I really don’t know what I’m going to do with my Trump Deranged friends. They literally are acting nuts; they don’t make any sense. The Axis allies—journalists, scholars, Democratic politicians, lawyers, ethicists <sigh!> and pundits are making even less sense, so there’s no one to pull the unhinged back onto their door-frames. In the Open Forum there was some discussion of Rep. Omar (D-Somalia) repeatedly telling a reporter to “fuck off.” This is not a sign of good mental health. Oh, heck, let me scroll though my Facebook feed and see what madness is afoot…Ah! Here’s a meme lacking juuuust a bit of context:
Like so much else I see from this clown corner, it’s too dumb to respond to. Then there are these certifiably idiotic political cartoons, which Steve Witherspoon linked to in the Open Forum. They reinforce my conviction, often stated here, that the entire genre of political cartooning is an anachronism and a vehicle for shallow thinkers to have their infantile analysis given undue gravitas by readers as dim as they are.
Meanwhile…
1. What a stupid sports scandal! The 21-year-old son of Atlanta Falcons defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich called college quarterback Shedeur Sanders during the NFL Draft pretending to be a team official and informing him he had been drafted by the New Orleans Saints. He hadn’t been. Jax Ulbricht had stumbled upon Sanders’ phone number on his father’s tablet and decided to use it for the practical joke. In so doing, he made his father subject to a $100,000 fine and the Falcons to a $250,000 fine for failing to prevent the disclosure of confidential information distributed to the club in advance of the 2025 NFL Draft.
2. And speaking of money, the gap in baseball between the team with the highest payroll and the team with the lowest has never been greater. The L.A. Dodgers, who won the World Series last year, pay their players $476 million while the poor, pathetic, Miami Marlins have a lowly salary total of just $69 million. Football and basketball employ a salary cap to prevent such a disparity; baseball, with a tradition of ruthless market capitalism, does not; nor does it have revenue-sharing. The sport also doesn’t have any mechanism to make cheap owners shell out dollars to make their teams better.
3. Also in sports ethics news, Ana Caldas, a trans male identifying as female, competed in the U.S. Masters Swimming Spring National Championship meet and took gold medals in every event in the 45-49 age group of the women’s division. Ana has also raced under the names Hannah Caldas and Hugo Caldas. The swimmer swam in five individual events and three relays over the course of the four-day competition in San Antonio, winning every individual race including the 50 yard freestyle, the 100 yard freestyle, the 50 yard breaststroke, and the 100 yard breaststroke. The U.S. Masters Swimming (USMS) board requires trans swimmers to have received hormone therapy and to show proof of testosterone levels below 5 nmol/L, but, of course, an athlete who has gone through puberty as a male will have advantages that hormone treatment cannot reverse. Here she is…
4. President Trump signed an Executive Order supposedly ending government funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting…we shall see. If so, it’s about time. The order says in part, “Unlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options. Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence. At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage.” Elon Musk helped out by posting this reminder of what we have come to expect from NPR:
5. I am still waiting for any defender of illegal immigrants to offer a single, logical, substantive argument for why any one of them shouldn’t be deported. (The question of whether it is practical to deport them all is a separate question.) No, citing “The New Colossus” doesn’t count. Over at the Federalist, three questions are offered to “angry Democrats” regarding the issue:
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Can You Identify a Single Alien You Would Deport?
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How Many Appeals Should an Illegal Alien Get for It to Be Considered ‘Due Process’?, and
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What Would the Ideal Deportation Look Like?
Eddy Scarry writes, “There is no end to the list of complaints Democrats have about any given deportation: The plane was inappropriate, the home country is terrible, the illegal alien is just a “gay makeup artist,” and on and on. They don’t actually care about the planes or return destinations or the character profiles of any given deportee. These are just more excuses for why Democrats oppose deportations. If they’re going to trifle with the logistics, they should have to offer alternative, acceptable conditions for deporting aliens. But they wouldn’t be able to do that, because that’s not the point. The point is stopping deportations altogether.”
But why? I don’t get it.
Ethics Alarms 
Surely, you get it Jack, They need to bolster their voting base in order to obtain/retain thier powers. I have heard many other excuses from my fanatic left wing acquaintances who use to be my friends. Who will harest (name the fruit or vefitable)? How will our homes be built, don’t you see all those immigrant roofers? Who is going to wipe grandma’s ass in the nursing home? Why should we seperate the families, their children are so cute?
But to add to questions posed to the left i would include:
The AUC’s sudden obsession with “due process” is part of their rope-a-dope effort to run out the clock for all the illegals so they’re still in the country by the time the mid-terms return congressional majorities to the Dems. So, all they have to do is keep the illegals here for the two years until the mid-terms, then it will be two more years until another election, by which time the illegals will have been here four years and will have completely imbedded themselves and made themselves irreplaceable. The AUC is simply playing for time. It’s just the current installment of importing Democrat voters for life.
From Prof. Turley’s post today: “The slowness of the removal process is being used to keep millions in the country indefinitely. It may prove to be President Joe Biden’s most lasting legacy, a de facto residency by simply overwhelming the system by the sheer number of unlawful entries.”
