Political-Paige
3 hours ago edited
Roberts and the majority of the Court have ignored their first obligation: to adhere to the Constitution, in favor of an obligation they created out of whole cloth: to protect at all costs inferior court judges by abrogating any semblance of judicial restraint.

Every time they duck the elephant in the room by pretending these ruling are well-intentioned misinterpretations of the Constitution, rather than the blunt usurpation of Article II power by a rogue and adversarial branch, they further degrade what's left of our checks & balances. They are a constitutional wrecking ball.

Their intentional misinterpretation of the unlawful actions of lower courts has upended 250 years of constitutional stability. The other two branches either rein them in by reminding that that enforcement is the prerogative of the Executive alone, or the Republic is nothing more than a dictatorship of unelected thugs.

The Constitutional crisis is already here. //

COUltraMAGA
3 hours ago
The only court co-equal with the executive branch is US Supreme Court.

That’s it.

All other courts have been created by the legislative powers of congress and can be curtailed, thinned, or eliminate by congress.

It’s time for Johnson and Thune to get heads cracking and draft reconciliation bills that require simple majorities to chain up or whittle down these idiots.

It’s Russia-gate and Impeachment-gate part 2.0 this time around. And I’m sick of it.

Insurrection Barbie
@DefiyantlyFree
·
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🧵🧵This thread shows how $4 Trillion in Federal Funds Were Funneled Through Leftist NGOs to Enrich Activists, Mobilize Voters, and Power Anti-Trump Protests—With Receipts

This is maybe the most important thread I have ever done. It explains how the two biggest pieces of legislation from the Biden administration filled the coffers of all of these activist groups that have been engaging in the Trump 2.0 resistance. From GOTV efforts, to Anti-Tesla protests to the legal battles against Trump.

The Center for American Progress (CAP), founded by Clinton ally John Podesta, is more than a think tank—it’s the strategic command center for the modern Left. Under Biden, CAP helped orchestrate the biggest activist cash grab in U.S. history: $4 TRILLION.
12:45 PM · Apr 24, 2025

Insurrection Barbie
@DefiyantlyFree
·
Follow
Replying to @DefiyantlyFree
Let’s be clear: these aren’t apolitical charities.

•Indivisible was built to oppose Trump.

•Sunrise led sit-ins to demand Biden go further left.

•Faith in Action and EDF advocate openly for progressive legislation.

And they’re all funded by your tax dollars—thanks to Podesta’s CAP and their policy-to-grant pipeline. This is government-funded activism, hidden behind a green mask.
12:45 PM · Apr 24, 2025

Insurrection Barbie
@DefiyantlyFree
·
Follow
Replying to @DefiyantlyFree
This is what they mean by “saving democracy”:

•Billions to leftist orgs

•Massive GOTV ops under federal cover

•Protest movements
subsidized by taxpayers

•Power concentrated in NGOs that answer to no one
12:45 PM · Apr 24, 2025

When you install a fresh, clean copy of Windows – say, if you're switching to the LTSC edition – Ninite is here to kickstart provisioning the new OS.

Ninite is a very simple, but very clever, tool that automates the process of installing a user-configured suite of apps and runtimes onto Windows. Not only will it help you get up and running as quickly and easily as possible, but if you keep the tiny custom installer, you can re-run it later and it will update everything it originally installed to the latest version. //

If you're also missing some important device drivers, Snappy Driver Installer Origin can help you there, as we have described previously. With LTSC there's much less need for O&O AppBuster but O&O ShutUp10++ makes it trivially easy to turn off most Microsoft telemetry.

The folder, typically c:\inetpub, reappeared on Windows systems in April as part of Microsoft's mitigation for CVE-2025-21204, an exploitable elevation-of-privileges flaw within Windows Process Activation. Rather than patching code directly, Redmond simply pre-created the folder to block a symlink attack path. //

For at least one security researcher, in this case Kevin Beaumont, the fix also presented an opportunity to hunt for more vulnerabilities. After poking around, he discovered that the workaround introduced a new flaw of its own, triggered using the mklink command with the /j parameter.

