Saturday Morning Return From The Undead Links

by | Oct 19, 2024 | Daily Links | 137 comments

I have not been doing well recently, having made the transition from “I haven’t gotten a flu in 30 years!” to “Did anyone get the license number of the truck that hit me?” It got bad enough for long enough that I ended up in our local ER, which is a bit scary when you consider that Green Acres would be a technological step up. Fortunately, after putting me through one of them Roentgen machines, it wasn’t pneumonia (the worry that sent me there), but still a fairly nasty infection. Pile of antibiotics later, I was released. None of the meds could get me energetic enough to stay awake for more than an hour, and I knew what I *really* needed, and how difficult it was going to be to extract it from them.

Ever the devious Jew, I conjured a way- I had an upcoming follow-up with my orthopedist, so I innocently told him that things were fine until a couple days ago, when all my painful symptoms had returned. “Oh, well I can give you another round of steroids…” Heh heh, mission accomplished. And of course, within a day I felt hugely better and ready to start a bar fight.

Other missions accomplished are births, and ones from this date include a guy who wasn’t actually a boxer; a guy who definitely knew his limits; a guy who would certainly wonder where things went wrong for his philosophy; a writer who had a sense for temperature; the guy who truly turned the ’60s into a cliche; a guy who I slightly knew who had a far more sane grasp of gender than any 200 green-haired harpies (sorry, that was a gimme); a good actor who always seemed to be in bad movies and shows; a Team Blue guy who tried to have some principles and paid the price; a guy who definitely would not have been allowed to interview Cackles last week; a guy who is an embarrassment to Team Red these days but shouldn’t be; Team Blue’s expert on nuclear policy; and one of our true heroes.

And Links will banish any sense of boredom.

“Don’t worry, we still hate Jews.”

In which Anne Applebaum fully completes her transition to lolcow.

Gene Simmons shows the world why he’s a hack. A successful hack, but a hack. You have a long tongue, great.

A textbook case on why I oppose capital punishment. Yes, there are people who are so evil they deserve to die, but the State is too vicious and incompetent to decide.

Wisconsin is a state I love, and it’s nice to see that they have a choice between someone stupid and corrupt versus someone stupid and corrupt.

It’s hilarious how the WaPo takes these nutters seriously.

Nature focuses in on the important matters in science.

“Dronie, fetch!”

The Old Guy fucking loves this song. And the energetic performance.

About The Author

Old Man With Candy

Old Man With Candy

Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me. Wait, wrong book, I'll find something else.

137 Comments

  1. Pat

    “Oh, well I can give you another round of steroids…”

    I was wondering how you were going to get Bolivian marching powder from an orthopedist. That makes more sense.

    • Pat

      But seriously, it’s good to hear you’re on the mend.

      • SDF-7

        Ok.. that got a chortle, Tres… hadn’t heard that one… but it seems apt.

      • MikeS

        Booger sugar

    • SDF-7

      I’m too square — I was just thinking of the Devil’s Lettuce at this point. Or the extract (CBD?) / oil derivatives.

  2. Tres Cool

    Welcome back.

    L’chaim !

  3. Pat

    a guy who wasn’t actually a boxer

    Happy birthday Robert DeNiro?

    • Pat

      a Team Blue guy who tried to have some principles and paid the price

      Happy birthday John F. Kennedy?

      • Pat

        a guy who would certainly wonder where things went wrong for his philosophy

        Happy birthday Socrates?

      • Chafed

        JFK had principles?

      • The Last American Hero

        He banged starlets, secretaries, and wannabe celebs, so he probably stuck it in a principal or two.

      • Pat

        JFK had principles?

        As the conspiracy theorists would have it, the MIC did him in because they thought he might not escalate in Vietnam.

      • Suthenboy

        “I am not an actor but I play one on TV”

        or

        “I am not a psychopath but I play one in real life.”

