March 18, 2025

YES, THE THEFT IS THE LEAST OF IT:

Posted at 6:49 pm by Glenn Reynolds 44

I’M PRETTY SURE THAT MEANS THAT IT IS A WIN: China’s Xi Is Angered by Panama Port Deal That Trump Touted as a Win.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is angry about a Hong Kong company’s plan to sell Panama Canal ports to a U.S.-led group, in part because the company didn’t seek Beijing’s approval in advance, people familiar with the matter said.

The Xi leadership had originally planned to use the Panama port issue as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Trump administration, according to people close to Beijing’s decision-making, only to see the rug pulled out from under it.

President Trump, who in the first minutes of his administration called for the U.S. to reassert control over the canal, celebrated the deal as a victory over Chinese interests in America’s backyard, turning Panama into a symbol of the U.S.-China battle for global influence.

Xi’s unhappiness suggests he, too, sees the canal that way and doesn’t like to be painted as the loser. His government republished a commentary last week describing the deal as a betrayal of the Chinese people.

Boo freakin’ hoo.

Posted at 6:17 pm by Glenn Reynolds 63

KURT SCHLICHTER: Boot the Ungrateful Foreigners the Hell Out of America.

I am loving this uproar over that communist terrorist fluffer from Columbia University, Mahmoud Khalil, who the feds detained with an eye towards booting his sorry rear out of our glorious country. First, I love how the commies are crying about it, how suddenly they care about free speech even though they carried absolutely nothing about free speech when normal patriotic Americans were being rounded up for daring to oppose abortion and bogus elections. I love how they’re calling his totally legitimate arrest a “kidnapping” when this guy’s unseemly and eager onanism over his dirtbag Palestinian buddies’ kidnapping of innocent Israelis is what got him busted in the first place. But mostly, I love this imbroglio because it shows that we Americans are not going to take any more guff from uppity foreigners.

We’re booting this tool out of our great country. It may take a bit of time to wind its way through the courts, but he’s gone. We should be booting his wife out, too, before she drops her kid – hey, a fetus leftists don’t want to kill! – and it gets American citizenship. In fact, we should boot out all these agitators and malcontents, deporting every single weirdo, loser, and mutation who hates America and thinks they have a free pass to try and gin up their Marxist revolution here on our sacred soil.
We’re done. We tried tolerance, and they attacked Jewish Americans. They would murder the rest of us too given the chance, so we’re not giving them one. Get the hell out.

And they will get the hell out. The law is very clear, and it’s very clear that this guy is going to soon be on a one-way flight to whatever geographic zit he popped out of. So will a bunch of his fellow travelers. See, we’re done with ungrateful foreigners. We’re not taking it anymore. American idiots are bad enough. We don’t need to import any more idiots. In fact, we need tariffs, idiot tariffs. And idiot reparations from the garbage countries they come from, but that’s down the road.

Related: Whoopi: ‘Any One of Us Could Find Ourselves Being Deported’ By Trump.

The Trump administration’s deportation of several violent Venezuelan gang members who were in the country illegally made the liberal ladies of ABC News’s The View very upset, Monday morning. Co-host Sunny Hostin called it a “constitutional crisis” while Ana Navarro suggested it was an attack on the Venezuelan Americans who voted for President Trump (she also basked in their purported misery). But moderator Whoopi Goldberg took the most factually inaccurate stand when she erroneously claimed it was evidence that any American could find themselves deported by Trump.

I’m not much of a fan of ABC’s News division, but unlike Whoopi, even I wouldn’t compare them to terroristic Venezuelan gang members. What is she trying to imply about the corporate hell-world in which she’s forced to work?

Evergreen:

UPDATE:

Heh, indeed.™

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 157

DON’T GET COCKY: ‘Bunch Of Losers:’ Dems’ Emerging 2028 Field May Not Bode Well For Liberals.

Political strategists are not yet sold that Democrats rumored to be prospective 2028 presidential candidates have all that it takes to unite the party and retake the White House.

