Welcome to Sunday, February 1, 2026, and we’re into a new month, one likely filled with more snow, slush and freezing temperatures. You can see what’s in store from this illumination of February from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, produced between 1412 and 1416. This page is attributed to Paul Limbourg, or the “Rustic painter”, and the Wikipedia caption is this:
An enclosure surrounds a farm comprising a sheep pen and, on the right, four beehives and a dovecote. Inside the house, a woman and a couple of young man and young woman warm themselves in front of the fire. Outside, a man chops down a tree with an axe, bundles of sticks at his feet, while another gets ready to go inside while blowing on his hands to warm them. Further away, a third drives a donkey, loaded with wood, towards the neighbouring village.
It’s also Car Insurance Day, G.I. Joe Day, National Baked Alaska Day, International Furmint Day (celebrating a grape and wine), National Dark Chocolate Day, and World Leprosy Day (it’s now called Hansen’s Disease). And it’s World Hijab Day as well as World No Hijab Day (I prefer the latter).
The Jesus and Mo artist put up this 2007 flashback struo in honor of No Hijab Day. I love the last panel, which tells you why the covering is worn:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 1 Wikipedia page.
And there’s a Google Doodle today celebrating The Art of Beat Making in Hip Hop. You can see an animated video about it by clicking on the screenshot below, and the occasion is given at the site:
In celebration of Black History Month, today’s #GoogleDoodle music video celebrates the art of hip-hop beat making, highlighting how hip-hop producers have innovated techniques for mixing and looping sound. The Doodle is set to a track composed by guest artist, Illa J.
Da Nooz:
*In the face of political criticism (and possible defunding), ICE has expanded its criteria for arresting people without warrants.
Amid tensions over President Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota and beyond, federal agents were told this week that they have broader power to arrest people without a warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo reviewed by The New York Times.
The change expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person.
The shift comes as the administration has deployed thousands of masked immigration agents into cities nationwide. A week before the memo, it came to light that Todd M. Lyons, the acting director of the agency, had issued guidance in May saying agents could enter homes with only an administrative warrant, not a judicial one. And the day before the memo, Mr. Trump said he would “de-escalate a little bit” in Minneapolis, after agents fatally shot two people in the crackdown there.
The memo, addressed to all ICE personnel and signed on Wednesday by Mr. Lyons, centers on a federal law that empowers agents to make warrantless arrests of people they believe are undocumented immigrants, if they are “likely to escape” before an arrest warrant can be obtained.
ICE has long interpreted that standard to mean situations in which agents believe someone is a “flight risk,” and unlikely to comply with future immigration obligations like appearing for hearings, according to the memo. But Mr. Lyons criticized that construction as “unreasoned” and “incorrect,” changing the agency’s interpretation of it to instead mean situations in which agents believe someone is unlikely to remain at the scene.
“An alien is ‘likely to escape’ if an immigration officer determines he or she is unlikely to be located at the scene of the encounter or another clearly identifiable location once an administrative warrant is obtained,” Mr. Lyons wrote.
The Times shared a description of the memo’s contents with several former senior ICE officials from the Biden administration. Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior adviser at ICE, called the new definition “an extremely broad interpretation of the term ‘escape.’”
Well, all you need to do now as an ICE agent is have a suspicion that someone should be apprehended and a feeling that the person won’t hang around. The first bit gives you license to detain almost anyone; the second, of course, can apply to nearly everyone save people working at a job (it takes a while to get a warrant). This will only increase the public rancor against ICE, and seems a bad decision.
*The UN claims that it is in danger of financial collapse because several countries, including the U.S., haven’t paid their dues.
The United Nations said on Friday that it was facing imminent financial collapse and would run out of money by July if countries, namely the United States, did not pay their annual dues that amount to billions of dollars.
Senior U.N. officials said that if the cash ran out, the agency would be forced to shut down its landmark headquarters in New York by August. The U.N. Security Council, a 15-member body responsible for maintaining international peace and stability, convenes its meetings at U.N. headquarters.
