… appears to be over. If it ever happened at all:
What shutdown? It turns out that large parts of the federal government were “show down” for the past three days.
Funding for Homeland Security has been approved for the next two weeks and the rest is fully funded (at bloated levels) through the end of September.
Of course he does:
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Monday condemned legislation requiring ID and proof of citizenship to register to vote as “nothing more than Jim Crow 2.0.”
Probably more like Jim Crow 2000.0, since the Democrats are fond of calling nearly everything the GOP proposes “Jim Crow.”
So, how would a person prove citizenship under the SAVE Act as proposed? If you listen to the left, “millions” couldn’t comply even though they are citizens:
The SAVE Act would require all Americans to prove their citizenship with documentation unavailable to millions and upend the way every American citizen registers to vote.
The article then goes on and on about passports, as though that’s the way it needs to be done, and although it’s already said birth certificates are fine. It mentions that real IDs wouldn’t work for the purpose.
But what does the legislation actually say? This:
As used in this Act, the term ‘documentary proof of United States citizenship’ means, with respect to an applicant for voter registration, any of the following:
“(1) A form of identification issued consistent with the requirements of the REAL ID Act of 2005 that indicates the applicant is a citizen of the United States.
“(2) A valid United States passport.
“(3) The applicant’s official United States military identification card, together with a United States military record of service showing that the applicant’s place of birth was in the United States.
“(4) A valid government-issued photo identification card issued by a Federal, State or Tribal government showing that the applicant’s place of birth was in the United States.
“(5) A valid government-issued photo identification card issued by a Federal, State or Tribal government other than an identification described in paragraphs (1) through (4), but only if presented together with one or more of the following:
“(A) A certified birth certificate issued by a State, a unit of local government in a State, or a Tribal government which—
“(i) was issued by the State, unit of local government, or Tribal government in which the applicant was born;
“(ii) was filed with the office responsible for keeping vital records in the State;
“(iii) includes the full name, date of birth, and place of birth of the applicant;
“(iv) lists the full names of one or both of the parents of the applicant;
“(v) has the signature of an individual who is authorized to sign birth certificates on behalf of the State, unit of local government, or Tribal government in which the applicant was born;
“(vi) includes the date that the certificate was filed with the office responsible for keeping vital records in the State; and
“(vii) has the seal of the State, unit of local government, or Tribal government that issued the birth certificate.
“(B) An extract from a United States hospital Record of Birth created at the time of the applicant’s birth which indicates that the applicant’s place of birth was in the United States.
“(C) A final adoption decree showing the applicant’s name and that the applicant’s place of birth was in the United States.
“(D) A Consular Report of Birth Abroad of a citizen of the United States or a certification of the applicant’s Report of Birth of a United States citizen issued by the Secretary of State.
“(E) A Naturalization Certificate or Certificate of Citizenship issued by the Secretary of Homeland Security or any other document or method of proof of United States citizenship issued by the Federal government pursuant to the Immigration and Nationality Act.
“(F) An American Indian Card issued by the Department of Homeland Security with the classification ‘KIC’.”.
A person can still register on election day, too, if a state allows it and the person provides the documentation.
Plus, there’s also this, which Schumer and the rest of the left seem to leave out:
“(i) IN GENERAL.—Subject to any relevant guidance adopted by the Election Assistance Commission, each State shall establish a process under which an applicant who cannot provide documentary proof of United States citizenship under paragraph (1) may, if the applicant signs an attestation under penalty of perjury that the applicant is a citizen of the United States and eligible to vote in elections for Federal office, submit such other evidence to the appropriate State or local official demonstrating that the applicant is a citizen of the United States and such official shall make a determination as to whether the applicant has sufficiently established United States citizenship for purposes of registering to vote in elections for Federal office in the State.
“(ii) AFFIDAVIT REQUIREMENT.—If a State or local official makes a determination under clause (i) that an applicant has sufficiently established United States citizenship for purposes of registering to vote in elections for Federal office in the State, such determination shall be accompanied by an affidavit developed under clause (iii) signed by the official swearing or affirming the applicant sufficiently established United States citizenship for purposes of registering to vote.
Requiring ID and proof of citizenship in order to vote is a popular proposal:
Despite the ongoing divide between elected Republicans and Democrats over requiring photo I.D. to vote, a whopping 86% of Americans support it.
The poll comes just days from the presidential election with voting underway across the country.
Support varied by political party, with 98% of Republicans, 67% of Democrats, and 84% of Independents supporting requiring photo I.D. to vote.
Another 83% of Americans support “requiring people who are registering to vote for the first time to provide proof of citizenship.” By party, 96% of Republicans, 66% of Democrats and 84% of Independents agree.
