Category: Stupid O’ The Day

Obama Judge Goes Full Theater Kid, Declares It ‘Unconstitutional’ for Trump to Pull Security Clearances

As lower and district court judges continue to one-up each other with absurd usurpations of clearly stated executive authority, another contender has entered the ring.

U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled on Friday night that the President of the United States does not have the power to pull government security clearances from Perkins Coie, a private law firm. Yeah, that would be the same Perkins Coie that worked with Democrats to gin up the Russian collusion hoax. 

In her order, Howell decided that quoting Shakespeare was appropriate. I guess our judiciary is full of theater kids.

“No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue in this lawsuit targeting a prominent law firm with adverse actions to be executed by all Executive branch agencies but, in purpose and effect, this action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,’” Howell wrote in the 102-page order on Friday. 

Howell alleges that the Trump administration violated the First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments, with her basic argument being that the executive order in question amounted to illegal coercion. In arguably politicized fashion, she went on to express animosity toward the law firms that cut deals with the administration to keep their clearances.

All of this will undoubtedly and justifiably seem ridiculous to onlookers, regardless of what legal arguments may or may not actually exist. Control over security clearances is a vested power in the executive branch, and if the president decides he doesn’t want a law firm that literally targeted him on behalf of Hillary Clinton to have access to classified materials within his administration, one would think he should be able to do so.

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Looks like ‘Stop Drop & Roll’ didn’t cut it for the jihadi.
Orange car in the lower right center

CBS Environmental Journo Slams Trump EPA: We Have ‘Less Than 10 Years’ to Save Planet.

During the “By the Way” segment on Friday’s CBS Mornings Plus, CBS environmental correspondent David Schechter decried the Trump Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Administrator Lee Zeldin by giving away the game on the climate alarmists by reupping a line that’s been deployed for at least five decades, which is we have “less than ten years” to save Earth from climate change.

Co-host Adriana Diaz twice teased his appearance and spelled doom about what deregulation at the EPA would mean, ominously wondering “what” the “big changes at the EPA” “could cost you” as the “administration…mak[es] good on the President’s campaign promise to roll back climate protections.”

 

With the liberal media, any and all regulations are nearly always seen as a benefit and for our own good, not a hassle.

“[O]ne of the things the EPA will now, ‘reconsider’ is what its press release calls a burdensome greenhouse gas reporting program where thousands of companies have to submit their emissions levels. Zeldin said the agency would try to undo a total of 31 environmental regulations from rules governing wastewater to emission standards. The Trump administration has also…revealed plans to shut down the EPA’s Environmental Justice Division,” she added.

Schechter came out swinging with the apocalyptic analysis that Zeldin has changed “the way we interface with the environment” as the EPA has decided it has “nothing” to do with “the environment or ensuring “we have clean air and…clean water.”

He continued with the claim Zeldin doesn’t want to “talk about the environment and why we need to keep it clean and why climate change has become such an existential threat with increased floods and fires and droughts and how the EPA has a role in trying to make sure that we control that and contain that.”

Moments later, he dropped the tiresome claim about having less than a decade or we’re goners:

I think the biggest risk is that we have a small window to deal with climate change, really. It’s getting smaller and smaller, less than 10 years, to sort of level out and reduce our emissions and we had and have currently a lot of rules that deal with that. To throw those all out would undo a lot of progress that’s been made to try to reach these new standards for our country and for the world. And we will lose our opportunity to really get ahead of this problem or even stay current with the problem.

Co-host Tony Dokoupil next summarized Zeldin’s view of the EPA as “if companies save money by not having to report a bunch of things that are a waste of time, they can take that saved money and make the energy process cleaner.”