It would also have to cancel the annual General Assembly gathering of world leaders held in September and shut the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which responds to global emergencies like conflicts and natural disasters, it said.
The U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, sent a letter to the ambassadors of all 196 member states on Thursday warning them of “imminent financial collapse,” saying the organization’s financial straits this time were different from those in any previous periods, according to a copy of the letter seen by The New York Times.
“The crisis is deepening, threatening program delivery and risking financial collapse,” Mr. Guterres wrote. “And the situation will further deteriorate in the near future. I cannot overstate the urgency of the situation we now face.”
. . . The United States is responsible for about 95 percent of the money owed to the United Nations, about $2.2 billion, according to a senior U.N. official who briefed reporters on the agency’s budget crisis. That amount is a combination of the U.S. annual dues for 2025, which has not been paid, and for 2026, the U.N. official said.
I am not a huge fan of the UN since it sided with Hamas and against Israel during the war on Gaza, and has, over the years, issued condemnation after condemnation of Israel. From AI:
Since October 7, 2023, the UN Security Council has adopted multiple resolutions focusing on humanitarian pauses, hostage release, and civilian protection in Gaza. While numerous UN bodies have heavily criticized and passed resolutions condemning Israeli actions, the UN General Assembly has not formally condemned Hamas for the Oct. 7 attack, with efforts to do so failing to meet required thresholds.
And in 2024 the UN condemned Israel 17 times, and the rest of the world only 6 times! The UN runs UNRWA, infested with Hamas terrorists and teaching Palestinian kids to hate Jews. Its secretary general as well as Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories, are palpable antisemites. UN Women was very slow to condemn Hamas’s attack on women and its sexual violence on women, waiting until December to do so. The UN force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, is supposed to prevent Hezbollah from engaging in terrorist activities and keep it from running the country, and has failed miserably. UNIFIL doesn’t do squat except run away when there’s fighting. As a whole, the major bodies of the organization, the Security Council and General Assembly, are not only biased but ineffectual. While the UN does engage in humanitarian activities, I think the whole megillah needs to be restructured, and that the U.S. should not contribute to an organization that itself lauds or fails to stop terrorism. Indeed, members of UNRWA engage in terrorism. This is why we aren’t funding it, and I see no way to make the UN into the world peacekeeping organization it was meant to be.
*Last week the feds raided an elections center in Georgia, and for apparently no reason other than Trump is still peeved at losing the 2020 election there (Georgia is a swing state) and called the state’s Secretary of State to beg for enough votes to win (remember?). They wouldn’t oblige him so now, more than five years later, Trump is still exacting revenge.
From the NYT:
On Wednesday, that obsession translated into action, when a team of F.B.I. agents, armed with a search warrant, descended on the Fulton County, Ga., elections hub outside Atlanta to seize ballots, voter rolls and scanner images — even though previous investigations have found no evidence to support his false claims of widespread fraud.
Curiously, the raid was accompanied by some Administration bigwigs, including erstwhile Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, now Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, who doesn’t work for the FBI. The Dispatch comments:
The only interesting thing about yesterday’s FBI search of an elections hub in Fulton County, Georgia, is that the feds got a warrant before carrying it out.
That should have been the least interesting thing about it, especially in context. The operation stank of irregularities that would have been extremely interesting under any other administration but are day-ending-in-Y normal for this one.
For instance, the federal prosecutor listed on the search warrant isn’t the local U.S. attorney in Atlanta, it’s a U.S. attorney from Missouri. We can only guess why, but the New York Times notes that Missouri prosecutors are tangled up with “Eagle Ed” Martin, a staunch “2020 was rigged” true believer and one of the most sinister henchmen in Donald Trump’s Justice Department.
The search was also curiously star-studded. Andrew Bailey, the highest-ranking official in the FBI apart from Director Kash Patel, was on scene to assist. Strangely, so was Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, having reportedly “spent months investigating the results of the 2020 election that Donald Trump lost, according to White House officials.” So that’s what she’s been doing instead of her job.