This is a very high level of support indeed.
I’m surprised this hadn’t already occurred:
“Effective immediately we are deploying body cameras to every officer in the field in Minneapolis,” Noem wrote.
“As funding is available, the body camera program will be expanded nationwide. We will rapidly acquire and deploy body cameras to DHS law enforcement across the country,” she wrote.
Bodycams have generally had a clarifying effect on disputes over the actions of law enforcement, and often exonerate the officers.
It’s not clear whether the Border Patrol agents involved in the Pretti shooting had bodycams. The relevant statement is: “Investigators have video from at least four Border Patrol agents on the scene who were wearing body cameras, said DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin.” Read that carefully and you’ll notice it doesn’t say whether any of the officers in the group clustered around Pretti were the same ones wearing the cameras, or whether it was other nearby officers.
NOTE: When a state cooperates with ICE or Border Patrol, it tends to go smoothly:
ICE announces the arrests of 650 illegal aliens in West Virginia as part of an operation with cooperation from local law enforcement via the 287(g) program. Per ICE, those arrested have convictions for child sex abuse, drug possession and endangering the welfare of children.
What’s the 287(g) program? It’s when local and state officers carry out the arrests, supervised by ICE.
… have Hispanic names and are probably Hispanic. This is not surprising; I’ve noticed before that many border agents are Hispanic. It makes sense, not only because the Hispanic population is large in the areas involved, but because, as the article notes:
Thus, the influx of illegal aliens from Latin American countries has put enormous pressure on the legal communities of Latin Americans. Not only are there more people fighting for the same resources (housing, jobs, and goods), but there are also more criminals, and statistical data shows that most criminals stay local. When the illegal immigrant drug dealers, pedophiles, and murderers come to town, they prey on their own.
But no doubt the left considers the two “white Hispanics,” which is what they called George Zimmerman.
Nor is “Hispanic” a race or even a single ethnicity, although it’s been regarded in the US as one for years.
First, Judge Gregory Carro in New York State argued that Luigi Mangione, the leftist terrorist, wasn’t a terrorist because he said he wasn’t.
Judge Gregory Carro argued that Luigi Mangione was wrongly being charged as a terrorist since the radical terrorist’s objective “was not to threaten, intimidate or coerce, but rather to draw attention to what he perceived as the greed of the insurance industry. …
“The defendant emphasized that he wished to spread a ‘message’ and ‘win public support’ about ‘everything wrong with our healthsystem.’”
One man’s terrorist is another man’s do-gooder.
More:
More of the same now at the federal level where Judge Margaret Garnett, a recent Biden appointee, decided that Luigi Mangione stalking Brian Thompson in order to kill him wasn’t a “crime of violence”.
Judge Garnett, a Biden appointee, noted the “apparent absurdity”, arguing that “the analysis contained in the balance of this opinion may strike the average person — and indeed many lawyers and judges — as tortured and strange, and the result may seem contrary to our intuitions about the criminal law.”
You said it, ma’am.
And:
But stalking a man in order to kill him, according to the Biden judge, isn’t a “crime of violence” and has decided to “foreclose the death penalty as an available punishment to be considered by the jury”’
That is so very strange that I did some more research, and discovered the rationale:
To seek the death penalty, prosecutors needed to show that Mangione killed Thompson while committing another “crime of violence.” Stalking doesn’t fit that definition, Garnett wrote in her opinion, citing case law and legal precedents.
So there has to be a separate crime of violence to elevate the charges to a capital offense in New York. So as strange as it sounds, Garnett’s ruling might indeed be correct on this.
I will add that in New York, the difference between capital charges and life imprisonment is more technical than real. You can read about the complicated history of New York executions here, but this is the most relevant part for today:
Capital punishment was reinstated in New York in 1995 for a wide-range of aggravating factors, when Pataki signed a new statute into law, which provided for execution by lethal injection.[28] However, there were no executions before the capital punishment statute was nullified in 2004.
On June 24, 2004, the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, held 4–3 in People v. LaValle that the state’s death penalty statute violated the New York Constitution, because in case of a deadlocked jury the judge could impose a sentence lesser than life without parole, so jurors would be “coerced” to vote for death solely to prevent the convict from being paroled. Governor Pataki criticized the ruling and called for a quick legislative fix.
Between December 2004 and February 2005, public hearings were held in Manhattan and Albany. …
In 2007, the New York Court of Appeals decided in People v. Taylor that the statute defect could not be corrected by a judge instruction to the jury that he would impose life without parole. This led to the commutation of the last of the seven death sentences that were imposed under the 1995 statute.
