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April 14, 2025
Sunrise — 6:18, 6:19, 6:22.
Talk about whatever you like. And please support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.
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25 comments:
Lovely photos today, and it looks like sufficient breeze to sail a cat boat ! Unusual, that early in the morning.
Imus hosts Yasser Arafat's funeral Link in 2004. Amusing chaos, gunfire, covered by Andrea Mitchell on the scene.
NY Post: IRS workers owe $46 million in taxes.
I would have overbid that on the Price is Right, on account that ratting out your fellow co-workers is highly frowned upon.
Have a friend, husband recently passed after a long struggle with Fournier's Gangrene. (For your own peace of mind, do NOT google that. Welp, I warned ya.) Another friend had taken her home, I had to retrieve her car from the hospital.
She's not car savvy, but she'd been driving with a low tire pressure light on. "I was gonna get it taken care of, one of these days."
I stopped by the house, I've got an air compressor. Her tires were 19, 19, 16, and 6. Yes, 6. And that last tire - well, it's pretty bad, belts are showing, but she'll have to take care of that. She at least knows now.
They're all up to 33, and the light's gone out.
Oil? BARELY touching the bottom of the dipstick. Took two quarts, and I warned her about that when I dropped off the car. It's an older KIA with a GDI engine, and over 100k they can be notorious oil hogs
I checked her bulbs. One headlight was out, so I went and got an H-13 bulb, swapped that out in a couple of minutes. She'd mentioned how he hates driving at night... think that might have been the problem?
So she's in as good a state as I could get her as far as the car goes. A little bit of maintenance can go a long way and a couple of quarts of oil is a lot cheaper than a tow and a locked up engine.
If you've got a friend who's going through a hard time, maybe they could use a bit of cover to keep things going through it. Because a lot of things can get dropped when folks are in the hospital - and afterwards... well, it's the right thing to do, y'know? I'd want someone to help my lovely bride and take care of such things if needed until she can do them herself...
Speaking of finitude, Thomas is the most senior justice in the Supreme Court. How does that play in his mind as to when to retire, if to retire at all plays on his mind? Maybe he wants to die with his robe on.
Would it be boorish of me to ask the almighty to call Thomas home while Trump is POTUS? 🤦🏽♂️
Headline: "'Everything we heard from Russians was a lie' — Chinese fighters captured by Ukraine speak out"
From 'Mission Impossible' opening scene: As always, should you or any of your IM Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. Good luck, Jim.
Thank you, Jerry, for setting an example and reminding me, reminding us, of our social obligations.
“China retaliates against U.S. tariffs by stopping payments to Congress.”
https://x.com/Rothmus/status/1911915294894727647
This is refreshing. JD is acting like a Vice President here.
Is that a silver lining, maybe?
Or am I grasping at a cheap trophy?
Best comment over there: "This is what happens when you stop buying things from China."
NYT reports:
With many of those [Chinese] goods now facing an extraordinary wall of tariffs thanks to President Trump, fear is rising that more products will be dumped in Europe, weakening local industries in France, Germany, Italy and the rest of the European Union.
For some reason, they never seemed to worry much about those products being dumped here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/world/europe/europe-china-dumping-tariffs.html
I read something earlier today that I just got around to looking up. Immigration courts. They are not part of the Article 3 judiciary. And are not approved by Congress. They're appointed by the Attorney General. And they do not have lifetime tenure- they're not judge judges...
They are nothing more then civil servants with judge before their names when they're at work.
So who can override a civil servant's decision? The supervisor. Like the AG, Pam Bondi. And who can override an AG's decision? POTUS. 'Twas an immigration judge, a glorified civil servant, who decided the poor innocent Maryland man must not be sent to El Salvador. Or, to put it another way, POTUS sent Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a known gang member, and criminal, unlawfully in the USA, a citizen of El Salvador, already subject to a removal order, back to his home country of El Salvador, overriding a decision made by an underling- an immigration judge, AKA, glorified civil servant to send him anywhere but there. But anywhere else didn't want a known gang member and criminal. And, TBH, most American's don't want him here. The Article 3 courts got involved too late. He was already in the air outside the USA when they acted. Out of their jurisdiction. OFW.
My heart doesn't bleed for the poor Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Nor for his family. As a citizen of El Salvador he's subject to the laws of EL Salvador. And is now housed in their prison facility, which I guarantee doesn't meet US standards for the coddling of criminals. Sucks to be him. But he is where the law abiding people of El Salvador and the government want him to be.
Ordering POTUS to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back now is way beyond any court's jurisdiction.
Sorry GoSpace. You and the new authoritarian government cannot rewrite the law.
