A federal judge declined to issue an order Friday evening blocking deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, concluding he lacks the authority to issue a nationwide order after the Supreme Court tossed his order earlier this month.
Lawyers with the ACLU had asked U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to issue a temporary order blocking any imminent AEA deportations, saying the Trump administration was actively busing dozens of men to an airport in Texas to be deported.
Boasberg said he was “sympathetic” to the concern about deportation flights resuming imminently, but he said he lacks the authority to issue a nationwide temporary restraining order barring such deportations.
Owen
Everything but tech support
Jed
Tech support
MN Government Goon Caught Vandalizing
A member of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s administration has been repeatedly caught on camera allegedly vandalizing parked Tesla vehicles with his keys while out walking his dog.
Dylan Bryan Adams, 33, a fiscal policy analyst for the State of Minnesota, was captured on vehicle surveillance footage allegedly dragging a key across the exteriors of several Teslas, stripping paint and causing thousands of dollars in damage.
Authorities reportedly arrested Adams on suspicion of causing an estimated $20,000 in damage, with formal charges still pending, according to the Minnesota-based crime watch account @CrimeWatchMpls on X.
Get it Done or We’re Moving On
When asked about the deal between Russian and Ukraine, Trump said: “We’re talking about here people dying. We’re going to get it stopped, ideally.
“Now if, for some reason, one of the two parties makes it very difficult, we’re just going to say, ‘You’re foolish, you’re fools, you’re horrible people,’ and we’re going to just take a pass.”
[…]
Zelensky had been hoping to use the deal to secure a US security guarantee in the event of a ceasefire deal, telling European leaders last month that “a ceasefire without security guarantees is dangerous for Ukraine”.
The US has so far resisted providing Kyiv with security guarantees.
At this point, this is clearly a negotiating tactic by Trump to put pressure on getting a deal done. But he’s also right. This isn’t our war. Our interests are limited and it is not our full responsibility to fix it. At some point, we should walk away.
And no way in hell do I want America giving Ukraine unlimited security guarantees. Maybe commit to economic sanctions or something if Russia misbehaves, but I don’t want us committing to armed defense of Ukraine.
That being said, I hope they get to a viable deal very quickly.
WI School Districts Whine After Making Terrible Decisions
This is happening all over Wisconsin. I saw a post about Port Washington schools having the same problem.
This is a recent board deck from the West Bend School District (thanks to the local resident who sent it to me). They hired 60… SIXTY… people with “free” federal Covid slush fund money. This is a district that has had declining enrollment for the better part of a decade and is projected to continue to have declining enrollment for another decade.
And yet, when someone came around with free money, they found a way to spend it by padding their staff with useless (I say “useless” intentionally) staff. How many of those staff members are friends of family of existing staff members? How many are doing jobs that have absolutely zero impact on student performance? The decision to hire these people was a terrible decision and a complete waste of money. How can I tell? The West Bend School District’s student performance has not improved. That is the #1, #2, and #3 goals of a school district – to educate kids. If adding these people did not positively impact educational outcomes, then it was a waste of money.
Now that money is finally going away and school districts all over Wisconsin – bolstered by the bleating of Governor Evers – are whining and crying about “cuts.”
Get bent.
They never should have wasted that money in the first place and the fact that these people should now all be fired is 100% the responsibility of the idiots who made the decision to hire them in the first place. The vast majority of Wisconsin’s school districts are terribly run and should not be rewarded for their mismanagement.
Honda Might be Moving Some Manufacturing to USA
There’s an old saying in economics… there are no solutions, just tradeoffs. Overall, tariffs are bad policy, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t positive tradeoffs. Here’s a potential positive tradeoff
TOKYO (Reuters) -Honda is considering switching some car production from Mexico and Canada to the United States, aiming for 90% of cars sold in the country to be made locally in response to new U.S. auto tariffs, the Nikkei newspaper reported on Tuesday.
Japan’s second-biggest automaker by sales plans to increase U.S. vehicle production by as much as 30% over two to three years in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to put a 25% levy on imported vehicles, Nikkei said.
Honda declined to comment, saying the information was not announced by the company.
Free Tuition Boosts Inequity
New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine made history in 2018 when it became the first top-ranked medical program to offer full-tuition scholarships to all students, regardless of need or merit.
The number of applicants, predictably, spiked in the year that followed. But then, the share of incoming students considered “financially disadvantaged” sank to 3% in 2019, down from 12% in 2017, reports showed.