Three sources inside the Trump administration, two of them at the Justice Department, told Politico they don’t understand why an official tasked with sniffing out foreign threats to the United States is participating in domestic law enforcement. Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, observed that there are only two possibilities:
Either Director Gabbard believes there was a legitimate foreign intelligence nexus—in which case she is in clear violation of her obligation under the law to keep the intelligence committees “fully and currently informed” of relevant national security concerns—or she is once again demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for the office that she holds by injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community she is supposed to be leading into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.
The 2020 election in Georgia was examined by Trump’s own campaign, members of his first administration, and state officials led by a Republican governor and Republican secretary of state. The closest anyone has come to identifying meaningful wrongdoing in Fulton County was human error that led to some absentee ballots being double-counted but didn’t affect the outcome.
One consultant to the president’s 2020 operation who looked into the possibility of fraud sounded flabbergasted when the Journal asked him about the FBI’s Fulton County raid. “That election is six years in the past,” he said. “There’s no undoing it. I can’t imagine there aren’t more important things to look at.”
Like an elephant, Trump never forgets—and he doesn’t forgive, either. And to think that I was once a supporter of Gabbard when she was a Democrat, and I’ll admit that I was even a bit sweet on her. She seemed savvy, was in the Army, surfed, was a Hindu, and had that cool skunk stripe in her hair. Now she’s proven herself just another flack for the Trump administration. What a letdown.
*I still think the U.S. is going to attack Iran soon, probably in conjunction with Israel, and is playing it cool to delude the regime. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the attack weaponry is in place, but nobody is sure what’s going to happen.
The U.S. military has assembled a formidable force in the Middle East within striking range of Iran. Now, President Trump must decide how to use it.
As warships and planes reach the region in growing numbers, administration officials said they are debating whether the main aim is to go after Iran’s nuclear program, hit its ballistic missile arsenal, bring about the collapse of the government—or some combination of the three.
Trump has asked aides for quick and decisive attack options that don’t risk a long-term war in the Middle East, officials said. The ideal option would be one that hits the regime hard enough that it has no choice but to accede to U.S. nuclear demands and lay off dissidents, they said.
There have been discussions about a punishing bombing campaign that could topple Iran’s government, the officials said. Trump and his team have also weighed leveraging the threat of military force to extract diplomatic concessions from Iran.
What Trump decides will determine the shape of any military action. “The kind of things you’d want to do and the force packages you would need are very different,” said retired Vice Adm. Robert Murrett, a former Navy intelligence officer.
A senior administration official said that while Trump has consistently said Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon, he is being purposefully ambiguous to keep his strategic objectives and military thinking secret.
Speaking about the ships converging on the Middle East, Trump told reporters Friday in the Oval Office that “they have to float someplace. They might as well float near Iran.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Friday that Tehran was open to nuclear discussions but that the U.S. needed to stop issuing military threats.
The last sentence is bullpucky. Iran never has and never will stop trying to make nuclear weapons. The regime knows that all it would take is one or two such missiles to entirely destroy Israel, while Iran is big and could stand some retaliation. The lesson that no administration has learned is this: DO NOT NEGOTIATE WITH IRAN ABOUT STOPPING THE PRODUCTION OF NUKES. I’m still a bit ambivalent about us interfering in another country’s internal affairs, but given the huge carnage of civilians there and especially the fact that Iran is ground zero for empowering terrorist proxies throughout the Middle East, I wouldn’t be sad if we attacked. The question is what kind of attack would topple the regime, and that’s coupled with worries about what would the Revolutionary Guard do.
*Over at The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan’s latest column has a provocative title, “Can the iPhone save our democracy?” It has to do with recording events, and of course he means the events in Minneapolis.
A video leaked this week of Greg Bovino, the former Minneapolis ICE honcho, that did the media rounds in the last 24 hours. He’s giving directions to his troops when he was in Los Angeles. It contained what you might expect:
This is our fucking city! … Arrest as many people who touch you as you want. Those are the general orders, all the way to the very top! It’s all about us now. It ain’t about them.