Nothing in the Alien Enemies Act or anywhere in the U.S. code allows the government to contract with a foreign government to imprison people removed from U.S. soil. These are not extraditions because El Salvador is not seeking these folks on any charges there, and they have not gone through any extradition process. There appears to be no trial on the horizon for any of them. The plaintiffs certainly don’t think one exists. Lee Gelernt, who is heading up the ACLU’s litigation against the use of AEA, said that “there’s no authority under the immigration laws to send non-Salvadorans to a notorious prison in El Salvador, nor can the Alien Enemies Act be used against anyone during peacetime.”
DOJ attorneys in the case of Abrego Garcia have been arguing in court that the only avenue for the detainees to seek redress is filing habeas corpus petitions, essentially a constitutional challenge against unlawful detention. The Supreme Court endorsed this position in its Monday ruling. This admits that the detainees are in U.S. custody at least through the transfer, yet the DOJ claims that the courts have no jurisdiction to hear these habeas claims once detainees are already at CECOT because they are no longer in U.S. custody; but whose custody are they in, then? If a private prison company is under contract to detain people on behalf of ICE, are those people somehow not in U.S. custody?
If Abrega Garcia remains alive in the Gulag, how many are dead?
Pretty simple for illegal immigrants: If you don't want to end up like Abrego Garcia, self-deport and pick your own destination. "Closing time, you don't have to go home but you can't stay here..."
Are the Democrats trying to get themselves down to a 10% share of the Hispanic vote? Both MS-13 and Tren de Aragua preferentially prey on low income and middle class Hispanic families — do Democrats think Hispanics want their daughters raped and their sons murdered for refusing to join the gangs? Do limousine liberals think Hispanics enjoy paying protection money? It just seems strange to me.
@Althouse, speaking of which, you are living in a liberal city and not too long ago taught classes that included, I presume, many young liberal women. Can you explain to us Normals what attracts young liberal women to violent criminals? I’m thinking of Taylor Lorenz talking about Luigi Mangione — watching her I got the impression that if Mangione had walked into the room she’d have ripped her clothes off and laid down with her legs spread, to put it crudely but accurately.
China has lowered the boom on the King! Instead of only hiking the price US companies have to pay to sell goods inside China via tariffs, Beijing also appears to be using its export capability to move the needle against Washington. Essentially, China has a mining and refinement monpoly over rare earth products, and even if the elements were available to the U. S. though expanded mining, it will take years to build refinement plants.
Rare earths are in everything, EVs and autos, space and other things from cell phones, defense key components, and space travel.”
Good point Gadfly, the US should NEVER have let itself become dependent on an ENEMY for such important commodities. Thank God Trump is going to get us off such a unreasonable dependency.
Nothing is turning out as Gadfly envisioned.
Nevada has the worlds largest deposit of Lithium. There are large, marketable deposits of Boron and Nickle in California. They are actively mining Copper and Nickle in Michigan.
Sucks, huh.
I checked the digital front page of the NYT a few minutes ago. Apparently the war in Ukraine is no longer newsworthy- Ctrl-F Ukraine 0 hits.
Gaza? One hit, about a guard at a Gazan "Hospital" killed by an IDF airstrike.
CTRL-F Trump- 20 hits. Sucking all the oxygen out of the room, amplified by their TDS.
I was hoping for some video at rhhardin's Arafat funeral link, but it was just Imus and Co yammering over audio (at least on my samples).
For me, Khomeini's funeral parade is the gold standard. I doubt that our technical overlords allow it anymore, but some years ago I looked it up and found a snippet including
the overturned coffin and crowd-surfing corpse.
Nice triptych, Althouse.
https://x.com/matt_vanswol/status/1911796326070730956?s=61
Fork in the Road #2 (ending 4/11/25) was federal layoffs done right. This logical, documented, and well-planned process fixed the comical self-goal of Musk's Fork #1. See the Bloomberg story entitled: "Federal Workers Jump at Buyout Offers They Once Shunned"
I deeply hope that Musk's team has learned elementary database management skills, as their initial OPM federal workforce "fictional employees" and Social Security "shocking findings of 150 years old people" were also bad jokes.
I never in my life thought I'd agree with ultra-big-government lefty Martin O'Malley of Maryland, but I do in this 4/15/25 TheHill article "Elon Musk is creating Social Security waste, fraud and abuse"
No hyperlinks because the Blogger post eater often treats links as spam.
"My heart doesn't bleed for the poor Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Nor for his family."
I guess it must be tough for them, being separated like that. Perhaps their family should be given the option of a plane ride to El Salvador so they can be together again.
Do you think they'd accept?
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