What are they going to spend it on? It's not like you can nip out and get a Starbucks.
Salaried workers typically do not get overtime, but it seems like there should be some sort of mission pay. Unless NASA is prepared to argue that being stranded in space is part of the job description.
Impeachment would be too mild for the claque of Woke-activist federal judges attempting to nullify the executive branch with hectoring writs against any and all sorts of executive actions. If simply bounced off their benches, they could just take up new careers as NPR legal commentators or transsexual pole-dancers. Rather, what you’ve got here is an obvious seditious conspiracy, plain for all to see, orchestrated by the same legal Nosferatus as RussiaGate, the 2020 election, and the J-6 witch hunt.
The catch is, this time it is discoverable and subject to prosecution because the party running this legal insurrection no longer has its hands on the levers of power in the DOJ and the FBI as it did when they ran the aforementioned ops. And so, the mighty silence emanating from those two agencies just now should tell you something: namely, that cases are being carefully constructed to finally bring these despicable caitiffs to real and chastening law.
If you want to know one paramount reason for institutional failure in our country, look to the evil enterprise that calls itself “Lawfare.” It originated as a blog launched on September 1, 2010, founded by three key figures: Benjamin Wittes, Jack Goldsmith, and Robert Chesney. Over time it evolved into an activist operation, The Lawfare Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to (cough cough) “Hard National Security Choices,” and run under the shady umbrella of the Brookings Institution.
The point of Lawfare is self-evident in its name: it is an instrument of warfare against a perceived enemy which, for the past decade, has been the political faction led by Mr. Trump, the once-and-current chief executive of the federal government. Mr. Trump is a danger to the bureaucratic arm of the federal government because he has defined it as a racketeering operation and moved decisively to end its depredations. Lawfare is the praetorian guard of the permanent DC bureaucracy, including especially its rogue intel actors, who function as enforcers for the Democratic party that largely staffs the bureaucracy.
Posted by: NoMoreBS ||
03/22/2025 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11128 views]
Top|| File under: Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life, & Kleptocrats
#1
When Trump won the last election, I felt that lawfare was going to be the main effort of the "Resistance" and that has come to pass. Bigly.
[AmericanThinker] The spectacle of global diplomacy rarely produces moments of unvarnished clarity, but when President Donald Trump met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington on February 28, the message could not have been starker: the war in Ukraine is no longer sustainable, and a deal must be struck before defeat becomes inevitable. Despite the lofty rhetoric surrounding indefinite support for Kyiv, President Trump laid down an uncomfortable truth—Ukraine is losing momentum. The country is under pressure from Russia, with reports suggesting that as many as 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers face prosecution for refusing to continue fighting. Without a settlement, Ukraine risks collapse, undoing the resilience it has displayed thus far. While Ukraine has managed to hold Russia at bay and achieve a notable moral victory, reality has set in. Realpolitik, President Trump holds, now demands a realistic peace deal.
The situation is far from simple. The EU’s historical mishandling of Ukraine, which mirrors its missteps during the dissolution of Yugoslavia, has exacerbated the crisis. While the Russian invasion is indefensible, the window for peace must be seized before it closes and throws the world into chaos. President Trump’s approach to this dilemma is as pragmatic as it is unsentimental. He made it clear that the United States will not engage in direct military action to expel Russia, knowing that doing so risks triggering World War III.
THE STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE OF THE CRITICAL MINERALS DEAL
Initially, Zelensky miscalculated a pivotal element of American strategy: the critical minerals agreement between the U.S. and Ukraine. This deal is central to the evolving U.S. policy in Europe. President Trump sees it as an implicit security guarantee. By winning access to Ukraine’s rich mineral resources, the U.S. establishes economic and industrial interests without deploying boots on the ground in the region. The agreement effectively allows an American protection shield in Ukraine without the need for military confrontation with Russia.
