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Trump's Second Term

Coal makes the world go round.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Fox: "We're announcing today expanded programs to help the American coal industry. We're helping it because for years it has been under assault. It was out of fashion with the chardonnay set in San Francisco, Boulder, Colorado, and New York City ... coal just makes the world go round."
Wait. You're going to subsidise coal? I thought Trump said coal was the one beautiful power source which made economic sense because renewables don't work. You dig stuff up, you burn it. Either that's cheap power or it's not. So which is it?

Why do you need to "help" that industry? Because it got its fee-fees hurt by wicked libs who told it its carbon emissions made it look fat? Either coal can stand on its own two feet or it can't. I expected the smoke but the mirrors are kinda suspicious looking.
 
Don't tariffs have to apply to physical objects? What precisely can be tariffed here? The photons?
He threatened movie tariffs before, some months ago. There was puzzlement at the time over what exactly you would tax but no answers emerged. If he presses on this time I guess we'll find out, but I don't expect it to make a scrap of sense.
 
Hegseth’s team reportedly plans to record and publicly release the address later, according to CNN, which cited three of its sources.

A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed the upcoming gathering to the Guardian, saying that Hegseth “will meet with his senior military leaders”, but did not provide any further details.

According to the Times, the Pentagon informed congressional committees overseeing the military on Friday that Hegseth intends to use the gathering to share with “most senior service members his intent for the department”, including new guidance on “military fitness standards and several other areas of interest”.
 
God, all the services have had pretty tough physical standards for a long time now..even the Navy which was pretty lax, You don;t meet the weight requirements you are given a certain amount of time to lose the weight, you don't then you can forget about reenlistment in the case of Enlisted personnel, and renewel of contract for officers.
I can promise you Hesgarth will be hated by a pretty big majority of enlisted men because he is pure Chickens***; the worst thing you can say about a officer:someone who mindless is obssesd with minor points which do nothing but make life tougher. Hesgarth obssesion with grooming is classic Chickens***.
 
Apparently, it's just as difficult to get a competent paralegal on the Comey case as it is to get a competent lawyer.

Lindsey Halligan is already making mistakes prosecuting James Comey

Lindsey Halligan’s debut as a federal prosecutor has drawn close scrutiny after a series of apparent early errors surfaced in court filings related to the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey.

Halligan, previously known as a private attorney and one of Donald Trump’s personal lawyers, assumed the role of U.S. Attorney only recently and has never prosecuted a case in court before.

Well, it appears the lawyer's just as qualified as everyone else in the Schitler administration. But how about her paralegals?

Oh dear:

Problems identified in Halligan’s initial filings, including duplicate case numbers and clerical errors such as misspellings in official documents that have been flagged on social media.

A widely shared post on X said she “doesn’t know the difference between a bedrock principle and a bedrock ‘principal’.”

The difference between the two is about word meaning—and in legal writing, it’s important:

  • Principle (with “le” at the end) means a fundamental truth, rule, or concept.

    Example: “Due process is a bedrock principle of American law.”
  • Principal (with “al” at the end) means a leader or main person (like a school principal) or can mean “main” or “primary.”

    Example: “The principal reason for dismissal was lack of evidence.”
So “bedrock principle” is correct when you mean a foundational idea or standard. “Bedrock principal” would incorrectly suggest a foundational person or primary figure, which doesn’t make sense in legal filings.
I would think that a "bedrock principal" would be the head of the school that Pebbles and Bam-Bam attend.

:popcorn1
 
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Nero was not the only made Emperor. Caligula, Commodus, and Caracells might have been even more loony.
Quite a few more were likely mad, but we have to remember that much of what we hear of particular emperors is the gossip and propaganda of their political and personal foes, recorded for generations far distant from the actual events. Romans were a very gossipy people, and loved a good scandal, and the more outrageous the tale the further it spread.
 
This is not a long article; you should read its entirety. I've picked out a few illustrative passages.


On Thursday night, former FBI Director James Comey was indicted on two charges in the Eastern District of Virginia. The fact that a brand-new interim U.S. attorney brought the case just days into her tenure was unusual. Even more unusual was the fact that the prosecutor in question — a Trump loyalist with no criminal experience — brought the case to the grand jury herself despite reports that some prosecutors in her own office worried they lacked the evidence to convict.

The extraordinary saga began when then-interim U.S. Attorney Erik S. Siebert was forced out of his job, reportedly due to his reluctance to push forward with indictments against presidential enemies that he did not think would result in charges. Siebert, who had been appointed to the interim position and nominated for the permanent job by President Donald Trump, announced his resignation on Sept. 19.

With Siebert gone. Trump needed someone else to do his bidding in the Eastern District. And he had just the woman for the job. As the president wrote to Bondi, “Lindsey Halligan is a really good lawyer, and likes you, a lot.” And soon after, on Sept. 22, Halligan was sworn in as interim U.S. attorney, with Trump also nominating her for the permanent position.

Halligan stands in stark contrast to Siebert. As described in a Justice Department press release from January, Siebert is an award-winning 15-year veteran of the office with supervisory experience. As a line prosecutor, Siebert has handled the full panoply of federal cases from violent crime to public corruption. He has the kind of record that would typically earn the respect of his peers and develop the judgment to exercise prosecutorial discretion in sensitive cases.

Halligan has a very different record. The former Florida insurance lawyer has no prosecutorial experience. In 2022, she helped defend Trump against charges of illegally retaining sensitive government documents at his Mar-a-Lago home. Her few court appearances came mostly in cases defending Trump.

This change in personnel seems to be no accident. The strategy matches what historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls “engineered incompetence.” According to Ben-Ghiat, when individuals are appointed to high office “without the credentials one would normally expect, they become dependent on and indebted to the leader.” The appointee is so grateful for their position that they feel beholden to the leader, and eager to repay his generosity. In exchange, the leader gets an appointee who is easier to control.
 
Except they weren't cursed by 24 hour news channels and the cancer of social media
And some of the emperors who were hated by the history-chronicle-writing aristocrats were actually quite popular with the people. Caligula wasn't confiscating middle class properties, he only bothered the upper class. Which is a point against him being mad right there.
 

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