  4. SDF-7

    Glad you’re doing better, OMWC. Thanks for the links, happy weekend all…

    a good actor who always seemed to be in bad movies and shows;

    I always assumed this was the Michael Caine class of actor — “It paid for my house!” take any role. This gentleman, Caine, Walken, Nic Cage, Donald Pleasance, etc. You know they had talent — and they did elevate the various odd B-movies they participated in between their more quality films.

    • Toxteth O'Grady

      MC re Jaws: The Revenge: “I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.”

  5. SDF-7

    a guy who is an embarrassment to Team Red these days but shouldn’t be

    Heh… from the linked Wiki page:

    Former Republican Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY), co-chairman of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, has been particularly critical, describing Norquist’s position as “[n]o taxes, under any situation, even if your country goes to hell.”

    If ever a quote called for a resounding “Fuck you, cut spending!” that’s it… “Oh noes… we can’t move on deficit reduction because we can’t try to steal more!” Farging bastiches.

    • juris imprudent

      Yep, this was the same comment I was going to make; Grover got hung up on the wrong side of the equation.

      • Gustave Lytton

        Drown government first, then work on the bathtub?

  6. SDF-7

    Team Blue’s expert on nuclear policy;

    Oh god bless it… I would have sworn that was going to be Fonda. Sigh.

      • ZWAK, doktor of BRAIN SCIENCE!

        I thought it would be Joe Biden.

  7. Ted S.

    None of the meds could get me energetic enough to stay awake for more than an hour, and I knew what I *really* needed, and how difficult it was going to be to extract it from them.

    You couldn’t get l0b0t to smuggle in some booze or a hooker?

    When my dad was in rehab for his hip fracture two years ago, he had my sister bring in… soft-serve ice cream!

  8. Pat

    The Old Guy fucking loves this song. And the energetic performance.

    Middle aged guys playing indie rock might as well be the title to my music library. This meets my approval. Probably the foulest insult the Old Man has ever had to endure.

  9. Ted S.

    a writer who had a sense for temperature

    Happy birthday Ray Bradbury!

  10. SDF-7

    A textbook case on why I oppose capital punishment.

    I can most certainly see your point — and have thought the same more than once. Then there are the cases where there’s a mountain of actual proof, actual witnesses (maybe even confession) and no remorse from the sick puppy… and you have to wonder “Why are we paying to keep this idiot around for 60+ years?”

    Truth is a three-edged sword, I suppose. In a perfect world we’d have better systems to actually determine guilt that couldn’t be corrupted and abused. Since we live in this one, I do lean towards your side more often than not these days… much like Red Flag laws or anything else where the government determines “competency” — too easy to see how it can be abused, and if nothing else (and there are more, this is just fresh on the mind) the COVID years showed how easily and gleefully they’d do it.

    TL;DR — Yeah, good point! Damn, I’m overly verbose some days.

    • cyto

      My philosophy is simple… there are plenty who deserve death.

      That doesn’t make the death penalty right.

      • SDF-7

        My preferred solution would probably involve a small deserted island and a minimal set of supplies. Make sure they can’t hurt anyone else, but don’t drain everyone else for their upkeep.

        Not enough islands (although we could be China and just make some, I doubt they’d have a sustainable ecosystem long enough to not be effectively putting the convict to death), risks having one come back and steal your doomsday weapon to threaten the galaxy, etc… I know… but it would be nice to just isolate them and let them take their chances outside of society.

      • R C Dean

        I’m puzzled about how its right for people to not get what they deserve.

    • creech

      And , now and then, you have a convict who knows he is guilty and would rather die than spend a lifetime in prison.

    • CPRM

      Last year a negro stole a dollar bill
      The judge he said “We mustn’t be severe
      Instead of death we’ll give him life imprisonment
      To show there’s justice here”

      For these are more enlightened days
      No room for all these savage ways
      Leave them, let them go
      Now every man may walk his road in peace
      For all are free!

      The Dubliners – Alabama 58

  11. Pat

    Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini

    Well then it’s no wonder so many people are justifiably trying to blow his brains out.

    • cyto

      Funny that this came out right after the Catholic dinner where Trump did a pretty good 30 minute stand up routine.