It's a simple enough function. According to Microsoft's documentation, mklink "creates a directory or file symbolic or hard link." And with the /j flag, it creates a directory junction - a type of filesystem redirect.

Beaumont demonstrated this by running: "mklink /j c:\inetpub c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe." This turned the c:\inetpub folder - precreated in Microsoft's April 2025 update to block symlink abuse - into a redirect to a system executable. When Windows Update tried to interact with the folder, it hit the wrong target, errored out, and rolled everything back.

"So you just go without security updates," he noted.

Trump issued the order on March 25, 2025, and Ward Clark gave us an overview of what's in it:

The EO discusses the integrity of voter registration:

Within 30 days of the date of this order, the Election Assistance Commission shall take appropriate action to require, in its national mail voter registration form issued under 52 U.S.C. 20508:

(A) documentary proof of United States citizenship, consistent with 52 U.S.C. 20508(b)(3); and

(B) a State or local official to record on the form the type of document that the applicant presented as documentary proof of United States citizenship, including the date of the document’s issuance, the date of the document’s expiration (if any), the office that issued the document, and any unique identification number associated with the document as required by the criteria in 52 U.S.C. 21083(a)(5)(A), while taking appropriate measures to ensure information security.

And, there is a section strong-arming the states into strictly abiding by federal election laws:

The Election Assistance Commission shall, pursuant to 52 U.S.C. 21003(b)(3)and 21142(c) and consistent with applicable law, take all appropriate action to cease providing Federal funds to States that do not comply with the Federal laws set forth in 52 U.S.C. 21145, including the requirement in 52 U.S.C. 20505(a)(1) that States accept and use the national mail voter registration form issued pursuant to 52 U.S.C. 20508(a)(1), including any requirement for documentary proof of United States citizenship adopted pursuant to section 2(a)(ii) of this order. //

On Thursday, Kollar-Kotelly issued a 120-page memorandum opinion in support of her order granting the plaintiffs in the LULAC and League cases a preliminary injunction, prohibiting the administration from giving effect to section 2(a) of the order (requiring proof of citizenship in the national mail voter registration form). //

anon-15qo
15 minutes ago
Article II, Sec. 3, ...he [president] shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,...
Article I, Sec. 4, of the Constitution gives states the responsibility of overseeing federal elections.
Amdt. 15, Sec.1, The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude–
Amdt. 19, The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Amdt. 24, sec. 1, The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.
Amdt. 26, sec. 1, The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, those of us who have spent years being censored, suppressed, and shadow-banned were hopeful that maybe things would finally change. And even when he brought on the Community Notes program, we thought, 'Ok, this is users holding one another accountable. This is better than Twitter Lefties nuking us because they could.'

But then we started seeing people abuse Community Notes ... and it's so much worse than we realized. //

Using multiple accounts to sabotage posts on X. Sadly, it sounds like new Twitter is a lot like the old Twitter, they're just sneakier.

So let me get this straight. If parents don't want their child enrolled in a curriculum that teaches them about sexuality and transgenderism, the burden should be on them to homeschool? All those taxes they pay to fund the public school system should just be voided? They get no say whatsoever?

Returning to the core issue, why is it this important for public schools to talk about topics that violate the religious principles of some parents? Does LGBTQ ideology really trump religious liberty? It doesn't, but Jackson thinks it does, and that's a scary proposition. Imagine a court with a few more justices in her mold, and where that would leave the country.

Consider what else her ridiculous argument could apply to. A hospital denying care based on race? That would be fine, according to Jackson, because the patient could just provide themselves with care. Of course, we all know she would never agree with that because this isn't about logical consistency. It's about partisanship and propping up a specific worldview. Remember, this is the same woman who made her "Broadway debut" in an LGBTQ play. //

Matt Whitlock @mattdizwhitlock
·
Justice Kavanaugh with the most important point of the day:

“They’re not asking you to change what’s taught in the classroom. They’re only seeking to be able to walk-out so their children aren't exposed to things that are contrary to their own beliefs.”

2:13 PM · Apr 22, 2025 //

As I said before, I'd argue this stuff shouldn't be in schools in the first place, but that's not even the issue here. Yet, Jackson still wants to trample on the rights of parents and spit on religious liberty. So is her motivation stupidity or worse? I'll let you be the judge of that.