Then this:
“Professional, legal, ethical, moral.” We’re on camera. But other than that, it’s what we do.
What checks might there be on an ICE empowered “from the very top.” Bovino tells us: “You’re on camera. But other than that…” My italics.
The iPhone seems to be the only serious threat to ICE’s violence. We know they feel emboldened to do virtually anything to anybody and have been granted a rhetorical “absolute immunity.” We also know that the federal government will tell big, beautiful, massive lies to justify any and all ICE abuses — before any investigations.
So Renee Good was a “deranged lunatic,” Karoline Leavitt declared. Good didn’t just try to run over an ICE officer; she did run him over, and it was unclear if he would survive his injuries, said the president. She was engaged in “domestic terrorism,” according to Stephen Miller. Equally, Alex Pretti was another “would-be assassin” who walked up to ICE officers “brandishing” a gun, trying “to murder federal agents” who, fearing a “massacre,” fired solely in self-defense. He was an “insurrectionist” rightly “put down,” in the words of one MAGA congressman. Last night, Trump repeated his description of Pretti as an “insurrectionist” and “agitator.”
But we’re left with a small but real reassurance: the propagandists don’t get away with it. And the only reason — I repeat — the only reason is because citizens’ iPhones recorded the split-second incidents, with footage before and after the killings, and everyone on earth could watch them. In both the Good and the Pretti cases, the iPhone footage simply, methodically refuted the Big Lies.
. . . We’ve become worried — with very good reason — about the damage phones have done to our brains, our attention span, and our democracy. But without them, the Trump lies about Minneapolis might well have prevailed. Yes, the phone brings illiteracy, antisemitism, white supremacism, and woke moral panics. Without the iPhone, after all, we would not have had the summer of Floyd. But it also provides a dose of granular visual reality that can be hard to wish or propagandize away, as the Floyd video did.
. . . .what happened this past week in America was that, even with all those caveats, a big majority of sane Americans emerged out of the woodwork, looked at the videos, rejected tribalism, and said: Nah, ICE is lying. And ICE had to retreat.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command,” is how Orwell describes the ultimate totalitarian triumph. Well, this past week, the Party failed. And reality won. More to the point, deeply divided Americans, thanks to the iPhone, can still see it. Which is, to be honest, something of
All I can do is make a comment that I don’t like to see in a comment thread after my posts: “+1”. Sometimes that’s all you can say here.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the editor is taking a snooze:
Andrzej: Siesta’s over, back to work.
Hili: Were you talking to me?
In Polish:
Ja: Koniec sjesty, wracamy do roboty.
Hili: Do mnie mówiłeś?
*******************
From Bad Spelling or Grammar on signs and notices:
From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:
From CinEmma:
This post by Masih is non-embeddable, but click on the screenshot to see the video, and heed the warning: it’s grim and a bit gory. But as she says, “Do not stop talking about Iran.”
From Luana, who says “Sarah Lawrence is a disgrace.” And most of all its President! Here Ezra Klein gets disrupted at the college because he’s a Jew.
As @SamuelAbramsAEI points out, after sitting silently while her students disrupted a Jewish speaker for insufficiently denouncing Israel, the college president simply jokes, “welcome to Sarah Lawrence.” https://t.co/tXUl0663TU pic.twitter.com/5sNla3DnNk
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) January 30, 2026
I wrote the President this email:
Dear President Judd,
I recently watched a video of Ezra Klein trying to speak at your school, with you sitting on stage and doing nothing to stop the attempted deplatforming of him. After the ruckus was over, you simply told him, “Welcome to Sarah Lawrence.”
If such disruptions are allowed to interrupt speakers at your school, it’s nothing to joke about—or be proud of. At the University of Chicago, protestors are summarily removed from the audience and our President would be ashamed of what happened. It is against University policy to interrupt a speaker, as it’s an abrogation of free speech. I presume that your school doesn’t have such a policy, but if it doesn’t, it should.Cordially,Jerry CoyneProfessor Emeritus, Ecology & EvolutionThe University of Chicago
When you lied on your resume but still got the job.. 😅 pic.twitter.com/K3Go8M7vtX
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) January 31, 2026
It’s time to see this video again, as the children saved by Nicholas Winton have grown up and surprised him at a BBC taping. And I always tear up when I see it.