      I had no idea that Stalin was a standup

      • SDF-7

        I’d be willing to bet that after he took power his jokes would always get a laugh….

      • Pat

        Stalin’s jokes were like grain shipments to Ukraine in 1932. Not everybody got them.

      • The Artist Formerly Known as Lackadaisical

        ‘grain shipments to Ukraine’

        I know it’s a joke, but they didn’t need shipments of grain. The problem was all the food leaving the country under duress.

      • Pat

        I couldn’t come up with a construction for the joke that captured the historical context.

      • Gustave Lytton

        Alright, you. You. You. You’re all on the next train to Siberia.

  12. cyto

    Electrosensitive is hilarious.

    For those unfamiliar, this is a classic. There were many doctors taking this seriously, and politicians and news media took up the cause. Doctors told them about symptoms and the pervasive problem…

    But despite the trappings of science, nobody was doing science.

    When a skeptic finally designed a real blinded experiment, it was conclusively proven that none of these individuals was even a tiny bit sensitive to electromagnetic “pollution”.

    All of these papers proposing molecular mechanisms for a phenomenon that never existed were a wonderful illustration of why the scientific method is important, and using science sounding words is not the same as doing science.

    • cyto

      This was not too far removed in time from the facilitated communication debacle centered at Syracuse.

      That one was finally put to rest by a 12 year old girl who designed a very simple blinded experiment proving that it was bunk.

      • Old Man With Candy

        I think you may be conflating two debunkings. IIRC, the one done by the 12 year old (actually, she was 9) was Therapeutic Touch.

        But this may also be my flawed memory- I’m surrounded by electromagnetic fields and often hallucinate Paul Brodeur.

      • cyto

        Definitely therapeutic touch was a 12 year old.

        Facilitated communication was also definitely an outside amateur who set up a partition and fed different information to the facilitator and the subject (proving that only the facilitator was communicating).

        I definitely smashed those together. Good catch

      • cyto

        It is important that we repeat these stories for those who were not around.

        I am constantly amazed at what younger people don’t know that I consider common knowledge. In politics of late it is the resurgence of communism as a viable system.

        But pseudoscience is always returning to a younger set that hasn’t been given the tools to evaluate it.

    • SDF-7

      But there were lots of papers, name recognition and grant money spent, right? Mission one hundred percent accomplished for those doing the “research”. Screw actual scientific progress (or is that “boink” it?)

      • cyto

        Hehehe…. good point.

  13. SDF-7

    It’s hilarious how the WaPo takes these nutters seriously.

    Meh… no skin off my nose what they believe as long as they aren’t doing human sacrifices and are basically leaving folks alone. If they wrapped it in a religion and called themselves Neo Amish they might be more socially acceptable?

    • cyto

      The original iteration was trying to ban wifi, cell phones and initiate panics about “electrical signals all around you that are harming you”.

      Live and let live is fine. Keeping the government out of private decisions is even better.

      But embracing and reinforcing mental illness and delusions is dangerous. For evidence, I point you to today’s sports pages.

    • cyto

      Excellent turn of phrase

  14. Pat

    Gene Simmons shows the world why he’s a hack.

    I think he jumped that shark during COVID

    • Drake

      But he does have a point. People enjoy catchy melodies, not grating technical performances.

      • ZWAK, doktor of BRAIN SCIENCE!

        Indeed. One of my favorite guitarists, Marc Ribot, should not be left to his own devices, as witnessed by his solo albums. But, by god is he fantastic when someone else is leading the show:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm3rEZiJFIc

        But, then you have someone like Rowland S. Howard, who will just grind you to dust, and couldn’t be contained by one of the best, Nick Cave:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAEW5z1YuPU

      • rhywun

        Yah, it’s the difference between pop and jazz.

        Me, I like one of these and not the other for exactly that reason. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

      • Pat

        I enjoy jazz, and grating experimental rock as well, but listen to pop more frequently, because I’m more often listening to music to turn my brain off than on. Simmons isn’t wrong, but he’s still an asshole.

