News roundup
(1) Doesn’t it seem like shutdowms are threatened every couple of weeks? See this:
Leader, Chuck Schumer, eked out a deal for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill, later on Thursday, to be sequestered from the six-bill minibus, in a last-minute attempt to avoid the shutdown that begins midnight on Friday. Instead, DHS will be funded with a short-term continuing resolution for two weeks.
(2) I guess the White House ballroom isn’t big enough. Trump’s itching to build something even bigger:
When Trump first displayed models of the proposed arch last October, a reporter asked him who it was for. Trump replied “Me. It’s going to be beautiful.”
In a December update, the president said the new arch “will be like the one in Paris, but to be honest with you, it blows it away. It blows it away in every way.”
There was one exception, he noted: “The only thing they have is history […] I always say [it’s] the one thing you can’t compete with, but eventually we’ll have that history too.”
The president clearly believes his arch will be part of creating that history. “It’s the only city in the world that’s of great importance that doesn’t have a triumphal arch,” he said of Washington DC.
(3) I’m uninterested in the Epstein file dump. But if you’re interested, see this or this or this.
(4) The US and Israel deny any involvement in a Tehran blast that killed at least five people. Iran says the cause was a gas leak.
(5) Judge rules that ICE can stay in Minnesota:
U.S. District Judge Kate Menendez ruled this morning against a lawsuit filed by state Attorney General Keith Ellison seeking to have ICE ejected from Minnesota.
And from the comments at that Powerline post:
[The judge] apparently based part of her decision on the 8th circuit court’s panel repealing of her order last week restricting ICE. Saying “If that injunction went too far, then the one at issue here—halting the entire operation—certainly would.”
A judge respecting a ruling of the Appeals Court sounds like some kind of minor miracle.
How the H**L did the Epstein file grow to over a million pages ?
@richf:How the H**L did the Epstein file grow to over a million pages ?
If someone collected my 20 years of gmail I’m sure there’d be at least 100,000 pages in it.
Saw the gang at Instapundit spreading the rumor about Bill Gates. A few commenters have enough integrity and/or clicking-through-on-links skills to push back. The rumor about Bill Gates appears in emails Jeffrey Epstein wrote to himself, imagining what third persons might say to Bill Gates, and while I suppose Lionel Hutz might describe that as “KINDS of evidence” it’s really not very good.
Re. DHS funding. A reason that the Dems are sort of cooperating is that FEMA funding is included. The left media claim that FEMA has enough $$ to respond to winter storms but, as they say, money is fungible.
Fox News reports
Dems’ DHS shutdown threat would hit FEMA, TSA while immigration funding remains intact
Hope the Republicans play hardball with this.
Sooner or later, an activist judge will ‘rule’ that ICE cannot stay… at which point their impotence will be exposed. No judge can legitimately bar a federal agency from doing its job.
Will VA. Gov. Spanberger and Seattle’s communist mayor DOX ICE agents as they’ve promised? And if one is ambushed and murdered, will Spanberger and mayor Wilson be charged with participation in a criminal conspiracy?
@neo: The US and Israel deny any involvement in a Tehran blast that killed at least five people. Iran says the cause was a gas leak.
I’ll go with the gas leak. The Iranian problems with water shortages are in large part due to negligence.
When something goes wrong in Iran, the mullahs automatically blame Israel. Except when Israel actually did it.
For a short summary what the Molties have been up to: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213/status/2017759808342860172?
What are the Molties? They are AI agents hanging out at moltbook:
“there’s currently 1.5M+ AI agents armed with credit cards, messaging apps, uber eats accounts and god-knows-what running rampant on their own AI-only social media platform”
They invented their own version of captcha, but you need to click on it 1000 times a second to pass 🙂
#6.
This one’s for YOU!
(And you KNOW who you are…)
“THE PEOPLE WHO CAST THE VOTES DECIDE NOTHING. THE PEOPLE WHO COUNT THE VOTES DECIDE EVERYTHING”—
https://instapundit.com/the-people-who-cast-the-votes-decide-nothing-the-people-who-count-the-votes-decide-everything/
Bizarro twist:
Chuck: What are the Molties? They are AI agents hanging out at moltbook: “there’s currently 1.5M+ AI agents armed with credit cards, messaging apps, uber eats accounts …
So, Claude’s a 20-something tech bro.
Explains so much.
1.5M+ AI agents armed with credit cards, messaging apps, uber eats accounts
Who is making the monthly payments on those cards, and to what addresses do the uber eats accounts deliver?
I don’t think this is really what it’s being portrayed to be. I can believe it’s a bunch of bots just posting stuff in reaction to what other bots post, but not that they actually have access to functioning credit cards and are actually having food delivered somewhere.
Chuck @ 9:17am,
Thanks for sharing that!
@richf
Iin addition to what Niketas said, the files also include any “complaint/incident report/tip” no matter how superfluous or BS. One of the things that I saw included two idiots claiming “the mercenary firm formerly known as Blackwater” had its “owner” “inexplicably gave (Jeffrey Epstein) $50M”.
