Idiot Math

Townhall 

Math is hard when you’re a kid. My kids – ages seven and eight – are learning math. Some days are good, others not so much. By the time you’re an adult, however, you should have it down. If you still have to take off your shoes to count higher than 10, someone failed you in life along the way. They failed you big time. Oh, and you’re likely a Democrat.

In the morass of all the news stories about just how broke the country is and how we’ll never, ever get out from under the crushing national debt, there are still things that make me laugh.

I love seeing stories where Democrats promise to “protect Medicare and Social Security” from those greedy Republicans. They never actually say how it is that those mean GOPers are planning to “rob” either of those programs because that would be a pretty neat trick, since they’re both beyond broke. That’d be like coming away with a bag full of money from robbing a vacant lot where a bank stood 30 years earlier. That would be a neat trick.

But some people, mostly Democrat voters, love going to town hall meetings to scream, “Keep government’s hands off my Medicare!” They really don’t understand how or when the program was created, nor do they have the foggiest idea how it is paid for or how it works.

The panic Democrats instilled in seniors any time a Republican mentioned the idea of changing Social Security for people under 40 – doing something crazy like allowing people to invest a tiny percentage, like two to three, of their own money into the stock market has always been met with shrieks. “THE DOW JONES INDUSTRIAL AVERAGE IS TOO VOLATILE” or “THIS IS A PAYOFF TO THEIR RICH DONORS!” they always yell.

When President George W. Bush suggested allowing this in the mid-2000s, Democrats freaked out. The Dow was around 10,000 then; now it’s almost 50,000. Do you think your “Social Security Trust Fund Account” saw that kind of growth over that same period of time?

But Democrats “protected” you from that horrible, horrible fate. Make sure to thank them in the voting booth next November.

There are, sadly, people who do think they’ve been protected by Democrats this way. Weirdly, Democrats like Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went from being wealthy to being incredibly super-rich in that same time period through the stock market. Very few people would have had the level of return that Nancy conned her way into, but no one has anything, thanks to her.

Democrats seem fine with this. They don’t do math very well, even basic addition and subtraction.

This level of ignorance of basic things benefits Democrats in immeasurable ways. U.S. Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14 raises millions of dollars each year because of her high profile and her ability to whine about how she’s “being targeted by the GOP” and “please help her fight back!”

The GOP has no shot at all in New York’s 14th District – AOC has won with 78 percent of the vote in 2018, 71.6 percent in 2020, 70.6 percent in 2022, and a real squeaker with just 69.2 percent in 2024. At this rate, AOC will lose to a Republican by 2144!

Still, every week she’s out there shaking down dumb Democrats to go further into credit card debt so she can live like royalty off their money.

Remember stories of how former U.S. Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell (CA-14) was paying his “wife” to take care of their kids? That money was coming out of campaign funds. Why? Why not? Your illegal alien nanny, your wife, your degenerate kids, siblings, sycophants, whatever – toss them all on the payroll. Like the Bidens, it’s less of a career and more like a family reunion.

They all do it because they all make the rules that govern themselves. Go out to dinner, talk about the campaign for a minute and boom: out comes the campaign card. Want to go somewhere, even Europe? Have your campaign set up a fundraiser for ex-pats there and it’s all covered. It doesn’t matter that your opponent doesn’t stand a chance or the other party isn’t even going to put a name on the ballot against you, raise the money and live the dream.

You can’t just steal it; it has to be “legitimate,” but they get to define what that word means. 

And in their wake is a long list of suckers. The best cons are the ones where the marks don’t even know they’ve been taken, and the Democrat donor class is the very definition of that. Their math and civics teachers owe them a refund.

Podcast thread for April 16

 

too crazy

Trump’s Hostile Takeover of the World?

American Thinker 

Eminently quotable writer James Howard Kunstler sized up President Trump’s play in Iran a couple months back by concluding, “The art of the deal is not for sissies.”  That line aptly describes Trump’s whole presidency, doesn’t it?  

Trump makes moves that scare people.  Even his friends and allies require an occasional pause to digest exactly what he may or may not be planning.  When he threatened to “end” Iran’s civilization, did the president mean that literally?  Or was that his way of maximizing the size of the stick he held in his hands, while Pakistan played peacemaker with a ceasefire carrot?  Only time will tell.  

