What President Donald Trump did in the Oval Office with the President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, was astonishing.

We hear people talk all the time about how, when we're talking with foreign nations, we should be pressing on human rights. Well, we got that, big time, from Trump, when he cornered the South African leader, lowering the lights and treating him to a video of evidence of the issues in his country. There wouldn't be a better time to do it, to promote change. The South African leader is there because he wants things. That's the time to say, okay, you want things, so do we, we want you to do something about what's going on.

This moment was interesting as Trump says he hadn't made up his mind yet on whether to term what's happening as "genocide," with President Ramaphosa at his shoulder. //

If it's not a genocide today, Jennings asked, how many more do we want to let get murdered before we're satisfied with the terminology? And it was a "boss move" for Jennings to note this, even as CNN was trying to call what Trump said "unsubstantiated" in the chyron underneath.

"We got the Olympics and then we got, through Johnny... we got the World Cup. We got them both. And I said, man, I won't be president! I got the Olympics and the World Cup [2026], and I won't be president, and they're gonna forget that I got them, nobody's gonna mention it, because you know, that's the way life is.

"And then they rigged the election. And then I said, 'You know what I'll do? I'll run again, and I'll shove it up their a*s.' And that's what I did. And all of a sudden, I then realized, I said, you know what? I got the Olympics. I got the World Cup, and I got the 250th. Look at the way this works out.

"So if they would have left us alone and wouldn't have cheated on the election and wouldn't have rigged it, I would have been retired right now. I would have been happily doing something else. And instead, they have me for four more years. Can you believe it?"

Girl patriot @Girlpatriot1974
·
Alice Marie Johnson, a 69-yr old grandmother, had her life sentence for a nonviolent drug trafficking offense commuted by Trump in 2018 after serving 21 years. Trump made her Pardon Czar Feb.2025.

"I had appealed to President Obama 3 times and had been turned down all 3 times."

11:34 PM · May 18, 2025 //

In addition to finding those people who deserve a second chance, Johnson wants part of her job to be to push for possibly outdated and antiquated laws that need to be changed. She also pointed out the fact that many people who don't have the money to navigate through the justice system are often caught in it, ... //

Johnson said she feels like she represents hope for those who may be in the same situation, and that "they will not be defined by the worst thing they have done in their lives." Lara Trump asked Johnson, "Would your story have been possible in any other country?"

Without hesitation, Johnson replied, "No, absolutely not. Only someone like President Trump could make my story possible."

Alice Marie Johnson summed up her life story with an undeniable truth: "I represent what America is all about: second chances..."

I reported how Pope Leo XIV greeted Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio after the Pope's inaugural Mass on Sunday. It was also interesting to see the Pope's brother sitting right next to Vance and his wife in the American delegation during the mass. Lou Prevost is a big Trump supporter and a fan of Vance, so that must have been fun. //

But the media was at it again, spinning away about the greeting. Check out this headline from The Daily Beast, painting the greeting as a "snub" on Sunday. //

Catholic Sat @CatholicSat
·
I love how Louis Prevost, the Pope’s brother, is now part of the US government delegation headed up by VP JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, having an audience with His Holiness Pope Leo XIV
7:50 AM · May 19, 2025. //

Retired Professor
an hour ago edited
Vance and Rubio sitting in front of the Pope's desk: "Boys, Sister Mary Oliphant has advised me that you two were running in the halls again."

Yesterday, James Comey caused quite the stir when he went on Instagram and posted a picture of a shell formation on the beach — obviously one he made — that spelled out “86 47,” which many interpreted as a threat on President Trump’s life.

Since then, everyone’s been arguing over the definition of “86.” As slang goes, it has a wide variety of uses, some of which are more innocent, such as when you run out of a menu item at a restaurant you “86” it or when you get kicked out of a bar for being too drunk or unruly you’re said to be “86’d.” But it is also been used by the Mafia and the military to refer to killing people, and well, it’s a little harder to swallow that the man who prosecuted the Gambino crime family wasn’t aware of its more sinister meaning.

