rice, who had a meltdown. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins set the tone saying she heard from unidentified source (a retired general, supposedly) who thought that this was “sadly political” and “tragic.” Rice shook her head sadly, as though this was a tragedy.
The Obama Machine is very unhappy about Trump’s new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs —
— Susan Rice laments Trump “politicizing” a formerly “apolitical” military:
“We have always had an extraordinarily apolitical professional military. It's one of our greatest strengths as a… pic.twitter.com/2xfQIpzLRF
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) February 22, 2025
Rice told Collins:
“We have always had an extraordinarily apolitical professional military It’s one of our greatest strengths as a democracy. We have civilian control, but we have men and women in our military of all backgrounds who are super highly qualified, and who serve with honor and serve with integrity and without politicization.
And now, suddenly, Donald Trump is bringing politics into the process of determining who should be our military leaders.
That is dangerous. It’s unprecedented. And it does not bode well for our integrity as a democracy.
What is it that he expects that Gen. Caine will do that one of the sitting four stars will not do? That’s the question we all need to be asking ourselves. They all take an oath to the Constitution to the United States, not to any individual president or any individual leader.”
Perhaps Susan Rice would like to check in on what her boss Barack Obama did in the past, in what some called a “coup” and a “purge” of 197 military officers to align the military with more of what he wanted? That was damaging and unprecedented.
Keep reading, for the obligatory “Scott Jennings explains to the CNN panel how the world actually works” moment. Exit quote: “If Susan Rice is unhappy, that pretty much confirms what a great move this is.”
JOHN PODHORETZ: Review: Brave New World. Or Captain America: Brave New World. Or something. Who knows.
The movie Captain America: Brave New World isn’t named that except in the ads. On screen, the title card reads Brave New World only. I don’t know why this is, but there’s something weirdly honest about it.
The movie centers on the woes of Sam Wilson—a minor Avenger nicknamed Falcon before he was given a magical shield and a much better superhero handle in the final scene of the Marvel Cinematic Universe climax, 2019’s Endgame. Sam doesn’t feel up to the job of being Captain America. And guess what? He isn’t. Now, the movie doesn’t say that. I am saying that. But Marvel knows I’m right. Maybe that’s why the words “Captain America” don’t appear on the title card.
The movie can’t decide if Sam is being made to feel less-than by our evil white supremacist culture, given that Sam is black—or whether he’s exhausted because he feels like he must represent all underrepresented people, because he’s black. All I’m saying is, he’s black, and that’s pretty much all the movie is saying about Sam Wilson, who appears to have two friends and no family and no backstory and is of absolutely no interest as a character. The original Captain America, Steve Rogers, had a wonderful backstory in which he was a 90-lb. weakling genetically engineered during World War II into a giant hunk of a guy who only agreed to the tampering to help save his country but found himself relegated to being a show pony in patriotic pageants. Apparently only white guys get good backstories.
If Sam weren’t as good as Steve Rogers, that would be evidence he was only chosen to carry the shield because he was black. Now, in one sense, that would be fine, no? I mean, if Sam is there to represent the marginalized people in our society, then he was a diversity hire—and what would be wrong with that in the eyes of Hollywood’s liberal culture? After all, Hollywood literally casts roles by putting out casting calls and saying which parts need to be “diverse.”
On the other hand, why couldn’t Sam Wilson be just as good a Captain America as a white guy? Perhaps he could have been… if he weren’t played by Anthony Mackie. While we’re supposed to decide by the end of this picture that Sam Wilson is just as magnetic and compelling as Steve Rogers, Marvel can’t fix what’s wrong with Anthony Mackie as a performer.
His problem is that he is nowhere near as magnetic or compelling as Chris Evans, who played the original Captain America in eight Marvel films. He’s a decent second banana, with good timing when it comes to throwaway lines and insults he doesn’t mean, but he is entirely without charisma. You look at other actors when he’s on screen. He’s like an anti-star.
This is one of those worst Marvel pictures, so boring that it gives you time to reflect deeply upon what makes it so bad while you’re watching it. There are so many things wrong here that I will only mention three.
Unmentioned by Podhoretz, but discussed by Seth Mandel at Commentary is another thing wrong with the new Captain America movie: The Great Erasure Is Here.
For the duration of the recent explosion in anti-Semitism in the West, the Jewish community has been warning of the erasure of Jewish and Israeli people and symbols from the public square. And now that has been done by Disney and Marvel studios in its major film franchise—and the response has been muted.
To say that this is a bleak portent for the future of American Jewish belonging would be an understatement.
The background, in brief, is as follows. Marvel, which is owned by Disney, announced a couple of years ago that it was finally bringing its Israeli superhero, Sabra, into the film franchise, though it soon became clear she would be a minor character in someone else’s story. There was an immediate uproar—Sabra is proudly Israeli (in the comic books, she works for the Mossad) and identifiably Jewish, her uniform consisting of a blue and white pattern with a Jewish star in the center. The entertainment world was up in arms that such a person would share the screen with their childhood heroes.
Marvel relented and assured everyone that the character, Ruth Bat-Seraph, would be reinterpreted, without explaining what the changes would be. In the end, Captain America: Brave New World remade the character into an Israeli-born, Russian-trained American superagent. She wears a business suit. She blends nicely into the background. “No one will even remember her,” writes Vulture’s Darrin Franich.
In a way, Disney and Marvel’s cowardice did us one favor: The fact that the character, played by Israeli actress Shira Haas, drew protests at movie theaters can put an end to claims that critics are motivated by anything other than the existence of Israeli people anywhere on earth.
