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Eugene Volokh | 10.8.2025 3:00 AM
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Good Morning! Government still "shut down", gold breaks $4000/oz.
Silver doing quite nicely as well. In times of inflation or great uncertainty, commodities are the place to be.
Still not sold on BTC.
Silver is just shy of its all time high of $49.95 (currently $48.82). Of course that high was reached 45 years ago when the Hunt brothers tried to corner the market.
Did "45/47/48?" ever make that inspection of Fort Knox??
Secretary Noem made it to war-torn Portland and was able to see the devastating violence first hand:
https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1975662466874175498
LOL. To all of you posting about the city burning or the ICE facility being "under siege", do you feel kind of stupid now? Trump is trying to bring in the military to deal with a guy in a chicken suit...
I mean, the thing is, we know what happened. Fox had, for whatever reason, aired some archival footage of what was happening in Portland in 2020. Trump saw this, and somehow got it into what passes for his mind that this was current, and so thought that Portland was a "war zone" and immediately ordered troops there, and everyone who works for him was too scared/sycophantic/sociopathic to tell him there was no need.
As a reminder, this is what DaMN liars think is "archival footage of what was happening in Portland in 2020":
https://thepostmillennial.com/6-portland-antifa-militants-federally-charged-over-attacks-at-ice-facility https://www.foxnews.com/us/anti-ice-portland-rioters-guillotine-clash-police-burn-flag-war-like-scenes https://www.breitbart.com/border/2025/10/07/portland-dismisses-charges-against-journalist-arrested-while-covering-attack-on-ice-agents/
Did you just hope nobody would click on those links?
Get a real argument, liar.
The "real argument" is that there was a court case over whether the National Guard's use here was legally appropriate. There was actual testimony, under oath, about the actual state of affairs on the ground. None of it matched the hysterical rantings of Donald Trump and his bootlickers like Michael P.
Actual testimony crazy Dave? As opposed to pretend testimony? But, and here’s the thing, pretend or actual, testimony doesn’t transform one judicial insurrectionist into the commander in chief. Outside of the deranged TDS wet dreams of crazy Dave.
It can’t be repeated enough. I know you’re an asshole, but do you have to be such a stupid asshole?
Just curious...
Why are these protests happening "at night"?
If they aimed to gain attention to the cause, wouldn't daytime be more effective?
https://pjmedia.com/victoria-taft/2025/10/07/what-i-saw-at-the-ice-headquarters-n4944565
How many blocks of Portland are jb and other Antifa stans willing to cede to violent protesters who infringe other citizens' rights? The answer appears to be "at least five".
Where are all of the alphabet people celebrating the success of Bari Weiss now that Paramount has acquired the Free Press for $150 million and made Weiss editor-in-chief of CBS News?
Governor Newsom decided to appease Trump a little and position himself in the center for 2028 by signing a bill to combat antisemitism in schools. If you believe the ACLU and teachers' unions this is a terrible blow against Muslim students. Teachers also hate the requirement that their teaching material be "factually accurate." At the same time Newsom appealed to his ordinary base by creating a new bureaucracy to fight "LGBTQ discrimination".
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/10/07/governor-newsom-signs-bills-further-cracking-down-on-hate-and-antisemitism-in-california-schools/ https://apnews.com/article/california-gov-newsom-schools-antisemitism-law-c72f084e250e66b826dfefd883d3a99f
We used to joke about the short lifetime of Italian governments. But the latest French government lasted less than a day. It may be too late to get a budget passed before the start of the new year. In America this is business as usual. In France it is considered a rare failure of government.
Le Monde opines: "France's political crisis shows leaders losing their sense of responsibility" (https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2025/10/07/france-s-political-crisis-shows-leaders-losing-their-sense-of-responsibility_6746187_23.html)
France is semi-presidential. That mean it has a president with actual powers but also a prime minster responsible to the legislature. Due to changes in 2000 normalising term lengths, the president and the legislature get elected at the same time and, as such, the president normally ends up with a majority of their own party in legislature. This is how the system is 'meant' to work.