      • The Last American Hero

        I’ll butcher a Bill Bruford quote – the best music is accessible enough that the random fan dancing near the front can bop their head to and the old jazz guy in the back of the room can smile and appreciate.

  15. rhywun

    “Everyone must seize this opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza, bring the hostages home and end the suffering once and for all,” she said.

    Uh….

    • Chafed

      She is useless. Wake me when Hamas surrenders. Then there’s something to discuss.

  16. The Gunslinger

    I heard Halperin’s comments yesterday, and I think he may be right. And I’m starting to think Trump may actually win.

    – “I think tens of millions of people will question their connection to the nation, their connection to other human beings, and their vision of the future for themselves and their children,” Halperin stated.

    https://www.christianpost.com/news/journalist-predicts-greatest-mental-health-crisis-in-us-history.html

    • rhywun

      an unprecedented nationwide “mental health crisis.”

      Already there IMHO.

      • Chafed

        For sure

    • The Last American Hero

      Never underestimate the power of voting chicanery in swing states. Mail in ballots, the new overseas ballot harvest in which anyone in the world can claim to be a citizen of Pennsylvania and get a ballot, voting machine bullshit, and a stubborn refusal to purge the voter rolls all play to Harris.

      If this were any year prior to 2020, I would predict Trump to win bigly. Since we live in post 2020, I will continue with my “Harris narrowly on or around election day and decisively when the post-fortification dust settles.”

  17. ZWAK, doktor of BRAIN SCIENCE!

    I was right there with you re Gene Simmons, but then I remembered Jaco Pastorius and just how far up his ass he is. Could there be a more pretentious guitarist?

    Well, yes. John Scofield, who can ruin a good concert in a bout three notes.

    • Old Man With Candy

      He was a grade A asshole, but a brilliant bassist. Completely changed the way people played after that. Anything he did with (at the very least) Weather Report or Joni Mitchell is just genius and groundbreaking.

  18. Pat

    How ‘gay rights’ charities turned against gay people

    Once upon a time, any self-respecting gay-rights charity would know that releasing thousands of insects to break up a meeting of gay, lesbian and bisexual people would obviously be a bad thing. Yet one week on from just such an attack at the LGB Alliance conference in London, we have heard crickets from Stonewall, Galop and LGBT Foundation – three of the largest taxpayer-funded charities that still identify as representing LGB people.
    _
    It shouldn’t be hard to condemn what happened as blatant homophobia. A cluster of trans-identified teens from the group Trans Kids Deserve Better (TKDB) opened bags containing 6,000 crickets and set them free in the auditorium. They claimed this was to disrupt a ‘breeding ground for fervent and violent transphobia’. Of course, as spiked readers may have gleaned, the accusation of ‘transphobia’ is bogus. What apparently makes LGB Alliance so objectionable is that, unlike Stonewall and Co, it is clear that biological sex matters for homosexuals. Speakers at the conference (of which I was one) differ on many points, but all are in firm agreement that lesbians don’t have penises. This is considered ‘transphobic’ because it calls into question the identities of men who get off on pretending to be women.

    • rhywun

      It is long past time to recognize that T and LGB are not a common cause.

      They are fundamentally different phenomena.

      • Beau Knott

        So much this ^^^

      • R C Dean

        The revolution will eat its own.

        Thousands of crickets released at a meeting.

        You will eat ze bugs.

        Am I missing something here?

      • juris imprudent

        The vanguard (“T”) eating the older, used-up revolutionaries (the original L and G – because the B were always viewed with suspicion by both of the other two).

    • cyto

      Just saw a tweet on this.

      Dude posted that someone from the alliance knocked on the door and asked if he supported LGBTQIA+. He says no.

      They ask if another guy is there by name.

      “He’s my boyfriend. He doesn’t support you either”

      Activist left very confused.

      • Pat

        He’s my boyfriend. He doesn’t support you either

        Life imitates art

      • cyto

        “Oh…. i get it. I’m not persecuted. I’m just a asshole”

        LOL

    • Suthenboy

      Those people will all be shot after the glorious revolution. They are used to stir shit and disrupt because that is what they do. After the revolution no shit stirring or disrupting will be tolerated. Since that is all they can do they will continue to do so, therefore they will be the first to be purged.

