I'm beginning to think right-wing knuckleheads are worse than left-wing

 

What gave rise to that thought was the outrage being expressed at Pam Bondi, our new Attorney-General, for her "delay" in not releasing the latest Epstein files right away, without prior scrutiny.  It's not surprising to anyone who has even a smidgen of legal knowledge.  Those files have to be examined page by page, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, because if something is released that impacts ongoing court cases or affects one of Epstein's victims, there'll be hell to pay.

Jeff Childers sums it up very well.

We think we’ve captured the Deep State on Twitter, but they’re using Twitter to capture us.

🪖 I won’t bury the lede. I will tell you exactly how they’re doing it to us. And then I will show you just where it has cropped up next.

Step One: Pick an effective conservative figure with influence or political power.

Step Two: Wait for them to do something even slightly open to interpretation.

Step Three: Seed social media with just enough innuendo to turn skepticism into a purity spiral.

Step Four: Place the popcorn bag in the microwave, label side down.

Let me now introduce you to one Pamela “Jane” Bondi, Trump’s pick for Attorney General:

You already know the maddening story. For ages, Pam promised to release the Epstein files. Last week, the highly anticipated Epstein reveal exploded like a DNC pipe bomb in a chaotic, misfired disaster. Blame ricocheted to the FBI’s SDNY field office, and within days, its never-Trump assistant director abruptly resigned. But what didn’t happen was any Epstein data dump. Instead, we got a mess of official explanations—none of which made sense.

🪖 In immediate response, as though from nowhere, a huge black-pilled mob rose up to take Pam down. She’s part of the coverup! She’s on the list! She was probably in on it from the start! Progressive media, otherwise allergic to Epstein stories, suddenly discovered a fresh sense of urgency, sprang into action, and began excavating a massive pig-pile of blame.

. . .

🪖 COINTEL. It has all the hallmarks. Let me show you. But first, to answer the inevitable objection, I am not saying we shouldn’t hold conservative leaders to account or nudge them in the right direction. Of course we should. But keeping our own side accountable should not involve character assassination or unsupported allegations or imputed motives.

Yesterday, some people were convinced to jettison a conservative Supreme Court Justice based on an ambiguous facial expression. That is not how we should hold our key conservatives to account.

Here are the red flags that Bondi’s character assassination is a psyop. First, Democrats are gleefully joining in. These are the same people shrieking about DOGE getting access to private IRS files, but now, they suddenly reject the idea that Pam might need to redact witness and source information? When did Democrats become the champions of full disclosure?

Second, all the angst is based solely on guesses about Pam’s dark motives, with zero rational examination of the actual facts. Here’s a fact: If Pam releases the Epstein files too quickly and even one accidentally unredacted sex-trafficked victim claims her life is ruined—or if one confidential source is put “in danger”—Democrats will never shut up about it. And they’ll use it to take down the entire Trump Administration. It will be evidence of Trump’s recklessness and “moving too fast.” That’s the minefield Pam is tiptoeing through.

Of course, she must be careful. She must be double-careful, since there are malign actors inside the FBI who might mis-redact the files on purpose just to create that scandal.

Here’s another fact. Pam said the FBI was resisting her directives. And people just dismissed that? Out of hand? Really? After everything we’ve seen, does anyone seriously doubt that the FBI has people trying to sabotage her?

Another fact: Pam has been on the job for a few weeks. And yet, some people think she can just log in, click “Epstein Files.zip,” and hit “Download.” Guys, be serious. Realistically, pulling it all together could take years.

The point isn’t to make excuses for Pam Bondi. That’s not my job. I’m not even arguing that everything is legit. The point is that no reasoned discussion is happening—and that is a red flag. What we see is pure outrage. Manufactured outrage. At our own side. And it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do: creating infighting, breeding factionalism, and tearing MAGA apart from within.

There are enemies within. Let’s not make things easy for them.