The alternative is called Cohabitation - when the PM and the President come from alternate parties. The system still works here - at least mostly. And you sort of end up with a more US style system, with the PM leading on domestic stuff and the President leading on foreign affairs.
Unfortunately France doesn't have that either at the moment. Decades of de-facto two-party system have broken down, meaning there is no majority in the legislature for anyone. You have a left wing alliance ranging from far left to the more moderate Socialist Party. You have Macron's centralist faction sitting in the middle, unable to peel off enough support from either side. Then you have the right wing faction, ranging from the moderate rump of the Republicans all the way to the far right National Rally. And any attempt to build an actual majority from these groups just doesn't work.
So the entire system is completely breaking down, with PMs lasting weeks at most before being brought down. Macron has some reserve powers to force things through but he's already tried that and popular resentment is already growing. New elections aren't likely to help either. The entire situation is just stuck.
So France is becoming the new Italy (or former Italy as they seem to be doing quite well currently)?
I've often thought that, if you can't achieve a consensus that something ought to be done by government, perhaps this is a clue that it shouldn't be done.
Maybe governments, generally, should downscale themselves to the point where they're only doing things that there's a societal consensus about doing, and you'd find it easier to form a government to do them?
Some legal hair-splitting from Sweden: "Swedish appeals court partially acquits far-right activist who burned copies of Koran." In Sweden it is illegal to criticize Muslims. It is legal to criticize Islam. What did the defendant mean when he burned a Koran? Maybe it was a legal attack on Islam.
For an American analogy, is an attack on Zionism distinguishable from an attack on Jews? This matters a lot when Title IX is in play.
https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/tommy-tuberville-biden-administration-fbi/2025/10/07/id/1229422/
Q: Will any DOJ/FBI staff involved with Arctic Frost see the inside of a jail cell?
Yes or no?
Should some? Yes.
"Should some? Yes." Like Jack Smith?
Thank God Senator McConnell blocked that snake, Merrick Garland, from SCOTUS. For that alone, he should get a medal of freedom.
Q: Will any DOJ/FBI staff involved with Arctic Frost see the inside of a jail cell? Yes or no?
No. This has been yet another episode of Simple Answers to Stupid Questions.
For what crime, exactly?
Hint: despite what a college football coach thinks, investigating Republicans for criminal activity is not actually a criminal offense.
With government shut down, time to enliven the tedium with a little political fantasy. But not complete fantasy. Start with a fact. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson continues to refuse to swear in Arizona special election winner Adelita Grijalva. CNN reported:
Speaker Mike Johnson is not planning to allow Democrats’ newest congresswoman-elect to be sworn-in until her party agrees to end the government shutdown, despite telling CNN earlier Tuesday that he would swear her in “as soon as she wants.”
“We will swear in Rep.-Elect [Adelita] Grijalva as soon as the House returns to session when Chuck Schumer, Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego decide to open up the government,” a leadership aide said.
With that conduct, Speaker Johnson remains in violation of his oath to support the Constitution. He has no legitimate power to tamper with an election outcome, nor to negate its effect in the slightest. Johnson is replaying on a smaller stage Trump's attempt to stop the vote counting in Congress.
Speaker Johnson would not be doing that if he could be called to account for his oath breaking, and tossed from his House seat as he ought to be.
A federal grand jury in DC ought to act on its own initiative, and hand down a presentment to Johnson for oath breaking. Assert in the presentment that the Constitutional oath requirement to hold office is self-enforcing, and thus the grand jury's finding that Johnson broke his oath disqualifies him from office.
Let the Supreme Court rule, if it wants to, that oaths of office are useless ceremony, and nobody can hold office holders to faithful performance of an oath. Then hand down federal grand jury presentments to each Justice who has broken his/her own oath with that ruling.