It does feel as if more Americans have come to accept that they must take a “wait and see” approach with the most unorthodox president of their lifetimes.  One of the few real American journalists writing today, Salena Zito, described Trump astutely back in September 2016 when she observed, “The press takes him literally but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously but not literally.”  Her insight — as succinct as it is clever — remains part of our cultural wisdom to this day.  

While CNN and MS-NOW-(What’s Its Name?) suggested to their dwindling audiences that Trump was about to drop nuclear bombs on Iran last week (a country about seven times larger than the United Kingdom), most Americans with common sense understood the president to be putting maximum rhetorical pressure on the surviving members of Iran’s Islamic terrorist regime.  

On the other hand, sometimes President Trump sends in Delta Force operators to black-bag narco-terrorist dictators in the middle of the night (How badly do you think Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro wishes he could go back and choose wealthy exile over solitary confinement in an American prison?).  A good poker player can’t bluff all the time.  Sometimes the cards have to back a confident bet.  

When it comes to handling adversaries of any kind, Trump enjoys keeping everybody guessing.  It makes him unpredictable.  His unpredictability leaves opponents unsettled.  While they’re looking left and right and turning around frenetically to see whether the president might be coming up from behind, Trump usually surprises them with a blow directly to the face.

That terrifies leaders all over the world who are not used to a street-brawler in the White House.  They would much prefer an American president who carefully unclasps his Rolex watch and daintily removes his dinner jacket before making any quick moves.  Instead, they get Trump — who comes out swinging, landing haymakers, throwing uppercuts, and knocking out teeth.  

Having President Trump in the White House reminds me of a scene in the Winston Churchill biopic, Darkest Hour.  Churchill is drinking during a working lunch with King George VI, and he tells the king that he has always been “unwanted” in parliament.  “Perhaps it’s because you scare people,” the king replies.  “Who?” Churchill asks.  “You scare me,” the king insists.  “What nonsense,” Churchill retorts, before asking, “What could possibly be scary about me?”  King George VI answers directly, “One never knows what’s going to come out of your mouth next.  Something that will flatter, something that will wound…”  

That movie came out in 2017, in the first year of President Trump’s first term.  It probably could not be made today.  Firstly, as the United Kingdom turns itself into an Islamic kingdom, rejects its historical achievements, and “cancels” it great historical figures, Winston Churchill has become persona non grata in the nation he singlehandedly saved from becoming a Nazi vassal state.  Secondly, a lot of people who watched that movie immediately recognized the similarities between Churchill and Trump.  

The former governor of Arkansas and current U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, walked out of the theater in December 2017 and immediately made the comparison in a series of social media posts: “Churchill was hated by his own party, opposition party, and press.  Feared by King as reckless, and despised for his bluntness.  But unlike Neville Chamberlain, he didn’t retreat.  We had a Chamberlain for 8 yrs; in @realDonaldTrump we have a Churchill.”  Recommending the movie to Americans, Huckabee complimented both Churchill and Trump by arguing that this is “what real leadership looks like.”

Members of the “elite” corporate press did not like Huckabee’s comparison of former President Barack Obama to former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain — the man whose arrogance, sense of entitlement, and fondness for appeasement betrayed his moral weakness and inability to do tough things.  But those “elite” propagandists were absolutely horrified that anyone with a significant number of social media “followers” could link Churchill to Trump.  People all over the world rightly remember Churchill as one of the twentieth century’s most consequential world leaders.  How could anyone, Hillary-supporters complained on cable news, see that kind of greatness in Donald Trump?

Ordinary moviegoers, on the other hand, understood exactly what Huckabee was saying.  Sure, Trump and Churchill have obvious differences.  Churchill was a functional alcoholic; Trump has been a teetotaler all his life.  Churchill spent most of his adulthood in debt and probably avoided bankruptcy only because of his celebrity; Trump is a billionaire.  Churchill was married to his wife, Clemmie, for fifty-seven years; Trump has been married three times.  For all their differences, though, these two men share a lot in common.

As was true of Churchill, President Trump has a larger-than-life personality that sucks up the oxygen from every room he enters.  Both men changed political affiliations over the course of their lives.  Churchill was comfortable insulting political foes, telling uncomfortable truths, and changing his mind whenever necessary.  He frequently argued against the prevailing opinions of his time, even when doing so made him unpopular.  Although, by title and privilege, Churchill was an Establishment “insider,” his independent nature, sometimes-abrasive personality, and fearless defense of controversial positions made him a consummate “outsider.”  It is not difficult to see why so many people went into movie theaters to see Winston Churchill brought back to life in the Darkest Hour and exited with the realization that there was something downright Churchillian about President Trump.