There's more at the link:  and, as always with Jeff Childers, it's all worth reading.

The outraged frothing-at-the-mouth that I've seen from some right-wing and conservative commenters is so over-the-top it's ridiculous.  Sure, I don't think Pam Bondi is an angel in human form, and I'm sure she's made mistakes in the past, and I don't expect her to be a legal and intellectual Einstein when it comes to the myriad challenges facing her in one of the toughest jobs in the United States.  I do, however, think that President Trump appointed her because he thinks she's the best person to do that job.  That being the case, I accept his judgment - after all, a great deal of the success of his administration will be riding on her, so he's had to be very careful about his choices! - and, like him, I'll give her space and time to settle in, and deal with the Deep State opposition to the President's policies that's presently baked-in to the Justice Department.  It's going to take hard work and a lot of time to get rid of that hangover.  Good luck to her as she tackles it - and let's not be too eager to criticize.  How well would we do in such a position?  I'm willing to bet I wouldn't do well at all . . . so I'll cheer her on from the sidelines.

Peter

This is potentially the biggest legal can of worms ever opened in the United States

 

PJ Media asks the hard question, and makes a case for it.

The Biden presidency might have been the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the American people. A shocking investigation by the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project has revealed that virtually every document bearing Joe Biden's signature during his presidency was signed by an autopen — except for one.

What makes this revelation particularly damning is that the only document confirmed to have Biden's actual signature was his letter announcing his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race.

. . .

The use of the presidential autopen dates back to the 1950s, and there's been much debate about its legality. In 2013, Barack Obama became the first president to sign a bill into law using an autopen. He was vacationing in Hawaii at the time. His office relied on a 30-page memo from President George W. Bush's legal team asserting that the president's presence was not required as long as said president had authorized the signature. 

What's not clear, in the case of Biden, is who was running the autopen and whether Biden was aware it was happening. 

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is demanding that the Department of Justice investigate whether Biden's obvious cognitive decline allowed unelected bureaucrats to essentially run the government without presidential oversight. If this is true — and let's be honest, all signs point to yes — every executive order, every pardon, and every official action taken under Biden's name could be constitutionally void.

There's more at the link.

This is potentially the biggest legal can of worms ever opened in the United States.  In theory, it could mean that every act, proclamation, executive order, etc. that was not signed in person by President Biden might have been "signed" - i.e. the autopen might have been controlled by - another person entirely, whether or not they had authorization to do so.  If they did, where is that authorization, for every single occasion on which they did so?  If they did not, they committed a crime by signing an invalid document into law.

What about people arrested and/or convicted and/or imprisoned for breaking a law that may not have been validly signed?  What about the funds expended by the government in response to a potentially unlawfully signed document?  Were they validly spent, or do they now have to be recovered - not to mention that most of them are long gone and can't be recovered?  What about those who signed illicitly for President Biden?  That's a very serious offense - but which one?  I can think of a dozen counts with which they could be charged.  Can we be sure of identifying all of them?

This is enough to make one's head spin.  I don't know what the fallout will be, but it's a matter of colossal importance in Constitutional terms.  I know the temptation will be to say, "Well, that's water under the bridge, and we can't fix it now, so let's just leave it" . . . but if we do that, we effectively condemn the Constitution and the rule of law to irrelevance.  That's a non-starter, right there - but what to do about it?  That's something that'll take years to figure out.

At the very least, we need a law specifying that anything signed into law by the President is only validly signed if:

• he personally does so (i.e. no autopen!);
• while in full command of his faculties;
• in public, recorded on camera;
• without any influence or "helping hands" involved.

Peter

Heads up, owners of Sig P320 pistols...

 

... take heed of this development in Washington state.

The Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission has prohibited recruits from training with a popular semiautomatic handgun and has banned the pistol from the commission’s campuses after reports the gun could fire without someone pulling the trigger.

