Is it time for another government shutdown?
And which party will the people blame if it comes to pass?
This time the usual roles are reversed, and in addition the Republicans say firings will ensue:
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., released a memo earlier this week highlighting past years’ comments by Senate Democrats warning of the pitfalls of a government shutdown.
“House Republicans acted responsibly last week to keep the government open with the clean short-term continuing resolution,” Johnson’s memo said.
“Senate Democrats, who used to warn that shutdowns would hurt seniors, veterans, and working families, are now threatening to force one unless Congress repeals the Working Families Tax Cut, restores taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal aliens, and sends half a billion dollars to leftist news outlets, among other partisan spending demands.”
Democrats claim to be protecting healthcare – but there’s also the issue of government jobs:
“[A]gencies are directed to use this opportunity to consider Reduction in Force (RIF) notices for all employees in programs, projects, or activities” that are funded by annual appropriations but are not “consistent with the president’s priorities,” Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a memo to senior administration officials.
The move raised the stakes of a shutdown for Democratic lawmakers, many of whom are advocates for the federal workforce.
Who will blink first? And who will be blamed? To anyone who’s been paying attention to shutdowns for the past umpteen years, it would be hard for Democrats to claim that a shutdown would be good and not bad. But reversals of that kind are certainly not unusual.
Here’s a recent poll by Rasmussen on the subject:
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 38% of Likely U.S. voters say that if there is a government shutdown, Democrats in Congress will be most to blame, while 29% think congressional Republicans would deserve the blame and 21% believe most of the blame would belong to President Donald Trump. Twelve percent (12%) are not sure.
If you add the “Trump” number to the “Rebublicans” figure, you get 50%. Not sure what a poll like that means, if anything. But I would wager that most people aren’t following this and don’t even know what it’s about.
Breaking story: Comey indicted
Well, well, well – It actually happened:
Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted by a federal grand jury Thursday on charges of making false statements and obstruction of justice.
“No one is above the law,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement on X. “Today’s indictment reflects this Department of Justice’s commitment to holding those who abuse positions of power accountable for misleading the American people. We will follow the facts in this case.”
This just broke, so I probably will be adding more to it later.
The left will scream “Lawfare-type revenge!” But to me it seems pretty clear these charges are well-grounded.
The new rule: all assassins are MAGA now
Actually, it’s not such a new rule that all assassinations are blamed on the right. If they managed to do it with the Communist Lee Harvey Oswald, it can be done to anyone.
The latest in the line is the guy in Dallas who tried to kill ICE agents, failed, killed some detainees instead and then himself, and left very clear messages about what he was intending:
A handwritten note recovered by investigators said, “Hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror, to think, ‘is there a sniper with AP [armor piercing] rounds on that roof?’” …
Jahn, who opened fire at a van near the entrance of an ICE field office in Dallas on Wednesday morning, had also conducted multiple searches of the “Charlie Kirk Shot Video” between Sept. 23 and 24, just before the shooting, FBI Director Kash Patel said in an X post Thursday. …
He also searched for apps that tracked the presence of ICE agents, and downloaded a document titled “Dallas County Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Management,” which the FBI said contains a list of DHS facilities.
He also engraved “anti ICE” on bullets. But the left insists he’s MAGA – as ACE points out – after the left celebrated the murders when they thought the dead people really were ICE agents.
There’s another angle that I think is telling, which is that Jahn apparently ran in gamer circles:
Dallas shooter Joshua Jahn’s gamer pals made ghoulish jokes about his attack on an ICE facility where he killed one person and critically wounded two others — including suggesting he “shoulda hit the range a lil more.”
The eight-member gaming group, formed in 2012 on the online gaming platform Steam, goes by the name “Fug bithces Get Money” with the tagline “we can uze da pew pew or not we are coollllll :-D.”
“[He] shoulda hit the range a lil more,” one member wrote in the gaming group chat on Thursday.
“He missed,” the user exclaimed. …
The 29-year-old gunman played mostly first-person shooting games, logging over 17,405 hours of playing time, totaling approximately two years.
Hours before Wednesday’s fatal shooting, Jahn logged onto Steam to play the first-person shooter games “Team Fortress 2” and “Left 4 Dead 2,” according to his profile created in September 2011.