Schechter was obviously not having it because, you can’t trust non-governmental parties to behave (click “expand”):

SCHECHTER: I don’t know if, I guess if that’s your reading of that claim, I think that’s an interesting way to look at it. You know, companies, corporations, many of them do, do the right thing and do spend a lot of time on their environmental issues and reporting and things like that, but, you know, the government’s job is to set a level playing field, if that’s how you view the government’s job, to set a level playing field with regulations so that everyone is following the same rules. Some companies do get in trouble when they get ahead of their competitors and they have rules that are maybe more stringent than what their competitors have. And then the market kind of catches up to them and they take a lot of criticism for being too far ahead of the pack. So, you know, having stoplights and roads and, you know, rules of the road, is what keeps everybody sort of moving in the same direction. That’s the idea of the EPA. That’s the power of the EPA. And to say we care about the earth and we care about clean water, that’s what we’re going to do, is one thing, but to look at what they did and want to cut 31 important regulations is really what you should be looking at.

DOKOUPIL: It’s interesting. Yeah, but this is the claim from the EPA press release. Hundreds of millions of dollars saved could better be used, “to improve and upgrade environmental controls to have a noticeable impact and improvement on the environment.” We’ll see what happens.

DIAZ: Yeah.

SCHECHTER: Yeah.

DIAZ: And if companies take it upon themselves to try to make that environmental improvement without the regulations.

This Friday segment actually capped three days of rage at CBS.

Rolling back to Thursday, senior White House and campaign correspondent Ed O’Keefe appeared on both CBS Mornings and the Plus editions to say the EPA will now be “rolling back…regulations” that said “greenhouse gasses are bad for public health[.]”

And, on Tuesday, CBS Evening News co-anchor Maurice DuBois said the agency was doing away with red tape “aimed at protecting public health and fighting climate change.”

Co-anchor John Dickerson commiserated with former Obama EPA official Matthew Tejada a half-hour later on CBS Evening Plus.

Tejada went full doomsday and fearmongerer by saying Zeldin’s announcement was “taking us back to the 1960s, from before the times when we had regulations that actually cleaned up our water, protect people from across our country, from cancer-causing agents in our air, actually cleaning up legacy contamination sites that people had been living on top of for generations.”

 

 

Tejada further vented the Trump administration will “tak[e] us back to that time when we didn’t have regulation” in which Americans won’t be “healthier” as they’re purposefully “allowing polluting industries” to “hav[e] absolutely unfettered ability to pour their pollution into our communities[.]”

Always a pompous partisan, Dickerson invited Tejada to go further (click “expand”):

DICKERSON: And Matthew, one of the announcements today said the agency is, quote, “reconsidering the 2009 engagement finding.” Help us understand what that means.

TEJADA: Yeah, that was the endangerment finding. That was the finding that basically unlocked the authorities of the Environmental Protection Agency and our federal government to start combating climate change. We have seen repeatedly how our climate is changing on a regular basis and having devastating consequences, not just in our country, but across the world, how it is causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damages every single year. They’re taking us back to not even square one, to the one decision that allowed us to start to make the slightest progress that was then supercharged during the last administration through the Inflation Reduction Act, another regulatory progress that we made recently. It is taking us back in time, just like all these other decisions are taking us way back to an era when we were suffering from pollution in every part of this country.

DICKERSON: And let me ask you now, finally, Matthew, about the environmental justice offices. Remind us about — define environmental justice for us and what you think will now happen as a result of these policies.

TEJADA: So environmental justice has worked for decades to make sure that every part of our country, especially those parts of our country that have not had the power to keep pollution out of their community and to bring in the positives of a clean environment, of green space, of natural resources. Those are black and brown communities. Those are indigenous communities. Those are low-income white communities. Those communities that have not had a power to actually be protected from environmental pollution. The environmental justice program at EPA worked every single day to make sure that those communities felt heard by their government and to bring their voices back into government to make it respond and serve those people too. And they are gutting that program today as we speak.

To see the relevant CBS transcripts, click here (for March 12’s CBS Evening News Plus) and here (for March 14’s CBS Mornings Plus).

Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva dead at 77. “Grijalva, D-Ariz., died of lung cancer-related issues on Thursday

The Fall of the USS Gettysburg.