In an order issued Feb. 24, commission Executive Director Monica Alexander made a permanent prohibition of the Sig Sauer P320, one of the most popular handguns on the market, a version of which is used by the U.S. military.

Alexander had temporarily banned anyone from carrying and training with the firearm after an Oct. 9 incident, in which a recruit in a Basic Law Enforcement Academy class in Spokane reported his Sig Sauer “self-discharged” as he drew it to fire on targets at the police range. The round struck the ground behind the recruit and fragmented, striking and injuring an instructor and another recruit.

The recruit insisted his trigger finger was “indexed” — pointed alongside the frame of the handgun, outside of the trigger guard — when he drew the weapon. A firearms instructor confirmed the incident, stating he was watching the recruit’s hand and that the “weapon immediately fired while he was drawing the weapon” while his finger was not on the trigger.

. . .

The work group uncovered a number of lawsuits and video of incidents involving the Sig Sauer P320 firing while in a holster, including 2022 body-camera video of an officer in Milwaukee who was wounded when his partner’s firearm discharged in its holster.

Another body-camera video shows a 2023 incident in Montville, N.J., where an officer’s holstered sidearm goes off in the lobby of the police station.

There also have been a number of lawsuits filed against Sig Sauer over unintended discharges of the P320, including one settled in Tacoma in 2023 after a man suffered a serious leg wound when his gun discharged while he was holstering it. The details of the settlement were not immediately available.

There's more at the link.

There's no word on whether the prohibition also applies to the Sig-Sauer M17 and M18, military versions of the SiG P320.  However, I'd assume the risk is the same - they're mechanically identical internally, as far as I know - so I'd be careful with the military pistols too.

I've never fired a Sig P320, so I can't comment from personal experience.  I know it's become very popular in certain circles, with a number of top competition shooters using it.  This troubling development in Washington state may change that.

Peter

An interesting SCOTUS ruling

 

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has ruled that a judge's order forcing the Trump administration to pay about $2 billion in foreign aid that it had "frozen".  This is interesting from a number of perspectives.

Firstly, the funds concerned are owed to parties (contractors, NGO's and other agencies) for work that had already been completed.  They weren't for projects that have yet to be begun, or work that has not yet been undertaken.  I can see the sense in that.  No matter whether one agrees with the politics of the former Biden administration or not, if it committed those funds to pay for those contracts and the work was carried out as agreed, then it should be paid for.  The ruling does not force the Trump administration to undertake, or authorize, or pay for, any more such projects.

Second, the ruling does not address one of the Trump administration's key issues:  whether or not a single district court judge can issue a ruling binding the administration in every district, in every State of the Union.  Surely a district court's powers extend only to the district concerned?  SCOTUS did not rule on this (to the stated displeasure of four SCOTUS justices, let it be said).  This leaves that question open to further consideration.  Should that be by SCOTUS, or by new legislation passed by Congress and the Senate to be signed by President Trump?  Who can make that determination?

Third, agencies, NGO's and others that have depended on US government aid until now have to seriously re-evaluate their work going forward.  They now know they can't rely on a "bottomless cup" of largesse from the United States.  They're either going to have to get assurances on a project-by-project case that the income will be there to support it, or they're going to have to put all such projects on hold unless and until a new modus operandi can be worked out with regard to funding.  Already some major charities and NGO's have furloughed or laid off large proportions of their workforces.  Expect that to continue.

Needless to say, I don't like the SCOTUS ruling:  but I believe in the rule of law.  This one might be distasteful to me, but I can't argue with its basic rationale;  that you pay for the completed work for which you contracted.  The Trump administration may not have contracted for it, but the Biden administration did, explicitly or implicitly;  therefore, the obligation exists.

Peter

How do you audit expenditure you can't find?

 

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of D.O.G.E.'s task in auditing federal government expenditure is that much of the latter is hidden from sight, and has to be dug out of the darker corners of our governing bureaucracy.  Real Clear Investigations reports:

The total amount of spending across “all agencies,” as recorded at usaspending.gov, appears to be 50% higher than most experts interviewed for this article think it actually was.