  19. PudPaisley

    Gotta head to work, but thought I’d pass along this personal example of the legacy media lying.

    On Thursday, I got stuck in a traffic standstill for about a half hour and found out it was because Kamala was in town for a rally that I hadn’t heard about.

    When I got home, I read a couple articles and found out she did a rally at The Eagle Rec Center at UW-La Crosse. Every article that mentioned attendance (local, regional, and national) said anywhere from 2,500-3,000+ in attendance.

    My first thought was I would give 10-1 odds to anyone willing to take it that attendance was under 500. I live a couple blocks from the rec center and I use their pool often in the winter. The rally was held in the rec gym which is no bigger than a gym at a large HS, with no bleachers.

    So I popped up a C-SPAN video of the event to see how they staged it. It’s all an illusion of a big crowd. My guess is there was 250-300 people there, so the press casually exaggerated attendance about 10-fold.

    • rhywun

      Is that the one where she had to bus them in? Saw a photo of that yesterday.

    • cyto

      I don’t think I have ever seen this before, but the dems have been doing this all year. They set up risers behind the speaker and put crowd there and on the sides of the stage. These are usually union supporters being told they are dignitaries.

      Then they put a handful of rows in front of the state, Then press, then a big partition segmenting the rest of the room, usually more than half the court in a basketball gym.

      They are careful about camera angles and post panning videos from just behind the 3 rows of attendees, panning from left to right to make it look like a gym full of people.

      Actually an effective technique. It really does make 300 look like 5,000. You just assume the entire space is filled like that, the entire floor, all of the bleachers….

      Without X, nobody would know

      • The Artist Formerly Known as Lackadaisical

        Sounds like they’re making cheap fakes. Maybe Gruesome can ban that too.

      • ZWAK, doktor of BRAIN SCIENCE!

        What you are saying, it is just Mal-information.

        In other words, correct but not helpful to the cause.

      • SDF-7

        They aim to misbehave.

  20. KK, Plump & Unfiltered

    Yes, there are people who are so evil they deserve to die, but the State is too vicious and incompetent to decide.

    Ayup

  21. slumbrew

    Just too much here for a short quote – from Wikipedia:

    In 1878 after 45 years of marriage, Clay divorced his wife, Mary Jane (Warfield) Clay, claiming abandonment after she no longer would tolerate his marital infidelities.[6] In 1894, the 84-year-old Clay married Dora Richardson, the orphaned sister of one of his sharecropping tenants. According to newspaper reports at the time, Dora was 15 to 16 years old. Her age varies in the few extant records; the 1900 US Census indicates that she was born in May 1882, suggesting that she may have been as young as 12 when she married Cassius M. Clay. Her age was a contentious issue, leading the minister who was initially to marry them to bow out. Clay’s children also objected, and Clay reportedly mounted a cannon in his doorway to deter anyone who intended to interfere with the wedding. The cannon had been long mounted on a high crow’s nest on the stately home’s roof, and was used to deter mobs that would attack the Clay home for Clay’s opposition to slavery (and later support of a fully integrated college in the area) in his political activities and newspaper.

    • ZWAK, doktor of BRAIN SCIENCE!

      It is weird were the family name turns up:

      “Mary Jane Warfield Clay (January 20, 1815 – April 29, 1900) was an American socialite, suffragist, abolitionist, and political activist. An early leader in the suffrage movement in Kentucky, she began by forming a suffrage club at her home in 1879. Her experience and success as a farm manager included her acute business sense in the middle of the American Civil War. She sold supplies from her farm to both Union and Confederate forces when they each occupied the Commonwealth.”

  22. Suthenboy

    Links: Galeleo Galilei sentenced to a life of house arrest comes to mind. The times, the mentality, the politics – the progressive world view. Wherever power and money are concentrated the worst people are drawn there. Ideologies to them are just Trojan horses to get to the throne.