Dr. Allan Josephson worked for nearly 15 years as chief of the University of Louisville's Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology, when he made a “mistake” that would cost him—he dared to speak up about so-called transgender surgeries and the harm they inflict upon young people.

For that terrible crime, he was demoted and eventually fired.

Revenge is best served cold, however, and now the university has agreed to a tasty $1.6 million settlement in the case.

If the average American were asked to point to the section of the U.S. Constitution granting the Supreme Court authority to execute immigration laws, chances are he would have a tough time finding it. Why? Because such a power doesn’t exist.

That pertinent fact didn’t seem to matter to seven justices on America’s highest court, however.

This past weekend, these justices took it upon themselves to usurp President Trump’s Article II powers over immigration enforcement by temporarily halting the planned deportations of dangerous Venezuelan gang members under the Alien Enemies Act. Released in the early hours of Saturday morning, the court’s one-page order arbitrarily directed the administration “not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court.”

The order provided no rationale for the decision, prompting Associate Justice Samuel Alito to pen a blistering dissent, in which Associate Justice Clarence Thomas joined. In addition to chastising the majority for “hastily and prematurely” granting emergency relief in a case still working its way through the lower courts, Alito laid out a bulleted list of everything wrong with the high court’s “unprecedented and legally questionable” actions. He notably wrote, “It is not clear that the Court had jurisdiction” over the matter, and, “Both the Executive and the Judiciary have an obligation to follow the law” (emphasis added). //

While hordes of illegals came across the U.S.-Mexico border, the Biden administration facilitated the placement of foreign nationals throughout the country in places like Springfield, Ohio, upending countless American lives in the process.

Some American families suffered great losses as a result of Biden’s open border policies. Illegal aliens who never should have been allowed to set foot in the U.S. to begin with took the lives of young girls like Laken Riley and Jocelyn Nungaray.

And yet, when Trump attempts to reverse this anarchy by lawfully utilizing his Article II powers and existing statutes to remove foreign nationals infringing upon America’s sovereignty, the courts interfere and tell him he can’t. That is patently absurd and illogical.

For one, the Constitution gives the authority to execute the nation’s laws to the president — not to the Supreme Court or any other lower court judge.

Secondly, the notion that the judiciary is “supreme” to the other branches directly contradicts the views of the Founding Fathers. As The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson recently explained, the founders “didn’t think the judiciary was the sole arbiter of what is and is not constitutional.” “While the courts, headed by the Supreme Court, indeed have an independent power to interpret and apply the Constitution,” Davidson wrote, “that doesn’t mean they are supreme over the other two branches, or the states for that matter.”

Alexander Hamilton even suggested in The Federalist No. 78 that the judiciary is to be considered the weakest of the three branches, as it “has no influence over either the sword or the purse, no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society, and can take no active resolution whatever.”

Indiana’s state treasurer repeatedly stood against big banks canceling accounts and releasing customer data of Christians and conservatives for viewpoint discrimination. A pending must-pass bill in Indiana’s Republican-run legislature would strip some of Treasurer Daniel Elliott’s powers and could give them to those same banks.

A measure currently part of state budget negotiations due to conclude April 29 would demote Elliott from manager of a $3 billion local government investment fund to one of a five-member board managing that fund. Three other members of the board would be banking executives. The fifth would be the director of Indiana’s Department of Financial Institutions, the state’s bank regulator.

The arrangement would create a financial conflict of interest because any bank stands to benefit from where these government funds are invested. The measure currently inside must-pass House Bill 1001 is being pushed by the Indiana Bankers’ Association

When you compare whatever you did to what happened at long-gone electronics chain Crazy Eddie, most malfeasance will likely pale into insignificance. Put another way, your infractions would likely be as noticeable as a miniature barnacle on the backside of a blue whale.

...The Antar clan emigrated from Syria, which Weiss says partly explains the grey attitude towards paying taxes. Indeed, scamming New York State of sales taxes was how the Crazy Eddie debacle started.