However, it gets worse than that for Comey. After posting the offending shell photo, the very next post on Instagram was him posting the favorable Publisher’s Weekly review of his third crime novel, out next week. //

So let me get this straight, Comey’s book is about successfully prosecuting a right-wing commentator for making vaguely worded threats? Really? (Also, “Samuel Buchanan”? I guess “Patrick Francis” wouldn’t have been on the nose enough for his liberal audience.) //

Comey’s animus towards Trump is beyond well-established. He is not ignorant of what 86 47 means. Nor is he unaware of the fact that the president faced two assassination attempts in the last year. For all these reasons, an argument could be made that Comey is being shown grace by the Trump administration in merely being investigated by the Secret Service over a post obviously calling for his assassination to his followers.

If he is to be interviewed, as my colleague at RealClearPolitics Susan Crabtree has suggested may occur, one can bet he won’t be ambushed and trapped in a bid to do to him what his FBI did to Flynn. Odds are, Comey will enjoy the protections of a system that he did not afford his own political opponents and avoid prosecution.

If Comey were held to the standard that he and his fellow coup plotters and lawfare insurrectionists have held Trump, he likely would have been prosecuted many times over for his abuses of power; his leadership in what amounted to a conspiracy to destroy a president — including to systematically violate or deprive the commander in chief and those in his orbit of their rights; and his running of information operations against the American people aimed at interfering in our domestic politics and defrauding the country. //

Comey’s animus towards Trump is beyond well-established. He is not ignorant of what 86 47 means. Nor is he unaware of the fact that the president faced two assassination attempts in the last year. For all these reasons, an argument could be made that Comey is being shown grace by the Trump administration in merely being investigated by the Secret Service over a post obviously calling for his assassination to his followers.

If he is to be interviewed, as my colleague at RealClearPolitics Susan Crabtree has suggested may occur, one can bet he won’t be ambushed and trapped in a bid to do to him what his FBI did to Flynn. Odds are, Comey will enjoy the protections of a system that he did not afford his own political opponents and avoid prosecution.

"Democrats are learning … that Democrats can not only be the party of resistance."

"Like we resisted so hard between 2017 and 2024," Smith said. "We impeached the guy [Trump]. Like, we prosecuted him. Convicted him of 34 felony counts. And guess what, he still got elected. I don't know how much harder we can resist right now." //

Scott Jennings @ScottJenningsKY
·
I can't believe it. They finally admitted it on live TV:

The prosecution of President Trump was an organized effort by the Democratic Party "resistance."

Lawfare is real. The justice system was weaponized against President Trump.

5:39 PM · May 15, 2025 //

"Just to be clear, everyone that now touts the 34 felonies, take it from Lis, this was not a real case," Jennings said. "This was a plot to upend the presidential campaign. Which backfired." //

cupera1 Mildred's Oldest Son
13 hours ago
The Trump Soviet Union show trial in NY City is a Rube Goldberg legal construction that should not have worked. The original alleged crime is a simple misdemeanor under a New York law against falsifying business records. This law passed the Statute of Limitations over five years ago. The NY DA’s office looked at this case at that time and passed on it. Then Trump announced his candidacy to run for president and everything changed.

To defibrillate the case against Trump they claimed that misdemeanor, Penal Law Section 175.05, was connected to an alleged election violation felony. This secondary statues the prosecutors cite, state and federal election crimes, cannot and were not proven. The state law had also passed its statute of limitation years ago. Federal law can’t be tried in a state court. The FEC looked at this case and laughed at it.

The only way this trial against Trump could have worked was using “lawfare" for Democrats: Selecting a jury of anti-Trump partisans. Using known liars and perjurers to support the charges. Keeping Brady evidence from the jury, don’t want anyone to get a conscience. And a DNC judge with his thumb on the scales that made multiple reversible errors during the trial and violating Trumps 6th Amendment rights. We learned that Trump was going to be found guilty BEFORE the jury came back. Democrats applied the same legal philosophy of Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, head of the NKVD under Stalin "Show me the man and I will find the crime."

There is an apocryphal quote, often attributed to Abraham Lincoln. When asked if he did not want to destroy his enemies, Lincoln supposedly replied, "Isn't that what I've done when I've made them my friends?" That's an admirable notion, but such friendships should be tempered with caution. Still, business relationships have a way of pouring oil on troubled waters. It will be interesting to see what the Middle East looks like a year from now.