In Fiscal Year 2024, for instance, the website pegs total spending at $9.7 trillion, when several experts said it was probably around $6.5 trillion. No one could explain the much bigger figure. Officials with usaspending.gov conceded to RCI that their totals were wrong and said the error, which shows up in similar fashion for the last five fiscal years would be fixed soon. They offered neither an explanation for their higher total nor an estimate of what it should be. Two weeks later, the erroneous figures remain.

. . .

The federal government has become so big and so expensive that even experts have trouble navigating the morass of contracts, awards, grants, loans, and other items that have transformed the U.S. spreadsheet into a labyrinth pitted with dead ends and rabbit holes ... The complexity and layers Musk’s team has encountered are a feature, not a bug, according to this view.

. . .

DOGE’s real accomplishment so far has been to bring attention to the federal government’s broken accounting systems.

Despite the hue and cry raised over DOGE, previous alarms have been rung by some other agencies only to be ignored.

On Jan. 16, four days before Biden vacated the White House, the Government Accounting Office said it was “unable to provide an opinion on the reliability of the federal government’s consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2024 and 2023.” 

The Office of Management and Budget has also flunked six of the 24 departments and agencies it looked at, including Labor and Education. The Defense Department has failed seven consecutive audits, while the Department of Education hasn’t gotten a “clean” opinion for three years.

It is hard to pass an audit when you don’t follow the basic rules of accounting.

There's more at the link.

As the article says, the dysfunction built into federal accounting systems is a feature, not a bug.  If something can't be properly audited, nobody can be held accountable for any malfeasance or criminal conduct, because it can't be proved.  I daresay a lot of politicians have used that feature over the years to direct money to causes and projects that would make the average taxpayer scream in outrage if he knew about them.  The USAID financial imbroglio tends to bear that out in microcosm.  USAID is one agency out of well over 400 in the federal government.  How much financial jiggery-pokery will we find in the rest of them?  Will there be as much wasteful spending in them as we found in USAID, and if so, will we be able to recover it?  Hopefully D.O.G.E. will be able to answer those questions.

Perhaps it's time to write into every expenditure bill that passes through Congress and the Senate a provision detailing how the money is to be accounted for, and what audits are mandated for its use over time.  It would be nice to think that the normal audit procedures of the federal government would suffice, but clearly they haven't in the past, so why would they be good enough in future?

Peter

There's method in President Trump's diplomatic "madness"

 

Remember a week or two back, when President Trump said the US will take over the Gaza Strip and redevelop it?

Looks like the Arab states in the region really don't like that idea.

A $53bn (£41.4 billion) reconstruction plan to rival President Donald Trump's idea for the US to "take over Gaza" and move out more than two million Palestinians has been approved by Arab leaders at an emergency summit in the Egyptian capital Cairo.

"The Egypt plan is now an Arab plan," announced the secretary general of the Arab League Ahmed Aboul Gheit at the end of this hours-long gathering.

Without referring specifically to President Trump's ideas, he underlined that "the Arab stance is to reject any displacement, whether it is voluntary or forced".

There's more at the link.

The Arab League's action comes after Israel supported President Trump's initiative, which would mean that many Palestinians from Gaza would have to be "resettled" elsewhere.  That concentrated some minds wonderfully, because the Arab states have systematically refused to resettle Palestinians on their territory - but any resettlement would have to involve them, because there's nowhere else for the Palestinians to go.  Furthermore, the cost of rebuilding Gaza is now for the Arab League's account, not America's.  $53 billion is not small change!

I daresay something like this is what President Trump had in mind all along, just like calling for and imposing reciprocal tariffs is designed to "encourage" other nations to relax their tariffs on American goods and services.

Ah . . . diplomacy!

Peter

In case you missed it...