So he played a shooter video game not long before the actual shooting. Was he a bad shot because he thought that practicing shooting in an online game would transfer over into real life expertise?
The left not only denies killers are on the left and claims they are MAGA (in an “absence of evidence” of any MAGA leaning), and/or blames the right for a “climate of violence” while repetitively calling the right Nazis, but it also blames the killings on guns and uses them to promote more draconian gun control. Any evidence of leftist leanings is dismissed as lies from Trump’s FBI and/or the police, who are the enemy. It’s a closed system of denial, and I doubt it convinces anyone except those already firmly on the left. But that’s a lot of people these days.
Finally, from Karoline Leavitt:
Three months ago, CNN irresponsibly gave free publicity to an app that recklessly shares the location of ICE Agents.
It has now been revealed the leftist lunatic shooter who opened fire on the Dallas ICE Facility was using one of these apps.
The liberal media is complicit in the increased threats and violence against ICE.
We see it every day — they are quick to write a fake story portraying ICE in a negative light, often omitting the real facts of these cases, and they hardly ever write about the vicious criminals that ICE is arresting every day to make our country safer.
Notice that she calls Jahn both a leftist and a lunatic. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Open thread 9/25/2025
Roundup
Once again, a lot of news:
(1) Trump and the UN escalator: Was it accidental or purposeful? Hard to say, but it’s being investigated.
(2) Rumor has it that James Comey is about to be indicted. For what? Not sure yet, but lying to Congress is a good possibility.
(3) Trump seems to be more Ukraine-friendly these days:
“After getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation and, after seeing the Economic trouble it is causing Russia, I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.” …
He added that Russia has been “fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win. This is not distinguishing Russia.”
More at the link.
Everything Trump says is a tactic, so it’s hard to say what this means. But one thing I think it means is that he’s fed up with Putin.
(4) Riots in Italy because the country didn’t join Britain, France, Canada, and Australia in jumping on the “Hey, recognizing Palestine now would be a great idea!” bandwagon.
Shooting at Dallas ICE facility
A shooter on the roof with a rifle, engraved bullets, and there are two dead victims plus one in critical condition. The shooter killed himself. The target was an ICE facility, and the bullets had anti-ICE messages.
This morning, a deranged gunman attacked a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Dallas field office from a nearby rooftop. The shooter fired indiscriminately at the ICE building, as well as at a van in the sallyport where the victims were shot.
We can confirm, the shell casings were found with anti-ICE messages on them. This was an attack on ICE law enforcement.
This horrific attack occurred amidst the 1000% increase in assaults against @ICEgov. Politicians and media pundits must stop the vile lies and smears designed to demonize and dehumanize ICE law enforcement.
Interesting message. Why do they call him “deranged”? (See my previous post today for a longer discussion of whether such killers are “crazy” or not.) He’s dead now, and I doubt we’ll ever know – except for the fact that completely “normal” people don’t ordinarily do such things unless they think they’re combating great evil and are part of a noble resistance underground, such as in WWII.
That’s where the role of the “vile lies and smears” against ICE come in. However, although apparently the killer was aiming for ICE, his victims were all detainees.
Why all these assassinations?
One answer is: copycats. It’s in the air. I believe the same was true in the JFK, MLK, RFK assassinations. The latter two took place in April and June of 1968, a time of extraordinary upheaval. It was also an era with revolutionaries planting bombs, and featured multiple cop killings.
Of course the killers back then came from different backgrounds and political persuasions, and had different motives. Were they crazy? No. The fact that some – such as Oswald – could be described as somewhat disturbed is irrelevant. They were all sane in the legal sense.
And I believe that is true of most political assassins, such as Robinson (and would-be assassins like Brooks), as well as long-ago assassins like John Wilkes Booth.
On the other hand, would-be assassin Hinckley chose a political target – Reagan – but his motive was not political and he came closer to the definition of “crazy” in that he was trying to impress Jodie Foster and was likely schizophrenic (although his diagnosis was disputed). In fact, Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was kept in a mental hospital until 2016. I wonder whether he’d have been found not guilty if his trial had occurred nowadays, however. And I wonder if the fact that Reagan recovered factored into it as well.