The idea of a language that consists entirely of allegories — of references to heroic tales and historical incidents — has been analyzed at some length by academic linguists. There is a peer-reviewed scientific paper called "Darmok and Jalad on the Internet." While there is no such language on Earth, we in fact use a lot of allegories in everyday speech. People speak of "Road to Damascus conversions" (Paul on the road to Damascus) and Washington at Valley Forge. Caesar at the Rubicon. We all know what these events were, and we know that we are not to take them literally, but as symbols of a sudden change in life's purpose, or having to endure extreme hardship on the way to victory.

Let me suggest that this is how President Trump's head works. He quite often speaks in allegories. When Trump says he wants to reopen Alcatraz, he is not referring to that overgrown rock in San Francisco Bay, but to the Alcatraz that we all know as the storied (and movied) cage for the worst of the worst, the place from which no one escapes. Everyone in our culture knows what Alcatraz is. If Trump had said he wants to expand Atwater, no one would have paid any attention. The Democrats and their media wouldn't have gone berserk. Trump's plea for prison expansion would have died right there. Instead we got several days of people telling us how stupid re-opening Alcatraz would be, followed by, "Well, maybe not Alcatraz, but how about expanding the SuperMax?" //

I suspect the Qatari jumbo jet is another allegory. He can get a new Air Force One from some backwater in the Middle East faster than he can from Boeing. In case people don't know this, it shouldn't be like that. (In fact, it isn't, and he almost certainly knows it. Turning a plain-vanilla 747 into a VC-25 would cost billions and take longer than waiting for Boeing.) But somebody needs to light a fire under Boeing, and he's trying.

In case you missed it, the below EO is a big deal. Trump is forcing the federal government to spell out everything that is a crime under federal law. The other thing the EO does is to force the government to add a "mens rea" element to most of these "crimes"; i.e., you have to be aware of the fact that you are committing a crime in order for it to be a crime.

Thus, if you decide to build a pond on your property and the EPA has some obscure regulation saying that is a crime, you would need to be aware of the criminal nature of the act before you did it in order to be guilty of anything.

This is great.

The whole EO is linked in my post below, but I wanted to call attention to one tangential aspect of it. The EO says:

"It privileges large corporations, which can afford to hire expensive legal teams to navigate complex regulatory schemes and fence out new market entrants, over average Americans.”

This is really important and is a theme I keep coming back to. Regulatory schemes like Dodd-Frank and the CFPB are created ostensibly to help the “little guy,” when in reality they create byzantine layers upon layers of compliance requirements that only mega-corporations can afford to navigate. Those sorts of laws are anti-competitive and hurt most of all the “little guy” they purport to help.

When you hear the likes of Bernie Sanders and Big Chief Lizzie Warren railing against the “oligarchy,” realize that they regulatory schemes they propose serve the oligarchy MOST OF ALL. In fact, Bernie and Lizzie and AOC are the oligarchs, not us.

Presidential Actions
FIGHTING OVERCRIMINALIZATION IN FEDERAL REGULATIONS
Executive Orders
May 9, 2025
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1. Purpose. The United States is drastically overregulated. The Code of Federal Regulations contains over 48,000 sections, stretching over 175,000 pages — far more than any citizen can possibly read, let alone fully understand. Worse, many carry potential criminal penalties for violations. The situation has become so dire that no one -– likely including those charged with enforcing our criminal laws at the Department of Justice — knows how many separate criminal offenses are contained in the Code of Federal Regulations, with at least one source estimating hundreds of thousands of such crimes. Many of these regulatory crimes are “strict liability” offenses, meaning that citizens need not have a guilty mental state to be convicted of a crime.

This status quo is absurd and unjust. It allows the executive branch to write the law, in addition to executing it. That situation can lend itself to abuse and weaponization by providing Government officials tools to target unwitting individuals. It privileges large corporations, which can afford to hire expensive legal teams to navigate complex regulatory schemes and fence out new market entrants, over average Americans.

The purpose of this order is to ease the regulatory burden on everyday Americans and ensure no American is transformed into a criminal for violating a regulation they have no reason to know exists.

Sec. 2. Policy. It is the policy of the United States that:

(a) Criminal enforcement of criminal regulatory offenses is disfavored.