Or if doing that seems too much like Trump/MAGA political antics to be realistic, just start talking it up as a possibility. My guess is that Adelita Grijalva would get sworn in PDQ.
Keep dreaming, lathrop.
"A federal grand jury in DC ought to act on its own initiative, and hand down a presentment to Johnson for oath breaking. ...
Let the Supreme Court rule, if it wants to, that oaths of office are useless ceremony, and nobody can hold office holders to faithful performance of an oath. Then hand down federal grand jury presentments to each Justice who has broken his/her own oath with that ruling."
Then, when the public reelect Republicans, your DC grand jury can hand down presentments for 51% of the electorate, too.
You're proposing that a grand jury in the most politically extreme city in the country, on its own initiative, set out to take over the country, and indict anyone who says "No". As revolutionary fantasies go, it's not the most realistic.
"As revolutionary fantasies go, it's not the most realistic." It's Lathrop. Realistic is not his style.
Bumble — In this case, avowedly not.
Bellmore — I worry that, "reelect Republicans," may not remain the honest yardstick you tout it to be. Given absence of complaint by you about Johnson's conduct, I doubt you care.
By the way, are you all-in with the military-style attack on a Chicago apartment building? American citizens' apartments got their doors bashed down. Warrants?
Residents, including children, got hauled out in zip ties, to let the government go through and trash their apartments.
It was theater of course, complete with assault forces rappelling down from Blackhawks.
Is that a style of governance you want established for the next D government to use? Or are you already fully committed to no more D governments ever?
"By the way, are you all-in with the military-style attack on a Chicago apartment building? American citizens' apartments got their doors bashed down. Warrants?" Do you have a cite or link for this?
"By the way, are you all-in with the military-style attack on a Chicago apartment building?"
I am gradually disengaging from the news, as I prepare for my retirement, (Which I plan to devote to gardening and fishing and similar unstressful activities.) so I can't say I've been following the news out of Chicago closely.
A quick scan of the news reports shows what happened there to be deeply contested. The fog of war, really, and that's only barely metaphorical; Neither side in the fight between the Trump administration's efforts to maximally enforce immigration law, and open borders fanatics attempts to maximally frustrate enforcement, are showing much in the way of restraint or honesty. I think this issue might actually be the trigger for a civil war, if we have one soon.
I'd expect that the actual truth is somewhere in the middle between the administration's "we were just innocently enforcing the law" and the immigration law nullifiers' "it was an indiscriminant military raid". You seem to have picked the latter side and decided to believe everything they say.
Certainly the administration has not been exactly hewing to the straight and narrow, they've been cutting corners all over the place, and I think deliberately so, in order to achieve a high level of self-deportation by creating fear among illegal immigrants as to their fate if they stick around.
While I WANT immigration laws enforced, I'm not down with that approach. Like I've said before, the Trump administration seems determined to fulfill its campaign promises, but in the most obnoxious ways possible.
But, to put it bluntly, the other side in this conflict aren't exactly angels. They've been deliberately encouraging and facilitating massive violations of US law, and they're not above lying to help things along.
So, I don't really know what the objective reality in Chicago is, but I'm reasonably sure it's not as EITHER side wants us to believe.
As an example, "Residents, including children, got hauled out in zip ties, to let the government go through and trash their apartments. "
Zip tying children
An old parody video, repurposed by the immigration law nullifiers.
Joe Biden blocked the release of a CIA report that the Ukrainian government thought that the US government exhibited a double standard on corruption in its treatment of the Biden family.
https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/emb8amvp-bidens-team-intervened-prevent-distribution-cia-report-his
Just The News!
When you’re too wacky for Fox!
An internal Fox News research briefing book warned that "John Solomon played an indispensable role in the collection and domestic publication" of parts of the Trump-Ukraine "disinformation campaign," The Daily Beast reported in February 2020.[51] Solomon was no longer associated with the network by late 2020.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Solomon_(political_commentator)
You do know that naming the source with an exclamation point doesn't actually constitute an argument, right?