Now the left is bound and determined to say all assassins are MAGA until proven otherwise, and that when their bullets are engraved with leftist sayings, they’re just being ironic and cute. Likewise, when they have leftist political histories, the left claims it’s a lie. When all of that falls through, the killers are just random crazy people, as good old Jimmy Kimmel – he’s baaack! – said on his return to TV last night:
This was a sick person who believed violence was a solution and it isn’t — ever — and also selfishly, I am a person who gets a lot of threats, I get many ugly and scary threats against my life my wife, my kids, my coworkers because of what I choose to say, and I know those threats don’t come from the kind of people on the right who I know I love, so that’s what I wanted to say on that subject.
So there we have the “sick person” description, as well as the “I’m actually the victim” and the “both sides” argument. All of which you hear a lot of these days.
Of course Robinson almost certainly is a “sick person.” The internet and the furry gaming community was part of that, a world into which he descended in recent years (did COVID lockdowns also have a role, perhaps?) But that doesn’t mean he’s not also a cold-blooded political assassin of the left, motivated almost certainly by political hatred and propaganda. It doesn’t mean he’s crazy. And it also doesn’t mean that it’s equal on both sides.
What’s more – and this is key – Kimmel also stated: “I don’t think the murderer who shot Charlie Kirk represents anyone.” Wrong, and we have the “X” posts to prove it, the ones from the leftists who celebrated the shooting. They were very numerous, and very chilling, and although Robinson wasn’t formally allied with these people in an organization, they nevertheless support him and it’s no stretch at all to say that Robinson represents them.
Words are not violence. But words can spark violence in a receptive mind, and Robinson’s mind had become quite receptive. I have a hunch the reasons were a toxic stew of the following: immersion in an internet world; the idea that Kirk was a “hater” (particularly of trans people) and a “fascist,” things the left has been saying for a long time; and especially the idea that trans people are under physical attack and even victims of a “genocide.”
I noticed that latter assertion – that there’s some sort of genocide going on against trans people – around the time of the Floyd riots and Black Lives Matter’s ascendance. The latter was pushing the “trans genocide” myth in addition to the anti-police myth of widespread killing of unarmed black people by cops. Somewhere I believe I even have an old draft for a post on the subject, which I don’t have time to look for now. Fortunately I don’t need to, because Andy Ngo – a longtime expert on Antifa – has done the work on this:
These assassins are fostered by the left, and it is almost certainly quite intentional.
Open thread 9/24/2025
I’ve been working on Gerard’s poetry book …
… and although I’m very close to finished, I recently hit an extremely frustrating formatting snag.
Formatting the essay book wasn’t easy, but it was a piece of cake compared to formatting poetry. The settings that purport to be appropriate only work for short quotes from poems, and that just won’t do for a book. I figured out a work-around, but then the formatting is messed up for prose chapters such as an introduction and afterward.
You can have poetry or you can have prose, but the latter requires indented paragraphs in a print book (not online, of course) and the former doesn’t. I’ve had a correspondence about this with the help desk of the software program I use, and they said what I’m trying to do can’t be done. It took me ages to learn how to use this program and I’m not going to start all over again with another that might not even solve the problem.
I’ve decided to simply cut way back on any pose sections. After all, the poetry is the thing.
I’m just venting here.
Roundup
Once again, so much news:
(1) Trump comes to the UN and he tells them what he really thinks.
BREAKING – At the United Nations, President Trump:
– Called for protections for Christians
– Eviscerated the UN for funding mass migration into the US and western countries
– Said Europe must stop adopting Sharia Law
– Harshly criticized globalism
– Slammed the UN for its climate alarmism
– Scorched countries for funding Russia’s war
– Promoted fossil fuels
– Urged countries stop falling for the “Green Scam”
– Said the UN doesn’t back up its words with any meaningful action on issues that matter
– Preached American exceptionalism and said none of their countries come close
– Demanded an end to biological weapons
– Concluded by urging UN members to protect their national identities by clamping down on mass migration and serving their peopleAnd of course, clowned the UN for its escalator breaking in the lobby and the teleprompter not working.
Hard to argue with any of that.