Failed 2024 candidates Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and a handful of Democrat governors — Gavin Newsom of California, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Wes Moore of Maryland  — are all thought to be potentially sizing up runs for the White House in 2028 as Democrats try to fight their way out of the political wilderness. Even though there is still plenty of road to go before the campaign kicks off, the prospective candidates could find it quite difficult to unite the party and appeal to enough of America to win back the presidency, pundits told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“We are in what has been referred to as the ‘invisible primary’ phase of the election cycle, because it is so early and the public isn’t paying attention to these early machinations,” Len Foxwell, a Maryland-based Democratic strategist, told the DCNF. “The only ones who are participating in the process at this point are the prospective candidates themselves and a relatively small and insular ecosystem of donors and party activists and elected officials who do this sort of thing, either as a passion or as a profession. It’s a very small and limited process right now, but it’s definitely happening.”

Related: VDH asks: What Are the Left’s Solutions for the Problems They Created?

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 131

LOW COST? DID SOMETHING GO WRONG? BlueHalo’s FE-1 Low-Cost Surface-To-Air Missile Fired For First Time. “The successful live-fire demonstration of the FE-1 Controlled Test Vehicle (CTV) was only recently announced but took place from Jan. 16-18 this year, at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona. It was conducted as part of the Next-Generation C-UAS Missile (NGCM) program, which aims to ramp up America’s munitions industrial base to meet rapidly evolving aerial threats, specifically drones.”

Posted at 4:51 pm by Stephen Green 41

WAIT, YOU TOLD ME HE WAS HITLER. NOW YOU WANT TO NEGOTIATE WITH HIM? Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo and More Than 400 Hollywood Names Urge Trump to Not Let AI Companies ‘Exploit’ Copyrighted Works.

More than 400 Hollywood creative leaders signed an open letter to the Trump White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, urging the administration to not roll back copyright protections at the behest of AI companies.

The filmmakers, writers, actors, musicians and others — which included Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo, Cynthia Erivo, Cate Blanchett, Cord Jefferson, Paul McCartney, Ron Howard and Taika Waititi — were submitting comments for the Trump administration’s U.S. AI Action Plan⁠. The letter specifically was penned in response to recent submissions to the Office of Science and Technology Policy from OpenAI and Google, which asserted that U.S. copyright law allows (or should allow) allow AI companies to train their system on copyrighted works without obtaining permission from (or compensating) rights holders.

“We firmly believe that America’s global AI leadership must not come at the expense of our essential creative industries,” the letter says in part. The letter claims that “AI companies are asking to undermine this economic and cultural strength by weakening copyright protections for the films, television series, artworks, writing, music and voices used to train AI models at the core of multibillion-dollar corporate valuations.”

That’s quite a newfound sense of patriotism for an industry that normally professes to hate America and has thrown its lot in with the CCP. But as Conquest’s First Law of Politics states, “Everybody is conservative about what he knows best.”

Still though, maybe you shouldn’t have gone all-in on the Hitler and Nazi stuff for the past decade, huh?

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll 192

THE NEW YORK TIMES FINALLY COMES CLEAN ABOUT COVID: It only took the newspaper five years to acknowledge what people had said since the beginning.

[The Times’ Zeynep Tufekci] wasn’t alone in reevaluating the mistakes of Covid; the NYT’s Apoorva Mandavilli did her share as well, writing “Science Amid Chaos: What Worked During the pandemic? What Failed?”

In May 2021, Mandavilli tweeted, “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.”

Now we know that intelligence services in the UK and the United States are of the belief that the virus originated in the lab in Wuhan instead of in the wet market nearby. It turns out the lab that was experimenting with the viruses unsafely may be the more likely culprit instead of bats flying thousands of miles, only to be eaten in that particular market in Wuhan, China. As my friends in the South say, “Well, blow me over with a feather.” It took five years for these experts to get here.

Mandavilli would like to know what failed during the pandemic. Our institutions, science, a myriad of culprits. But the bottom line failure was that of basic common sense, and the bravery to just plainly state objective facts. The emperor had no clothes, and it took the New York Times five years to say it aloud.

