The cruise’s first big port destination was the Dominican Republic. The ship docked in Taino Bay, which is a very touristy area before one gets into the heart of the island itself. Today was going to be a big day: my family had a planned tour of Ocean World.

Ocean World is a theme park of sorts allowing one to interact with all manner of sea and land creatures from the island. Guests can meet capybaras, feed lovebirds and even learn snorkeling in the fishy pools splattered across the campus. My family and I were there to meet the main attractions as far as we were concerned: the dolphins. Continue reading →

Pamela Jo Bondi had the blond hair of a Trump gal and the resume of a Florida attorney general. Yet, she wasn’t Trump’s first choice for the job, as many forget that Trump had his eye on the one person who best personified justice in the age of Trump. No, not Roy Cohn, who was dead, although if he wasn’t dead, he would no doubt be a prime candidate for AG, if not SCOTUS itself. No, it was the venerable Matt Gaetz, whose legal genius was only surpassed by his appreciation of underage women and deep interest in Aliens.*

When even the Republican controlled, Trump loyal, Senate couldn’t stomach Gaetz, and so the job went to Pam Bondi. Before her confirmation, Bondi put on her nice girl act. Afterward, not so much. Despite her belligerence in support of Trump, she never stood a chance.

President Trump had complained too freely, too frequently, to too many people about her inability to prosecute the people he hates. She was falling short of Mr. Trump’s unyielding, unrealistic demands for retribution against his enemies. She had made mistake upon mistake in her handling of the Epstein files. Her critics were in the president’s ear.

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In an op-ed in the New York Times, Prawf  Stephen Vladeck makes the point that, even though Trump appears certain to lose the birthright citizenship case argued before the Supreme Court, he’s already won.

If anything was clear during Wednesday’s Supreme Court oral argument in the birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara, it’s that President Trump is going to lose. The justices’ questions were skeptical enough to suggest that somewhere between six and eight of the justices will hold that Mr. Trump’s executive order purporting to limit birthright citizenship is unlawful, whether because it violates an immigration statute Congress enacted in 1940 and updated in 1952, the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, or both.

It’s generally perilous to believe that the questions posed during oral argument reveal what the outcome will be, as justices often challenge arguments only to later take the position that they appeared challenge. It’s a way to test arguments rather than reveal votes. But based on yesterday’s oral argument, the questions posed appear overwhelmingly to demonstrate that the majority of justices rejected the specious arguments that John Eastman, and hence Trump, and thereafter the MAGA faithful, found powerful. They were neither textual, relevant nor historically sound, even though they’ve been sold to, and bought by, the gullible and clueless. Continue reading →

Judge Richard Leon, appointed by George W. Bush, preliminarily enjoined the construction of Trump’s Folly, the gargantuan yet gaudy ballroom that would dwarf the White House and fundamentally change the nature of one of the premier symbols of the nation.

The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner! President Trump (“the President”) claims that Congress has given him authority in existing statutes to construct his East Wing ballroom project and to do it with private funds. The plaintiff, the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States (“National Trust”), claims the President has no such authority under existing statutes and that a preliminary injunction is necessary to avoid irreparable harm. I have concluded that the National Trust is likely to succeed on the merits because no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have. As such, I must therefore GRANT the National Trust’s Motion for a Preliminary Injunction, and the ballroom construction project must stop until Congress authorizes its completion.

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The first one was huge, purportedly five million people. The second even bigger. And the third said to be a whopping eight million people. Eight million is a lot of people. So what?

Protesters filled streets and town squares across the United States on Saturday at thousands of rallies, the third in a sequence of nationwide, loosely coordinated demonstrations under the banner of “No Kings.” They came to denounce President Trump and much of his second-term agenda, wielding signs and chants about issues such as mass deportation, restrictions on voting, attacks on diversity and two matters that have suddenly moved to the fore: the war in Iran and the soaring gas prices that have resulted from it.