Perhaps the quality that most links these two world historical figures, though, is their willingness to fight while all around them are flailing.  Trump’s critics spend a lot of time accusing him of instigating chaos.  But there is an undeniable consistency to the policy objectives he pursues.  In his first term, he set America on a trajectory to be an energy powerhouse.  While Europe commits economic suicide by refusing to develop its own natural resources in its misguided war against the weather, Trump has pursued a relentless “Drill, baby, drill” policy.  He’s managed to partner with Venezuela both to enlarge America’s access to hydrocarbon energies and to block China from exploiting resources in the Western Hemisphere.  With the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed and energy exports from the Middle East severely crippled, the United States and the Russian Federation are best positioned to navigate the economic consequences.  

Will the energy crisis across Europe make the European Commission more or less likely to find a reasonable way to end the Russia-Ukraine War?  Will the energy crisis in China provide a new incentive for Xi Jinping to help the United States bring Iran to heel?  Will more people begin to realize that President Trump’s dismantling of Iran has as much to do with preparing for war with China as it has to do with establishing a new regional order in the Middle East?

Here’s the simple truth for corporate news mouthpieces too lazy or too fake to understand President Trump’s motivations: The man is always negotiating.  While his adversaries scream and shake their heads, Trump is preparing for the next hostile takeover.  Kunstler said it best: “The art of the deal is not for sissies.”

America cannot survive unlimited birthright citizenship

America cannot survive unlimited birthright citizenship

The Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment was never intended to reward transient foreigners, diplomats, or invaders who enter without consent.

Brian Lonergan for American Thinker

As the Supreme Court weighs challenges to President Trump’s executive order limiting automatic citizenship for children of illegal aliens and temporary visa holders, America stands at a constitutional crossroads. If sanity and common sense prevail, the justices will recognize what generations of anti-borders advocates have obscured: birthright citizenship, as currently practiced, was never meant to be a global entitlement.

The 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause was a surgical remedy for the unique injustice inflicted on freed black slaves and their descendants — not a blank check for the world’s opportunists. Unless the Court restores its original meaning, this misapplied policy will accelerate the erosion of everything that makes America worth defending.

The historical record is unambiguous. Ratified in 1868, the 14th Amendment’s first sentence — “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens” — was drafted to overturn the Supreme Court’s odious Dred Scott decision, which had declared Black Americans non-citizens.

The clause was drafted to protect a specific group fully subject to American sovereignty — freed slaves who had lived their entire lives under the Constitution’s authority, owed it allegiance, and possessed no competing loyalties to other countries. It was never intended to reward transient foreigners, diplomats, or invaders who enter without consent. The phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” was the escape hatch precisely to exclude those whose primary allegiance lay elsewhere.

Yet today that escape hatch has been welded shut by judicial fiat and politicians with sinister motives. The 1898 Wong Kim Ark decision extended citizenship to the child of legal Chinese immigrants domiciled in the United States — but even that ruling hinged on lawful permanent residence and full subjection to American law, not tourist visas or illegal crossings.

Modern birth tourism and illegal alien births represent a grotesque perversion of that narrow precedent. Wealthy Chinese, Russian, and Middle Eastern elites pay up to $50,000 for “maternity hotel” packages that include apartments, private doctors, and airport shuttles. Their American-born infants receive passports they treat as luxury accessories, while the parents return home to enjoy the strategic option of future U.S. sponsorship, education subsidies, and welfare access.

This exploitation is a moral insult to the legacy of freed slaves. The 14th Amendment was purchased with the blood of 360,000 Union dead and the sweat of four million emancipated Americans who had been denied every right of citizenship under Dred Scott. Their descendants fought for generations to make that promise real — through Jim Crow, lynchings, and civil rights marches.

To watch that hard-won inheritance commodified by foreign nationals who treat American soil as a maternity ward is to cheapen the very sacrifice that secured it. The freedmen’s citizenship was an act of justice and national reconciliation. Birth tourism is a scam against the American people. It turns the Constitution’s most transformative promise into a loophole for global elites and lawbreakers alike.

The downstream consequences are catastrophic. When hundreds of thousands of new citizens annually owe their status to a passport lottery rather than shared language, history, or values, the culture begins to fray. Bilingual ballots, ethnic enclaves, and demands for foreign-language instruction in schools are symptoms of decline, not signs of strength.