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

At around 0300, on Sunday, 22 December, the Aegis cruiser USS Gettysburg (CG 64) shot down an F/A-18F preparing to land on USS Harry S Truman (CVN 75) while operating in the Red Sea.  The Carrier Strike Group to which each of these units was assigned was an element of the U.S.-led Operation Prosperity Guardian, assigned to protect Red Sea merchant traffic from Yemen-based Houthi attacks.

First, we all need to understand that there is only one man who knows what happened on that day, and that is the commanding officer of Gettysburg.  Apart from the F/A-18F crew, which possesses a very small but critical piece of the puzzle, everyone else is just an observer, a post-exercise armchair quarterback.  Having said that, while Gettysburg’s captain knows what happened in terms of the detailed, incredibly complex sequence of events, unless the failure was the result of discrete, identifiable human error, he may not, in the immediate aftermath, understand why certain things did happen. For example, if systems or off-ship persons failed to operate as advertised, he wouldn’t know exactly why those systems or persons failed. That level of detail may only be revealed in the post-mortem.

Slowly, those pieces are being put together, and each day more is understood as to what happened. That is a good thing, because this was a combat-level laboratory, in which strengths and weaknesses were on real-world display.  This was a night which should be closely studied, and learned from, against future nights in which the missiles are flying.

Here’s the problem: By the time that the Navy, writ large, understands all the errors and failures that contributed to this particular chain of events, a standard strategy may well have been enacted, i.e., “Nothing to see here, folks.  Move along.”  You see, the Navy doesn’t like to discuss “family business” with taxpayers, who may ask awkward, and potentially embarrassing, questions. It is much easier to pin the tail on one specific, commanding officer donkey.

During the first decade of this century, the commanding officer a ship was referred to, by the staff of Commander Naval Surface Forces, as “the sacrificial captain,” and for good reason.  Holding one person up to the public, as the single point of failure in any specific disaster, forestalls further, probing questions that often don’t have easy answers.

In the end, this may mean that larger systemic issues remain unresolved. Rather, blame is often placed at the door of the ship in question, and everyone else who might have been, in one way or another, complicit, simply moves out of the blast pattern until it’s safe to go back to exactly what they were doing before.

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Observation O’ The Day:
I assume you’ve noticed that the lying dems almost unanimously shake their heads “no” as they’re saying “yes” to almost every lie they tell. this is a perfect example.

He likely doesn’t care how he’s thought of, as he thinks his pension and benefits are sacrosanct. Well. I’d give him pause to consider that at Courts Martial where he could wind up ‘dismissed’ (that’s the same as a Dishonorable Discharge for the enlisted ranks) and the loss of all pay and benefits. Not to mention a long term at the Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.

In the day of the internet, which records and keeps everything, these moron politicians still think they can gaslight people

Tony Blinken Tells Congress ‘No One Anticipated’ Taliban Takeover of Afghanistan.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified before Congress on the Biden administration’s chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal in a long-awaited hearing that was originally scheduled for September. Though he claimed that “no one” in the Biden State Department anticipated the Afghan government’s swift collapse, a group of diplomats warned Blinken of that very prospect roughly one month before the Taliban captured Kabul.

“Even the U.S. government’s most pessimistic assessments did not anticipate that the Afghan government and security forces would collapse so rapidly in the face of Taliban advances,” Blinken told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday.

Twenty-six diplomats, however, sent Blinken a dissent cable in mid-July 2021—one month before the fall of Kabul and six weeks before a suicide bombing attack killed 13 American servicemembers—warning of Afghanistan’s rapid deterioration. Asked why he ignored that cable, Blinken responded, “Very simply because no one anticipated the government and Afghan forces would collapse as quickly as they did.”

Blinken’s appearance comes nearly two months after the Biden official was set to testify before the House committee in late September. But Blinken failed to attend the hearing, defying a subpoena in the process, and only agreed to testify after the November presidential election. Blinken also missed a May deadline to turn over withdrawal-related internal documents, which were requested under subpoena.