“Tuition-free schools can actually increase inequity,” said Jamie Beaton, co-founder and CEO of Crimson Education, a college consulting firm.
“Tuition-free colleges experience surges in application numbers, dramatically boosting the competitive intensity of the admissions process,” he said. “This in turn can skew admissions towards middle- or higher-income applicants who may be able to access more effective admissions resources, such as tutoring or extracurriculars.”
What the story doesn’t talk about is outcomes. How many students were able to complete their degrees? How many graduated and went on to good careers? Colleges focus so much on the equity of admissions but not the success of their students after they graduate. That is part of the problem with higher education.
Murderer Opposes Death Penalty
Oh, that’s rich. So he can execute someone by his authority for whatever reasons he likes, but he shouldn’t be killed because the government didn’t follow procedures. He’s a coward. If he wants to be a martyr to his monstrous cause, he should man up and welcome the chair.
Luigi Mangione asked a federal judge in New York on Friday to stop the government from seeking the death penalty if he’s convicted of federal charges related to the shooting death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, arguing the Justice Department made a “political, arbitrary, capricious” breach of protocol.
“When the United States plans to kill one of its citizens, it must follow statutory and internal procedures,” defense attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo said. “Mangione seeks Court intervention now not merely because the Government has failed to follow these procedures but because it has abandoned them.”
Judge Rules that Terrorist Agitator Mahmoud Khalil
Good.
An immigration judge ruled Friday that Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil can be deported on grounds that he threatens foreign policy, as alleged by the Trump administration.
[…]
While a student at Columbia University, Khalil was part of a leadership group protesting the war in Gaza. Khalil took part in negotiations with school administrators demanding the institution cut ties with Israel and divest from Israeli companies. Khalil finished his graduate studies at Columbia in December and is set to graduate in the spring.
Khalil — whose wife is about to give birth to their first child — was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at his Columbia housing in March.
[…]
The government has argued, under an obscure 1952 federal law called the Immigration and Nationality Act, that it believes migrants are deportable “if the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe that the alien’s presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
I love how any law with which the reporter disagrees is deemed “obscure.” Most of our laws were written a while ago and there are so dang many of them that most of them could be deemed “obscure.” But it’s still the law and it is very clear that the Secretary of State has this arbitrary authority.
Interest Groups Fight for Child Care Welfare
This is yet another example of a “temporary” or “emergency” government program that people are trying to make permanent. The politicians decided that it was fair for taxpayers to pay for child care during the pandemic because of… something. Now that the pandemic is over, there is still an entire ecosystem of child care providers and parents who want to continue to suckle at that teat. The same politicians are pushing to make the welfare permanent as another step down the road of Socialism. Rinse. Repeat. Incrementalism works.
One in four Wisconsin child care providers could close their doors if the state’s ongoing support isn’t replaced after it ends in June, according to a state-commissioned report released Thursday.
More than one in three providers expect to reduce their capacity for children or the hours they operate, or both, according to the report, based on a survey of most of the state’s licensed child care providers.
The report was commissioned by the state Department of Children and Families (DCF) and produced by the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It was released by the office of Gov. Tony Evers to support $480 million for child care providers in his 2025-27 proposed budget — a successor to the state’s Child Care Counts program that was funded with federal pandemic relief money.
House Passes Bill to Rein in Rogue District Judges
Good. It’s unlikely that it will be able to get out of the Senate, but this is a rational bill. I would remind Democrats that this cuts both ways. If we allow pissant district judges to exercise a veto power over an entire branch of government, the chaos they inflict on our nation will swing against Democrats when they are back in power.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House passed legislation Wednesday mostly along party lines that limits the authority of federal district judges to issue nationwide orders, as Republicans react to several court rulings against the Trump administration.
In many cases, the courts are questioning whether the firings of federal workers, freezing of federal funds and shuttering of long-running federal offices are unlawful actions by the executive branch and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The pace of nationwide injunctions has certainly increased during Donald Trump’s presidency. Republicans are arguing that the increase is the result of “activist liberal judges.” Democrats counter that the courts are simply striking down illegal executive orders and actions from the Trump administration. They also note that some of the judges issuing the injunctions were nominated by Republican presidents.
The bill passed by a vote of 219-213. It limits the scope of injunctive relief ordered by a district judge to those parties before the court, rather than applying the relief nationally. But the bill is unlikely to advance through the Senate, where at least some Democratic support would be needed.