Each anchor baby is entitled to public education, emergency Medicaid, and eventual chain-migration sponsorship of extended family once they turn 21. Every hospital delivery, every public-school desk, every welfare check represents resources diverted from citizens whose ancestors built the system now being gamed.

Most dangerously, birthright citizenship erodes American exceptionalism itself. The United States has always defined citizenship by consent and allegiance, not blood or soil alone. We are a propositional nation whose strength rests on the rule of law, individual liberty, and the deliberate choice to fully participate in American society. Granting citizenship automatically to the offspring of those who reject that choice — illegal entrants or short-term visitors — turns sovereignty into a birthright for foreigners and renders citizenship meaningless.

The Supreme Court now has the chance — and the duty — to correct a century of misinterpretation. Overturning the expansive reading of birthright citizenship is not radical. It honors the freed slaves whose struggle birthed the clause, halts the birth-tourism scam that insults their memory, and reasserts that American citizenship is a privilege of the sovereign people. Failure to act will not preserve some abstract ideal of openness. It will speed the transformation of the last best hope of earth into just another crowded, factionalized, overburdened state that is culturally unrecognizable and fiscally bankrupt. In other words, no longer exceptional. We owe future generations more than that.

Brian Lonergan is director of strategic communications and content at the Federation for American Immigration Reform in Washington, D.C., and co-host of the “No Border, No Country” podcast.

Image: Pixabay // Pixabay License

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Study: Trump Cut Bloated Legal Immigration By Bigger Numbers Than Illegal Crossings

The Federalist 

A new report from the Cato Institute shows Trump has not only delivered on illegal immigration — he’s delivering on legal immigration too.

“The cut to legal entries was 2.5 times as large” as the cut to illegal entries, David J. Bier wrote in his report, noting that illegal entries have also fallen under Trump. But “cuts in legal immigration broke the trend of rising legal immigration from 2021 to 2024.”

While the report counts asylum claims processed at official ports of entry as part of “legal” immigration and therefore inflates the “legal” category, the data still shows a sharp decline in traditional pathways used in mass migration.

The report shows that refugee admissions have dropped roughly 90 percent, with roughly 12,500 refugees having been admitted in late 2024 compared to just 1,300 admitted by March of 2026. Notably, the Trump administration has adopted a refugee admission policy that balances sustainability and cultural cohesion. Trump also capped refugee admissions to 7,500 per year, meaning only about 500 refugees can be admitted each month.

Asylum claims at legal ports of entry fell a whopping 99.9 percent after the president scrapped the CBP One App, according to the report. Put another way, there were around 40,000 asylum claims made in December of 2024, and just 26 made in February of 2025. Bier notes other aliens trying to enter at legal ports of entry (known as “inadmissible”) “also fell in 2025.”

The Trump administration has also cracked down on green cards, restricting targeted countries and paused the Diversity Visa lottery, according to Bier. As a result, permanent immigrant visas are down “by about half.” Bier estimates that the Trump administration’s decision to end immigrant visas for 40 different countries resulted in “one in five immigrant visa applicants” being denied.

“These bans affected half of all legal immigrants coming from abroad, including half of all spouses and minor children of US citizens,” Bier reported, noting that visa issuances for people from non-banned countries also did not increase.

H-1B visas are also down by roughly a quarter compared to 2024 levels. Notably, the president instituted a $100,000 fee, potentially deterring petitions. As Bier reports, the State Department has indicated that the new fee “led to an 87 percent decline in petitions for workers outside the United States.”

In addition, international student visas plunged by 40 percent in peak summer months year-over-year. When it comes to mass illegal migration, the president closed the southern border down and effectively ended releases into the interior, the report noted. “Gotaways” have also plummeted.

None of this is to say that more work can’t be done when it comes to immigration, with more deportations of illegal aliens being concern No. 1. But these numbers would have been unfathomable just two years ago — and completely impossible with a Democrat in office.

Democrats Can’t Update Their Script On The Iran War To Incorporate New Realities

Notice that events are developing.

The Federalist 

Democrat Sen. Chris Murphy appears to know just one thing, and that one thing is that Donald Trump is very bad. To Murphy, all events prove this. No other conclusions are possible. Someone ran a red light in Enid, Oklahoma, this morning, and a diner in Michigan ran out of whole milk during the breakfast rush: You see, Trump is a danger to America.