Ironically, the controversy may have been the only interesting thing about the movie. The reviews suggest it would have to be much better than it is in order to be considered merely “bad.” You may not remember Ruth Bat-Seraph after it’s over, but it appears you won’t remember anything or anyone at all, and that such amnesia will be a blessing. There was one fleeting cameo appearance by another actor who, according to Adrian Hennigan writing in Haaretz, “briefly threatened to wake the audience up, because otherwise I’m struggling to recall the last time I saw such a tedious superhero film.”
Hennigan notes that the word “Mossad,” which is in Sabra’s backstory, isn’t mentioned in the movie. He doubted she’d even be back in another film and observed that “Unless Trump also takes over Marvel Studios, Sabra is definitely not getting her own movie.”
Is this entire kerfuffle simply because Disney couldn’t talk Scarlett Johansson into a cameo in the new Capt. America movie? In any case, as the Forward quips, “‘Captain America’ has 99 problems, and an Israeli superhero ain’t one.”
READER FAVORITE: OLIXIS Ice Maker Countertop. #CommissionEarned
WELL, I HOPE IT WORKS OUT BETTER THAN THE LAST ONE: Why Germany is ripe for revolt.
As Germany’s federal elections approach this weekend, chancellor Olaf Scholz and his Social Democrats (SPD) are bracing for their worst results since 1887. The SPD is battling with its equally unpopular coalition partner, the Green Party, for a humiliating third place, behind the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and the right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD).
The coming bloodbath for Scholz’s government speaks to far more than the haplessness of his leadership or the unpopularity of his party. Germany has just endured two years of recession – the longest economic slump in its postwar history. Industry is in freefall, shedding almost a quarter of a million manufacturing jobs since the start of the pandemic. A series of terror attacks by Islamists and asylum seekers has made many Germans wonder if the state can do its basic duty to keep them safe. Talk of German efficiency and punctuality now sounds like a sarcastic joke, as roads and bridges fall into disrepair, trains are routinely late and infrastructure projects are plagued by delays and cost overruns. One in five German children lives in poverty. Germany is not merely in an economic downtown – it faces a profound structural crisis, largely of its elites’ own making.
None of these problems began in earnest in the Scholz era. The chancellor is merely the current frontman for a long-running ‘consensus’ that has now become unsustainable and unsupportable. Tellingly, at the last federal elections in 2021, Scholz campaigned as the continuity candidate following the long reign of CDU chancellor Angela Merkel, under whom he served as vice-president and finance minister in a ‘grand coalition’. He even aped her signature ‘Merkel rhombus’ hand gesture to ram this point home. The accusation that ‘politicians are all the same’ rings far truer in Germany than elsewhere. Every mainstream party is implicated in this crisis.
As Jim Geraghty tweeted in 2015:
TRUE.
This stuff is at least as damaging to the rule of law as any action surrounding TROs or whatnot. The first and most central commitment of any civilized legal system is the suppression of depraved violence. https://t.co/N4UOYShUnz
— Adrian Vermeule (@Vermeullarmine) February 22, 2025
JUSTICE: Judge Ho’s Decision To Appoint Paul Clement In United States v. Adams.
From time-to-time, the federal government declines to defend a judgment in a pending Supreme Court case. In such cases, the Court will appoint an amicus to defend the judgment below. In other words, the amicus is not arguing his own personal views on the law, but is instead defending what the lower court did.
This approach makes some sense when there is an actual lower-court opinion. But this approach does not make sense in a trial court. The Court appointed Paul Clement to “present arguments on the Government’s Motion to Dismiss.” What kind of arguments? The order does not say. Maybe Clement will agree with the government. Maybe he won’t. Who knows? In effect, the Court has appointed Paul Clement to give Paul Clement’s opinion on the issue. Clement is a friend of the Court, to be sure. But unlike most amicus, he is being elevated to the status of a party. I think Article III jurisdiction demands adversity, and appointing an amicus to argue his own views does not suffice for adversity. For all we know, Clement will agree with the government, and there still will be no adversity.
In candor, I am a bit befuddled by this decision. I know Judge Sullivan appointed an amicus in the Michael Flynn case. That is certainly a precedent, but not a particularly good one.
There is another element to discuss here. It is pretty obvious the Court appointed Clement to have a well-known conservative (potentially) argue against the Trump Administration. Judge Ho took a page from the Seila Law playbook, in which Circuit Justice Kagan selected Clement. . . .
Will Clement’s appointment here work out for Judge Ho? Well, unlike with Seila Law, Clement is not forced to defend any particular judgment. He will give his own opinion. And I have to think that Judge Ho did not inquire about those views in advance. If he did, that would be extremely problematic.
Judges are acting unjudicial.
JOHN YOO AND ROBERT DELAHUNTY: Breaking Watergate’s Hold on the Presidency.
President Trump’s flurry of executive orders represents the most aggressive phase of the campaign against the dysfunctional administrative state. Trump does not mean solely to turn back the clock to the “halcyon,” pre-Watergate days of the Imperial Presidency. A President who wants to shut down the Department of Education and hand its responsibilities off to the states is not seeking to concentrate more power within the Executive branch.
If Trump succeeds, the federal government’s elected branches will re-acquire lost powers. Trump aims not to eviscerate congressional power but to restore a lost sense of congressional responsibility. Unelected and unresponsive bureaucrats should not make the hard decisions in domestic policy but, again, should return to popularly elected representatives. At the same time, the President, too, would no longer be saddled with a recalcitrant bureaucracy. The civil service will understand that it exists to carry out the President’s and Congress’s policies, not to pursue an agenda of its own. Trump wants the right-sizing of the Administrative state, and certainly not its expansion. His aim, as we see it, is not to accrue power to the executive but to see that power flows through its proper channels. That is a goal worth fighting for.
Read the whole thing.