Trump Fights for Adequate Water Pressure
A global trade war roller coaster was not enough to distract Donald Trump from fulfilling one of his longtime priorities Wednesday: changing the federal definition of “showerhead”, a move the White House said would “end the Obama-Biden war on water pressure”.
Trump has complained for years about inadequate water pressure in American showers, sinks and toilets, and has blamed federal water-conservation standards for the problem.
“In my case, I like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair,” Trump said as he signed the executive order, which the White House said would apply to multiple household appliances, including toilets and sinks. “I have to stand under the shower for 15 minutes until it gets wet. It comes out drip, drip, drip. It’s ridiculous.”
State of Emergency Declared in Albuquerque for Crime
A state of emergency has been declared in New Mexico‘s largest city, as the governor calls in the National Guard to help combat out of control crime.
Action by the Democratic governor clears the way for dozens of guard members to help the Albuquerque Police Department starting next month.
About 60 to 70 soldiers will be stationed in largest city, home to over a quarter of the state, for six months to a year, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham told reporters Tuesday.
Grisham pulled the trigger after the chief of police asked for assistance at the end of March, as the city of dealing with a fentanyl crisis, violent crime and growing homelessness problem.
Some of the troops will be assigned to Central Avenue, part of the historic Route 66.
The area is known as ‘The War Zone’ by locals, and is the site of homeless encampments and open-air drug use.
DHS Revokes Parole Status for 900,000 People
The Department of Homeland Security revoked parole status for those who used the CBP One App to obtain the status. The move puts over 900,000 migrants up for deportation.
Parole status is a two-year temporary authorization to be in the United States due to circumstances in the home country.
Remember that Biden was having random illegal sign up on the app in order to waive them into the country to avoid the unseemly sights at the border. It was all fake and these people do not have legitimate claims to have parole status. They can leave and reapply if they have a legitimate status.
Another Usurper Judge Makes Ridiculous Ruling
This is getting more and more ridiculous.
A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that the White House cannot bar Associated Press reporters and photographers from the Oval Office, Air Force One, and other secure spaces where journalists from other media outlets are admitted.
District Court Judge Trevor McFadden in an order said that the White House’s current blocking access to AP journalists to those tightly controlled spaces with President Donald Trump is “contrary to the First Amendment” of the U.S. Constitution.
Of course the President has that right – just as the judge has the right to restrict who enters his courtroom. The notion that allowing one member of the media to be present obligates Trump to allow any and all members of the media is ridiculous and unworkable. These are confined spaces and choices have to be made.
SCOTUS Stays Rogue Court Order
For now… SCOTUS needs to police their branch and make it clear that some rando district court does not have the authority to stop the actions of an entire other branch of government.
The Supreme Court has granted a request by the Trump administration to temporarily block a lower court order requiring that a deported Salvadorian man be returned to the US.
Chief Justice John Roberts agreed to pause a ruling that Kilmar Abrego Garcia should be brought back from El Salvador by midnight on Monday.
The government has said Mr Garcia was deported on 15 March due to an “administrative error”, although they also allege he is a member of the MS-13 gang, which his lawyer denies.
In its emergency appeal to America’s highest court, the Trump administration argued the Maryland judge lacked authority to issue the order and that US officials cannot compel El Salvador to return Mr Garcia.
[…]
Chief Justice Roberts’ administrative stay on Monday afternoon will allow the Supreme Court time to consider the case.
Most Foreign Exchanges Continue to Slide
It’ll get worse before it gets better. Circuit breakers likely to trip tomorrow.
Asia-Pacific markets extended their sell-off Monday as fears over a global trade war sparked by U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs fueled a risk-off mood.
Japanese markets led losses in the region in early trade. The benchmark Nikkei 225 plunged 8.03% while the broader Topix index plummeted 8.64%.
Over in South Korea, the Kospi index fell 4.34% at the open, while the small-cap Kosdaq fell 3.48%.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 declined 6.07% at the open. The benchmark slid into correction territory with an 11% decline since its last high in February, in its previous session.
Futures for Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index stood at 22,772 pointing to a stronger open compared to the HSI’s last close of 22,849.81.
I’m not panicked. I’m not pulling out of the equity markets. I think tariffs are terrible policy, but I also think that the U.S. economy was inflated. The U.S. economy is incredibly resilient and will bounce back fine.