I remember the first time I ever saw this footage. It’s stuck with me ever since as an incredible example of human goodness. https://t.co/56EEJH1YDS
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) January 27, 2026
One from my feed; read the whole thing:
BRIAN MAY QUIETLY WALKED INTO A SMALL RESCUE SHELTER ON THE BRINK OF CLOSING — WITH JUST 48 HOURS LEFT BEFORE EVERY CAT INSIDE WOULD BE PUT DOWN
The bills were overdue. Donations had dried up. The owner had run out of options. In less than 48 hours, 39 cats were scheduled to be… pic.twitter.com/g9v06QJlsV
— The Husky (@Mr_Husky1) January 31, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This French Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was 12 years old. https://t.co/fhJ3SgNtEL
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) February 1, 2026
. . . and two from Doctor Cobb. I want to go to the Camel Festival!
I went to a camel festival in the Gobi Desert this morning, a celebration of nomadic life, and it was absolutely amazing
— Jonathan C Slaght (@jonathanslaght.com) 2026-01-31T13:18:17.699Z
Look at the size of this fish!
It's hard to grasp how large this grouper is until you see it in comparison to the ship's toilet on the left.This appears to be an Atlantic goliath grouper or 'itajara' (Epinephelus itajara). They can reach 800 lbs (350 kg) & 8 feet long (2.5 m)Let's talk about these gentle giants.
— c0nc0rdance (@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social) 2026-01-30T16:24:55.914Z
A BIRTHDAY THOUGHT:
Let America be America again. / Let it be the dream it used to be. … / Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed – / Let it be that great strong land of love / Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme / That any man be crushed by one above. -Langston Hughes, poet and novelist (1 Feb 1902-1967)
Very good letter to President Judd: you point out a problem AND provide an example of a solution from UChicago policy and practices against “heckler’s veto”. Thanks for writing it. I would only suggest that, if you did not do it, the letter should be cc’d to the Chair and Vice-chair of the Board of Trustees…President Judd’s bosses.
According to her cv, President Judd’s academic credentials are in music and music theory including the Renaissance. Perhaps she could also study some Renaissance philosophy.
Most of the smart analysts are saying we’ll do something kinetic in Iran but I REALLY doubt Israel will be involved.
Little sheep dog who lied on his resume is hilarious (as a shepherd owner)
They take time to ease into the shepherding job I’ve found. 🙂
PCC(E) and I have similar taste in wimin! I liked Tulsi’s look but I was never wild about her opinions. Ditto the UN, they’ve been beating up on Israel since 1975 (“Zionism is racism”). I wish they’d just do vaccines and clean water and stay out of the Middle East. UNWRA must be utterly destroyed. It is the vector of Pal “nationalism” and victimhood.
D.A.
NYC
“…the UN, they’ve been beating up on Israel since 1975 (“Zionism is racism”)”
That 1975 Resolution was certainly a low point – but it isn’t the lowest point. The UN has been beating up on Israel since its inception in 1945. Forgive me for elaborating. Again.
The UN inherited a Charter obligation to fulfill the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine to create a Jewish state according to the borders explicitly delineated by the League of Nations. Instead, the UN proposed much smaller borders for the nascent Jewish state, and offered the Arabs their second state in Palestine. This was rejected by the Arabs, who then started a war of aggression whose stated purpose was genocide. The UN never once condemned that genocidal war of aggression, nor has it ever said that Jordan was in illegal occupation of Judea and Samaria from 1948 until 1967.
And then the UN reached it lowest point – it started calling Israel’s 1967 presence in Judea and Samaria an illegal military occupation, which has now morphed into a constantly repeated phrase of Israel’s “illegal occupation of Palestinian territory” as if somehow by magic the PLO has conjured up sovereign ownership.