I edited it for you, but it does actually given a long history of me and others pointing out that Solomon has a terrible journalistic history.
Terrible journalistic histories are all over the place. The most common form of them is to simply avoid reporting anything that casts doubt upon the narrative, whatever the narrative might be.
As David Burge famously said, “Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.”
If you're not rather open minded about where you find your news, you wind up letting the MSM dictate what you can know, and they DO typically have an agenda.
It's not so much that I think Just the News is such a great source, IOW, as that I'm not impressed with the MSM being much better. Though maybe bad in different ways. You'll notice that Just the News routinely does something in that story the mainstream media are really bad about: They actually link to primary sources so that you could judge them for yourself!
“ The most common form of them is to simply avoid reporting anything that casts doubt upon the narrative, whatever the narrative might be.”
This is just your conspiracy theory tendency talking. It never occurs to you that the “MSM” does’t report on some things because there’s nothing reliable there yet to report on, confusing professional journalistic standards with a conspiracy theory that hundreds of outlets are involved in a “narrative.”
No, that doesn't occur to me, because I've interacted too much with the media, I've been personally involved in one or two stories that got reported there, and I know better than that.
Back in the 70's and 80's, before the news media market radically changed and consolidated, you had enough ideological variety in the media that they kept each other honest. If you left out some important part of a story, your competitor would expose it.
That's not the case these days, once you exclude a few outlets like Fox, or the small fry like Just the News, it's an ideological monoculture, and they're not concerned about their omissions being exposed.
Because even if they're exposed, people like you won't believe it!
“Because even if they're exposed, people like you won't believe it!”
Projection is a heck of a drug.
“If you left out some important part of a story, your competitor would expose it.”
This still happens regularly. A lot of reporters might be “culturally” left-like most information class professionals-but they generally try to adhere to professional standards and profit seeking and regularly break stories critical of Democrats and other leftists. In fact, many conservative outlets do little “reporting,” instead they just collect, selectively choose and present “MSM” actual reporting. The idea that the hundreds of outlets and thousands of reporters are “in on” some conspiracy is the kind of thinking that had you duped for incredibly silly conservative stories such as the “Biden green screen” one.
Meanwhile, Fox News reports that CIA officials occasionally acknowledge the obvious. The original story is apparently paywalled, but:
A senior CIA official said it was “extremely rare and unusual” and “inappropriate to go outside of the intelligence community and inquire with the White House on the dissemination of a particular report for what appears to be political reasons,” according to Fox News Digital.
Trump supporter worried about administrations following intelligence community norms, lol. The disingenuousness continues.
They actually link to primary sources so that you could judge them for yourself!
JTNy s actually links to primary sources to make their readers, including Brett, who will never actually read those primary sources, think that JTN is doing journalism. Because their links never actually support their stories.
Denialist liars don't make actual arguments, they just shout their denialism without any facts or specific claims. They deserve to be banned from society.
" Because their links never actually support their stories."
Really? "Never" support their stories?
Sounds like another Trump says Windex bad, so Democrats chug Windex case.
I would say generally.
An ad hominem argument is an argument. It's a fallacious argument that reveals the absence of any valid argument, but it's an argument. (At least by the standards of Monty Python's Argument Clinic sketch.)
Why is it allowed to impeach witnesses in a trial? Isn’t that an ad hominem?
It’s because it shows the unreliability of the witness. Deductive logic isn’t the only game in town.
Ad Hominem is "You're a bad person, thus your position is false."
"You're a bad person, thus your testimony is unreliable." isn't ad hominem.
Witness impeachment is different than reporting in a few ways. There are multiple ways to impeach a witness, for example based on prior inconsistent statement or criminal conviction. But the most relevant difference is that impeachment is relevant for fact witnesses, where the court is asked to rely on the witness's testimony to establish what happened. We're not relying on John Solomon to establish the underlying facts here.