In 2008, the State Senate again passed legislation that would have established the death penalty for the murder of law enforcement officers, but the Assembly did not act on the legislation. In July of that year, Governor David Paterson ordered the removal of all execution equipment used to perform lethal injection and the closure of the execution chamber at Green Haven Correctional Facility.
The 1995 statute has never been repealed and is still on the books. …
There is currently no inmate on federal death row sentenced for a crime committed in the state of New York.
However, the death penalty can still be imposed in federal cases, even in New York. The reality is that it has not been imposed. The Mangione case is in line with that.
You may have noticed a Latin American wave of elections won by politicians on the right. The latest is in Costa Rica:
The rightwing populist Laura Fernández has won Costa Rica’s presidential election in a landslide after promising to crack down on rising violence linked to the cocaine trade.
Fernández’s nearest rival, centre-right economist Álvaro Ramos, conceded defeat as results showed the ruling party far exceeding the threshold of 40% needed to avoid a runoff.
The link is to the leftist Guardian, so it’s hard to know exactly what they mean by “rightwing populist” (Trumpish?) and “centre-right” (Romneyish?). But clearly, Costa Ricans want someone on the right rather than the left. Has the country ever had a leftist government? Yes, and it turned to the right only in 2022. But this recent election is a continuation of that trend.
Fernandez’s inspiration is Bukele of of El Salvador:
The country of 5.2 million people, famous for its white-sand beaches, has long been seen as an oasis of stability and democracy in Central America. But in recent years, it has gone from transit point to logistics hub in the global drug trade.
Drug trafficking by Mexican and Colombian cartels has seeped into local communities, fuelling turf wars that have caused the murder rate to jump 50% in the past six years, to 17 per 100,000 inhabitants.
Fernández cites the iron-fisted Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, who has locked up thousands of suspected gang members without charge, as an inspiration on how to tackle crime. Bukele was the first foreign leader to congratulate her.
Fernández’s win confirms a rightward lurch in Latin America, where conservatives have ridden anger towards corruption and crime to win power in Chile, Bolivia, Argentina and Honduras.
In Argentina at least, it was also economics.
Compare and contrast to this news in the US:
The January New York Times/Siena College poll found that only 32 percent of registered voters believed the country was better off than when Trump returned to office. 49 percent said it was worse. Trump’s approval rating stood at 40 percent, disapproval at 56 percent, and a majority of respondents, 55-42 percent, described his first year as unsuccessful.
These figures were released just days after the White House’s “365 Wins in 365 Days” announcement. They reveal a populace largely unmoved by achievements that objectively transformed policy, economy, and security.
Skepticism of this polling is not misplaced. The New York Times has long demonstrated a pattern of framing narratives through a left-leaning lens. It often underreports Republican accomplishments while amplifying Democratic perspectives. Trump condemned the poll as “fake” and “fraudulent,” denouncing it on Truth Social as a rigged effort to undermine his agenda. He promised to incorporate it into a multibillion-dollar defamation suit against the Times.
It may not be totally accurate, but I don’t think it’s fake. I think it represents something real; some sort of backlash. Look at the results of a recent Fox News poll:
A new Fox News survey, released Thursday, finds the Republican Party is seen as better able to handle border security (by 15 points), national security (+12), and immigration (+5).
The Democratic Party is favored on transgender issues (by 22 points), healthcare (+21), vaccines (+16), helping the middle class (+14), and affordability (+14).
And on three issues where Republicans have recently held the edge, now neither party has shown a clear preference: taxes (+1D), foreign policy (even), and the federal budget deficit (+2R). …
The survey shows if the election were today, 52% of voters would back the Democratic candidate in their House district and 46% the Republican. That’s a 6-point edge, which is right at the poll’s margin of sampling error.
The current 52% Democratic support is the highest recorded for either party; the previous high was 50% for the Democrats in October 2017.
Do people have such short memories of what Democrats do when in office? Do voters require that the current administration fix everything or they turn on it and turn to the opposition, no matter what the record is of the latter? Is it perhaps the dying off of older voters and the ascendance of young voters steeped in leftism?
It was “affordability” that got Mamdani elected. And special elections are not going well for the GOP; for example, this just happened:
Democratic Texas Senate candidate Taylor Rehmet defeated Republican Leigh Wambsganss, who President Donald Trump endorsed, 57.21% to 42.79% in the runoff election for the District 9 seat. …
Trump won District 9 by 17 percentage points in 2024. It encompasses Tarrant County and parts of Fort Worth and Arlington.
What gives? I quote two comments to that LI post:
I live in TX Senate 9 district and consider this a major upset. Rehmet aligns 90% with Jasmine Crockett’s positions. His (incessant) mailers seemed all warm and fuzzy, but his positions on his website are pure leftist dogma. Early voting was hampered by the storm last week, but that’s no excuse. We need a nationwide message on the positive economy now through November.
