RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2025/02/11/democrats-loved-unelected-power-trump-weapons-against-them/

With Democrats in disarray and unable to choose a positive theme, they have settled on the obvious alternative. Unite around their shared hatreds. Near the top of that list is Elon Musk and his Doge project. “Nobody elected Musk.” “He is more powerful than the president.” Time magazine tried to drive home that point by depicting him behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.

These attacks are manifestly untrue, but they follow a shrewd piece of political advice, given by the old Leftist organiser, Saul Alinsky. Personalise your political grievances. Let one person stand for much bigger complaints. It’s easier to mobilise around that concrete target and move on to bigger goals by taking him down.

Republicans recognise the risk here. They have responded by pointing out that Musk answers directly to president Trump. There are no middlemen, no bureaucratic protections. Trump can fire Musk as soon as he becomes a political liability. That, of course, is what Democrats hope to make him.

This predictable back-and-forth is part of a broader attack on Trump’s swift, aggressive actions against entrenched Washington power centres. Rolling them back and asserting control is the heart of Trump’s MAGA agenda.

Both sides recognise that basic point, but they have overlooked another, equally important one that illuminates the long arc of America’s changing governance. Democrats created all the tools Trump is using to attack official Washington. Oops. They hoped to centralise power in the presidency and break through the old limitations of the 1787 Constitution. They largely succeeded after decades of effort. 

What the authors of this transformation never expected was a president who would use the great powers they handed him to dismantle their own cherished projects. Yet that is exactly what Trump is doing.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21385/maganomics-fusion-energy

America’s next great economic revolution — to be spearheaded by President Donald J. Trump — is currently being studied by the preeminent polling firm, John McLaughlin Associates.

A poll will investigate America’s next great economic and technological frontier: clean, limitless, inexpensive energy through nuclear fusion by a made in America nuclear reactor superior to China’s tokamak.

This new 21st Century Manhattan Project would entail a trailblazing, all-out effort to compete against Communist China, already investing billions into this field.

Just as President Franklin D. Roosevelt headed the original Manhattan Project, when America raced to develop a nuclear weapon before scientists in Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan could unlock its enormous deadly power and use it against the Allies in World War II, Trump could usher in a new Clean Controlled Fusion Energy Revolution.

In that era, Roosevelt recognized the existential threat and directed all necessary resources to win that fateful race. Today, we know China is investing enormous sums into fusion energy research that seeks to create a sustained reaction that would be channeled to create unlimited electricity. America must create technology that is far superior to China’s tokamak fusion reactors.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/vance-is-right-about-the-limits-of-judicial-restraints-on-executive-power/

In its awful 2012 ruling in Arizona v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld one aspect (out of four) of Arizona’s contested immigration statute — a provision requiring state police, in certain circumstances, to verify a detained person’s immigration status with the federal government. This was a rejection of the Obama administration, which had argued that this provision was preempted by federal law and that its enforcement would interfere with Obama administration policy.

Hours after the Supreme Court ruled against President Obama on this point, the Obama administration announced that it would cease cooperation with Arizona’s efforts to verify a detainee’s immigration status. That is, after Obama lost in the Supreme Court, he decided he was going to ignore the Supreme Court because, under the Constitution, it was his job, not the justices’ job, to decide immigration enforcement policy.

This is nothing new or unusual from Democratic administrations. When FDR initially didn’t get his way on New Deal programs, he threatened to pack the Court until the justices got their minds right. When Biden didn’t get his way on socializing student load debt onto the rest of us, he bragged to his progressive base — which he was desperately trying to turn out to vote for Democrats against Donald Trump — that he didn’t care what the justices said, he was going to keep figuring out ways to do what they said was illegal.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hollywood-rages-impotently-about-anti-fascist-trump/

In the wake of a recent poll which only confirmed what Donald Trump’s election landslide proved – that celebrities have become politically irrelevant – Hollywood continues to rage impotently against the new President with their tired, old, ineffective smears that he and his new administration are “fascists” and “Nazis.”

To recap: the Left has spent every waking moment since Trump announced his presidential run back in 2015 trying to demonize him as Hitler 2.0. The coordinated media smearing of Trump as a more dangerous fascist than Benito Mussolini was so relentless and demonstrably false that it ultimately backfired; last November, voters rejected the fear-mongering propaganda and embraced a positive, hopeful movement to make America great again.