Bingo. I realized this myself quite a while ago.
When it comes to Trump derangement, I think there’s only going to be one remedy: time. Fundamentally, the derangement comes from stymieing the liberal drive to their Utopia, and while that was stalled under Bush, it has been far more threatened under Trump. Bush appears to have been a product of the bipartisan, deep state, military complex, and while he pushed some conservative ideas (I forget which, if any at this point), he nevertheless did little to hinder the eventual progressive victory. Trump, though, came as an immense surprise in 2016, and his survival to retake the White House in 2024 continues to tear the veil. The progressive agenda cannot work. It cannot achieve Utopia. It cannot make things fundamentally better. Only in the short term does it see any benefits, and the long term consequences keep looming larger and larger. What the progressives are finding out now, to their dismay, is that more and more people are turning away from their agenda, and are even turning away from the scare tactics the Left has imposed in an attempt to keep the hoi polloi in line. As the veil continues to be pulled back, more people will abandon the progressive agenda, until finally (maybe a couple of generations from now, unfortunately) this version of secular messianism will be largely relegated to the dustbin of history.
The real question is whether Trump and his successors will continue to successfully pull away the veil. If the opponents of the progressive agenda cave to pressures, if they continue to play the “Stupid Party,” and if they ruin the tentative trust the populace has placed in them, then the progressives will be able to seize the reins and drive their agenda once again. So we have two paths before us: if Trump and his successors can deliver a working alternative to the progressive agenda, avoid shooting themselves in the foot, and keep the trust of the populace, then the progressive drive will wither and die fairly quickly. The other path, if Trump and his successors continue to be Trump and the Stupid Party, the pendulum will swing back to the progressives, and it may take the utter ruin of the US, even of Western Civilization, before the derangement ends and a new civilization rises from the ashes.
I think it’s reasonable to worry that the Trump administration is being too indiscriminate when deporting asylum seekers.
Andry Hernandez Romero (the gay makeup artist), according to all the sources I could find, apparently arrived in the US a year ago via a regular San Diego crossing and was taken into custody for processing of his asylum case. The centrist/left sources I could find claim the DHS deported him because some crown tattoos on him were associated with a gang. His defenders claim they are innocent tattoos. A DHS spokesperson is quoted referencing undisclosed additional information suggesting gang membership. I could find no right sources covering the story.
Barring additional information, I would say it’s an unethical bait-and-switch for the US to detain asylum seekers if the US may choose to then deport said seekers to a supermax prison without a stronger reason than a suggestive tattoo.
Of course, even if this is truly the injustice it appears to be, it also matters whether this is a one-in-a-million mistake or a more common occurrence. I sense it is the latter (especially as [admittedly left-leaning] media provide no shortage of examples).
Beware the chineese robber fallacy… https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/
5. “I am still waiting for any defender of illegal immigrants to offer a single, logical, substantive argument for why any one of them shouldn’t be deported. … The point is stopping deportations altogether. But why? I don’t get it.”
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Except for the Shadow, no one truly knows. I surmise, as with most political issues, the motivations for stopping deportations are varied and depend on the group one identifies with.
Democrat Politicians:
Democratic run states that are bleeding their citizens dry with wealth redistribution are losing population to tax-friendly states. Representation in Congress and Federal Aid to states are based on population. To maintain influence and keep the Federal funds flowing, these states need to replenish their population losses.
Progressive politicians and their supporters use fighting deportation efforts to gain headlines and soundbites.
The “Broken US Immigration System” is a wonder wedge issue for both parties.
Politicians of all parties never do anything that doesn’t benefit them politically or financially. Virtue signaling can translate to votes and campaign contributions. The fact that a massive influx of illegal aliens is overwhelming courts, safety net systems, and can lead to financial ruin for cities, states, and the federal government is irrelevant. The average politician’s concern and planning horizon does not extend beyond the next election.
Given that people’s ability to vote is based on the honor system, it is delusional to think that no ineligible voters are casting votes in elections. Democrats chant that “every vote must be counted”. They do not chant that “every legal vote must be counted”. Go figure.
Democratic voters, supporters, and various miscreants:
Virtue Signaling! Virtue Signaling! Virtue Signaling!
The opposite of President Trump’s agenda.
Trump derangement syndrome.
Mainstream Media:
All of the above.
Catholic Church:
Two-thirds of Catholic Charities’ revenue comes from government coffers.
The majority of South and Central Americans are Catholic Church adherents. New Catholicism followers are needed to replace the Church’s ranks in the US.
Law Firms both for and against illegal immigration:
Billable hours.
The legal immigration system of the US, as codified in our laws, is largely ignored. Also, some current immigration legislation is designed to overwhelm immigration systems, making the orderly flow of immigrants into the US impossible. Unless the motivations highlighted above are addressed, chaos, disorder, lawlessness, massive tax burden, and deaths caused and suffered by illegal aliens will continue. The realist in me does not hold out much hope because it will require politicians to ignore their self-interests and implement and adhere to an immigration system that will benefit we the people and the nation as a whole.