(2) I wrote about this briefly in today’s previous post, but I thought I’d mention it again: Kimmel’s been reinstated, but Nexstar says “no thanks,” so many local stations won’t be carrying him.
(3) Pacific Island nations seem to be pro-Israel. When I read that, I wondered why. Here’s the answer I got:
Explanations of this anomaly have rightly placed emphasis upon the intensely Christian character of Pacific societies.
Adherence rates in most Pacific countries sit above 90%. Across the region, Israel and Judaism are exalted as the sacred foundations of their faith. Governments drawn from these societies duplicate these views, which are then borne out in international forums such as the UN.
… [In] Melanesia … local people now advance the claim they have descended from these dispersed [Israelite] tribes, a strategy designed to ensure their salvation
In a variety of ways, people have woven Jewish people, their sacred geography, and the state of Israel, into their own kinship networks.
This may occur directly, as communities assert membership of the ten lost tribes of Israel. …
The kinship connection may also occur indirectly, through expressions of spiritual affinities with Jewish people. In any case, it is in a truly Pacific manner that kinship networks have opened and then closed around those things they wish to extract value from.
They also get US aid. But so do plenty of countries that vote pro-Palestinian.
(4) Trump also had a seemingly cordial meeting with Zelensky, and made a statement that he (Trump) thinks NATO nations should shoot down Russian aircraft that enter their space.
(5) A jury in Florida found would-be Trump assassin Ryan Routh guilty on all charges.
Routh served as his own lawyer, which isn’t usually a good career move. This seems to have been the case for Routh as well:
Jurors on Tuesday delivered a guilty verdict for Ryan Routh on all charges after he attempted to assassinate then-presidential candidate Donald Trump at his West Palm Beach golf club last September.
After the verdict was read, Routh reportedly appeared to try to stab himself in the neck with a pen before four U.S. Marshals restrained him.
His daughter, Sara Routh, reportedly stood up and said:
“Don’t do anything. I will get you out. What the f—, f—, he didn’t hurt anybody. This is not fair. This is all rigged – you guys are a–holes.” The jury was still in the room at the time.
Routh, 59, was charged on five federal criminal counts, including attempting to assassinate a major presidential candidate, assaulting a federal officer, and multiple firearms offenses.
The charges carry a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Stab himself in the neck with a pen? Is this some sick Charlie Kirk reference? As for the daughter, has she never heard of the idea of an attempt? As best I can recall, Routh was lying in wait with a weapon and was only stopped by an alert Secret Service agent. According to Google’s AI, here’s the definition of “attempt” in the legal sense:
The legal definition of “attempt” in criminal law is the specific intent to commit a crime and taking a “substantial step” toward its completion, even though the crime is not actually carried out. This substantial step is defined as conduct that is strongly corroborative of the actor’s intent to complete the crime, and it must go beyond mere planning or preparation.
I think Routh’s behavior fits that definition quite well.
And, in a strange foreshadowing of the Tyler Robinson texting “confession” to his roommate-lover, here’s what Routh had done:
The government delivered its closing argument first, with prosecutor Christopher Browne telling the court that the suspect had planned to kill Trump “for a long, long time.”
“It is not every case where the defendant writes his intent down on a piece of paper,” Browne said during his closing statement.
Browne was referring to note Routh wrote before he was arrested and left in a box at a friend’s home in North Carolina. It was addressed “To the World” and stated plainly, “This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump.”
“Chickens coming home” – again
Sometimes I think things have changed dramatically for the worse since I was a child. And I do believe that’s true – of some things.
But sometimes I think there are aspects of human nature – and of left and right – that have hardly changed at all, and that perhaps we’re just more aware of them because of social media, the internet, and cable news.
For example, as an instance of something that’s really changed, we have Jimmy Kimmel, a talk show host on a major network expressing something other than empathy/sympathy/sorrow/shock at the assassination of a prominent American political/religious figure. In the 1960s, or when Reagan almost lost his life, talk show hosts kept their politics to themselves. Kimmel has become highly political in recent years – and unfunny as well as unentertaining. But until now he hasn’t been at all reluctant to offend at least half the country.