THE COMPONENTS OF PRESIDENT TRUMP’S PEACE PLAN
President Trump’s broader strategy is taking shape. His plan calls for a comprehensive agreement: the recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea and Donbas, Ukraine’s accession to the European Single Market, and the stationing of European—rather than American—peacekeeping forces at Ukraine’s borders with Russia.
From a tactical standpoint, this outcome is a win-win for all parties. Russia secures its Black Sea position and gains control over Ukraine’s eastern regions, which are rich in basic minerals, such as titanium and non-ferrous metals, crucial for Russia’s aerospace and defense sectors. Ukraine would gain economic integration with Europe and a security framework that avoids NATO troops. The western part of Ukraine, rich in specialty minerals like nickel, graphite, lithium, and uranium, would remain firmly under U.S. control. Specialty minerals are of significant interest to a range of industries. The deployment of European peacekeeping forces would finally grant Europe the long-sought geopolitical role it has struggled to attain.
THE MONROE DOCTRINE REDUX: U.S. LEVERAGE OVER RUSSIA
Hidden by the agreement on a limited ceasefire and prisoner swap, the conversation between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on March 18, revealed the end game behind this strategic shift. According to the U.S. readout, a peace settlement in Ukraine could pave the way for economic cooperation between the U.S. and Russia. This is neither an act of goodwill nor an ideological concession but a recalibration of global influence. President Trump recognizes that, with China’s growing dominance, isolating Russia is unsustainable. Instead, offering economic incentives creates strategic leverage. The US aims to support Russia’s development in Siberia in exchange for access to its mineral resources, seeking to weaken Moscow’s growing alignment with Beijing.
The normalization of U.S.-Russia relations also entails a crackdown on Iran, with Moscow agreeing to restrict Tehran's nuclear ambitions—a significant concession in the Middle East in exchange for U.S. mediation to end the war in Ukraine.
These developments reflect the essence of the Monroe Doctrine—limiting adversarial influence through selective engagement. Despite his defiant posture, Putin understands economic imperatives. If President Trump presents a viable alternative to China’s, Moscow may reconsider its trajectory. Critics may dismiss this as mere transactional diplomacy, but in geopolitics, transactions shape outcomes.
[CityJournal] The accused Hamas sympathizer is shrouded in mystery—and so are his supporters.
As it unfurls, the saga of Mahmoud Khalil—the Columbia agitator picked up by immigration enforcement last week—looks less like a complicated immigration-law dispute and more like something out of a John le Carré novel.
But inspect the details, and Khalil’s case gives us a glimpse a well-established network linking American universities, international progressive NGOs, and government agencies. This network places ideologues like Khalil in positions of power and influence and promoting radical policies that challenge both the will of American voters and our national-security interests.
As always in such shady tales, the simplest questions are the hardest to answer. To start: Who, exactly, is Mahmoud Khalil? According to the Guardian, he was born in Syria in 1995 to Palestinian refugees, then fled at 18 to settle in Lebanon. After his detention, however, the U.S. government reported that he was a citizen of Algeria. How did he end up there?
His professional history is equally convoluted. The Guardian claims he worked for various international NGOs, then landed a job with Britain’s Foreign Office, where he helped administer the prestigious Chevening Scholarship program. (The Telegraph, to make an intricate story even more complicated, reported that Khalil worked for the embassy, not the Foreign Office per se). Then it was on to the UN, where Khalil interned for UNRWA—the organization’s agency for Arab Palestinian refugees that, as a recent lawsuit claims, is a major source of staffing and funding for Hamas. How did a Syrian refugee end up in these positions?
Maybe the influencers who gave him these jobs are the same ones who leapt to his defense. Immediately after his arrest, Khalil’s case was taken on by no fewer than 19 lawyers.