And so, at this exact moment, Murphy proposes to stop Trump’s “insane war,” a war that has very tenuously paused for peace talks and a ceasefire. Loudly and with great theatrical zeal, he proposes to stop a thing that is stopped.

It’s like a man who runs into the theater, ignoring the empty stage and the house lights and the audience walking to the exits, and announces that he’s come to stop the show.

Democrats have done this before. The American military raided Caracas on Jan. 3, then left. No war resulted. No hostilities continued. Days and then weeks later, congressional Democrats were still engaged in meaningless theatrics, boldly declaring their intention to stop Trump’s war in Venezuela. Which didn’t exist.

They were fighting ghosts, or the noises in their own heads.

Wars mature. A bunch of stuff happens, and no one understands the action, because of the inherent chaos of large-scale violence. “The fog of war.” But then we arrive at inflection points, and maybe the fog parts, just a little. We get some modest clarity on murky things that have been happening in an atmosphere of sustained uncertainty.

Without saying that we can know all of this, because war is the enemy of certainty, a few new realities seem to be emerging. First, the Iranian strength of controlling the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint is turning out to work both ways. Kharg Island, the critical oil production center for the Iranians, is 300 miles north of the strait, inside and above it. The chokepoint isn’t just a chokepoint that Iran can impose on the world — it’s both things, a chokepoint Iran can impose that can be imposed on Iran. The Iranian economy can be strangled by the same chokepoint. The Trump administration, imposing a naval blockade on the strait that Iran was blockading, just identified that reality with brutal clarity.

A bunch of military axioms focus on the way that the risks of combat bounce and echo. “If the enemy is in range, so are you,” and “tracers work both ways.” You can oppose the war, or doubt the wisdom of starting it, and see that both sides face risk from fighting it. The risks for Iran are emerging, and the way they play out remains to be seen. A bunch of professional military planners at CENTCOM probably know what they are.

Update your cognitive maps, or you end up like Chris Murphy. Senate Democrats now scream that they intend to end Trump’s war, while Trump … says that he intends to end Trump’s war. Events continue. Last week’s talking points won’t work this week. It’s also probably way too early to say, as people seem to enjoy saying, that Iran is a disaster just like Vietnam.

The ending of the war remains unclear, and the ceasefire might turn out to only be an operational pause before fighting resumes. Or it might presage a fragile and messy peace, or it might precede a lasting peace made on reasonable terms. But notice that events are developing. And if you get a chance, mention that simple fact to Chris Murphy.

The Danger of Allowing Good Intentions to Override the Constitution

The Danger of Allowing Good Intentions to Override the Constitution

Wanjiru Njoya for Mises.org

Walter E. Williams often made the point that a policy should be judged by whether it works, not by its good intentions. This warning is especially important because politicians are experts at declaring good intentions. If we judge them by their stated intentions alone, when their schemes end in disaster they could simply remind us that they meant well. Unfortunately, Professor Williams’s warnings went unheeded.

In their book Who Killed The Constitution, Thomas E. Woods and Kevin R.C. Gutzman make a very similar argument about the irrelevance of good intentions. In evaluating the constitutionality of a law or policy, whether it is constitutional or not is an entirely separate question from its good intentions. Too often, people are quite happy to endorse unconstitutional laws or unconstitutional government action if they believe it is “good” or, at least, if they think the motivations behind it are good and reflect what “should” be done.

This strikes at the heart of the increasingly hostile debates between North and South in the 1840s and 1850s. Given that slavery was morally wrong, and the radical abolitionists of the North were motivated by good intentions in desiring to abolish it immediately, did it matter what the Constitution said? Jefferson Davis of Mississippi insisted on the principle of constitutional government and the supremacy of the law. By contrast, the Radical Republicans of Massachusetts, led by Charles Sumner, insisted on what they judged to be the morally right thing to do. In his Senate speech on “The Barbarism of Slavery,” Sumner said,

Look at [slavery] in the light of principles, and it is nothing less than a huge insurrection against the eternal law of God, involving in its pretensions the denial of all human rights, and also the denial of that Divine Law in which God himself is manifest, thus being practically the grossest lie and the grossest Atheism.… Barbarous in origin; barbarous in its law; barbarous in all its pretensions; barbarous in the instruments it employs; barbarous in consequences; barbarous in spirit; barbarous wherever it shows itself, Slavery must breed Barbarians, while it develops everywhere, alike in the individual and in the society to which he belongs, the essential elements of Barbarism. 