But the Left refuses to take the lesson to heart. Hollywood in particular still teems with bitter, angry, self-righteous elites who cannot accept that those cisgender white nationalists in the flyover country they so despise voted this fascist strongman into the White House. To paraphrase the quote attributed to film critic Pauline Kael about Richard Nixon, “How could Trump have won? Nobody I know voted for him,” the Hollywood elites wonder.

One giveaway that the Left was hyperbolizing about Trump was their kneejerk (ab)use of the word “fascist,” which they won’t or can’t even define correctly. To the Left, “fascist” is the go-to label for anyone and anything that stands in the way of their lust for one-party hegemony – and no single person is more of an obstacle to that obsession than Donald Trump. In fact, “fascism” is best defined by the man so closely associated with it that he is called the Father of Fascism – Il Duce himself, Mussolini: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

This is a Big Government slogan. This is the slogan of a Party that wants to consolidate all power into a State that maintains that power by crushing dissent.

But Trump is a man who campaigned on dismantling the Deep State, and in whose first couple of weeks in office he has taken a wrecking ball to the bloated, corrupt bureaucracy of an out-of-control federal government. But Hollywood won’t let the truth get in the way of a necessary narrative.

https://hotair.com/david-strom/2025/02/08/doge-cancels-180000-anthony-fauci-museum-exhibit-n3799632

Well, well, well. 

As DOGE rampages through the federal budget in the most glorious way possible, they keep finding the most egregious spending. 

The worst spending tends to be the anodyne-sounding programs that are sold to make our lives “better,” but the funniest and often most infuriating are the smaller and more ridiculous things like transgender comic books and operas. 

This spending item stands out for another reason: it celebrates Anthony Fauci as a American hero and not the evil villain that he is. 
Someday, and I hope that day comes soon enough for Fauci to see it happen, he will be exposed to all the world as the man who gifted us both COVID and the tyranny and social destruction that followed in its wake. Perhaps then it would make sense to spend hundreds of thousands or millions to expose him and hold up as an example of why bureaucrats should never be allowed to become too powerful. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/11/the-big-lie-about-trumps-nih-cuts/

As day follows night, Democrats and various other big-government parasites screamed that the Trump administration’s decision to cut back on National Institutes of Health grants to colleges and universities would prove cataclysmic.

What’s really happening? Donald Trump is choking off a slush fund that colleges and universities have used for decades to finance left-wing causes.

On Feb. 7, the NIH announced that it would pay only 15% in overhead costs to colleges and universities instead of the average 26% it paid out in 2023.

The primal screams were immediate.

Rosa DeLauro, the ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee, claimed that “they are causing irreparable damage to ongoing research to develop cures and treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, ALS, Diabetes, Mental Health disorders, opioid abuse, genetic diseases, rare diseases, and other diseases and conditions affecting American families.”

A Johns Hopkins University professor wailed that “the lives of my children and grandchildren – and maybe yours – will be shorter and sicker, because discoveries will not be made.”

Harvard President Alan Garber said that it would “cut research activity at … every research university in our nation.”

Attorneys general from 22 states have filed suit against the overhead cap, claiming the harm will be “immediate and devastating.”

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/10/how-to-commit-democratic-party-suicide/

The Democratic Party is polling about 31 percent approval, a near-historic low.

Despite enjoying a huge lead in fundraising, legacy media favoritism, and incumbency, in the 2024 election, Democrats lost the White House to Donald Trump. Ever since, they have offered nothing new, no novel agenda, no innovative policies—nothing other than screaming that they are loudly against everything and anything that the president is for.

In the past, what did they accomplish by following their prior two impeachments with attempts to de-ballot Trump? Who thought sending an FBI swat team to raid Trump’s home or waging five lawfare civil and criminal suits and issuing 91 felony indictments against him would win over the public?

Was conducting a media barrage of Hitler-Trump invectives, or lowering the bar of demonization that likely led to two assassination attempts of Trump a good way to win an election?

Apparently not, given the Democrats have now lost the presidency, the House, and the Senate. The Supreme Court is conservative. They have no power to subpoena anyone; they cannot block any nomination. Much of their old administrative state control is eroding. All the main issues—the economy, energy, border security, illegal immigration, crime, DEI/woke, and foreign policy—poll against the Democrats. The more they shouted that biological men must be able to compete as transgendered females in women’s sports, the more that 80% of the public disagreed, women were turned off, and the absurd idea was exploded by Trump.