(b) Prosecution of criminal regulatory offenses is most appropriate for persons who know or can be presumed to know what is prohibited or required by the regulation and willingly choose not to comply, thereby causing or risking substantial public harm. Prosecutions of criminal regulatory offenses should focus on matters where a putative defendant is alleged to have known his conduct was unlawful.

(c) Strict liability offenses are “generally disfavored.” United States v. United States Gypsum, Co., 438 U.S. 422, 438 (1978). Where enforcement is appropriate, agencies should consider civil rather than criminal enforcement of strict liability regulatory offenses or, if appropriate and consistent with due process and the right to jury trial, see Jarkesy v. Securities and Exchange Commission, 603 U.S. 109 (2024), administrative enforcement.

(d) Agencies promulgating regulations potentially subject to criminal enforcement should explicitly describe the conduct subject to criminal enforcement, the authorizing statutes, and the mens rea standard applicable to those offenses.

Sec. 3. Definitions. For purposes of this order:

(a) “Agency” has the meaning given to “Executive agency” in section 105 of title 5, United States Code;

(b) “Criminal regulatory offense” means a Federal regulation that is enforceable by a criminal penalty; and

(c) “Mens rea” means the state of mind that by law must be proven to convict a particular defendant of a particular crime.

Sec. 4. Report on Criminal Regulatory Offenses. (a) Within 365 days of the date of this order, the head of each agency, in consultation with the Attorney General, shall provide to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) a report containing:

(i) a list of all criminal regulatory offenses enforceable by the agency or the Department of Justice; and

(ii) for each criminal regulatory offense identified in subsection (a)(i) of this section, the range of potential criminal penalties for a violation and the applicable mens rea standard for the criminal regulatory offense.

(b) At the same time the head of each agency provides to the Director of OMB the report required by subsection (a) of this section, the agency head shall publicly post the report on its agency webpage.

Trump opened his speech with Lee Greenwood’s famous patriotic song playing. As the entire song played, the president stood on the stage before he took to the podium. //

After his speech, the president was joined on stage by the Saudi Crown Prince as the Village People's 1978 hit "Y.M.C.A." played in the background. Those in the room gave the president a standing ovation.

However, there was one noticeable difference at the speech in Riyadh because Trump did not show off his dance moves during the Village People’s hit. //

YMCA has topped the charts 40 [sic] years after its release thanks to an online dance sensation started by Donald Trump...

YMCA shot up the Billboard dance/electronic sales chart as polling day approached on Nov 5, and finally hit number one following Mr Trump’s victory the week of Nov 17.

Trump may be getting closer to Obama's recent policy.

ByABC News
August 29, 2016, 2:05 PM //

President Barack Obama has often been referred to by immigration groups as the "Deporter in Chief."

Between 2009 and 2015 his administration has removed more than 2.5 million people through immigration orders, which doesn’t include the number of people who "self-deported" or were turned away and/or returned to their home country at the border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

How does he compare to other presidents?
According to governmental data, the Obama administration has deported more people than any other president's administration in history.

In fact, they have deported more than the sum of all the presidents of the 20th century.

In July of 2024, the Biden/Buttigieg FAA moved control of the New York/Newark airspace from New York, also known as N90, to Philadelphia Tower, or the Philadelphia TRACON [Terminal Radar Approach Control Facility].

As part of the move, the STARS [Standard Terminal Automation Replacement System] system that processes radar data for Newark remained based in New York City. They didn't move it from New York down to Philly, where the controllers would be. Redundant and diverse telecommunications lines feed this data from New York to Philadelphia TRACON, where controllers handle New York arrivals and departures.

The Biden/Buttigieg bungled this move without properly hardening the telecom lines feeding the data, which was already well known to be error-prone. Without addressing the underlying infrastructure, they added more risk to the system. In fact, there were issues in October and November under Biden and Buttigieg that would have highlighted to the prior Administration that the underlying hardware would continue to cause problems. //

The incidents on April 28th and May 9th resulted in very brief outages that impacted the STARS radar data displays going down. The most serious of these outages lasted approximately 30 seconds. This includes the STARS radar data displays going down, again, for 30 seconds. The STARS displays took approximately 60 seconds, then, to reboot and come back online.