    “Dont worry, we still hate Jews” <—- immigration has gone awry when we have so many of a culture with diametrically opposed values that our pols have to start catering to them.

    Amy Carter, expert on nuclear policy? She has an MFA FFS. Team Biden, freak show.

    What has happened to the serious scientific journals is truly a crime against humanity. <— not hyperbole

  23. The Artist Formerly Known as Lackadaisical

    ‘The former president has brought dehumanizing language into American presidential politics.’

    Yeah, he’s said some real craft stuff about his fellow Americans, like calling them all deplorable, or making fun of their ‘bitter’ clinging to religion and social practices…

    Hey, wait a minute…

      • The Gunslinger

        FTA:

        – “Everyone just cheered and screamed for killing babies. So that was disappointing.”

        Alrighty then.

      • The Artist Formerly Known as Lackadaisical

        @Gunslinger:

        Pretty soon you won’t be able to call yourself a real Democrat unless you’ve had an abortion or at least been sterilized in a ‘sex change ‘ operation.

      • juris imprudent

        Listen buster – there is no freedom until you’ve changed your gender AND had an abortion! Got that?

      • Pat

        there is no freedom until you’ve changed your gender AND had an abortion!

        If only that were a joke.

      • juris imprudent

        Wonder if the Bro’ wants to contest that first?

    • rhywun

      It’s almost like centering your entire campaign around fucking abortion is going to inevitably result in embarrassing scenes like this.

  24. DrOtto

    The Hold Steady – not a bad choice for the day.

  25. Suthenboy

    Re: Grover

    Pols to people – “What do you want?”
    People – “End the corruption and theft. Get rid of the trough.”
    Pols to people – “We cant do that. What else do you want? Anything? Anything other than getting rid of the trough?”

    That is the heart of it.

  26. DEG

    And of course, within a day I felt hugely better and ready to start a bar fight.

    Glad you’re feeling better.

    The Republican bristled at the claim that he opposes negotiations with drug companies, insisting that he would like to see the government flex its purchasing power to drive down drug costs.

    Central planning. What could possibly go wrong?

    We have even come across a number of ‘global’ analyses that assume that June, July and August are summer months for the entire world. You’d think that this kind of mistake would’ve been caught early on, but no, it still happens.

    These authors have too much time on their hands.

    This week’s Powerline fun.

    • The Gunslinger

      – “Dak Prescott cologne. For those nights when you don’t want to score.”

      Nice

    • rhywun

      analyses that assume that June, July and August are summer months for the entire world

      This is completely believable. 🙄

    • Pat

      28… but then, 39… good golly miss molly.

  27. Tundra

    The Old Guy fucking loves this song. And the energetic performance.

    I love The Hold Steady. Craig Finn and at least one of the other dudes were in a Minneapolis band called Lifter Puller. So good.

    Something old

    Something newer.

    Thanks Old Man. Great way to start the day!

  28. The Late P Brooks

    He’s going after the NGOs?

    “I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil,” he said at a recent rally in California, one of several in which he has brought it up.

    He can start with the United Nations.

    • rhywun

      I can’t get past all the stolen bases and outright lies in the lurid prose in that DNC propaganda piece.

    • cyto

      There is a huge network of NGOs that we arr funding to move illegals into and around the country. I would assume this is designed to create an arms length relationship from what would otherwise be an illegal operation.

      Also seems deliberately designed to change voting patterns.

    • juris imprudent

      Sure, per the language of the act quoted – all it needs is Congress to declare war.

  29. The Late P Brooks

    “Whenever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government … and the President of the United States shall make public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States, and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed, as alien enemies.”

    Congress, with the support of President John Adams, passed the Alien Enemies Act as part of the four Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 as the U.S. stood on the brink of war with France.

    Let’s declare war on Mexico (again). We’ll all be rich.

    • The Last American Hero

      It doesn’t take a declaration of war – don’t you even War Powers Act, bruh? You can do whatever you want for 2 months, and even after that all you get is a strongly worded ruling from the Supreme Court.