The power of the administrative state, the legacy network news, print media, and Silicon Valley’s social media and search engines, the billions that poured into the Biden and Harris campaign all went for naught.

The efforts of moderators to warp debates, of network news to edit out unfavorable Harris or Biden comments, of leftists to cancel, deplatform, ostracize, censor, and shadow ban their enemies have failed. More likely to succeed now are numerous lawsuits against leftwing media for chronic defamation and censorship.

Given that collective meltdown, what would a sane Democratic Party do?

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2025-2-8-kindergarten-konstitutional-law-comes-to-the-southern-district-of-new-york

In yesterday’s post, reviewing a Washington Post op-ed by Ruth Marcus that called efforts by the duly-elected President to direct the bureaucracy to implement his policies a “power grab” and an “onslaught against the government itself,” I described the piece as reflecting “kindergarten-level constitutional analysis.” After all, my 6 year old first-grader grandson is fully capable of reading the first sentence of Article II of the Constitution (“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America”) and figuring out that this guy is given the sole and full power to direct the executive branch of the federal government. Nothing about the elected President exercising such powers is or can be a “power grab.” If you are somehow unable to grasp that simple proposition, you therefore must be at sub-first grade level of comprehension, and thus kindergarten level, at the highest.

Well, today Kindergarten Konstitutional Law came to the Southern District of New York. In response to a motion made by some 19 states (all Democrat-led), a Southern District Judge named Paul Engelmayer issued a Temporary Restraining Order preventing President Trump and Treasury Secretary Bessent from “granting access” to Treasury Department payment systems to anyone other than “civil servants with a need for access to perform their job duties.” Here is a copy of Judge Engelmayer’s Order. Looking at the language of the Order that I just quoted, it seems to mean quite clearly that even President Trump and Secretary Bessent themselves are enjoined from looking at the line-by-line details of who is getting paid by the Treasury. Why? Because the information is “sensitive.” I’m not making this up.

So who is this Engelmayer guy? You will not be surprised to learn that he is someone with the highest of the high credentials of the super-elite who claim the prerogative to run the federal government outside of any democratic control. Here is a Wikipedia biography of Engelmayer. (The bio contains a prominent caveat that “a major contributor” to the bio “appears to have a close connection” to the subject. I take that to mean that Engelmayer probably wrote the thing himself, so you can take it for what it’s worth.). The bio says that Engelmayer is a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard College, and a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School. He clerked on the D.C. Circuit, and then for Thurgood Marshall at the Supreme Court. He served as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, and did a term with the Solicitor General’s office in Washington during the Clinton administration. And at some point he slid seamlessly into the job of Managing Partner of the New York office of Wilmer Hale. He was named to the Southern District bench by President Obama in 2011.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/02/a-victory-for-women-athletes/

As long as we’ve had organized sports, no one thought it would be a good idea for men to compete against women, until the last several years. As part of the trans craze, male athletes infiltrated women’s competitions, teams, and locker rooms. The consequences were woeful, and sometimes, men claimed a spot on each rank of the podium in women’s divisions. Now, President Trump has intervened with his aptly named executive order, “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports.”

Trump has already been fighting the pervasive gender ideology through his executive actions. On Inauguration Day, he signed an order on “gender ideology extremism” that directed all federal agencies and employees to operate on sex-based definitions of words like “male,” “female,” “men,” “women,” “boys,” and “girls.” On January 28, Trump signed the order on “chemical and surgical mutilation” that protects children from the medical abuse that is often wrongly branded as “gender-affirming care.” The recent executive order, announced on Wednesday, takes drastic action to ensure that Title IX promotes equal opportunity and equal protection in sports on the basis of sex rather than gender — and universities or athletic associations that don’t comply will likely suffer a painful punishment.

In his order, Trump directed the secretary of education to pursue action against educational institutions or sports associations that either require women to compete against males or undress in their presence. Moreover, all executive departments and agencies are empowered to rescind funding to programs that similarly violate these sex-based protections. The Department of Justice is instructed to coordinate and provide the necessary resources to enforce these policies. But perhaps only minimal enforcement efforts will be needed, since it seems that even the most high-profile organizations have already proposed plans to make changes. For example, the NCAA announced that women’s competitions would be limited to athletes who were born female.