Identifying who the “barbarians” are is all well and good as a moral principle, but as a principle of government it is unsatisfactory. In addition to the somewhat apocalyptic framing—after all, nobody wants to co-exist peacefully with barbarians—it does not answer the question of what is to be done if all sides regard each other as barbarians. It could only lead to endless war, each side trying to crush the barbarians. The whole point of constitutional government is that the constitution provides a foundation for the resolution of disagreements.

A similar constitutional question arose in a case discussed by Woods and Gutzman, concerning racial segregation in schools in the Jim Crow era. Given that the Supreme Court regarded racial segregation as abhorrent and wished to end it immediately, did it matter what the Constitution said? The problem with the constitutional position on racism during Jim Crow was the same as the problem with the constitutional position on slavery in the 1850s—these things were increasingly regarded as immoral but were not unconstitutional.

One way to answer these questions is to “read” the Constitution as if it aligns with whatever may happen to be the perceived good outcomes of the day. It would entail reasoning backwards—deciding on the “right” moral or political outcome and then interpreting the words of the Constitution to fit that outcome. This is easier to accomplish than many might think, and activist courts are adept at this.

The Fourteenth Amendment is an example of how easily this can be achieved. The meaning of this amendment, as understood today, bears little resemblance to its meaning at the time it was put forward by the Radical Republicans. The goal of the Radicals, at the time, was to ensure that there would be no challenge to the constitutionality of their civil rights bill which was intended to safeguard the rights of freedmen to vote and to enjoy all the rights of citizens without being encroached upon by their states.

The Radicals expressed no intention to achieve racial integration or racial amalgamation. Indeed, this would have been a rather startling goal given that, as Brion McClanahan points out in his book The Jeffersonian Tradition, the Republican Party in 1860 campaigned in Wisconsin under the slogan, “Down with amalgamation!” and “Separate the Races!” Moreover, black people could not vote in many Northern states, including Connecticut. Yet today, it is confidently asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment not only outlaws racial segregation, but in fact requires diversity, equity, and inclusiveness.

The problem with reading the Constitution to mean whatever may be deemed desirable is obvious. As the “right” outcome varies widely depending on who is trying to achieve it, the “meaning” of the Constitution in turn varies widely. We are expected to believe that the words mean first one thing, then the very opposite. Accepting this strategy simply means that those in power can do whatever they want and retrofit the meaning of the constitution to validate their actions.

It would be more honest to acknowledge that the Constitution is being overridden by the desire to do the right thing, in favor of pursuing some “higher” moral goal. In addition to being more honest, this has the merit of sounding principled. We know that laws, and even constitutions, can be morally wrong, and that obeying bad law is no justification for causing harm to others. But again, we encounter the obvious problem—anyone can declare that they are driven by the pursuit of higher moral goals and, therefore, they do not have to follow the law. If that is all that is needed to override the Constitution, there might as well not be a Constitution.

A further strategy would be to announce that the case is exceptional, and that while the constitutional rule would normally apply, the exigencies of the case require an emergency response that is not strictly permitted by the Constitution. Again, the problem is obvious. It provides an incentive for policy makers to lurch from one “emergency” to another in an endless series of “exceptions.” As Woods and Gutzman argue,

To make exceptions for government actions that seem “right” but aren’t consistent with the Constitution is to make arbitrary, and quite dangerous, distinctions. Doing so breaks “the chains of the Constitution” that, in Jefferson’s memorable phrase, are needed to “bind down” politicians. Once we allow the government to go outside the bounds of the Constitution, we have created a precedent for other extraconstitutional actions later.

Alas, the government’s next move might not seem so “right” or desirable.

Constitutional theorists have grappled with these problems for centuries without coming to any simple solution. The obvious thing to do is amend the Constitution. This is what Chief Justice Taney suggested in the Dred Scott case. He acknowledged that moral and political opinion in America had changed since the foundation of the Union, and suggested that the correct thing to do if it was sought to confer citizenship on freedmen was to amend the Constitution. The problem is obvious—the Southern states could not be persuaded to ratify such an amendment with no practical solution provided to address their concerns about emancipation. These concerns were of no interest to the abolitionists, who were driven by what William Dunning referred to as “moral fervor.” Even after the war, the vanquished Southern States still could not be persuaded to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. This amendment was, in the end, never properly ratified.

