Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Iran
2. Tariffs
3. SOTU
4. Threat
5. Cartels
6. Spamburger
7. AI
1. Iran. As of this morning, we are perhaps 54 hours into the current war with Iran. Unlike the previous strikes aimed at kneecapping their nuclear capability, this one has two objectives. First, to eliminate Iranian ability to deliver nuclear weapons by missile. This includes missile stockpiles and production. Second, a decapitation strike to remove the command, control and intelligence (C3I) layer for Iranian government and its military, with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards being first up to bat. If possible, continuing strikes will eliminate Iranian ability to murder their citizens, like the 34,000+ killed after the last round of protests. For their part, Iranian citizens still alive and expatriates in other countries are (mostly) ecstatic. The remaining combat capability in Iran appear to be executing their doomsday plan of firing everything remaining, hitting as many US / Israeli installations in surrounding nations as humanly possible. The strikes mostly managed to encourage the Gulf nations to band together in support of the allied strikes. They also introduced the possibility that those nations may end up joining the festivities against Iran. These are not unimportant numbers, as for the record, Saudi Arabia has more F-15s than Israel. Even initially hesitant European nations (Great Britain, France and Germany) quickly came out in full support of the strikes. There has been a lot of blather about Iranian needing ICBM capability to reach out and touch nations far away from them. I would submit that analysis is BS, as Iran has the ability to orbit satellites, having launched over 30. And if you can orbit a satellite, you can reach out and touch any point on the globe with a nuke, which was Iran’s entire interest. Hitting it, OTOH, is something else entirely. We will continue to be in the fog of war for a while, while democrats And their useful idiot enablers will prattle on demanding War Powers Resolution(s), which may very well be overcome by events sooner rather than later. More next week.
2. Tariffs. On Feb 20, SCOTUS struck down Trump’s use of the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs. Cue the leftist Snoopy happy dance, which went on for days. The case was a near textbook example of anti-Trump lawfare brought by the same crowd conducting lawfare since Jan 21, 2025. My first reaction was that it was a remarkably idiotic 6-3 opinion, with only Thomas, Kavanaugh and Alito voting against the majority. Upon further review, that was an uninformed kneejerk opinion (my favorite). Thankfully, I didn’t put those thoughts at that time in print (yay!).
- Among the multiple commentaries on the opinion, the most positive came (as usual) from Jeff Childers’ Coffee and COVID, Feb 21. Childers is a pretty positive guy. His analysis is that the opinion is a gift by SCOTUS to the country in the form of a firewall, a machete, and two shields. While the opinion seemed to hand the left everything they hoped for, it was a long-needed clarification of a poorly worded half century old statute. More than a few congress critters have blasted the obscure verbiage in IEEPA. Some even proposed cleanup legislation. None was ever passed. Maybe this opinion will provide incentive.
- Justice Kavanaugh helpfully provided a roadmap to keep the tariff engine operating, citing four other existing laws that can be used by Trump to get the same outcome. Within 90 minutes after the opinion was posted, Trump issued a new Executive Order replacing IEEPA tariffs with those based on alternative statutes suggested by Kavanaugh. In short, he knew what was coming and had an immediate response, not due to some sort of subterfuge or insider knowledge, but expecting a negative outcome and being prepared.
- The firewall comes from SCOTUS shutting down future use of IEEPA by democrat presidents to inflict tariffs for other reasons, climate change, for instance. What if that future president declares a national state of emergency under IEEPA and uses the tariff tool to “solve” climate change by imposing the Green New Deal by executive fiat? While they were considering IEEPA, SCOTUS allowed Trump to build his tariff dashboard and operate it for eight months. Ultimate impact of tariffs imposed under IEEPA and the other statutes is negligible, at best.
- The first shield in the option applied to Trump. Three conservative justices made a forceful, substantive case that he did have legal authority to impose tariffs under IEEPA, turning the discussion into a legitimate legal disagreement rather than one about a lawless power grab. The dissent neutralized the majority opinion. The dissent answers all democrat “Trump is a dictator” claims.
- The second shield is for SCOTUS itself. In handing Trump a significant policy loss, it shields the majority from future criticism of being Trump partisan lackeys, supporters of a partisan president. Trump helped out by blasting the majority while praising the minority, especially his majority appointees like Gorsuch and Barrett. Best of all, the opinion didn’t actually harm the Trump tariffs at all. There are multiple cases in the pipeline before SCOTUS including birthright citizenship, race-based redistricting, Fed independence and firing of agency heads. There are others, but you get the idea. They may all go against Trump, making the left very happy. But if any one of them or more goes in Trump’s favor, he will change the nation. One example is a reversal of race-based redistricting could allow redistricting of 27 democrat voting House seats locking in a Republican House majority for a decade or more.
- Finally, the machete is the majority’s legal reason for chopping IEEPA’s tariff power, one that will be used against the liberal SCOTUS wing. It is an extension of the SCOTUS move toward the Major Questions Doctrine. This means that this and any future administration will no longer be able to read between the lines on a poorly written law and make it up as they go. It is a tool that will be used to significantly cut back on the administrative state by finally forcing congress to do its job rather than delegate it all to an unaccountable federal bureaucracy.
- All in all, not a bad outcome.