Sure we are, we are relying on his history of non-credible reporting. And it’s bad. It’s called informal logic. His history of terrible reporting does t conclusively prove this report by him is terrible, it just means there’s a high probability it is. In a time of limited resources and many sources why go to him? It’s a waste of time, and the fact you continue to go to him demonstrates motivated reasoning which additionally warrants skepticism about your posts on his reporting.
Sigh. Once again, someone on the Internet fails to understand the concept of the ad hominem fallacy. "You should ignore what this guy says about (e.g.) Hamas because he's fat" is an ad hominem fallacy. "You should ignore what this guy says about Hamas because he's unqualified" is not an ad hominem fallacy. Nor is "You should ignore what this guy says about Hamas because he's an established liar."
John Solomon was shown the door from multiple news organizations for unreliability; The Hill, which barely has editorial standards, first tried to salvage their relationship with him by moving him to the opinion side of their outlet, but eventually kicked him to the curb because even there he was unable to conform to basic journalistic standards. At that point he couldn't get any job and had to start his own blog.
Elaborating an ad hominem argument doesn't change its essence, no matter how many words you type.
Bitter denialists want to make this about John Solomon because they know they can't defend what Joe Biden and the Obama administration did.
There is nothing in there that appears to need any defense.
Your denialist tic is firing on all cylinders this morning.
Joe Biden, as Obama's VP, blocked the release of a CIA report that would have pointed out that Ukraine's government made the same points that conservative critics would make repeatedly over the next decade, that Biden's trip to get his son's employer off the hook of a corruption case was transparently self-serving, hypocritically corrupt and counterproductive to the bilateral relationship.
Saying denialist lot doesn’t change the fact that you post lies from liars, when you don’t post articles that don’t back up your claim.
Ad hominem (argument bad because person is bad) vs credibility (factual claim is wrong because person lies a lot).
You want to be fooled. And it frustrates you how many aren’t going along with that.
It says a lot when you prefer lying about the facts to making a policy argument based in reality.
You do love your sources with credibility issues. it’s not ad hom to say hey this guy lies a lot maybe find a better source.
And from what I can tell looking at other versions of the story it’s not the government it’s some random official idly speculating.
A Palestinian woman whose son serves in the U.S. Navy was secretly evacuated from war-torn Gaza in recent weeks after an intervention by the Trump administration and the Israeli and Jordanian governments, according to people familiar with the matter and correspondence reviewed by The Washington Post.
The operation, entailing a coordinated pause in Israeli military strikes to safeguard the woman’s movements, illustrates the extreme difficulty of orchestrating a legal exit from the Gaza Strip without resources and influence. The unusual operation occurred as the Trump administration has, at turns, been accused of turning a blind eye to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza — even, in some cases, when they are U.S. citizens.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/10/07/trump-gaza-rescue-us-sailor-mother/
A complaint to the International Criminal Court accuses Italian Prime Minister Meloni of genocide because her government supplied arms to Israel. It looks like it's just some academics making noise, a highbrow version of a change.org petition. Which is not to say it's legally wrong, but in the words of Shania Twain, "that don't impress me much."
In other ICC news, the court has gotten around to the conflict in Darfur in 2003 and 2004. A Janjaweed leader has been convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. https://apnews.com/article/icc-court-darfur-sudan-verdict-538055077897127929259e7515b7a40c
Maybe in 2040 a bunch of retired European prime ministers will be called to face justice.
Court documents show that a New Jersey man arrested Oct. 5 outside of St. Matthew’s Cathedral just hours before the start of the annual Red Mass had a “fully functional” arsenal of explosives that he threatened to detonate. According to the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, after officers took [the defendant] — a 41-year-old resident of Vineland, New Jersey — into custody, they discovered he had “multiple suspicious items, including vials of liquid and possible fireworks” inside a tent he erected on the steps of the cathedral.
[The defendant] had previously been barred from the cathedral premises and was encountered when authorities were making a security sweep several hours in advance of the annual Mass to mark the start of the Supreme Court’s new term.