He got into trouble a few days ago, but now he’s being reinstated – sort of:
Nexstar Media Group, Inc., announced on Tuesday that it will continue preempting “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” despite Disney allowing the show to return to ABC.
“We made a decision last week to preempt ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ following what ABC referred to as Mr. Kimmel’s ‘ill-timed and insensitive’ comments at a critical time in our national discourse. We stand by that decision pending assurance that all parties are committed to fostering an environment of respectful, constructive dialogue in the markets we serve,” the company said in a statement.
“In the meantime, we note that ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ will be available nationwide on multiple Disney-owned streaming products, while our stations will focus on continuing to produce local news and other programming relevant to their respective markets,” Nexstar added.
It may even help his sagging ratings. More people might tune in to hear whether he’ll continue to diss the right or whether he’ll pull back a bit.
But although talk show hosts didn’t do this back then, I remember that when JFK was assassinated the left lost no time whatsoever blaming the right even though the killer was a Communist. The left – and many regular Democrats – blamed the right for creating a “climate of violence.” Sound familiar?
And what of the chickens of the title of this post? It comes from a speech and answer given by Malcolm X – who later was himself cut down by an assassin’s bullet that most agree came from his old allies now turned enemies, the Nation of Islam. At the time of the speech, not long after JFK was assassinated, he was still allied with that group, but by the time he was killed in 1965 he had pulled away. If you read the speech you can see themes that are very popular with today’s left; here are some excerpts, for example:
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that as it was the evil sin of slavery that caused the downfall and destruction of ancient Egypt and Babylon, and of ancient Greece, as well as ancient Rome, so it was the evil sin of colonialism (slavery, nineteenth-century European style) that caused the collapse of the white nations in present-day Europe as world powers. Unbiased scholars and unbiased observers agree that the wealth and power of white Europe has rapidly declined during the nineteen-year period between World War II and today.
So we of this present generation are also witnessing how the enslavement of millions of black people in this country is now bringing White America to her hour of judgment, to her downfall as a respected nation. And even those Americans who are blinded by childlike patriotism can see that it is only a matter of time before White America too will be utterly destroyed by her own sins, and all traces of her former glory will be removed from this planet forever.
But before God can set up his new world, the Muslim world, or world of Islam, which will be established on the principles to truth, peace, and brotherhood, God himself must first destroy this evil Western world, the white world…a wicked world, ruled by a race of devils, that preaches falsehood, practices slavery, and thrives on indecency and immorality. You and I are living in that great Doomsday, the final hour, when the ancient prophets predicted that God himself would appear in person, in the flesh, and with divine power He would bring about the judgement and destruction of this present evil world. …
The white liberals control the Negro and the Negro vote by controlling the Negro civil rights leaders. As long as they control the Negro civil rights leaders, they can also control and contain the Negro’s struggle, and they can control the Negro’s so-called revolt. The Negro “revolution” is controlled by these foxy white liberals, by the government itself. But the black revolution is controlled only by God.
The black revolution is the struggle of the nonwhites of this earth against their white oppressors.
It goes on for quite some time in that vein. But the “chickens” part came as part of a question and answer period afterwards. I don’t think there’s any recording of it, but here’s Malcolm X a few months later, attempting to explain his remarks. Again, it’s very familiar stuff:
If you go to YouTube and look at the comments there, they almost all say some version of “Yes, that’s what happened to Charlie Kirk, too.” I’ll give you just a few typical examples, all put up after Kirk was killed:
Charlie Kirk
I thought about this after Charlie Kirk got popped
The chickens appeared in Utah yesterday to greet Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk is all I shall say.
When I heard about Charlie Kirk this was the first thing that came to mind.
“They won’t even admit the knife is there” is basically half of Charlie Kirk’s content
We Know Why we’re all here.
And of course we have so many social media postings, and pundits and politicians, openly saying the same thing about Charlie Kirk’s killing. One popular observation is the idea that it’s fitting that Kirk was killed with a gun, since he supported gun rights and said that defending liberty by supporting the Second Amendment meant – sadly – that some people would be killed by guns. The assassination is generally justified and even applauded by many people on those grounds plus the idea that Kirk was a “hater” – although nothing could be further from the truth.
But plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.