Heading Khalil’s legal defense team is Ramzi Kassem, professor of law at the City University of New York, with a panoply of connections. Himself a Syrian immigrant, Kassem is a fellow of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, which helped fund his legal education at Columbia University. At CUNY, Kassem founded Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR), which, among other areas of interest, focused on challenging the Trump administration’s treatment of Muslims on the No Fly List. CLEAR has received major gifts from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and Jeff Bezos’s former wife, MacKenzie Scott.
Kassem’s previous clients include a few members of al Qaida, including Ahmed al-Darbi, a terrorist convicted in 2017 for bombing a French oil tanker, as well as another close associate of Osama Bin Laden’s. In 2022, the Biden administration nevertheless tapped Kassem to serve as a senior policy advisor.
How did Khalil’s predicament come to Kassem’s attention? It’s worth noting that while still a student at Columbia, Kassem was himself a leader of anti-Israeli agitation.
So was another of Khalil’s lawyers, CLEAR’s Shezza Abboushi Dallal. In a recently surfaced video of an online training of anti-Israel activists, Dallal acknowledges that statements in support of Hamas may implicate a non-citizen’s legal status—the very assertion that she and Khalil’s other lawyers are now denying—and advises her charges to remain silent rather than frame themselves.
There’s nothing inherently nefarious about hardworking and talented people, immigrants or native-born, ending up in positions of power and influence. Nor is it novel for NGOs with deep pockets to promote their worldview and their people. But the Khalil case points at a concerted, long-term effort to capture American institutions, change them from within, and push policies and ideas that lie far outside the social consensus and, arguably, the boundaries permissible by law.
Ramzi Kassem is typical. He is committed to a long list of radical causes, from defanging law enforcement to defending America’s sworn enemies. Nonetheless, he has enjoyed heavy support from progressive philanthropists, accreditation from America’s finest schools, and eventually made his way to Washington to help reshape policy.
Similarly, it is troubling that those who argue, against all available evidence, that Mahmoud Khalil is a martyr on the altar of free speech—rather than someone who violated the terms of his residency by advocating for a terror group—enjoy near-universal access to and support from our finest academic institutions, our best-endowed philanthropies, and our best-placed legal or political elites. Telling foreign nationals to refrain from espousing support for a terror group to evade legal trouble exceeds the bounds of advocacy; it approximates aiding and abetting people in skirting our immigration laws.
If nothing else, the Khalil case demonstrates yet again that for America’s progressive elites, power, not principle, is the currency that counts, and that the system they’ve designed ensures that their power is preserved in perpetuity, defending even those fellow travelers who work to undermine our national-security interests. The only way to regain control of the institutions that these hostile activists have commandeered is to know their playbook and use the law to curb their influence. Shadowy activists subverting the will of the American people and then seeking protection from a bubble of big-money NGOs and ideologically aligned government officials isn’t a safeguard protecting our democracy; it’s a clear and direct threat to our national security and interests.
[DailyCaller] While Republican lawmakers continue to call for impeaching judges who block President Donald Trump’s agenda, Congress has another tool it could use to prevent judges from overriding executive authority.
Limiting courts’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions, which district judges use to block policies across the entire country, could become a strategy for Republicans looking to rein in what the Trump administration is slamming as an abuse of power by the judiciary.
“The Supreme Court should have addressed the issue of nationwide injunctions a decade ago,” South Texas College of Law professor Josh Blackman told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “But the Court keeps kicking the can down the road. Congress should take a close look at how to ensure courts are properly exercising their jurisdiction.”
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley said Thursday that he would introduce legislation to “stop the abuse” of judicial authority through nationwide injunctions. California Rep. Darrell Issa has already introduced similar legislation, which was voted out of the House Judiciary Committee 14-9 in early March.
Get your egos out of who gets credit, guys, and get the thing passed.
Issa’s No Rogue Rulings Act of 2025 would limit judges to only issuing injunctions that apply to parties in the case, rather than the entire country.