Published reports indicate that [the defendant] had in his tent 200 incendiary devices including handmade grenades, bottle rockets, Molotov cocktails, and vials of nitromethane, the compound used in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. . . . Court documents show that [the defendant] had expressed hostility and disdain for the Supreme Court, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Catholic Church and Jewish people.
The Red Mass is an annual start-of-term Mass of prayer for the Supreme Court and the administration of law.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/molotov-cocktail-arrest-at-the-red-mass-another-ominous-sign
“a tent he erected on the steps of the cathedral.”
What the?
I suspect that if he had 200 explosive articles inside a tent, most of them were no more than firecrackers. Not that that helps him legally.
Clearly a loon, but possibly a dangerous one.
Wasn't a priority for DC police apparently...
Your story makes it look like it was a priority.
One of these days a violent extremist will end up being left wing. I hope it's this one. You hayseeds really need a win on this front.
100% of the potential new hires for next year that I'm interviewing are foreign students who need an hb1 Visa.
Mind you, they're good and they know their stuff. They all deserve a job.
But I can't help thinking that management at the bank I work for didn't get the memo. 100%? cmon.
Sounds like maybe there's not that many Americans qualified for the role?
"not many">> 0.0% one or two out of five is not many to me, and that I might believe. not 0%.
Meanwhile, All the banks want a piece of the Fannie and Freddie IPO. I can't help Wondering how much of that deal book they think they can offshore
Five is a pretty small n.
The true pool is about 100 applicants, I only see my subset and then the results are aggregated.
What is a 90% confidence interval around the true proportion of foreign students?
What is the probability I am wasting my time, because none of these kids can be hired next year?
"The true pool is about 100 applicants, I only see my subset and then the results are aggregated."
Seems like that's a recruiting and HR problem.
There are hundreds of sob stories in the media about American grads who are sitting in their parents' basements, filling out hundreds of applications without getting any traction for interviews. Are they all unqualified? If so, whose fault is it that so many recent graduates of US colleges and universities are not qualified to do entry-level professional work?
"100% of the potential new hires for next year that I'm interviewing are foreign students who need an hb1 Visa." Sounds like you need a higher posted salary or better recruiting.
"Mind you, they're good and they know their stuff. They all deserve a job." If that's so, they'll easily be able to get one in their home couuntry.
So which Family Medicine Residency do you work for?
The Grist reports that Atlanta has recently passed legislation that requires all new roofs to be more reflective. The changes won't be immediate; existing roofs don't have to be painted white just yet, but new buildings and replacement roofs are subject to the new law. The new roofs could cool the entire city by an average of 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit and as much as 6.3 degrees in the hottest neighborhoods. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/city-sparks-debate-passing-law-023000537.html
Saw the Stones at the Fox, Oct 1981, I think thats when everything got painted black. So you're saying being White makes things cooler?? Have you seen who mostly lives in Atlanta? And almost nobody from Atlanta says they're from "Atlanta" You're from Marietta, Roswell, Alpharetta, Duluth, Norcross, Dunwoody, Tucker, College Park, Forest Park, Smyrna, East Point (which is in West Atlanta, was supposed to fool Sherman into going the wrong way) Decatur, Stone Mountain, Lilburn, Doraville, Sandy Springs..... I've got a better idea, Give everyone a fan, and everybody fan really hard in sync.
Frank
Ah, memories. Back in the day we were arguing about global warming at Crooked Timber, and I suggested that if they were really concerned about it they'd start insisting on roofs being white, to reduce the urban heat island effect. I got such a mocking...
But the science was sound. Black roofs are just stupid, collectively, if you're in a densely populated area.
Maybe not if you live in London 1940 (or Dresden 1945)
I read in my local newspaper, The Wisconsin State Journal, that in a recent sale of coal mining leases a Navajo tribe related energy company bid less than one tenth of a cent per ton for rights to a coal field. And it was the only bid. The last successful coal leasing sale brought over a dollar a ton. While the Trump administration maybe bullish on coal the market seems to think otherwise. Coal is both dirty and expensive to use and it is not coming back.