 

... 22 Democratic Party senators just released individual video statements criticizing President Trump.  Nothing wrong with that - except that they all used precisely and exactly the same script, word for word, parroting each other.  Originality?  Thinking for themselves?  Not so much!

Needless to say, President Trump and Republican politicians are having a field day responding to such ham-handed criticism.  Elon Musk has even offered a free Cybertruck to anyone who can identify the author of the script.  I imagine there's a lot of searching going on right now!

To be fair, President Trump's claim that he would bring down prices, starting on day one of his presidency, has not yet been visible in the marketplace - except in the Washington D.C. area, where housing prices are falling under the weight of fired federal officials and bureaucrats!  However, the amount of waste, fraud and financial abuse he and his team have uncovered in the federal government means that a great deal of money will be saved in future, which should help our inflationary situation.  As for high prices in general:  I don't know whether or not they will come down.  They've certainly gone up during the Biden administration, but historically, when that's happened, they've been slow to come down again.  Will producers be able to save enough on their input costs to lower their prices on their finished products?  That remains to be seen, and it's not something a President can dictate.

Perhaps the price of finished copycat videos will go down, thanks to heavy demand for them from Democratic Party senators?

Peter

If "democracy dies in darkness", so does evidence

 

The Washington Post adopted a new slogan when President Trump was elected:  "Democracy dies in darkness".  I don't know why it felt the inauguration was so dark, but they're entitled to their opinion, I guess.

Now it emerges that the Southern District of the FBI in New York City had been sitting on "a truckload" of evidence from the Jeffrey Epstein case, and had not even reported its existence to its superiors in Washington D.C.  What better way to interfere in the administration of justice than to keep the evidence so dark, nobody in high places knows it exists?

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi revealed that the Department of Justice has received more Jeffery Epstein files from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after the document release she touted last week fell flat. 

Speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday night, Bondi confirmed that a "truckload" of Epstein files were delivered by the FBI after she gave the agency until 8 a.m. on Friday morning to deliver them. 

"I gave [the FBI] a deadline of Friday at 8 a.m. to get us everything," Bondi explained. "And a source had told me where the documents were being kept, Southern District of New York, shock. So we got them all by Friday at 8 a.m."

"Thousands of pages of documents. I have the FBI going through them...and Director Patel is going to get us a detailed report as to why the FBI withheld all of those documents," she continued.

There's more at the link.

I see that the boss of the Southern District was given a choice between immediate retirement or being fired (he chose the former).  However, he's only one person.  How many others of the same ilk had he recruited and/or transferred to his district, to ensure that it would be run the way he wanted it?  How much more evidence and important information is still hidden in the files and computer servers of the Southern District?  And how much may already have been destroyed, rather than admit its existence?

A few years ago I said that "The FBI can no longer be trusted in any way, shape or form".  I hope that, with the changes that have just begun to be introduced under the Trump administration, that judgment may be revised . . . but this latest brouhaha over the Epstein evidence doesn't give me any immediate cause for relief.  There's still an awful lot of partisan political deadwood in the FBI that needs to be pruned back and burned out.

Peter

Deep Schools corruption???

 

We've heard of the Deep State often enough, but Tulsa, Oklahoma looks to have a Deep Schools problem.

The highly anticipated state audit for Tulsa Public Schools released Wednesday [last week] accuses former leaders of promoting a culture where financial misappropriation ran wild for years.

. . .

Byrd pointed to various areas of concern highlighted in the audit, noting that her office found more than 1,400 financial discrepancies. She said multiple district administrators fostered a culture of financial noncompliance and disregarded laws and policies meant to protect taxpayer money.