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Sedition, Insubordination, Conduct Unbecoming. In a time of war; Treason.
This sort of thing must be rooted out and the bureaucraps fired, those on active duty who took part relieved, and those who may not have been on active duty (retired), recalled and face courts martial. The military must be completely subordinate to the elected constitutional national command authority and follow their legal orders or what we’ll wind up with is a military hunta akin to the praetorian guard of the roman empire who decided who the next emperor would be after disposing of the last one.

Sorry, We Can Only View This Secret Pentagon Meeting as a Plot to Foment an Insurrection

John Frankenheimer directed a movie called Seven Days in May in the 1960s, starring Kirk Douglas as a military officer who uncovers a coup against the president of the United States by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who signed a deeply unpopular nuclear disarmament treaty. That’s a movie. In 2024, the Pentagon brass plotted to countermand President-elect Donald J. Trump’s orders. If we’re going by the Left’s rules here, this is an insurrection. It’s a military coup. What’s worse is that these anti-Trump meetings were held in secret and then got leaked to the media (via CNN):

Pentagon officials are holding informal discussions about how the Department of Defense would respond if Donald Trump issues orders to deploy active-duty troops domestically and fire large swaths of apolitical staffers, defense officials told CNN.

Trump has suggested he would be open to using active-duty forces for domestic law enforcement and mass deportations and has indicated he wants to stack the federal government with loyalists and “clean out corrupt actors” in the US national security establishment.

[…]

“We are all preparing and planning for the worst-case scenario, but the reality is that we don’t know how this is going to play out yet,” one defense official said.

Trump’s election has also raised questions inside the Pentagon about what would happen if the president issued an unlawful order, particularly if his political appointees inside the department don’t push back.

“Troops are compelled by law to disobey unlawful orders,” said another defense official. “But the question is what happens then – do we see resignations from senior military leaders? Or would they view that as abandoning their people?”

CNN’s Scott Jennings tore apart these unelected bureaucrats yesterday. We’re back to the same Deep State games, but this time, Trump, with no re-election ahead of him, can go hard and fast to rid the Pentagon and any agency of troublesome government workers who think they’re above the law and not accountable to the will of the people. The illegal orders narrative is also ridiculous, soaked in the anti-Trump hysterics that have engulfed the Left.

Secret meetings on thwarting a duly elected president are not a good look.

Time and time and time again, “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” and other similar words are being used as excuses to dumb down educational standards. Here are 24 examples.

By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)

October 15, 2024

Time and time and time again, “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” and other similar words are being used as excuses to dumb down educational standards.

Here are 24 examples:

1) The New York Times wrote, “The Board of Regents on Monday eliminated a requirement that aspiring teachers in New York State pass a literacy test to become certified after the test proved controversial because black and Hispanic candidates passed it at significantly lower rates than white candidates.”

Original: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/nyregion/ny-regents-teacher-exams-alst.html?_r=0

Archive: https://archive.ph/GzyQM

2) The New York Times wrote, “A 2009 Princeton study showed Asian-Americans had to score 140 points higher on their SATs than whites, 270 points higher than Hispanics and 450 points higher than blacks to have the same chance of admission to leading universities.”

Original: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/opinion/white-students-unfair-advantage-in-admissions.html

Archive: https://archive.ph/MEDXn

3) Patrick Henry High School, San Diego’s largest high school, cited “equity” as its reason for removing some of its classes in advanced English, advanced history, and advanced biology.

Original: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/education/story/2022-04-10/san-diegos-largest-high-school-quietly-eliminated-several-honors-courses-parents-are-outraged

Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20220410124259/https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/education/story/2022-04-10/san-diegos-largest-high-school-quietly-eliminated-several-honors-courses-parents-are-outraged

4) The Vancouver School Board cited “equity and inclusion” for why it got rid of its honors courses in math and science at its high schools.

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