I won't miss coal for electricity, though replacing it for steel and cement production isn't the easiest thing in the world. It is indeed filthy.
But whatever replaces it has GOT to be comparably reliable. Not going away every time the Sun goes down, or the wind stops blowing.
Modern coal fired electricity generation is very clean, as long as you don't count CO2 as a pollutant. I don't. It actually helps agriculture, and the tiny amount we produce this way has near zero effect on global warming.
Look at India and China: "China and India are constructing significant numbers of new coal-fired power plants to ensure energy security, with China approving the largest capacity of new coal plants in a decade and India also seeing substantial private sector interest. In the first half of 2025, China and India accounted for 87% of all new coal power proposals, construction starts, and capacity commissioned globally."
They are running away with cost effective electrical generation, while China funds global warming scare campaigns in the U.S.
From the annals of "what do you call a thousand lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean"...
Of the $450,000 settlement, $305,000 goes to lawyers and fees. The sisters' former workers who were paid biweekly stand to collect less than $200 each.
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/long-island-dairy-queen-biweekly-paychecks-lawsuit/
Some actual reportage from Portland:
My Shocking Undercover Experience at Portland's Antifa-Besieged ICE Building
Ignore the cameras, listen to this partisan lady.
It is in a style that Brett would like. Breathless speculation and fear of cities.
“There is an Antifa operator whom I've observed in many ICE videos and still photos, and whom I've seen for years at other leftist gatherings in Portland. He's violent. He's at ICE all the time, and I've told my friend who covers this story nearly every day to stay away from this guy. ”
“ Once I was in the zone, it took less than five minutes for me to ruffle the feathers of the willowy Antifa Karen”
She didn’t experience much, so she transitions into rumor and hearsay. “ My friend HunnyBadgerMom (her X handle), C.K. Bouferrache, tells me that Antifa works in shifts. They go back to their safe house nearby, which is well known, and get a little R&R before they start their next shift at night, where the violence takes place. I caught the shift change in a photo. ”
No violence actually seen. Just breathless ‘reporting’ of how scared people seemed and speculation about how the protestors are organized. Oh sorry I mean Antifa.
And then of course plenty of talk about 2020. Which could be a clue to those not as pickled as Brett.
Grand Jury Declines to Indict Two Chicago-Area ICE Protesters
A federal grand jury declined to indict two people charged with assaulting law enforcement agents outside a suburban Chicago ICE facility, an attorney for one of the defendants said.
The rejection of charges by a grand jury, once extremely unusual, is growing more common in cities targeted by President Donald Trump with immigration raids, military deployments, and other federal resources to crack down on crime.
It’s extremely rare for grand juries not to return indictments. Grand jurors don’t hear defense arguments and prosecutors are asked to meet a much lower standard of proof—probable cause—than when proving a defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/grand-jury-declines-to-indict-two-chicago-area-ice-protesters
The grand jury didn't even need to hear the defense side (couldn't anyway) to reject the indictment.
Might be time to move the trials elsewhere. Downstate.
You know, Birmingham and Selma were "Mostly Peaceful" in the 1960's. Way more peaceful than they are now.
I am looking forward to the mass permanent firings of bureaucrats that will result from the Schumer shutdown. They won't be enough to balance the budget, but every bit helps.
They could start by eliminating the Department of Justice. I mean all it is effective at doing at the moment is blocking the Epstein inquiries
In other news, the Ukraine war continues.
But as I had previously suggested, Ukraine may be getting Tomahawk missiles since Putin didn't come to the peace table.
Sounds like a gradual escalation of Tomahawk strikes is anticipated.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/ukraine-prepares-delivery-tomahawk-missiles-203132782.html
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J.D. Tuccille | 10.8.2025 7:00 AM
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