Key findings from the audit:

• Byrd says the investigation focused on more than $37.7 million in expenditures.
• $25 million of the money investigated, according to the audit, violated the district’s own policies.
• Former Chief Learning and Talent Officer Devin Fletcher was able to commit fraud because of lax financial and internal controls. Fletch was convicted and sentenced to 20 months in federal prison in 2024.
• Tulsa Public Schools paid more than 700 vendors without receiving proof of services.
• Some vendor contract language was vague.
• Some invoices didn’t list services on them at all.
• State auditor’s office experienced difficulty obtaining some records pertaining to the audit due to poor record-keeping practices.
• Processes were taken to bypass the local board of education to avoid oversight.
• Conflicts of interest in awarding vendor contracts.

“Oklahoma law states that no payments can be made without an itemized invoice, as well as proof of receipt of goods or service,” said Byrd. “TPS’ disregard for this statute was perhaps the most pervasive issue uncovered during our investigation.”

. . .

News 4 also received late reaction to the audit findings Wednesday from Governor Kevin Stitt who encouraged Drummond to take action:

I requested this audit in 2022, and today Auditor Byrd finally confirmed what myself and many other Oklahomans believed to be true— where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And it’s deeply troubling to see Tulsa Public Schools having engaged in such gross financial misconduct. The release of the audit is only the first step in holding wrongdoers accountable. The Attorney General needs to take immediate action and bring charges wherever possible. This can never be allowed to happen in Oklahoma again.

There's more at the link.

As if we needed any more evidence of why a D.O.G.E.-style investigation of any and all administrative bodies, in federal, state and local government, is vitally necessary!  $25 million is chump change on a federal level, where we're talking expenditure in the billions and trillions of dollars;  but it's a huge financial burden on the taxpayers of Tulsa, who are now on the hook for however much can be proved to have been stolen or misused.  How long will it take them to make up that loss?  And how much impact will that have on their children?

Full marks to the Governor of Oklahoma for pushing for this investigation, three years ago;  and full marks to the auditor for pushing for its publication, despite resistance from Tulsa Public Schools.  As usual, the administrators and bureaucrats are scuttling for cover now that their misdeeds have been uncovered.  I hope much of the money can be recovered from those responsible for its loss, and that those guilty of criminal malfeasance in office will spend long enough behind bars to regret their error of judgment.

I wonder how many other school districts have similar problems that haven't yet been detected?  I'm willing to bet it's more than a few, in every state in the nation.

 

Peter

Friday's little diplomatic bust-up has revealed a lot

 

When President Zelensky tried (and failed) to maneuver President Trump into providing security guarantees for Ukraine, he not only damaged his country's relationship with ours, he also acted as the spark to a fuse that's since revealed all sorts of interesting behind-the-scenes information.

First off, it's clear Zelensky was manipulated into acting as he did.  A cabal of Senators met with him beforehand, and appear to have assured him that if he insisted on guarantees, Trump would cave in and provide them.  Did they do that because they actually believed their assurances, or because they wanted to make President Trump look bad in front of the world's press?  I'm betting on the latter - and the fact that he didn't cave in, but stood firm on his original premise, appears to have shocked those Senators as much as it did Zelensky.  Francis Porretto put it like this:

Zelensky met with a bipartisan group of Senators before meeting with Trump and Vance. I have yet to see such a report that went into the details of the meeting. How did those Senators advise the Ukrainian? Unclear. Worse, the ABC report concludes with a statement from two Democrat Senators castigating Trump and Vance!

[Minnesota Senator Amy] Klobuchar and [Delaware Senator Chris] Coons came out with posts on X in defense of the Ukrainian president after his exchange in the Oval Office, particularly the moment in which Vance accused Zelenskyy of being “disrespectful” toward his American hosts.

“Answer to Vance: Zelenskyy has thanked our country over and over again both privately and publicly. And our country thanks HIM and the Ukrainian patriots who have stood up to a dictator, buried their own & stopped Putin from marching right into the rest of Europe. Shame on you,” Klobuchar wrote.

“Every time I’ve met with President Zelenskyy, he’s thanked the American people for our strong support. We owe him our thanks for leading a nation fighting on the front lines of democracy — not the public berating he received at the White House,” Coons wrote.