Just to be clear, there is not a single International institution – including the UN itself, the ICC, the ICJ or the Geneva Convention which recognizes that territory taken by a war of aggression is the sovereign property of the aggressor. Indeed, all these institutions say, or have consistent policies that say the exact opposite: aggressors are not entitled to sovereignty over captured territory – but defender nations ARE entitled to sovereignty of captured territory. This applies twice now to Israel – in 1948 and 1967.
Judea and Samaria are Israeli territory under International law according to the League of Nations borders under uti possidetis juris, according to the Geneva Convention, and according to the policy of the UN itself. That it singles out Israel for different treatment for the past 77 years is its lowest point, imho.
Indeed Roger, I’ve made a few of those points before. Sadly I burn a lot of fuel just trying to educate people on the larger, more thematic arguments people with (Pal flag) in bio seem to miss. (sigh)
Oh..and when I do, I usually get silence, or in person just a walk away calling me a ZIONIST.
D.A.
NYC
Yes, Trump didn’t forget about election fraud. A lot of us haven’t. Election fraud happens. However, after 2020, when allegations of fraud were made, they were never investigated. People acted as if the entire notion was absurd, if not seditious. If you suggested that there was potentially something wrong, you were subjected to the same tactics as climate deniers, COVID deniers, and people who question trans orthodoxy have been. Did fraud happen? Yes. There have been many revelations about dead voters and unqualified voters (including illegal aliens). Was that enough to sway the election? I don’t know. Should allegations be investigated? Always.
As for the NYT, it’s ridiculous to say that previously investigations found nothing. There were no previous investigates. Fulton County has stonewalled all attempts at investigation for six years (as have places like Maricopa County). As for the search having no basis other than Trump’s mania, here is a story about the report that led to the search warrant. Analysis will take time, but one tidbit has been leaked so far: investigators have yet to find a voting machine tape that indicates the count started at zero.
States, including solid red states with elections run and certified by Republicans, found no evidence of widespread fraud.
There were over 60 court cases where judges, including judges appointed by President Trump and other Republican presidents, looked at the evidence and said there was no widespread fraud. Some of those cases reached the supreme courts of those states.
Why did Fox News pay Dominion $787,500,000 for defamation regarding their voting machines?
Note Smartmatic has won in court against Mike Lindell and Newsmax regarding their claims of voting fraud. Legal action is still ongoing regarding Fox News.
Why were Rudy Giuliana, John Eastman, Ken Chesebro, Jenna Ellis, and Jeffrey Clark disbarred or had their licenses revoked regarding the 2020 election?
Why did the GOP try to pass off fake electors as valid ones?
“However, after 2020, when allegations of fraud were made, they were never investigated.”
I’m flabbergasted at your statement. They were investigated to death with over 800 audits in 34 states. They were the ostensible subject of 62 lawsuits By Trump et al and never once was any relevant evidence presented to support allegations of fraud.
The FBI investigated this. Bill Barr concluded there was no election fraud. The record is crystal clear. Your allegation belongs in the same bin as the MAGA revisionism that January 6th was not an insurrection.
Roger and Greg,
Thank you for being part of the excellent, embedded, self-correcting feature of WEIT comments.
Trump did not raid the election center in Georgia because he is peeved about the 2020 election. He did it as a test run to affect the upcoming midterm elections. Why are the feds gathering voter rolls from states? Many states have given that information to the feds. Why did Pam Bondi’s letter to Tim Walz state one of the conditions for drawing down the ICE presence was Minnesota handing over its voter registration lists? Remember when Trump said he wished he had called out the National Guard to seize electronic voting machines to “find evidence of fraud”? The Georgia raid is one of many little trial runs the administration has undertaken to stay in power no matter what. Arresting journalists, putting the military on our streets, having states undergo midterm redistricting to provide more GOP seats in Congress–a blind man could connect these dots.
I think you are right about the upcoming elections. The Orange Toddler will not accept any election result he doesn’t like. Was the GA raid was testing the waters? I think so. It’s going to get very ugly.