      Honestly, 2 months of loading up C-130’s and shipping them to Venezuela or Haiti* would staunch the bleeding pretty quickly.

      *No, most of the migrants aren’t from Venezuela or Haiti, but they are miserable shitholes and the thought of getting dropped off there should give people pause.

    • rhywun

      If Trump’s connection to Epstein was in any way shady, it would currently be the subject of another half-dozen lawfare cases in the Southern District of New York.

      • cyto

        Exactly.

        The only connection between the two is that Trump heard he was “recruiting” young female staff at Mar-A-Lago and kicked him out of the club.

        Funny you don’t hear that story

      • juris imprudent

        Dons tinfoil hat AND cape: The Deep State that has the Epstein evidence knows they can control Trump just as much as anyone else!

      • Tundra

        Tedious cunts are tedious.

      • MikeS

        And cunty

  30. The Late P Brooks

    “The issue that has hamstrung each of the last four presidents, of both parties, has not been legal authority — it’s a lack of resources,” he says. “The federal government doesn’t have the capacity to identify, track down, round up and remove every single one of the 11 million-plus undocumented immigrants in this country.”

    One of the primary obstacles is a lack of funding for immigration enforcement, something that lawmakers sought to address in a bipartisan border security bill earlier this year. It would have put $20 billion toward border provisions and implemented several policy changes to adjust and expedite the asylum process.

    Senate Republicans blocked the bill after pressure from Trump, which Democratic critics say he did so that he could campaign in part on fixing the chaos at the border.

    “The irony that Trump is now trotting out this old, anachronistic statute to solve a problem that he could have solved much more directly and much less controversially, I think it ought not to be lost on the folks who are learning about these authorities for the first time,” Vladeck says.

    That bill was perfect in every way. Only a power crazed maniac would have opposed it.

    • Pat

      The federal government doesn’t have the capacity to identify, track down, round up and remove every single one of the 11 million-plus undocumented immigrants in this country.

      I’ve mentioned this before, but I cited that 11 million figure in a research paper in college. In 2006…

      Also, if staying in the country undocumented were more difficult because, say, you weren’t pulling in around $3,000 a month in benefits and subsidies for yourself and your children, you probably wouldn’t need to send agents out to round up eleventy six gorillion people, or whatever the number actually might be.

      • cyto

        All they have to do is enforce employment law as written. Problem solved.

        Well, and stop issuing temporary leave to stay in the US awaiting adjudication of asylum claims for what are clearly economic migrants

      • Pat

        All they have to do is enforce employment law as written. Problem solved.

        That was one of the policy recommendations I concluded with. In the intervening years, I’ve kind of changed my mind, in that I think the level of intrusiveness in hiring required is bad for all of us, and, a weakness in that strategy that I recognized at the time: falsified documents and identity theft make it fairly trivial to get around those basic checks, and the burden for that level of enforcement should be on the government before the fact, not private industry afterwards.

  31. Not Adahn

    Greetings from downtown Chicken Creek, OK!

    I’ve returned to NE OK for the first time in 30 years to scatter my father’s ashes.

    • Pat

      Sorry to hear the occasion for which you made the trip, but may it bring back many pleasant memories, and create some new ones too.

    • Tundra

      Condolences, but good on you for taking care of the old man.

  32. MikeS

    Weekend Interview: Trump Tangles With the Journal’s Editors

    Mr. Gigot asks how Mr. Trump would persuade Xi Jinping to stand down from a blockade of Taiwan.

    “Oh, very easy,” the former president says. “I had a very strong relationship with him. He was actually a really good, I don’t want to say friend—I don’t want to act foolish, ‘he was my friend’—but I got along with him great. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago with me, so we got to know each other great. He’s a very fierce person.”