The transcript of the Trump / Vance / Zelensky meeting makes it plain that the backhanding the Ukrainian received was only what his conduct had earned. Why, then, would two United States Senators characterize it in the exact opposite fashion?

Because they [like Zelensky] are animated by hatred.

If there’s anything the Democrat Party despises without limit, it’s a Republican president who refuses to play by their rules. Atop that, Trump is an outsider: one who, by their lights, doesn’t belong in the corridors of power ... They want his hide tacked up on their barn wall as a warning to others who contemplate intruding on their domain.

There's more at the link.

Nor is such behind-the-scenes encouragement limited to politicians.  Deep State neocons were part of it too, as Mollie Hemingway notes.

Zelensky repeatedly declined opportunities to sign the deal in Kyiv and Munich, and requested the meeting at the White House. It later came out that [Susan] Rice and Tony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, and Alexander Vindman may have been personally advising Zelensky to do this meeting in the way he did -- that they recommended him to be hostile and to try to goad Trump into blowing up. Even though he didn't, and even though Zelensky's actions horrified many normal Americans, the Obama team went on the airwaves to falsely characterize what happened.

I think their goal was to have a wonderful performance by Zelensky, an angry Trump appearing to scuttle the deal, and the support of the neocon portion of the GOP to start applying pressure on Trump to have US Troop commitments as part of the "security guarantee." It was a set-up, in Susan Rice's interesting choice of words.

. . .

As you can see from the hostility of the bureaucracy to any Republican oversight, no matter how reasonable or minor it may be, the entrenched bureaucracy and permanent DC apparatus is quite active. That goes quadruple for the deep state in the Intelligence Community. I'd expect more and more shenanigans and to be prepared so that you don't fall for the next information operation. The post-WWII architecture in Europe and the US needs this war to continue or be settled on "US troops on the ground" type guarantees, even though that's not what Americans want.

Things will heat up here, and it's a very dangerous time.

Again, more at the link.

What steps are being taken to bring charges against those US "advisers" for interfering in foreign affairs?  At the very least, they should be registered as foreign agents if they want any say in the matter.  If they're not, they've broken the law, and should be charged.

We also see that the so-called "Deep State" isn't limited to the USA, but is an international operation, with "Deep States" (for want of a better term) active in every European nation and in the European Union as a whole.  That was made very clear when several European leaders consoled and encouraged Zelensky in precisely and exactly the same words.  It was like those news broadcasts we've seen in the USA, where dozens or scores or even hundreds of nominally "independent" TV news stations all parrot exactly the same words and phrases to their audience, clearly reading from the same script.  Those European leaders were using a script for public consumption when they encouraged Zelensky.  It's as plain as the nose on your face, and demonstrates how forces and individuals behind the scenes are manipulating the situation.

The lack of logic and rationality behind the European approach was illustrated by Polish prime minister Donald Tusk when he pointed out that "500 million Europeans are asking 300 million Americans to defend them against 140 million Russians."  Europe appears willing to fight to the last American to defend Ukraine - and President Trump's not playing that game.  Now they have to figure out how to do it themselves, without American firepower to support them - but they've cut their armed forces to the bone in order to pay for entitlement programs.  How are they going to do it?  The short and simple answer is that, without the USA, they can't.  As Divemedic put it:

There is not a reason to spill a single drop of American blood, nor waste a single American dollar on a war that simply isn’t our problem. Let Europe worry about this one. I don’t think that Russia is going to go to war with the European Union unless the EU keeps beating war drums and trying to start one. We need to stop letting France, Britain, Russia, and Germany drag us into the wars that they have been fighting in Europe for over 1,300 years. If they want to keep fighting, let them, but there is no reason for us to be involved.

More at the link.  I said much the same thing three years ago.

Finally, the Telegraph advises that there may be "wheels within wheels" on this issue.