However, it was when Sam Antar learned the in-and-outs of Wall Street, finance and public accounting, that the fraud really ramped up. Gone was dodging sales tax. In was cooking the company’s books and going public. Sam Antar had figured out that the family could make even 1more money by falsely boosting profits to help push the stock price higher.

Once the fraud was exposed, and Eddie Antar was charged with securities fraud and insider trading, but fled the country, Sammy offered to testify as long as he had immunity. //

Since 2009, Sam Antar has been a forensic accountant, working with federal and local law enforcement agencies, teaching them what to look for in paperwork - and where to look for paperwork - as well as digging on his own time into waste, fraud, and abuse, always on the hunt for white collar crime.

He is a man on a mission.

And way back in February, while going through the records from Letitia James' 'luxury campaign spending,' as he calls it, Sam came across some wonky-looking personal finance filings. Things weren't adding up to the eagle-eyed Antar. //

After our recent investigations exposed New York Attorney General Letitia James’ pattern of luxury campaign spending and creative accounting, a deeper examination of her personal financial disclosures reveals troubling new questions about her property holdings and financial reporting.

The same pattern of obscured luxury that characterized her campaign spending now emerges in her personal financial statements, starting with a Virginia investment property that seems to defy financial logic. Purchased in August 2020, James values the single-family home at “$100,000 to under $150,000” in her 2023 financial disclosure. Yet somehow, this same property carries mortgages totaling up to $400,000 – potentially more than twice its declared value. //

Sam E. Antar @SamAntar
Memo to @NewYorkStateAG Letitia James: I know every trick in the book. Every trick that’s been left out of the book. And every trick you’re thinking about doing but haven’t done yet.
11:44 PM · Apr 21, 2025. //

When a guy's already done time for legendary crazy, there's not much he's going to worry about when he's on the right trail of wrongdoing.

This is gonna be sumpthin' to see.

Between October and December 2024, the airline did not have a single passenger involuntarily denied boarding, according to statistics published by the Department of Transportation.

In comparison, Ameican Airlines involuntarily bumped more than 3,200 people from its flights during the same period.

While European schools returned to teaching children in person, American schools and teachers' unions were demanding remote teaching and, once back in school, physical barriers between each student and HEPA filters in every classroom. Was there data backing up these demands? No, but there was a "source”: a 14-year-old girl. The daughter of a man named Robert Glass produced a 2007 computer “model” that claimed that in the event of a pandemic:

'closing schools and keeping students at home during a pandemic would remove the transmission potention... and would be effective at thwarting its spread within a community'.

The CDC was eager to adopt the Glass model as a standard. The CDC produced two policy reports using Laura Glass’s school project as a basis for closing America down. Using a dearth of hard data, the Glasses concluded that schools “form the backbone” of viral spread in an epidemic. Robert Glass claimed that by closing schools, businesses could stay open. Was this based on data? No, but the CDC used it anyway in two reports.

Contained in the CDC report(s) was a footnote. Zweig dove into the footnote rabbit hole. Six links later, he found the wellspring. The claim was based on nonsense:

“Our assumption is the 37% of transmission occurs in the contexts, with the within-school transmission coefficient being twice that of the within-workplace coefficient. However this choice is arbitrary” (page 25) //

Zweig also blames TDS. He notes that at one point, the American Academy of Pediatrics forcefully recommended that schools reopen. When Trump recommended the same thing, the Academy changed direction – U-turning soon thereafter (with the help of teachers' unions). It became a binary choice. If Trump recommended something or agreed with doctors, it must be “bad” (pages 147-149).

“An Abundance of Caution” is worth the time, but only if you are willing to read about a year-long trainwreck and how “experts” ruined lives.

Can't run Windows 11? Don't want to? There are surprisingly legal options

Windows 7 - updated to Jan 2020, Jan 2021, Jan 2022, or Jan 2023

Scheduled future adoptions:

Windows 10 v22H2 - Scheduled for adoption in October 2025

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The case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, revolved around Muslim, Christian, and Jewish parents from Montgomery County, Maryland. The county school board would not allow these parents to remove their elementary school children from portions of class actively advocating for things like gay marriage, trans-identifying children, pride parades, and the idea that a child can change his “gender identity” at any given moment.