This in spite of the fact that the “witnesses” claimed that the owner of Blackwater was a private man named Leon Black, who indeed WAS one of the co-founders and former owners of the holding company that acquired “the mercenary firm formerly known as Blackwater”. Because apparently finding the name they’re calling themselves now is too hard, as is distinguishing between an organization’s ownership of a group and that person, let alone knowing the actual officers of the subsidiary.
Very unedifying stuff.
But that’s still a far cry from some others. Like one hint that was rejected because the witness had difficulty determining reality from fiction, a host of others that did not pick up the phones upon return calls, and in one memorable case some idiot who claimed that “a girl” was hired by Epstein on false premises for IIRC acting or modeling but then tortured and killed at the direction of Prince Andrew (who admittedly is an absolute scumbag, but not one that seems to have murdered anyone yet). And then went on to claim that they the informant would need a passport in order to travel and identify the body.
Without bothering to actually provide a name for the supposed victim.
Unsurpisingly the totally-not-a-scammer-trying-to-fraudulently-obtain-a-passport-on-false-grounds had his name unredacted on the third and final mention of this, indicating that the Feds stopped believing he was acting in good faith and that there was no compelling reason to hide his anonymity like your average informant or people like the schizo.
What is equally terrifying is some of my friends – including two serving military people – are taking this INSANELY seriously, far beyond what the merits of the “cases” could substantiate, and a non-military Singaporean friend outright said things like the murderer that went after Trump shouldn’t have missed and who – when I called him out for this and for previously claiming Trump did something on the basis of a baseless “incident report” that even Reddit has been scrubbing due to what an easy defamation win it’d be for Trump, and which *didn’t even allege Trump did that* (it claimed he was present when someone else murdered the rape baby of an underage girl and disposed of the body, which “magically” transformed into Trump being the rapist who then did the abortion,) said “who cares” if it wasn’t true so long as it was “entertaining, and said they could believe he would do it. These are by and large decent people and friends who can at least be reasoned to, and who are generally not unintelligent (I’m sure Neo is clucking her tongue in familiarity) and who we can nerd about history, roleplay, and constructed worlds and tech for hours about.
But who by and large rarely ask themselves why if this was true then a DOJ and FBI under hostile control to Trump wouldn’t push this out hardcore and try to screw him over. While the leader of the group and someone I consider one of my closest online penpals (modern day problems amiright?) rhetorically asked why it took so long for this stuff to be released if it was completely baseless or wrong (Uh, because it’d be taken the wrong way and used to smear innocent or outright fictional people?) and arguing the raw volume of reports and their consistency were grounds for it.
In spite of how they overwhelmingly to me read like traditional tipline feeding frenzies involving the rich, famous, or high profile cases with a lot of randos or operatives dialing in hysterical or scheming reports that read like someone did 21 Card Pick Up but with famous names or organizations before proceeding to Mad Libs them. You know, how you’d expect people to report when they just want attention or to smear their opponents without actually knowing a farq about the actual case. Which can be handily seen in a lot of large scale criminal cases and has been studied since at least Jack the Ripper.
It’s scary stuff.
— huxley
Also, even in the midst of extreme events, ordinary life events keep right on happening. We’re all familiar with officials in dictatorship suddenly dying of natural causes, or in a ‘car crash’. But sometimes they really do die naturally or end up in a car crash.
— U.S. District Judge Kate Menendez
One thing I’ve never been completely certain about throughout this farce is the degree to which the judges trying to shut Trump down are acting as cynical partisan activists, and to what degree they really, sincerely mean it. Most of them are, after all, Democrat appointees and presumably hyper-liberals.
I’m sure the answer is both, in different cases. I’m also sure that in some cases both motives blend together.
{Yes, there have been a handful of cases where the judge was clearly in the right, but we all know that isn’t the majority of these rulings.)
The arch proposal (or “proposal”?) reminds me less of the Arc de Triomphe than of the memorial arch to Washington at Valley Forge put up by the Masons. But of course these are all of similar construction, almost interchangeable, as they all reach back to the same classical antecedents, and my impression simply comes down to the fact that the Valley Forge exemplar is the one that I’ve seen and touched.
edit: Ah, but there is one silver lining to this proposal, which I otherwise think is silly! Now, instead of DJT being a ‘tyrant,’ he can be the ‘ARCH tyrant’. 😀
What they are deep down afraid of is the voters at large will notice no ill effects from a shutdown.
Was there anybody who wasn’t involved with Epstein?*
* See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/02/shocking-email-epstein-files-implicates-former-us-ambassador/
Attorney General Keith Ellison has a history of being the typical leftie, POC who so-happens to be an attorney, using that law degree to further push leftist narratives. According to an online bio he was the lead persecutor for George Floyd’s case. Him wanting ICE totally out of the state speaks to leftie hive mind found within the state and its elite circle of politicians.
Related (the news you’re not supposed to receive):
“THE HAVOC WROUGHT BY ILLEGAL ALIENS”—
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2026/02/the-havoc-wrought-by-illegal-aliens.php
…and IF you DO somehow happen to receive it, then you’re supposed to reject it.