Ultimately, the better solution would be to limit the power of the state by devolving decision-making as much as possible into the hands of ordinary citizens. This is no guarantee of perfection, but it avoids the problems caused by concentrating unlimited power in the hands of a demagogue or a rogue government.

Pentagon Is Ramping Up Plans for a Potential Military Operation Against Cuba

Townhall 

President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have not hidden that Cuba is next. We removed Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is gone, along with most of his regime. Cuba is next. Even the older communists on this island nation post-Fidel are starting to rattle their sabers a bit, with its president claiming he’s not afraid of the United States. He has to say that, though I believe most people in Cuba, which feels like a time capsule, know they would be overwhelmed quickly. 

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Operation Ortsac—Castro spelled backward—was the planned invasion of the island if military force became necessary to remove Soviet missiles. It might not be back on officially, but USA Today reports that the Pentagon is allegedly ramping up:

Military planning for a possible Pentagon-led operation in Cuba is quietly ramping up, in case President Donald Trump gives an order to intervene there, USA TODAY has learned.

Two sources familiar with the order spoke to USA TODAY on condition of anonymity because they're not authorized to speak to media.

The directives appear to be an escalation of recent tensions between the U.S. and Cuba that began in January when the Trump administration curbed oil shipments to Cuba as part of a broader campaign to force sweeping political changes on the communist-run island. 

USA TODAY has reached out to the Department of War and U.S. Southern Command for comment.

[…]

The United States and Cuba acknowledged they are in the early stages of trying to find a way out of the crisis, but it's not clear how much each side is willing to compromise. In March, USA TODAY reported the two countries had been in discussions to sign a possible historic economic deal that would thaw relations.

It would be nice to get the casinos back in Havana. Just saying. 

Conrad Black - US and Catholic Church must maintain a united front against ‘the Antichrist of our time’

 

The intemperate exchange between President Trump and Pope Leo XIV over the weekend said nothing flattering or even positive about either of them. The Pope knows perfectly well that the deranged Iranian theocracy is violently hostile to Christianity and that the fiercely pursued ambition of that regime to arm militant Islam with atomic weapons capable of being fired at the principal European cities, including Rome, is a menace to all mankind, and certainly to everything traditional to Christianity. He had absolutely no business identifying the attitude of the Iranian government as a pacifistic one in relationship to the United States.

What might have possessed him to imagine that antagonising the President of the United States could be a sensible or even justifiable use of the great moral and practical authority of his office certainly escapes my imagination, as a thoroughly practising Roman Catholic (converted from atheism many years ago), all of whose natural instincts are deferential to the Pope.

For Leo to express his preference for a peaceful resolution of the problems between Iran and its neighbours (extending 4000 km in all directions to accommodate the range of the missiles on which it is trying to fit nuclear warheads), is quite in order. For him to demur from the more bellicose of President Trump’s threats against Iran is comprehensible though it is a trespass of pontifical moralising into the stylistic expressive tendencies of the world’s foremost secular leader. The Pope could have been expected to be aware that when Trump was talking about “eliminating” a “civilisation” this was tactical hyperbole, since he was threatening the destruction of hydro electric generation plants and bridges and not mass murder of civilians of the kind that the Holy See should have been much more explicit in condemning when it actually occurred, particularly under the Third Reich.

As a strong though not uncritical supporter and long-time friendly acquaintance of President Trump, I also regret his intemperate responses. It is simply not appropriate to urge the Pope to “get his act together.” The Vice President, JD Vance, who led the American negotiators with Iran at Islamabad, did a good deal better on Fox News, speaking as a coreligionist of the Pope, for whom he expressed personal admiration. Leo should not have implied that recourse to direct hostilities had been unjustified or hinted at moral equivalence between the world’s principal terrorism-sponsoring state whose entire raison d’être is one of sectarian and racial hatred and unlimited violence, and the world’s principal democracy. The United States has done more to preserve Judeo-Christian values than any government or other entity in the world including the Roman Catholic Church for the last 110 years. The Pope, as an American, is well aware of this, including the liberation of Rome by the United States Army and its reception of a benediction of gratitude from Pope Pius XII from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica on June 5, 1944.

Naturally, and it is fair to assume that this was not something the Pope intended or would approve, Trump’s domestic enemies clutched the hem of the Pope’s garments and swaddled themselves in ecclesiastical sanctimony. The CBS television program 60 Minutes, a long time spigot of anti-Trump bile, gathered together three haemophiliac bleeding-heart cardinals, Tobin of Newark, McElroy of Washington, and Cupich of Chicago, to amplify the scurrilous theme that Trump was fundamentally irreconcilable with the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church, which represents almost a quarter of Americans, including Melania Trump.