    That visit coincided with the April 2017 U.S. bombing of Syria, where China reportedly had a military presence. Mr. Trump says he decided to tell Mr. Xi about the bombing over dessert: “I said, ‘President, we’ve just shot 58 missiles into Syria to an airport that’s housing a lot of new planes. Your people are not at risk, but they’re on their way right now.’ He hears it and he goes, ‘Repeat.’ . . . I said, ‘You speak English, don’t you?’ ” Until then, the two men had communicated only with the aid of an interpreter.

    “I repeated it, and he understood it. He sat like this, he’s a good poker player. First it looked like he was furious, right? I repeated it again. ‘Oh, OK.’ Then we got back to—he was pretty cool. But he’s a fierce guy.”

    Mr. Trump returns to Mr. Gigot’s question: “I would say: If you go into Taiwan, I’m sorry to do this, I’m going to tax you”—meaning impose tariffs—“at 150% to 200%.” He might even shut down trade altogether.

    Mr. Gigot: “Would you use military force against a blockade on Taiwan?”

    Mr. Trump: “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me and he knows I’m f— crazy.”

    • Tundra

      Good interview, thanks!

      By contrast, in Ms. Harris’s 27-minute interview with Fox’s Bret Baier on Wednesday, she mentioned Mr. Trump by name 23 times. The two nominees have one thing in common: an intense interest in Donald Trump.

      Lol

  33. The Late P Brooks

    Speaking of declarations of war

    hio Congressman Mike Turner, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is pressing the White House for an “immediate” briefing amid reports that North Korea has sent its soldiers to fight in the Russia-Ukraine war, a development Turner says would cross a “red line.”

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky raised alarms during a news conference in Brussels this week after he claimed that North Korea, Russia’s key ally, is preparing to send thousands of troops from different branches of its armed forces to fight against Ukraine. Kyiv’s Defense Intelligence Directorate said a day later that there are almost 11,000 North Korean infantry troops training in eastern Russia.

    ——-

    In a letter addressed to President Joe Biden on Friday, Turner, a Republican, wrote that, if true, the reported leap in Russia and North Korea’s military partnership is an “alarming” and “extreme escalation of the conflict in Ukraine.”

    That would make a nice welcome gift to leave on the Resolute Desk.

    • cyto

      First, that Russia needs additional troops to handle Ukraine with western munitions.

      Second, that is haven’t seen anything about this in the national news.

      Big help for Kim though. They always need to bleed off a bunch of young men.

      • The Last American Hero

        And the young men have only been getting 2 meals a day.

      • Grummun

        How much good are Nork troops going to be? I guess they are already used to starvation rations in shitty conditions. But as combat troops, any better than cannon fodder?

      • dbleagle

        All the norks need to be is to act as bullet sponges. That is always the Russian way of war. Putin is running out of domestic sponges unless he wants to mobilize his country- which something he doesn’t want to do.

  34. The Late P Brooks

    “Oh, well I can give you another round of steroids…” Heh heh, mission accomplished. And of course, within a day I felt hugely better and ready to start a bar fight.

    Pert as a ruttin’ buck.

  35. The Late P Brooks

    Being a spineless weasel is a job requirement

    Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday continued to steer clear of criticizing President Joe Biden, arguing that vice presidents not denigrating the commander-in-chief is an American tradition.

    After she delivered remarks at an afternoon campaign rally, Harris was asked by NBC News to identify one policy she would have done differently from Biden over the last three and a half years.

    “To be very candid with you, even including Mike Pence, vice presidents are not critical of their presidents. I think that really, actually, in terms of the tradition of it, and also just going forward, it does not make for a productive and important relationship,” Harris said.

    She was too busy carrying out her orders to think about policy.

    • The Last American Hero

      Presidential Administrations over the last 40 years: The Reagan Administration, The Bush Administration, The Clinton Administration, The Bush Administration, The Obama Administration, The Trump Administration, The Biden-Harris Administration.

      From Day One, this was packaged and sold as a co-presidency since everyone with 2 functioning brain cells knew that Joe only had 1. Sorry lady, but your name is on the letterhead and has been for 4 years.

    • Gustave Lytton

      even including Mike Pence, vice presidents are not critical of their presidents

      Trump wasn’t really Pence’s president, someone else was?

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