“We have a crisis on the bench right now and not just with this or any single judge,” Issa said in a statement Wednesday, adding that his bill is “the comprehensive solution we need to ensure that this problem does not occur anywhere in our federal judiciary and resets the proper and appropriate balance in our courts.”
Nationwide injunctions put the over 670 district court judges “temporarily on a par with the Supreme Court of the United States because each one can halt a practice nationwide unless and until a higher court revises, reverses, or vacates its order or Congress modifies the underlying substantive law,” Heritage Foundation legal scholars Paul Larkin and GianCarlo Canaparo wrote on Friday.
“Unless and until Congress endorses that practice, the federal courts should limit the reach of their judgments to the parties to a lawsuit,” they argued.
The Trump administration urged the Supreme Court last week to evaluate lower courts’ use of nationwide injunctions, asking the justices to limit rulings that prevented his executive order on birthright citizenship from taking effect nationwide.
“District courts have issued more universal injunctions and TROs [temporary restraining orders] during February 2025 alone than through the first three years of the Biden Administration,” Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote in the application. “That sharp rise in universal injunctions stops the Executive Branch from performing its constitutional functions before any courts fully examine the merits of those actions, and threatens to swamp this Court’s emergency docket.”
Several Supreme Court justices have previously expressed opposition to the practice. During oral arguments for a challenge to the abortion pill in 2024, Justice Neil Gorsuch criticized “a rash of universal injunctions.”
Nearly two-thirds of all nationwide injunctions issued since 2001 were against the first Trump administration, according to a Harvard law review article published in June 2024, which does not include data from his second term. Nearly 92% of those rulings were issued by Democrat-appointed judges.
University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds included restrictions on nationwide injunctions among his suggestions for addressing the problem of overstepping judges in a Substack post Wednesday, noting pushing for impeachment is “a symbolic and probably self-destructive gesture.”
“Impeachment is hard, there’s no way the Republicans will get 2/3 of the Senate to vote for removal, and history suggests — from Bill Clinton through two different attempts on Donald Trump — that failed impeachment efforts leave their targets stronger, not weaker,” he wrote.
Chief Justice John Roberts issued a statement Tuesday after Trump called for impeaching a judge who ruled against him. Obama-appointed Judge James Boasberg ordered the administration on Saturday to halt flights carrying members of the Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang after Trump used the Alien Enemies Act to initiate their deportation.
“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said.
Courtesy of Fred:
[X]
JUST IN: @RepAndyBiggsAZ proposes legislation to rein in rogue judges.
The bill would stop lower court judges from abusing their jurisdictions to issue nationwide injunctions against the President of the Untied States.
#3
Ha! "For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision" A Supreme Court Justice has NO standing in making that statement. Impeachment is entirely the responsibility of the US Congress: majority vote in the House and 2/3 majority in the Senate can impeach any federal judge, Roberts "notwithstanding"
#4
^ they want to prove an unelected bureaucracy and judiciary actually run this county and that voting is merely theater. "A republic. if you can keep it" - Benjamin Franklin.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] The USS Constellation was supposed to be a symbol of America's resurgence at sea.
Instead the newly designed warship risks becoming a floating monument to bureaucratic inertia, technological overreach and humiliation.
The glimmer of hope began in 2020 at a shipyard in Wisconsin, where rusted cranes and tools creaked under the weight of America's declining shipbuilding industry.
Fincantieri Marinette Marine, an American arm of the storied Italian shipbuilder, had just won the contract to build the Navy's next-generation frigate.
The grand designs would build a vessel that could protect against submarines, missiles, and drones with sleek European efficiency and cutting-edge American firepower.
It was supposed to be fast, reliable and proven designed to show the world that the US Navy could still dominate the waves.
Instead, the USS Constellation has become one of consternation and a cautionary tale at that.
To speed up the building program, the Navy did something unusual: it chose a design already in use by Italy's navy, where frigates like the Carlo Bergamini class were being built in just four years.
With that head start, the US plan was ambitious but reasonable - with the aim of delivering the first Constellation-class frigate by 2026.