Police Release Documents about the Covenant Killer
This story is very long, but I encourage you to read it all. It is very telling. I’d like to highlight a few key points.
Audrey Hale felt no hatred against anyone at the school where the former student gunned down six people. In fact, the 28-year-old relished fond memories of The Covenant School and wanted “to die somewhere that made her happy,” Nashville police said.
“Hale bore no grudge against the school or staff” and considered them to be “‘innocents’ and victims on par with herself,” the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said.
The revelation came in a trove of new details released in a report by Nashville police Wednesday – two years after Hale randomly slaughtered three teachers and three 9-year-old children at the private Christian school.
[…]
Hale attended The Covenant School in the early 2000s, from kindergarten through fourth grade. The former student denied suffering any emotional or physical abuse during this period, investigators said in the report obtained by CNN.
“She felt safe and accepted at The Covenant and made friends with other students,” the report said. “She considered her family life during this time as happy, with a positive relationship with both of her parents and her brother.”
But more than 16 years after leaving the school, Hale targeted the beloved alma mater “due to the notoriety she would obtain” and “because she had a personal connection to the school from earlier in her life and felt she had to die somewhere that made her happy,” police said.
I remember the narrative of the time where liberals were insinuating, or outright accusing, that the murderer targeted this little Christian school in revenge for some past wrong. Perhaps they abused her. Perhaps they stifled her trans yearnings. You know, they said, these oppressive Christian schools repress people and cause them to lash out. Some on the Left jumped all over this little school as a proxy to slander all private Christian schools.
Well, it turns out that she chose this school because it was a place that made her happy and was a joyful time in her life. Would that she had stayed in the embrace of Christianity and perhaps there would have been a different outcome.
While the killer “identified as a male and used he/him as preferred pronouns,” Nashville police said, “Under Tennessee law, a person’s gender identity must correspond with their biological sex or with information present on their certificate of live birth.”
As a result, authorities described Hale as a female in their 40-plus-page report.
Yes, she was a trans.
“Notoriety was the motive,” the report summary says. “It is known that Hale, and other mass shooters, studied material from Columbine High School prior to committing their attacks.”
Yet another mass killer who was motivated by fame. But why?
Hale suffered from anxiety and social phobias, “which led to her self-isolating more often,” the investigative report said.
“Her isolation and loneliness led Hale to begin believing the only true friends she could confide in were her stuffed animals, who she felt would never abandon her,” police said.
“She assigned them names and personalities, took them with her whenever she travelled, and began creating cartoons and digital media, including stories where they demonstrated some of the same emotions she felt.”
[…]
Investigators determined Hale was sane, but evidence suggested worsening anxiety, depression and rage.
She wanted fame because she was lost and lonely. She was clearly suffering from a declining mental state. She felt unfulfilled in her life and lacking worth.
Investigators learned Hale felt chronic loneliness and disappointment.
“She felt abandoned and ignored by those she longed to befriend and engage with romantically, which angered her more than anything else,” the report says.
Make no mistake. This was an evil, narcissistic, monster who is 100% responsible for killing six people including three kids.
But I think it is worth noting the societal implications. We hear more and more about our young people feeling increasingly isolated, depressed, and lonely. Marriage rates are down. Birth rates are down. Church attendance is down. Young people are increasingly living alone until much later than previous generations. We have a couple of generations that are just lost. They lack purpose and they lack a connection to the larger community. With an increasing number of lost, lonely young people, more of them will lash out. Some will do it in harmless ways, some will become monsters – and everything in between.
Crime, like politics, tends to be downstream from culture. We have a culture issue and it’s getting worse.
Treasury Secretary Blames Tech Selloff for Market Pullback
Now that’s just some plain BS. The market clearly reacted to Trump’s Tariffs. The fact that his administration is trying to deflect blame instead of owning it and explaining it as a temporary pullback in the name of the longer term good (not that I agree with that, but that is the argument he should be making) is stupid on multiple levels.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday the sell-off in the stock market is due more to a sharp pullback in the biggest technology stocks instead of the protectionist policies coming from the Trump administration.
“I’m trying to be Secretary of Treasury, not a market commentator. What I would point out is that especially the Nasdaq peaked on DeepSeek day so that’s a Mag 7 problem, not a MAGA problem,” Bessent said on Bloomberg TV Wednesday evening.