So there's been some discrepancy, 30 seconds versus 90 seconds.

The outage was 30 seconds, but then the displays took another minute to boot. That's where you get 30 and 90 seconds, but the telecom was out for 30 seconds.

The outage also interrupted the phone line and radio frequencies for a very short period. This is how controllers talk to pilots....These frequencies returned almost immediately, which is why you heard pilots actually telling airplanes that they couldn't see them with the radar. //

On Friday night [May 8] the FAA implemented a software update to prevent future outages. The software patch was successful, and our redundant lines are now both working. We know this because on Sunday there was an outage -- you all reported on that -- and the outage was -- the main line went down, but the redundant line did stand up, meaning our patch, our fix worked.

Now...the controllers who had seen this the prior two times, when they saw the main line go down, they were concerned. Even though they could see airplanes and talk to airplanes, out of an abundance of caution they actually shut down the airspace for 45 minutes, but we still had our scopes and our telecom functioning on Sunday morning.

Vice President JD Vance, who was actually in India at the time of the assault, played an instrumental role in negotiating the ceasefire. It was decided he would get the job of calling Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi:

In his noon phone call with Modi, Vance made it clear that the U.S. believed that there was a high probability of dramatic escalation as the conflict went into the weekend.

The vice president encouraged Modi to consider de-escalation options, including a potential off-ramp that U.S. officials knew the Pakistanis would be amenable to.

Officials from all sides stayed up into the wee hours working for a breakthrough:

Modi listened to the vice president’s message, although he didn’t explicitly indicate openness to any of the options put forth.

Vance's call to Modi came less than a month after he met with the Indian leader in New Delhi to discuss trade talks.

From that point, key U.S. officials continued to work the phones with their counterparts in India and Pakistan into the night to help re-establish communications between the two sides, allowing them to work out terms for a ceasefire in the next 12 to 18 hours.

Expect to see a lot more of his conversion of anecdotes into data in opposition ot Hegseth's enforcement of President Trump's directives. I think that we'll also see a lot of folks who developed gender dysphoria under Obama as a tool to advance their careers and make themselves bulletproof to charges of incompetence suddenly "cure" themselves as they look at the trans gravy train coming to an end. //

anon-kcqz
36 minutes ago
While I applaud SecDef Hegseth doing this for cultural reasons, let's not lose sight of the fact that divesting ourselves of these lunatics is part of a broader overall strategy to evaluate every member of the service for whether or not they could contribute meaningfully in a war. Hegseth is giving us back our teeth, and the whole world will become more peaceful as a result. //

stm-33
18 minutes ago
The Pentagon has spent 51 million of your tax dollars in the past four years to treat over 4200 transgender troops. Biden and former Secretary of Defense Austin turned our once proud military into a "woke" joke and disastrous social experiment. Since when is it a good idea to have mentally ill troops in the military; especially ones that need continual harmful hormonal injections that can possibly cause psychotic episodes. They had troops flying rainbow flags and were painting "rainbow bullets" on Marine helmets in recruiting ads. The Chinese and the Russians were rolling on the ground laughing and the armed services couldn't meet 75% of their recruiting goals.

Thank God, that Trump has stopped this nonsense as is constitutionally his right as Commander in Chief. Amazingly, the fact that recruiting has reached a 20 year high in just a few short months after Trump was elected should tell you everything you need to know how harmful and ridiculous this whole idea was.

JD Vance
@JDVance
·
Follow
Great work from the President’s team, especially Secretary Rubio.

And my gratitude to the leaders of India and Pakistan for their hard work and willingness to engage in this ceasefire.
Secretary Marco Rubio

@SecRubio
Over the past 48 hours, @VP Vance and I have engaged with senior Indian and Pakistani officials, including Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Shehbaz Sharif, External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Chief of Army Staff Asim Munir, and National Security Advisors Ajit
9:00 AM · May 10, 2025 //

It wasnt me
3 hours ago
Trump to India, Pakistan: You know China is behind this, don't you? They are trying to distract investors from leaving China and moving to your countries or the US.