The president appeared to make an initial offer to Putin that contained nearly everything the Russian dictator wanted ... But there may well be a more sophisticated logic behind Trump’s seeming madness.

The Trump administration is thought to view China, not Russia, as the gravest threat to the United States and Europe in the long-term, having declared in the 2017 National Security Strategy that it is a “revisionist” power that seeks “to erode American security and prosperity”. China’s Belt and Road initiative is widely seen as a disguised attempt to secure control of future land and sea routes, by laying out massive transport, energy, and telecommunication infrastructure across the Eurasian landmass.

. . .

The Trump administration has every incentive to undo China’s Grand Strategy.

Team Trump may well have concluded that this can only be achieved through radical changes to US foreign policy elsewhere. In the first instance, it necessitates cutting the West’s losses in Ukraine and conserving US combat power to deter Beijing. US officials seem to have realised that Putin is prepared and willing to fight, at almost any cost to Russia, until the last surviving Ukrainian and until the last missile is left in the West’s stockpiles.

. . .

A peace deal in Ukraine might have the benefit of giving Nato members the breathing space – as well as the incentive – to finally re-focus their economies towards defence, so that they can meet Trump’s call for 5 per cent of GDP to be spent on their militaries. On Tuesday, Starmer committed to increase UK defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP, up from 2.3 per cent now. Others are likely to follow suit. A rearmed Nato would serve as a much stronger deterrent against both Russia and China in the long-term, minimising the chances that Putin might attack a Nato country in the future.

. . .

Trump may be preparing to signal to Putin that he is content with Russia serving as the dominant power in Eurasia, as long as it doesn’t invade a Nato country. By having direct talks with Russia and excluding Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, at least for the time being, Trump has already played on Putin’s sense of vanity, Russian national pride, and Moscow’s long-term sense of being a great power that deserves a seat at the table with the big boys.

. . .

Peace in Ukraine, a reshuffle of alliances in the Middle East, and a new settlement with Russia would allow the United States to return to a version of the original Monroe Doctrine, refocusing on hemispheric defence and freeing Washington up to directly confront Beijing. Having renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, Trump is signalling to China to get out of the US sphere of influence and strategic security perimeter. 

The US would protect the Western Hemisphere – North, Central, and South America, including the surrounding islands. Russia would dominate Eurasia. Europe would look after itself. And with US assistance, Japan, Australia and South Korea would, within a Joint Deterrence Force framework, take the lead in ensuring stability in the Indo-Pacific. 

Could this be Trump’s latest Art of the Deal? We may be about to find out.

More at the link (may be paywalled).

The Telegraph is quite correct.  President Trump can't allow himself to fixate on Ukraine and its problems.  He has to sort out our own country's internal mess and deal with geopolitical issues across Europe, the Middle East, Eurasia and the Far East, all at the same time.  Committing too much US effort to Ukraine would force him to short-change all those other areas . . . to the undoubted pleasure of China, North Korea, Iran and other trouble-makers, who would instantly move to take advantage of such preoccupation elsewhere.

I'm very sorry for the people of Ukraine, who find themselves pawns in a battle of nations and alliances and are bleeding and dying while the politicians wring their hands and search for solutions.  Ukrainians are the real victims here . . . but nobody's talking about them.  They aren't even on the globalists' radar screen.  They're the "little people".  They don't count.

May God have mercy on them.  They're going to need it.

Peter

Memes that made me laugh 251

 

Gathered from around the Internet over the past week.  Click any image for a larger view.

Sunday morning music

 

Following last weekend's look at dwarf metal, I came across this rather strange piece of heroic fantasy music.  It's certainly metal-ish, and brings in most of the tropes and tales of the genre.  You'll recognize the voice of Christopher Lee as the narrator.  I'm not sure I like it, but it's different enough that I thought I'd let you hear it and make up your own mind.  (If you want the lyrics, they may be found at the video's YouTube page.)

It's . . . well, it's different!

Peter