I, too live in this district. The WSJ has a column today about how this vote was all about immigration enforcement. I disagree. I have several friends that typically vote Republican withhold their votes because the disliked the candidate. This was a runoff election and there were two Republican candidates that split the vote. Don’t let the press confuse or discourage you.
Those two GOP candidates ran in November, however. I think that commenter is saying that, because there were two, the worse GOP candidate ended up being the person who ran against Rehmet. But the final result wasn’t even close; you can read more about it here.
I can’t find statistics on turnout, but my guess is that it was fairly low. At any rate, both candidates will be running against each other again in November.
Composer Philip Glass, 89, is apparently not a Trump fan:
Composer Philip Glass announced Tuesday that he is withdrawing his symphony from the Kennedy Center, pointing to the arts center’s values and leadership.
“After thoughtful consideration, I have decided to withdraw my Symphony No. 15 ‘Lincoln’ from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,” Glass announced in a statement posted to X.
“Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony,” he continued. “Therefore, I feel an obligation to withdraw this Symphony premiere from the Kennedy Center under its current leadership.”
Really? I was unaware of Trump’s support for slavery, or his advocacy of the South’s defiance of the federal government (seems the opposite, actually).
And I wonder whether Glass is aware that Lincoln met with many accusations similar to those against Trump: that he was a tyrant who didn’t respect the law. For example:
“What shall we call him? Coward, assassin, savage, murderer of women and babies? Or shall we consider them all as embodied in the word fiend, and call him Lincoln, the Fiend?”
So wrote Virginia’s Richmond Enquirer of the President of the U.S. in 1862. It was not unusual. Caught up in the passions of the era, the Northern Copperhead papers no less than the Southern press called Abraham Lincoln names that for venomous variety have been unsurpassed before or since in editorial tirades against a President—”The Ape,” “Simple Susan,” “Kentucky Mule,” “Illinois Beast,” “traitor,” “lowborn, despicable tyrant,” “cringing, crawling creature.” …
Thus the Illinois State Register (Springfield), taking Lincoln to task for his “assumed clownishness,” charged that his “buffoonery convinces the mind of no man, and is utterly lost on the majority of his audience.” The Chicago Times, one of his angriest foes, sneered that “he cannot speak five grammatical sentences in succession.” One of Lincoln’s greatest speeches, the second inaugural (“with malice toward none”) was dismissed by the Times as “slipshod” and “puerile.” …
Of his assassination, the Dallas Herald wrote: “God almighty ordered this event.” Houston’s Tri-Weekly Telegraph crowed: “From now until God’s judgment day, the minds of men will not cease to thrill at the killing of Abraham Lincoln.”
Then again, Philip Glass actually is a loaf of bread. If you’re unfamiliar with Glass’s work, the following parody may not make sense. It’s from a favorite play (or rather, series of short plays) of mine by David Ives, called All In the Timing:
(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.”
On yesterday’s thread about anti-MAGA rage in the health professions, there was some discussion about the leftism of therapists. I’m unaware of any threats by therapists to kill MAGA fans. But then again – unlike nurses and doctors – they’re not in the business of directly tending to their clients’ bodily needs, so they don’t have as much opportunity – or is it temptation?
But I think it might be time to recycle a post I wrote in May of 2023 on the topic of the leftism of therapists, and the fact that many have been refusing to treat people on the right for many years prior to Trump. So the rest of this post is a repeat of that earlier post.
Here’s a long article on how therapists have become social justice warriors. I haven’t yet read the whole thing, although I intend to do so. But I’ll just point out that: (a) there have always been many bad therapists out there, although there are probably many more these days; and (b) the vast majority of therapists have been on the left for a long long time.
On a personal note connected with point (b), twenty or so years ago when I was newly divorced and newly conservative and wanted to discuss both issues with a therapist, I had an amazingly difficult time trying to find a therapist willing to deal with a client on the right. So this sort of ostracism is not a new phenomenon at all, although I’m virtually certain it is now far more common than it was back then, and it was already common back then. If anyone is interested, here’s a website which purports to list therapists willing to work with conservatives. I have no idea whether it’s reliable or not, however.
If anyone is looking for a therapist, I suggest being basically up-front about your politics when you first speak to each therapist on the phone. Explain that you are politically conservative and ask whether they’re comfortable working with a conservative, whether they come from an identity politics ideology, and that sort of thing. The therapist may be truthful in telling you yes or no. You can often get a good sense of this in even a brief conversation, and it doesn’t cost a cent.
But what a terrible mess.
Where did January go? Wasn’t it New Year’s Eve just a moment ago?