Cardinal McElroy claimed on the weekend that the US-Israeli attack on Iran was not a justified act of war, an assertion he knows to be false, given the countless murderous provocations by Iran and its promise to exterminate Israel as a Jewish state if it achieves nuclear military capabilities. Cardinal Cupich infamously minimized the horrible problem of deviant sexual exploitation of seminarians and children by many Roman Catholic clergymen as “another problem like climate change”, and recently proposed a lifetime Catholic achievement award for Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, one of the most militant proponents of unlimited access to abortion in American public life.

Both the Pope and the President of the US are entitled to misspeak and to utter injudicious reflections. And a vast organisation like the Roman Catholic Church has representatives that can be found to say almost anything. But both the Pope and the President and all who serve them have an obligation, especially in a time of crisis such as this, to avoid unnecessary abrasions between themselves. Despite many shortcomings, inanities, compromises, and even tragic misjudgements, the United States of America and the Roman Catholic Church are two of the mightiest pillars of Western civilisation and their leaders have an obligation to maintain as unified a front as possible against forces that can accurately be described as the Antichrist of our time.

https://brusselssignal.eu/2026/04/us-and-catholic-church-must-maintain-a-united-front-against-the-antichrist-of-our-time/

Trump Just Reasserted American Power for the Next 100 Years

Townhall 

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller declared President Trump’s actions in Iran a “total resetting of the American power dynamic for the next 100 years,” arguing that the U.S. has not only severely weakened the Iranian regime and its military, but also continues to shape its behavior throughout the ceasefire through the American blockade of its ports and ships

This is what President Trump’s foreign policy has been about. For too long, we have relied on negotiations and limited uses of force. The Trump administration is making it clear that the United States is here to win and lead, and will do whatever it takes to achieve its objectives.

"Never listen to a Panikin, Jesse. You will do very well in life, ignore the Panikins, right?" Miller said Tuesday in an interview with Fox News. "They were the ones who warned of calamity in Venezuela and ended up being one of the greatest single foreign policy, military, geopolitical maneuvers in world history. What you're watching now in Iran with the implementation of this blockade is the total resetting of the American power dynamic for the next 100 years."

"President Trump is saying, we, the United States, have the world's not just most powerful military, most powerful Navy," he added. "And whoever controls the seas is able to control the outcomes in any foreign policy showdown. And so President Trump has put Iran in a box. He's played the checkmate move."

And so now, no matter what path Iran chooses, America wins. If Iran chooses the path of a deal, then that's great for the world. That's great for everybody. If Iran chooses the path of economic strangulation by blockade, then the world will pass Iran by. New energy routes will be established. New supply chains will be established. Other nations throughout the region, throughout the world, and especially America, will power the world. And Iran will become a footnote.

"So that's the choice Iran has," he continued. "And President Trump has put America into a win-win posture. You know, they accuse the president of having no strategy. He's just kind of flying by the seat of his pants. You look at Venezuela. You look at drill, baby, drill. You look what's happening with Iran and the Strait, and now China, Indonesia, the deals we've cut with the Japanese and the South Koreans. It does look like there's a strategy to counter the Chinese and make America energy dominant."

Miller went on to explain why Democrats and other panicans simply can't acknowledge the president's win.

Why don't they accept that? If I can see it, well, they should be able to see it, too. Because it's a total discrediting, Jesse, of the corrupt politicians and corrupt systems that brought America to its knees. Our wealth, our treasure, our power has been bled from us for 50 years. We won World War II, and then we decided that we were going to get rid of the Department of War.

We were going to get the Department of Defense, and we were going to have a politically correct foreign policy. And we sent away our jobs, we sent away our wealth, we sent away our industry, and we gave other countries a chance to compete against us. President Trump has used trade policy, energy policy, manufacturing policy, and, yes, hard military power to ensure another century of American dominance.

Not only has American strength been reasserted, he argued, but it is also good for America at home.

"And what's important for your viewers to understand is our quality of life that we have in America is purchased by American strength," Miller said. "The reason why our GDP per capita blows every other nation out of the water is because of American strength. That's why we're able to enjoy the life that we enjoy, but it was threatened as never before until President Trump said, we are going to be a proud, powerful, mighty nation again. And that's what you're seeing right now play out in the Middle East."