But once the contract was secured, the Navy began constantly modifying the design, frequently changing the requirements, requesting upgrades and tweaking designs after shipbuilders have already begun construction.
The triggering error is clear.
The hull was lengthened by nearly 24 feet. The bow was reshaped. The sonar dome was removed. The engine rooms were redesigned.
Generators and switchboards, separated in the Italian model for survivability, were forced together in the US version, triggering spatial reshuffles and weight increases.
A new propeller was required for acoustic performance. Cooling systems needed enlarging, which in turn demanded bigger pumps - and more space. Ventilation had to be rerouted. Room layouts had to be redone.
Nearly five years after the initial contract award, and over two years into physical construction, the Constellation is just 10 percent complete.
If that pace holds, the ship won't sail the open seas until 2029 - a nine-year timeline, double that of the Italian version it was based on.
The labor shortage is one of myriad challenges that have led to backlogs in ship production and maintenance at a time when the Navy faces expanding global threats.
The cumulative impact of American 'improvements' seems staggering.
The Navy chose a ship design already in use by navies in France and Italy instead of starting from scratch with the hope of keeping costs down.
The idea was that 15 percent of the vessel would be updated to meet US Navy specifications, while 85 percent would remain unchanged, reducing costs and speeding construction.
Instead, the opposite happened: The Navy redesigned 85 percent of the ship based upon its Italian predecessor, resulting in cost increases and construction delays.
Construction of the first-in-class Constellation warship, which began in August 2022, is now three years behind schedule, with delivery pushed back to 2029 - and the final design still isn't complete.
'Every shipbuilding delay, every maintenance backlog and every inefficiency is an opening for our adversaries to challenge our [naval] dominance,' said John Phelan, Trump's nominee for Secretary of the Navy, to the Senate Armed Services Committee last month.
According to Eric Labs, a longtime naval analyst at the Congressional Budget Office, Navy shipbuilding is currently in 'a terrible state' - the worst in a quarter century, Labs says.
'I feel alarmed,' he said. 'I don't see a fast, easy way to get out of this problem. It's taken us a long time to get into it.'
Marinette Marine is under contract to build six guided-missile frigates - the Navy's newest surface warships - with options to build four more. But it only has enough workers to produce one frigate a year, according to Labs.
That 'strategic pause,' as the Government Accountability Office put it, wasn't just costly but crippling.
One set of design documents required 170 comments and revisions from Navy overseers.
'The Navy peeled back the onion and realized how far the design was from meeting the Navy's standards, and had to take a strategic pause to try and right the ship,' Shelby Oakley, director at the GAO, told the Wall Street Journal.
But as time dragged on, the costs also began to mount.
Originally estimated at $1.3 billion, the cost of the Constellation has now surged past $1.9 billion - with more overruns almost certain.
The Navy claims its changes enhance 'lethality, survivability, and fleet commonality.'
But critics see a Navy driven by committees, and hamstrung by outdated practices.
'American ships are fearsome weapons of war… but they are expensive to build and also expensive to run,' former Vice Admiral Jeremy Kyd, who commanded U.S. ships in joint exercises with Britain's Royal Navy, told WSJ.
Such vast expense is also seeing international buyers giving a wide berth.
While the F-35 fighter jet and Patriot missile systems are top global sellers, American-built ships rarely win foreign bids, consistently losing to their sleeker, cheaper European and South Korean rivals.
And while the US Navy fumbles through design reviews and paperwork, China has taken to the seas like a duck to water.
Combined with shifting defense priorities, the last-minute design changes and cost overruns, it has put the US way behind China in the number of ships at its disposal - and the gap is widening.
From 2014 to 2023, China launched 157 warships. By comparison, the US has launched only 67. It means China's fleet is now the largest in the world.
'The U.S. is the global laggard in warship construction,' the Journal reported bluntly.