I don’t see what action a President can take over election results he doesn’t like. He might not “accept” a Congressional election but it’s not in his remit to certify Congressional elections. It’s actually the other way round.
If he thinks there is something wrong with a state’s voter registration lists and the state thinks there isn’t, there will be a lawsuit. This is America, after all. Lawyers are always ready to pounce. I think the election fraud stuff is propaganda to keep the base energized. Unseemly (unless true, of course) but not going to be effective. Even if fraud could be proved, all anyone can do is put the perpetrators in jail. You can’t do the election over with the fraud “corrected” and get a different result, which would be the only political pay-off for proving it.
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. (That’s in the bucket labeled “can’t do anything about it.”) Naturally we in the rest of the world are counting on (and literally betting on, as in investing in) the orderly biennial reconstitution of the Congress of the world’s only important country. We get a lot of Canadians saying 2024 was the last national election the United States will ever have. I actually tried to get a Canadian Substack commenter to take a bet against that, warning him it would be a sucker bet against himself. He declined, saying he doesn’t bet on any outcome he can’t influence. I laughed. I wouldn’t bet on any outcome he could influence either!
I also note it was a Missouri prosecutor who requested the search warrant, not a prosecutor in Georgia. Was Bondi prosecutor-shopping? Anything this administration does is suspect.
Leslie MacMillan–We saw what happened on January 6. And Congress has pretty much ceded their power to Trump. Even state legislatures bow to Trump, as demonstrated by midterm redistricting and providng voter rolls.
There is a great movie that was released last year of the life of Nicholas Winton starring Anthony Hopkins called One Life.
Yes, I saw it and it’s excellent.
Additionally, today is National Freedom Day.
My thought went directly to this: the American Revolution is the only true revolution. Prior, political philosophies and real-world governance had “primacy of a ruler”. Any change consisted of one form of non-freedom traded for another.
The “turn about” in the American Revolution was placing of “Freedom First,” also known as individual right to one’s life, property, and the right to follow one’s choices in the pursuit of fulfillment.
Establishing freedom as a fundamental Principle at the root philosophically was followed by 80 years of struggle to make it real in reality, protected by law.
The World Turned Upside Down
Thanks for sharing that video and for the reminder of Sir Nicholas’s life. What an uplifting way to start the day!
About the perfidy of the UN when it comes to bias against Israel. I was driving around the other day, listening to NPR, when they put up an interview with an Italian international lawyer for the UN who is working to advance their accusations that Israel was (has attempted to?) commit genocide and other war crimes. Trump had placed various road blocks upon her movements and access, greatly hampering her work, and she was pretty incensed about it. Not once did she hint that Hamas was just a tiny bit naughty, and the interviewer – this being NPR, remember – only gave her sympathetic and soft-ball questions.
So once again I was yelling at my poor radio.
NPR. That’s the hard stuff, Mark.
I angry watch PBS Newshour every night b/c apparently my blood pressure isn’t high enough yet. And I’m pretty sure they’ve gotten even more extreme in the past decade.
The two tiered morality reserved for Israeli vs Arab behavior strikes me as wildly racist. best,
D.A.
NYC
From Andrew Sullivan: “Greg Bovino, the former Minneapolis ICE honcho.”
Andrew may not have delved into chain of command, lines of responsibility, joint operations versus single agency, etc. Nor do I expect most observers of ongoing federal operations to do so. But let’s correct a common misperception: Greg Bovino is not—and was not—with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He is a career border patrol officer with Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a different agency with an overlapping yet very different mission. This matters—because it is part of the problem. And being able to sort out the bureaucratic threads will be part of the solution.
Kristi Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, brought Bovino in and gave him the made-up title of “commander-at-large” of Border Patrol, with him reporting directly to her. (I suspect it is because his TV showboating and media whore ways are like her own.) So, we had a man who was ostensibly serving a supporting role to ICE who could bypass his own chain of command within CBP, as well as any senior-level coordination with ICE. Moreover, Bovino brought with him Border Patrol officers whose mission at the border does not necessarily prepare them for the types of interior missions and criminal enforcement that are the purview of ICE. Not surprisingly, there has been internal dissent at ICE since these arrangements were announced in October; people anticipated some of the very problems we have seen.
