JUST BECAUSE YOU DON’T HEAR ABOUT IT, DOESN’T MEAN TRUMP ISN’T DOING GOOD STUFF: Bonus: NYT admits first major fallout; energy industry surges; Trump’s EO guts Deep State ops—VOA, Pentagon’s CIA outpost gone; lawfare villains falter; Trump vows legendary justice; more.
March 17, 2025
AS HE SHOULD. WE HAVE ENOUGH HOME GROWN RACISTS: Marco Rubio Tells South Africa’s Terror-Simping Ambassador to Get the Heck Out of Dodge.
March 16, 2025
OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.
IF THERE’S SO MUCH GOVERNMENT AIR TRAVEL THAT IT’S ALL THAT’S PROPPING UP THE AIRLINES, THERE’S TOO MUCH GOVERNMENT AIR TRAVEL: The government is employing fewer people and they’re traveling less. United Airlines could lose millions of dollars. It says in the story, though, that it’s 2% of total air travel so I think the airlines can weather it.
I HOPE IT WORKS: SpaceX to send Starship to Mars next year, Elon Musk confirms.
CURRENT POLITICS IN A NUTSHELL:
Gotta love that while Mark Kelly was trading in his Tesla, Elon Musk was flying into space to save Kelly’s fellow astronauts who were abandoned by Joe Biden’s autopen.
— Kate Hyde (@KateHydeNY) March 16, 2025
ANTI-ASIAN RACISM, STRAIGHT UP: Why was a brilliant kid rejected by the University of California? “Despite a 4.2 high school grade-point average, near-perfect SATs, and the fact that he founded a software company while still a high school sophomore, Stanley Zhong was rejected by admissions officers at UC Berkeley, UCLA, Davis, San Diego and Santa Barbara – every University of California campus he applied to. Just 18 at the time, the Palo Alto, California, native shook off the disappointment and immediately earned a prestigious job as a Google programmer. A year later, he hasn’t given up on his dream: he’d still like to go back to school and eventually earn a doctorate in computer science. To level the path to admissions, he’s suing the University of California system because, he says, race factored into his UC rejections.”
PRESIDENTIAL NONACQUIESCENCE IS ITSELF A CHECK ON JUDICIAL OVERREACH, ALBEIT ONE THAT SHOULD BE USED RARELY:
“No! You can’t just defy judges. It’s unprecedented!”
The precedent: pic.twitter.com/pieT2zjOQg
— Still Boneless (@still_boneless) March 16, 2025
👏👏👏”Non-acquiescence” is on the table (or in the air) for the first time in 160 years —since Merryman— pushed by a radical district court judge ruling, one that the D.C. Circuit can reject out of hand. Or the circuit can send up to SCOTUS stat. I hope the planes can be… https://t.co/3qtjtO6f7F
— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) March 16, 2025
When Ex Parte Quirin was before the Court, President Franklin Roosevelt warned them that he would not turn over the captured German saboteurs to some U.S. Marshal with a habeas order. The Court then declined to issue one.
I do think that if John Roberts is as concerned about the institutional future of the federal judiciary as he says he is, something needs to be done to rein in these rogue district judges.
It’s pretty clear at this point rogue judges, not the Trump admin, are posing a threat to rule of law.
SCOTUS needs to acknowledge this and reassert the judiciary’s role—best way to do that IMO is require TROs to be done by a three judge panel w/ expedited SCOTUS review.
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) March 16, 2025
DO TELL: Colleges Are in Trouble and Suddenly Realizing They Have Few Allies.
If only there had been some sort of warning.
Related:
Faced with falling revenues, universities are announcing across-the-board spending freezes. Instead, they should differentiate between sane departments and those that have lost their way. Departments captured by post-modernists should be cut, to allow adequate funding for others.
— Timur Kuran (@timurkuran) March 16, 2025
AN ELECTRIC PICKUP TRUCK MAKES A LOT OF SENSE FOR THOSE WHO ACTUALLY USE IT FOR PICKUPS: Toyota Confirms an Electric Pickup Truck Is Coming Soon. But how many pickup owners do?