Funny how that keeps happening at the DNC-MSM.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 48

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Trust us!. “There has been a consensus that judicial impeachments should be limited to incapacity or corruption, and that has largely held up. Until recently, though, it was also a consensus that presidential impeachments should involve incapacity or corruption too, and … that hasn’t held up nearly as well for the last 30 years. And especially lately. That loss of confidence has nothing to do with the Supreme Court or John Roberts. However, the plague of district courts enacting nationwide TROs to block executive authority does. Roberts and his colleagues could intervene in such cases more quickly to deal with such challenges; half of the current court has pushed for decisive action already. . . . It’s one thing to say “trust the process.” It’s another thing entirely to act in a manner in which people can put their trust in it. Presidents shouldn’t go out of their way to undermine confidence in the judiciary, but Roberts needs to get more firm to put an end to the way the judiciary is involving itself in policy rather than law. He’s correct to guide us back to the path of the rule of law, but the rule of law in the judiciary had better include some reforms to curtail the game-playing that takes advantage of our customs for sheer political and ideological purposes. Maybe Roberts should focus more on that than on Trump’s vents on Truth Social.”

When I hear people talking about traditions and the judiciary, I’m reminded of what Gandalf told Sauron’s ambassador who was demanding immunity: “Where such laws hold, it is also the custom for ambassadors to use less insolence.” If courts are making unprecedented intrusions into the political sphere, they can expect unprecedented intrusions into the judicial sphere.

And if Roberts is really concerned about the legitimacy of the federal courts, he needs to realize that more people are watching — and have a vote — than the editorial boards of the Washington Post and the New York Times.

UPDATE: Josh Blackman:

Last year Representative AOC and other members of Congress introduced articles of impeachment against Justices Thomas and Alito. As best as I can recall, Roberts said nothing about this. Likewise, the Federal Judges Association and the American Bar Association said not a word about the never-ending crusade against two members of the Supreme Court. These attacks were never about disclosures. These critics were trying to delegitimize the Court. Yet, everyone was silent.

Likewise, in 2023, Senator Ron Wyden told President Biden to “ignore” any ruling from Judge Matt Kacsmaryk concerning mifepristone. We aren’t talking about turning planes around over international waters. This would be a ruling that could be timely appealed in the normal course. Yet Roberts did not say a word about this in his end-of-year address or anywhere else. The FJA, the ABA, and all the usual suspects were silent. To the contrary, the Judicial Conference acceded to the criticism of Judge Kacsmaryk by trying to force down a rule to take cases away from him! I realize that Chief Justice Roberts is hitting the panic button, but his protest has started a bit too late.

Ilya Somin dismisses this as “whataboutism,” but I think that he’s wrong. The Constitution doesn’t speak to this question; it’s one that has been addressed by norms and customs. But norms and customs are based on what people do. And what people have done. And if what people do and have done is different from the assorted norms and customs, then maybe those norms and customs aren’t norms and customs anymore. Maybe they never really were.

I’ll note that one leader of a widespread movement to impeach a Supreme Court Chief Justice (in this case, Earl Warren) over judicial rulings — Gerald Ford — later became President. So you can say that we shouldn’t do this sort of thing, but it’s a bit disingenuous to say that we don’t do this this sort of thing.

Posted at 4:06 pm by Glenn Reynolds 191

THINK TRUMP IS MAKING PROGRESS? The wise lads of Issues & Insights think the answer to that question is a resounding Yes! So much so, they see Santa Claus when they see the Chief Executive.

Posted at 3:51 pm by Mark Tapscott 10

OOPS:

To be fair, Scarborough is both a hack and not terribly bright.

Combined, they’re the equivilent of walking in clown shoes across a lawn covered in rakes.

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green 64

NO, THE CONSTITUTION DOES NOT SANCTION BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP: President Donald Trump’s recent executive order confronted head-on the myth that merely being born within the United States guarantees an individual U.S. citizenship, as Birthright Citizenship advocates claim.

Rod Martin lays out a succinct and detailed presentation of the facts of the legal history of citizenship in the U.S. and in doing so makes it quite clear that merely being hatched here doesn’t a U.S. citizen make.

Posted at 2:57 pm by Mark Tapscott 78