And as we mentioned and have mentioned in the past, some of them who have a much more reliable history—such as the Rasmussen poll, the Insider Advantage poll, the Trafalgar poll—they all had Donald Trump, at the end of 100 days, with either roughly 50-50 approval ratings or even slightly above that, 48-46, 50-49.

But my point is, in one of the daily Rasmussen polls, they had an astonishing figure, that they broke down Donald Trump’s support by ethnic category.

And there were 39% of black Americans that expressed support for Donald Trump. That’s an astonishing number. Given that 95% of the news coverage, according to the Media Research Center, has been negative. And yet here is a traditional Democratic constituency where 4 out of 10 people like what’s been going on.

But even more astonishing is the ethnic constituency that expressed the highest approval of Donald Trump’s first 100 days was the Hispanic community. In fact, far above the so-called white community.

How can that be possible? The Democratic Party had told us that closing the border and stopping the illegal entry of 10 to 12 million illegal aliens during the Biden administration—that was deeply unpopular to the Hispanic community. //

What I’m getting at is that a group of elites in the Biden administration, for particular political purposes—and I’ll be frank here—I think they did want people to come in, both to serve as future constituents under the lax rules and protocols of early and mail-in voting, and also to grow the government and have more constituencies on welfare. //

And why would so-called white people poll much more negatively against Trump’s first 100 days than Hispanics? It’s because the white elite had created an agenda under the Biden and Obama administration that was elitist.

By that I mean—let’s face it—Sen. Bernie Sanders had to take out the word “millionaires” from his usual castigation of millionaires and billionaires. And it wasn’t just because he’s a millionaire now. That is the trademark of the professional bicoastal classes. And they’re interested in issues that are not existential—at least not everyday existential. By that I mean global warming, the Green New Deal, transgendered men in women’s sports, international organizations—the U.N.

But they’re not interested in what the Hispanic working classes are interested in. And that’s affordable gasoline, affordable power bills, good-paying jobs, schools that allow their children to be competitively educated, safety in their neighborhoods.

And the idea that they should have some natural antipathy for illegal aliens just because they share the same language and maybe ethnic background—they don’t. They’re just like anybody else that’s trying to make a living and has been ignored and shunned by the grandees of the Democratic Party.

There is no shortage of generals in our military:

There are about 800 general officers in the military, but only 44 of those are four-star general or flag officers. Hegseth has already directed the firings of more than a half-dozen three- and four-star generals since taking office, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. CQ Brown Jr., saying those eliminations were “a reflection of the president wanting the right people around him to execute the national security approach we want to take.” //

SLOTown Hoosier
17 minutes ago
We have more 4-Stars today in the Army than the Army and Air Force combined in WW II.

China's economy has been a house of cards for some time now, but President Trump's tariffs may be knocking that house of cards down. Case in point: Chinese factories are closing down, and Chinese workers are furious. Laid-off Chinese workers are taking to the streets to demand re-employment and back pay. //

BHedrick
27 minutes ago
Hmmm. The capitalist nation takes care of its workers better than the socialist utopia. Whodathunkit? //

sukietawdry wildmlm
11 minutes ago
When I was in China, our tour guide told us that the people hate the government and don't trust (corrupt) law enforcement but revere their military. In Beijing, small groups of soldiers out and about on the streets attracted groups of boys and young men who would fall in lockstep behind them. If Xi loses the military, he's cooked. Tiananmen Square has always been guarded by soldiers, but following the uprising security became very tight and you have to pass through checkpoints and metal detectors to get on the premises. There won't be another "Tiananmen Square" unless the army wants one. //

KJSpeed
36 minutes ago
Confucius say; House of Cards no match for Strong Wind from West!

Hold the line America! This may accomplish far more than equal trade. The cracks are showing in China's top-down politburo. //

NavyVet
43 minutes ago
Why is the dollar so weak right now?
Because China is dumping all its treasuries, to the tune of $1 trillion, in an attempt to undercut Trump.
Of course, it's not working: it just makes American exports cheaper, more attractive.

But the real question is, what is Xi doing with all that money? Spending it on his military?

"construction workers threatened to throw themselves off the buildings"
If they are willing to die, maybe they should consider doing it in an effort to throw off the bonds of communism.
You know, the totalitarianism the democrats want to impose on us, but can't because we're still armed.