I risk boring people with this type of inside bureaucratic baseball simply because I am cautioning against the all-too-common shorthand that “ICE” is the problem. (Noem gets my vote as the CHIEF problem.) ICE might have some difficulties of its own, but reducing all immigration enforcement problems to the convenient shorthand “ICE” is akin to broad-brushing “academia” as partisan, anti-fact defenders of ideology and motivated reasoning. Distinctions matter—even when they bore—especially when deciding whose funding you will target and whose heads need to roll.
Absolutely, Doug. Thanks for that. Not boring at all to me.
We say “accountability” is just responsibility without authority. (Never take a job with “accountability” as one of the deliverables.) The other side of that transaction is authority without responsibility. Divided lines of command are what allows people in authority to evade responsibility, and are key to understanding how it happens.
Car Insurance Day. How exciting!
I am no fan of the U.N. but I go back and forth regarding whether the U.S. should participate or not. Probably we should. Otherwise, we would have zero say regarding U.N. policies and resolutions and we would cede full control to Russia, China, the European Union, and the third world countries that hate us. The power of the U.S. is better wielded from within than from without. But I’m still no fan of the U.N. Maybe they should relocate to Geneva.
Regarding Iran, I too think that next week could be telling. Why hasn’t the Trump administration not yet acted? Not acting let some of the anti-regime momentum in Iran die down right at the moment when the probability of success of the counterrevolution was seemingly at its peak. Here is a sober account of why U.S. military action in Iran is not as simple as it might seem: https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/why-attacking-iran-is-so-complicated.
Good letter to President Judd. Clear and succinct. Jews should not be required to erase their identities—including their connections to their ancient Jewish homeland—to placate mobs. Author Sarah Hurwitz* does an excellent job outlining the history of the Jewish people giving up aspects of their identities—first one, then the next, and then the next in order to fit in as citizens in their countries of residence (only to be turned on and slaughtered in Europe and Russia, and expelled elsewhere). Requiring Jews, like Ezra Klein, to renounce in public their commitment to the State of Israel is just the most recent chapter is this longstanding effort to demand that Jews erase themselves as a people in exchange for acceptance. A university president should be smart enough to understand this.
https://www.amazon.com/As-Jew-Reclaiming-Story-Those/dp/0063374978
Sullivan: “A video leaked this week of Greg Bovino . . . giving directions . . . It contained what you might expect:
‘ . . . Arrest as many people who touch you as you want.'”
Does Sullivan have a problem with that? What ought one reasonably expect or not expect? I look forward to his going on record about protesters, including Pretti, spitting on ICE agents (a good reason to wear a mask) and kicking out the tail lights of and by other means damaging and blocking ICE vehicles? Are these arrestable offenses? Or are these activities to be guilefully conflated with at-a-distance putatively objective observation and recording? I trust that Sullivan has no problem with iPhones also capturing these activities.
On a Sunday a.m. TV program that fine fellow, the pure-as-the-driven snow and politically guileless Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, reflected to the effect that, had Pretti been arrested for the above offenses instead of ICE letting him go, Pretti might have modified his modus operandi and reasonably likely would still be alive. This conjecture has merit regardless of who utters it. As Shermer has put it, what is legal is not always smart.
I look forward to Sullivan similarly holding forth on ICE protesters commandeering and disrupting the Protestant (Southern Baptist) church service and Don Lemon’s involvement. As Sullivan is Catholic and surely (would claim to be) unbiased about such matters, I trust that his position would be the same had it instead been a Catholic church. (Or an A.M.E. church, a mosque, a synagogue or LDS temple for that matter.)
The WaPo had a piece on the massacre(s) in Iran with video footage of a bazaar on fire, but no footage of dead victims. I tried to comment that the Ayatollah’s head needs to be on a pike, but they wouldn’t let me.
Question is, has WaPo ever covered women’s eyes being shot out in Iran?