Monday, February 24, 2025
Extremist
In Germany, as in the U.S., an “extremist” is someone who thinks the lights should go on when you flip the switch; who doesn’t want energy costs to triple or quadruple; who thinks it desirable for domestic manufacturers to be able to compete in global markets. If our elites continue to define the sensible as “extreme” and the absurdly fanciful as “moderate,” we will see more and more “extreme” results, as in today’s German election.
WWII Rules
This calls the entire strategy into question -- as should have happened after October 7. The Israelis set a high store on getting hostages back, and they pay a high price to do so. All that does is incentivize hostage-taking, and now the Israelis are paying for it with these spectacles intended to humiliate them. At some point, the Israelis have to make the price for hostaging the permanent and total defeat of Gaza and the destruction of its infrastructure until capitulation. That is the only way to end wars when one side insists on fighting for annihilation.
Also:
It's time to deal finally and forcefully with Hamas' billionaire boys club in Doha. No more 'safe zones,' and no more cheap talk. These people run the Iranian proxy army that killed dozens of Americans on October 7 and kidnapped several more, using them as leverage against Israel and the US. The only message Hamas and all of the other Iranian toadies will understand is utter destruction. So let's quit pussyfooting around and give them a demonstration that they will never forget.
And:
Enough is enough. This war won't end without the utter annihilation of one of the belligerents, because the belligerent most likely to lose an all-out war keeps trying to annihilate the one who keeps cutting deals. After twenty years of this, the game should really be over, and WWII rules should apply -- utter destruction or complete capitulation. The Gazans have to be forced to choose, since they keep choosing war.
Oxymoron
Under Article II, the concept of an “independent executive agency” is an oxymoron. Executive powers are vested in the President. For liberals, lack of accountability is a feature, not a bug. But it is not what the Constitution contemplates.
Your Laptop, Please
In Germany, it is a crime to insult someone—even a politician!—in public, and even more so on the internet. So is anyone being prosecuted for insulting leaders of the Alternative For Germany, the reviled anti-immigration party? Oddly, the 60 Minutes reporters never asked that question.
The 60 Minutes narrator says, “We were with state police as they raided this apartment,” looking for evidence of posting a “racist cartoon.” In German, “state police” is Gestadt Polizei. I’d swear I’ve heard that phrase somewhere before. You could shorten it into something catchy…
If the rest of us see echoes of the Third Reich in these efforts to criminalize wrongthink, the Germans themselves—consistent with their reputation—seem blind to the irony.
Green Grifters in Retreat
The tide has turned on “green” energy, which in fact is devastating to the environment. Every day, we are seeing a return to common sense and a re-prioritization of affordable and reliable energy. This obviously is the philosophy of the Trump administration, but the same thing is happening around the world. And, in a sign of the times, Greta Thunberg has moved on from being grotesquely wrong about energy to being grotesquely wrong about the Middle East.
The ACLU is Trash
Did you know that the Constitutional role of the federal bureaucracy is to prevent the elected President of the United States--the CHIEF Executive--from doing things that he was elected to do?
That is the legal opinion of the ACLU, which also argues that the First Amendment requires the censorship of Americans' speech by the government and that sterilizing and mutilating pre-pubescent children is a human right.
Math: Enemy of the Green Grifters
Around the world, green fantasies are colliding with reality. What may save us from an even more costly debacle is the fact that the tech industries have, out of necessity and because they employ people who can multiply and divide, switched their allegiance from Green to Keep the Lights On.
A President of the United States of America
So what is the Trump administration supposed to do when it finds that an executive branch agency is wasting money, engaging in corrupt practices, or spending resources in ways that actually undercut the administration’s policies? According to the Democrats, nothing. Once Congress has appropriated money to USAID or any other agency, the Trump administration has no option but to spend it—and, apparently, to spend it in the ways that the unelected bureaucrats in that agency choose.
Of course, if you look at the appropriations bill that covers USAID, you will see no reference to transgender operas. Nor will the phrase “transgender comic book” appear. USAID’s funding is allocated in broad categories that sound noble. But where the money actually goes, Congress has no idea.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has talked about this. When he was in the Senate he tried to exercise oversight over USAID. Employees of that agency would appear before his committee, and he would ask them how money in a particular category was being spent. Where is this money going? Who is being paid, and for what purpose? And the USAID witnesses would refuse to answer. They didn’t have to say; they were independent.