The numbers tell the story. US attack submarines that once took six years now take nine. Aircraft carriers now need eleven years - up from eight. Frigates are slower here than anywhere except Canada.
The Pentagon is scrambling and President Trump has floated the idea of an Office of Shipbuilding, along with an executive order aimed at reviving the industry and breaking China's dominance.
But steel tariffs, labor shortages, and archaic equipment - some of it pre-World War II - make that a tall order.
A recent McKinsey report found that many US shipyards operate with tools that are so old, spare parts must be fabricated from scratch.
A lack of skilled workers makes things worse. A third of Fincantieri's US workforce is over 50.
One of the industry's chief problems is the struggle to hire and retain laborers for the challenging work of building new ships as graying veterans retire, taking decades of experience with them.
There simply aren't enough trained welders, engineers, and systems specialists to build ships quickly - or reliably.
Shipyards across the country have created training academies and partnered with technical colleges to provide workers with the skills they need to construct high-tech warships.
Submarine builders and the Navy formed an alliance to promote manufacturing careers, and shipyards are offering perks to retain workers once they're hired.
The Navy is trying to help shipyards ensure that once new workers are trained and hired, they stick around in a tight labor market.
The shipyard, which employs more than 2,000 workers, is providing bonuses of up to $10,000 to keep workers, said spokesperson Eric Dent. 'The workforce shortage is definitely a problem and it's a problem across the board for all shipyards,' he said.
Retention is a concern even for shipyards that have met their goals, including Huntington Ingalls Industries, which makes destroyers and amphibious warships in Mississippi and aircraft carriers and submarines in Virginia.
Complicating matters further is something out of the Navy's control: the changing nature of global threats.
Throughout its history, the Navy has had to adapt to varying perils, whether it be the Cold War of past decades or current threats including war in the Middle East, growing competition from Chinese and Russian navies, piracy off the coast of Somalia and persistent attacks on commercial ships by Houthi rebels in Yemen.
And that's not all. The consolidation of shipyards and funding uncertainties have disrupted the cadence of ship construction and stymied long-term investments and planning, says Matthew Paxton of the Shipbuilders Council of America, a national trade association.
'We've been dealing with inconsistent shipbuilding plans for years,' Paxton said. 'When we finally start ramping up, the Navy is shocked that we lost members of our workforce.'
Frustration over America's shipbuilding woes has even reached the Oval Office.
In a now-infamous 2017 meeting, President Trump was shown photographs of modern naval ships - sleek destroyers, stealthy frigates. He tossed them aside.
Then he saw the USS New Jersey - a relic from World War II, bristling with massive guns.
While the White House later disputed the account, the symbolism is stark.
In Trump's eyes, and in the eyes of many defense watchers, modern U.S. warships may be powerful, but they've lost their swagger. Worse, they're arriving years behind schedule.
The Navy's plans are ambitious with a fleet of 390 combat ships by 2054, up from 295 today.
Hitting that target would require doubling the current production rate - something that is likely impossible without massive reform.
As for the USS Constellation, a ship named after one of the first vessels in the original US Navy - it remains in pieces.
#2
But once the contract was secured, the Navy began constantly modifying the design, frequently changing the requirements, requesting upgrades and tweaking designs after shipbuilders have already begun construction.
Those Admirals need to be fired, not retired and given a medal. Make it a career ending third rail.
#3
Why? The naval procurement people got involved.
They screw up everything they touch. They're kinda like dogs who have to piss on everything they pass, to show that they were there.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
03/22/2025 8:38 Comments ||
Top||
#4
sleek European efficiency
What was he smoking when he said that?
Scope creep on steroids (or Grift) The bane of my existence for 30 years of IS.
#5
But once the contract was secured, the Navy began constantly modifying the design, frequently changing the requirements, requesting upgrades and tweaking designs after shipbuilders have already begun construction
Classic Project Management case - look up "The VASA". It was also a ship-building project.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