HEATHER MAC DONALD: Racist–But Underfunded? Universities have gone from arguing that science is biased to claiming that even the overhead on their massive federal research budgets must not be cut by the Trump administration. Academic bureaucrats often collect surcharges of more than 50 percent on the federal grants that go to researchers. How could science ever progress without taxpayers subsidizing the six-figure salaries of deans of inclusion and community engagement?
READER FAVORITE: VIKING Hose Nozzle, Garden Hose Nozzle with 8 Spray Patterns. #CommissionEarned
THE PASSIVE VOICE IS SURE DOING A LOT OF WORK HERE: ‘We Were Badly Misled’ Says the New York Times As They Admit COVID Lab-Leak Theory Was True.
Maybe the Times means Xi Jinping’s administration? Because it certainly wasn’t Trump’s:
Pressure from who in the administration? President Trump was pretty adamant about calling it the ‘China virus.’
And why didn’t The New York Times bother sending a reporter or two to do some digging on this?
We all know why. Because if they thought it could hurt Trump to investigate, they would have.
Tom Cotton was routinely called a racist for referring to the lab leak origin – in February of 2020. To which a variety of Democrat house organs, including the Times, responded:
“Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins,” lamented the Times, before accusing Cotton of contributing to an “infodemic.”
“Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked,” explained the Post, which later issued issued a correction that still characterized the theory as “fringe.”
The Daily Beast declared that he was promoting a “Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory Dismissed by Actual Scientists.”
Tom Nichols, a cable news “conservative” who has since been rewarded with a staff writer position at The Atlantic, approached Cotton’s comments even more scornfully. When Cotton pointed out to detractors that he had not said that the virus had originally been developed as a bioweapon by the Chinese government, and that there were several hypotheses worth exploring, Nichols responded by calling it an example of “why arguing with a conspiracy theorist rarely goes well.”
“It gives the person advancing the theory to keep repeating it ‘just as a hypothesis,’ as Cotton does here. Every time you ask him, he’ll repeat it, say it’s unlikely, and then say he’s just asking questions,” continued Nichols. One might wonder if such questions are worth being asked — especially by the press. But Nichols left that to Cotton, instead opting to mock the senator for doing so.
Anne Applebaum, also a staff writer for The Atlantic as well as a member of the advisory panel for the Global Disinformation Index, compared Cotton’s comments to those of “Soviet propagandists who tried to convince the world that the CIA invented AIDS.”
As late as May of 2021, Apoorva Mandavilli, the Times’ replacement for veteran chief science reporter Don McNeil, who was forced off the paper during 2020’s culture war, was tweeting:
With today’s Times’ headline, we’ve entered into “Oceania has never been at war with Eastasia” territory:
IT’S HARDER TO ARGUE FOR POLICIES THAT ARE STUPID AND UNCONSTITUTIONAL: Blue State AGs Having Trouble Making the Case for Their States’ Unconstitutional Anti-Gun Limits on Second Amendment Rights.
FROM WHERE? PORTLAND, OF COURSE: Fired Oregon Nurse Expressed Interest in Joining Hamas, Posts Hamas War Propaganda.
“I would refuse to treat you. I don’t take care of animals. Dogs. Rats. Vermin of any kind” wrote Camesha Lynn Hart, former RN at OHSU
Former, happily.
READER FAVORITE: Alpha Grillers Meat Thermometer Digital. #CommissionEarned
GLOBAL WARMING: IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Earth’s orbit is filling up with junk. Greenhouse gases are making the problem worse.
THEY STOPPED HUNTING THEM: How a rapidly growing population of crocs has been impacting Australia’s Northern Territories ecosystem.
SKYNET GRIPS: A “biohybrid” robotic hand built using real human muscle cells.
Or maybe it’s “Howard Wolowitz smiles.”
AND KEEP DIGGING: Democrats Hit Rock Bottom as Internal Numbers Reveal Total Collapse.