Attorneys for the county board are claiming the purpose of the instruction was to simply engender “inclusivity,” and that the children who were being exposed to the material, ranging from pre-kindergarten to sixth grade, were only being shown that gay “marriages” exist. But that narrative was swiftly cut down by questioning from Justice Samuel Alito to parents’ attorney Eric Baxter, senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. //

The books and instruction materials themselves are incredibly controversial, particularly for the exclusively young and captive audience they are meant for in Montgomery County, and Justices Alito and Brett Kavanaugh were both perplexed as to how it became unfeasible for the schools to allow an opt-out choice for parents.

The county offers opt-outs for “virtually everything else under the sun,” said Principal Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris, who is representing the Trump administration on the side of the parents. But when it comes to force-feeding children gay and trans propaganda, the opt-out is “not administrable,” according to Schoenfeld. //

Justice Amy Coney Barrett took a different route, noting how Montgomery County’s policy is not one that simply exposes children to a concept, but rather relays a point of view as an unquestionable fact.

“It’s saying: ‘This is the right view of the world,’” Barrett said. “This is how we think about things. This is how you should think about things. This is like, 2+2 is 4.”

The school board also claims that there is no religious hostility in the requirement, but Justice Neil Gorsuch pointed to instances where board members said students were repeating their parents’ religious “dogma,” and expressing anger that the issue has some Muslim parents joining forces with others who they described as white supremacists and xenophobes.

Many conservatives have bought into this common notion that, while pornography is immoral, nudity in high art is permissible. Often, these arguments tie into the concept that truth, beauty, and goodness are interconnected. Because art conveys truth and beauty, it must also be good, even when it contains nudity.

Or so the narrative goes.

In What is Art?, Leo Tolstoy presents an alternative view. He addresses the common assumptions about nudity in art by questioning the truth, beauty, and goodness framework.

Is Art Good because it is True and Beautiful?
Tolstoy dismantles the Western assumption that truth, beauty, and goodness are inherently interconnected, an idea that stems from ancient Greek philosophy. Why, he asks, do we so willingly accept ideas about morality from the ancient Greeks? As he points out, they were far from a moral people.

Before we accuse Tolstoy of committing the genetic fallacy, it’s worth considering the pitfalls of conflating the three. In The Great Good Thing, Andrew Klavan remarks how humans often confuse symbols with the things they symbolize. For example, we love the actors because of the characters they portray and are tantalized by sex rather than the love it embodies. Likewise, beauty isn’t intrinsically good, but can be a symbol for goodness.

This is important to remember when evaluating art. Too often, we make the mistake of thinking that because an artwork is beautiful, it must therefore be good. Goodness naturally creates beauty, but not all beautiful things are good by default. Beauty can be imitated and used for evil as well as good. //

Tolstoy notes that the naked body is “precisely what one never sees and what a man occupied with real art hardly ever has to portray.” Even if art’s purpose is to imitate life, it is peculiar how overrepresented nudity is. There is more bare skin in a single art exhibit than most normal people will ever see in a lifetime. //

I’m not suggesting we take a sledgehammer to Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s masterpieces or erase every living memory of them off the internet. However, as we create art, we need to reevaluate our long-held ideas and assumptions. The fact that celebrated works from the past contain nudity doesn’t justify us including it in our films, literature, and other mediums. It’s time to reassess giving art a free pass just because it’s art.

economist and fiscal policy guru Daniel J. Mitchell has crunched the numbers. https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2025/04/21/improved-data-on-ronald-reagans-fiscal-performance/

In 2020, I crunched numbers from OMB’s Historical Tables to rank the fiscal performance of nine recent presidents, going all the way back to LBJ.

I was especially interested to see which presidents did best and worst when looking on overall domestic spending (entitlements plus discretionary).

The numbers showed that Ronald Reagan easily was the most fiscally prudent while Richard Nixon was the worst of the worst (though there’s an argument that LBJ was even worse when looking at the long-run impact of his policies). //

Mr. Mitchell also notes:

You have to go back to Harding and Coolidge to find presidents who were analogous to Reagan.

And there's a name I was not surprised to see: Silent Cal Coolidge. We could use a little Silent Cal today.