That is a constitutional absurdity and a policy outrage. And it also is one of the reasons why Democrats love the fourth branch. They use vague appropriations to enable spending for which they would never want to take responsibility. Can you imagine a Democratic House member trying to explain to constituents why he voted to fund a transgender opera in a foreign country? But no such explanation ever becomes necessary. The fourth branch is shrouded in secrecy and “independence.”
If you take seriously the fact that the President runs the executive branch—indisputable, under Article II—then, if the president learns that money is being wasted, that an agency has gone rogue, that its officials are pursuing policies that contradict those of the administration they serve—the president’s duty is to stop it. Stop the spending, fire the employees, neuter the rogue agency.
Of course it is true, as the Democrats say, that the President doesn’t have the power to abolish an agency that Congress has created. Thus, for example, President Trump cannot, by executive order, abolish the Department of Education. But he can run the Department of Education, and if that department is spending resources in ways that are wasteful or that contradict his administration’s policy goals, he can stop or redirect that spending.
The Democratic Party press has the current crisis exactly backward. The fact that President Trump is asserting control over the federal employees who work for him is a natural, if long-overdue, return to constitutional norms. The idea that the executive branch is somehow beyond the control of the president is the real crisis, one that has been long in the making. Ultimately, the Supreme Court will sort out the respective powers of Congress and the President with regard to the agencies that are established by Congress. In the meantime, President Trump needs to continue to assert his constitutional responsibility for the executive branch.
More here.
But I Was Told Musk Being Unelected is a Threat to Democracy
Those grants and subsidies that truly go to life-saving activities not covered by statute could be brought to Congress. Elected representatives and senators could then look at those activities and fund them through either a budget resolution or a separate statute. In fact, that's how a democracy-based constitutional republic is supposed to work. Self-governance means decisions that send $50 billion annually should be made by people with direct accountability to voters, not by unelected and sinecured bureaucrats issued [sic] blank checks who believe that the officers elected by the people have no control over those decisions -- in either the legislative or executive branches.
So Atwood and Democrats in the House and Senate are free to introduce bills in both chambers to specifically authorize grants to specific organizations. That would require them to defend such spending, as well as the recipients of those grants. It would also allow all of us to know where our money goes and the purposes for which it will be used. We won't need a platoon of twenty-something data-scientist geniuses to brute-force a deliberately opaque system to get the kind of transparency that self-governing republics require.
Wanna bet that Democrats wouldn't dare to float a majority of these grants and recipients publicly?
More here:
All of this ignores an obvious point: Congress could restore funding for any worthy efforts at USAID that the administration has terminated. They could earmark those funds in the State Department budget (now that Congress has re-enabled that process) or fund it with direct legislation. There are no legitimate reasons that the funds for worthy projects should have to come out of a slush fund that defeats accountability, both fiscal and political. That is precisely how spending is supposed to function in our constitutional system of self-governance, in fact.
They're Enemies of the Civilized World
No, the problem is not that evacuating the Palestinians from Gaza is cruel or unfair--although arguably, it is the latter. It's that the Palestinians have proven to be political and social poison wherever they settle. Ask the Jordanians. Ask the Lebanese. Wherever large numbers of Palestinian "refugees" settle, chaos and death follow.
Where Palestinians go, wars follow. And I am not referring to Israelis fighting Palestinians--that is a given because Palestinians are committed to killing Israelis until the state no longer exists. No matter where Palestinians settle--in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Europe, or the United States--they are trouble for the ruling regime.
Next Step
What I don’t know is how detailed Congress’s AID appropriation is, and how much latitude the administration has to shift dollars away from counter-productive, left-wing ideological fantasies and toward spending that advances American foreign policy, or at least does some charitable good.
Destroy Big Wind
One of the most felicitous aspects of the new Trump administration is its determination to drive a stake through the heart of the zombie wind industry. Because it is an absurdly inefficient and unreliable way to generate electricity, wind power was doomed from the start. But the Trump administration is seeing it off.
Old School
I don’t think “counter terrorism” works long-term, no matter how good you are, when the entire population supports terrorists. It then requires a much less surgical approach designed to break the will to fight, a la World War II.
Defeated By Basic Math. Again.
Spontaneous battery combustion is just one of many reasons why the ballyhooed “energy transition” will never take place. The Manhattan Contrarian, who, inconveniently for the Left, is able to multiply and divide, explains why batteries are so central to “green” energy. An enormous amount of battery storage would be needed for wind and solar energy to be remotely feasible as principal energy sources.