Bessent was referring to Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, whose new language models sparked a rout in U.S. technology stocks in late January. The emergence of DeepSeek’s highly competitive and potentially much cheaper models stoked doubts about the billions that the big U.S. tech companies are spending on AI.
The so-called Magnificent 7 stocks — Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia — started selling off drastically, pulling the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite into correction territory. The tech-heavy benchmark is down about 13% from its record high reached on December 16.
However, the secretary downplayed the impact from President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs, which caught many investors off guard and fueled fears of a re-acceleration in inflation, slower economic growth and even a recession. Many investors have blamed the tariff rollout for driving the S&P 500 briefly into correction territory from its record reached in late February. Wall Street defines a correction as a drop of 10% from a recent high.
Trump’s Tariffs
Ugh. Bad policy and bad politics.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday laid out the U.S. “reciprocal tariff” rates that more than 180 countries and territories, including European Union members, will face under his sweeping new trade policy.
Trump and the White House shared a series of charts on social media detailing the tariff rates they say other countries impose on the U.S. Those purported rates include the countries’ “Currency Manipulation and Trade Barriers.”
An adjacent column shows the new U.S. tariff rates on each country, as well as the European Union.
Those rates are, in most cases, roughly half of what the Trump administration claims each country has “charged” the U.S.
No, I don’t like tariffs. They are stupid policy. An argument can be made for reciprocal tariffs to create a fair playing field (with the hope that both countries back down), but even then it’s a risky policy playing with consumers’ money.
But even if the reciprocal tariffs were a good idea as a policy or a tactic, Trump’s timing is terrible. He is on a very short clock to get some big things done in terms of cutting government, cutting taxes, cutting regulations, etc. He needs Congress’ support for that and the Republican margins in Congress are razor thin. When Trump’s approval rating starts sagging because everyone’s 401(k) is crashing, those marginal Republicans will stray. Trump will not be able to help encourage party discipline if he’s a lame duck president with a weak approval rating.
Get the big stuff done in Congress FIRST. The play with international trade with tariffs if you want. As he’s doing it, even if some other countries do lower their tariffs and open up markets for American goods, it will take capital to invest in building the capacity to serve those markets. It’s much harder to get capital when we suck trillions of dollars out of the equity markets.
A Few Early Election Thoughts
Well, darn. It looks like the liberal will win the Supreme Court race. This will have terrible, long-term impacts on Wisconsin. The more pro-education candidate may yet win the DPI race. We’ll see. That would be a marginal improvement, but a win is a win. Thankfully, the Voter ID Amendment will pass. Huzzah. A few thoughts…
Wisconsin is a liberal state. It just is. It leans liberal by 5%-10%. Yes, those people are crammed into a few areas, but there are more of them. It was more even ten years ago, but migration (conservatives out to low tax states and liberals in to work/school in Madison) has changed it. A Conservative like Walker is unlikely to win a statewide race any time soon. A populist like Trump can pull it off.
The Supreme Court race was completely nationalized. This needed to happen for Schimel to have a chance, but it also obliterated the dynamic of a race about issues. It wasn’t about a liberal court usurping power and turning back the clock by illegally invalidating Act 10, Wisconsin’s abortion law, redistricting, etc. etc. etc. It became Pro Trump v. Anti Trump. And while Trump won Wisconsin a few months ago, it was against perhaps the second worse presidential candidate of all time. Crawford was even able to blunt the correct attack on her as a weak-on-crime liberal judge with a bunch of lies about Schimel’s record.
The liberals have won the recent supreme court elections with a proven formula. They run a woman. The abortion issue favors them and the liberal court smartly kept that issue alive for this election. And they overtly promise things to constituent groups – kill School Choice to the teachers; kill Act 10 to the unions; gerrymander districts for the Dem machine; who knows what else. Yes, she had proxies make the promises to keep her hands clean, but promises were made. You can hate the new rules or you can play by them.
The state Republican leadership needs to go. All of them. And they need to move the state party HQ out of Madison to a red area. They have one job – to win elections – and they suck at it. If they are going to get serious about winning elections, they need to absolutely gut the state party and get some competent people in there.
It is going to be interesting to see what happens to the voting patterns in a post-Trump era. He has a unique ability to activate the liberal base. I suspect that will get more difficult for Democrats when Trump is no longer on the scene, but that is likely several years away.
I’m disappointed in you, Wisconsin, but I understand you.
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