3. SOTU. President Trump made the first formal State of the Union (SOTU) of his second term a week ago. The 1+47 speech was the longest in history and honestly seemed short. Trump was combative, focused, and did everything possible to remind the audience all the positive things taking place over the last year, celebrating the victories while democrats sat on their hands in response. The democrat response to the speech will provide a gold mine for campaign ads over the next eight months. No election is ever won on what you have done. They are won on what you are expected to do next, in the future. The only thing past performance does is mildly remind voters that you are good for your word. But what is your word worth if the Other Side is promising the sun, the moon and the stars if you only vote for them? Zohran Mamdani, Mikie Sheriill and Abigail Spanberger were all elected on those magic promises, promises quickly forgotten as they quickly bury an unsuspecting electorate in democrat legislative excess. What is Trump promising? An expansion of his popular child investment accounts. Those all disappear with a democrat majority in the House. An expansion of these to adults was smuggled into the Big Beautiful Bill and is in the process of being rolled out. That also goes away also with a democrat House majority. He is going to buy votes with the voters’ own money that stays in their own pockets, a remarkably conservative approach. He told the AI world to build their own power plants rather than compete with existing customers for existing energy generation. This will help control the rising cost of electricity. He handed out two Medals of Honor. He celebrated the men’s Olympic hockey team. He tied the precipitous drop in murder rate over the last year with border control and the lack of illegals crossing over. Democrats sat on their hands for most of these, something that will show up in campaign ads.
4. Threat. About a week and a half ago, Susan Rice, who was O’Bama’s wet work specialist during his two terms in office decided it would be a great idea to publicly threaten Trump supporters with renewed lawfare should democrats take control of either / both house(s) of congress or heaven forbid the presidency in 2028. She quickly extended the threat to any corporation thought to be bending the knee to Trump too easily for democrat sensibilities. The source of the threat is important, as this woman is echoing O’Bama himself. Unlike O’Bama, neither Rice or Holder nor any other O’Bama true believer is lazy like O’Bama himself. They are smart, dedicated, ruthless, utterly without morals or scruples, and want to destroy Team MAGA, much like the Romans did to Carthage. When someone who hates you threatens to destroy you, you are well advised to believe them and keep them as far away from the levers of power as humanly possible. This is not a threat from Rice. It is a promise from her and the greater O’Bama World. Like our response to the Islamist world, listen to them, believe them, plan a response to them, and have a great time utterly destroying them as they are completely predictable. We aren’t.
5. Cartels. A week and a half ago was a very busy time, with the death of Jalisco New Generation Cartel leader El Mencho Oseguera in a shootout with Mexican soldiers in Tapalpa, Jalisco, Mexico. The raid was coordinated with US special forces but done by Mexican military. El Mencho was among the most powerful cartel heads in Mexico. 27 members of security, 46 suspected cartel fighters and a civilian were killed in the attack. El Mencho had a $15 million US bounty on his head. In response, cartel violence ramped up nicely nationwide, forcing a previously reluctant and suspected compromised El Presidente Scheinbaum to roll out military in response. Tourists from the US were forced to shelter in place for a few days as the violence was mopped up. Trump is having himself quite the month, rolling up Maduro, the Ayatollah, and the head of one the largest Mexican cartels. The only one of these still alive is Maduro. All of these were involved in international terrorism and drug trafficking.
6. Spamberger. Democrats selected newly elected VA governor Abigail Spanburger to give their response to the Trump SOTU. She was well prepared and gave a presentable speech, with the main goal being an attempt to demonstrate that she was reasonable, not completely crazy, something that got her elected governor last Nov. She has the same problem that Biden did, running as one thing (a reasonable moderate) and governing as something entirely different (a screaming leftist lunatic). Expect to see more of this from democrats, especially if it has worked a couple times. Spanburger was one of 50 intel and former military members recruited and trained by democrats in 2018 with this outcome in mind. 9 of them were elected to congress. She was a former CIA case worker who reportedly was ineffective because she was so partisan doing her job. The question for democrats continues to be if what they have done, are doing and want to do is so great, why do they have to lie about it and keep offering up chimeras rather than actual people?
7. AI. A couple AI thought for your consideration in addition to the Trump promise that their new data centers will need to build their own power rather than competing with the existing customer base. First comes from Anthropic AI, which got itself cross-threaded with DoW sufficiently that Trump directed all federal agencies no longer to use it. Anthropic refused to make changes in its ethical rules for its Claude AI demanded by DoW and was dropped following a short discussion. Note that the Harris – Biden AI brain trust were hired by Anthropic. Sounds like they brought their “up yours” worldview along with them to their new job. Ran across a story about Anthropic claiming that they had solved the mainframe problem figuring out IBM’s legacy installed COBOL code to the extent trained COBOL programmers are no longer needed. I don’t know if I believe that or not. But I do know that most of the COBOL expertise has retired and the mainframe world is moving to virtualization and Linux. Peter Diamandis has a couple stories about AI getting to the point where it is starting to make up its own mind about things. The danger is that most of these AI’s (everything other than Musk’s Grok) are so woke it makes your teeth hurt. Smart, woke software packages are hardly an improvement to anything, yet they are coming at us like a fleet of freight trains.
More later –
- AG