People certainly have a right to protest, to air their grievances against the government and let the president know that the streets are filled with people who, contrary to his self-announced claims, do not think he’s the greatest president ever. Many people turned out to add their voices to the chorus of condemnation. Many people turned out to do something, anything, about what they see as an American travesty. Many people turned out because Trump broke his promises and made their life more miserable than it was before. Continue reading →

I tried infinite scrolling, and frankly found it to be boring and a poor use of time. Sure, there were some funny and interesting videos, but they ran dry rather quickly and the allure of the next good one wasn’t strong enough to prevent me from hitting the “x.” But that’s me, and I’m neither a teenager nor a digital native. Others have not been able to pull themselves away, and that’s the root of the problem.

Last week, juries in two different states delivered multimillion-dollar verdicts against Big Tech. A New Mexico jury handed down a $375 million verdict in a case brought by the state’s attorney general against Meta for enabling child sexual exploitation. The next day, a California jury awarded a young woman a combined $6 million in damages from Meta and YouTube for the allegedly addictive and mentally distressing properties of social media apps, including algorithmic curation and so-called infinite scroll, where the app continually provides you with new content as you scroll down the page.

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If the names of white men were stricken from a promotion list to one-star general because they were white men, it would constitute unlawful discrimination. The same is true if the names were of black or female officers. They shouldn’t get the promotion because of their race or sex, and they shouldn’t be denied the promotion either. That’s the part the eludes Hegseth. Or maybe it doesn’t elude Hegseth at all and he’s just racist and sexist, using the Trump-demanded war against woke to cleanse the military of those he deems unworthy of being in this white man’s army?

Two of the officers targeted by Mr. Hegseth are Black and two are women on a promotion list that consists of about three dozen officers, most of whom are white men, senior military officials said.

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Prefatory note: Friends, the travelogue is taking a slight break this week.

I remember the first season of ABC’s reality TV juggernaut “The Bachelor” somewhat vaguely. As I recall the lead was a single guy from a fairly large tire magnate family. The premise of the show was vulgar, but it made sense: this was a guy twenty women would arguably throw themselves at in real life.

Fast forward to last week and the show’s gone from THAT to…well…having twenty men compete for the love of a single mother of three with multiple baby daddies and a guilty plea for domestic violence. Continue reading →

One of the most incomprehensible aspects of Trump’s foreign policy decision-making is his abject refusal to do lay any responsibility, any blame, on Vladimir Putin and Russia. Jay Nordingler wrote an insightful post about how Trump understands America’s position in the world relative to Russia, and his personal grasp of his role relative to Putin. It doesn’t explain why, but it does explain how.

William F. Buckley Jr. had a line about moral equivalence. He worded it slightly differently each time, but here is one version: “The man who pushes an old lady into the path of an oncoming truck, and the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of an oncoming truck, are not to be denounced evenhandedly as men who push old ladies around.”

In Trump’s eyes, however, the United States and Russia are two sides of the same coin, each the moral equivalent of the other. Continue reading →

Only in a fantasy narrative wholly detached from any cognizable version of reality could one not see the settlement as the United States Department of Justice, or Attorney General Pam Bondi to be more specific, handing over taxpayer funds to a Trump=aligned criminal-turned-retconned victim to the tune of $1.25 million as an act of  flagrant corruption. Granted, that’s not a huge sum, particularly in light of the sums that will be paid by Bondi to victims-of-injustice Trump and his family, but it’s still nothing to sneeze at.

But mostly, the notion that the United States paid off Michael Flynn, who twice pleaded guilty to obstruction for lying to investigators, after being fired by Trump as National Security Advisor for lying to Vice President Mike Pence, and ultimately pardoned by Trump in the waning hours of his first term, is such a flagrant act of corruption as to be absurd, but for the fact that it happened. The Attorney General of the United States agreed to give $1.25 million to Flynn, who pleaded guilty and was pardoned, for being maliciously prosecuted. Nope, it actually happened. Continue reading →