White House Counsel Alina Habba: "The law is 'what our attorney general of the United States says'"

White House adviser Alina Habba lashed out at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) after he blasted President Donald Trump's freeze on federal grant programs.

"Your attorney general is not the attorney general!" she exclaimed. "We have an attorney general. That will be Pam Bondi."

"And what your opinion is on what the law is doesn't really matter," Habba continued. "It's what the White House counsel says and what our attorney general of the United States says."

https://www.rawstory.com/alina-habba-attorney-general-law/

Pete Beinart has one of his pieces where he questions whether "Israel has a right to exist." A genuinely understand this line of thought for a few reasons. One is despite what a bunch of people outside I/P want, very few people who live in I/P actually wants a South African solution. It constantly doesn't poll well among Israelis and Palestinians. Both want their own state. Also, well meaning outsiders imposing their solution on the people on the ground has a horrible track record of success and the idea of doing this to the I/P conflict is mind-boggling. The third reason why this seems like a no brainer solution is that Israel obviously currently exists and Israelis demonstrated that they will fight like hell for their country so making Israel not exist would require a massive use of force. That nobody is volunteering to be this force shows the questionability of the endeavor.

Secret Service was outside a Chicago elementary school because, check notes, an 11 year old made an anti-Trump video. Trump is an extraordinarily fragile man.

https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/01/24/ice-agents-denied-entry-at-cps-school-in-back-of-the-yards/?fbclid=IwY2xjawIBNMZleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHWoy2dYMNCCZS1VHGyvujRR9H0Q8RSA1wQrm1oYRTofKwr931luVUvAY9g_aem_5rMT2wKVF1w2HvphpDLthQ

I'm very angry at the normies in deep blue San Francisco going out and about like everything is normal. It is not normal.

Everything that Trump wanted to do but could not do because of COVID along with four years of boiling and pent up rage are coming out now. He is also in the clear state of degeneration. Everything is degenerating at once.

Cry, cry loud and hard.

DEI and related stuff puts liberal and center-left politicians between a rock and a hard place because they need one of two things to happen and neither of them is going to happen. They need the activists who love the DEI stuff to tone it down because they are pissing people off at best and providing a lot of nut picking ammo to the Right. The activists either think that they are doing important work or that being ridiculous is part of the point and they wont' quit. Alternatively, we need the people who are pissed off at various DEI stuff to develop thicker skin but politicians telling Latinos and Latinas not to get annoyed at activists using the term Latinx when most Latinos and Latinas despise the term isn't going to work.

1. Ending Birthright citizenship by EO isn't unconstitutional if five out of four Supreme Court Justices say it is fine by sophistry.

2. It means that asylum seekers can't enter the United States through the Mexican-US border along with other people even if they have visas and such.

3. I'm very meh on DEI but the right is not going after it in good faith but as a bogeyman. Getting rid of remote work is a way to exert dominance and insure compliance.

4, 5, and 6 agreee.

7. Trump needs his freikorps.

Woke is mainly ivory tower discussions that moved into online spaces with a slightly bigger number of speakers. The big problem with a lot of it is that it comes across as really doctrinaire to normies. I don't think it turns people away from liberalism or leftism but it definitely can turn them off from politics. Take for example discussions about what books should be read in school. Real world people will speak about including non-white or LGBT authors. Online left edgelord people speak about cancelling white male authors with glee. Totally different ways of approaching the same topic.

Meanwhile, American Jews stayed loyal to the Democratic Party despite the antics of the Pro-Hamas people. There are only 250,000 Palestinian-Americans according to Wikipedia. This is really Muslim-Americans who are having their faces being eaten. Many of them were also going back to the Republicans before 10/7 because of the social liberalism of the Democratic Party. It is just considered very impolite to point this out and we have to pretend it is all about Israel and Palestine.

Can somebody please explain to me how so many people on the Western further left can take clear statements like "we want "Arab Muslim Palestine" and scramble it around to "we want multicultural secular Palestine" in their headspace? Every Muslim majority country on this planet puts Islam front and center in their national identity complete with blasphemy and apostasy laws and an official international oreganization of Muslim majority countries but Diaspora Jews are supposed ot just ignore all of this and pretend that they are a bunch of secular multicultural liberals despite it all and betray over half the world's Jews while two billion Muslims get their Grand Muslim Union?

Trump has done a pardon of all 1,600 people convicted for participation in January 6 on live TV. This is going to end bad. All constraints have been removed from Trump and he is going full on the further right extremism.

Trump comes out swinging against birthright citizenship. This is going to cause a lot of chaos because there are plenty of people born to undocumented immigrants who latter get status in the United States.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/01/20/trump-immigration-executive-orders/

Israel released 90 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 3 hostages. Bloody bastards Hamas.

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/2025-01-19/live-updates-838156

I saw Nosferatu today. It was fine. A good workmanlike movie. It wasn't especially scary and you really need to go into it completely lacking prior knowledge of both the previous two Nosferatu movies or Dracula to be surprised about plot developments. The main advantage was that it took away the parts of the original Nosferatu that would come across as unbelievable or incredibly dumb for a 21st century audience, it's hard to give an example without a spoiler, and made them more in line with how people more familiar with the horror genre should play out.

Josh Marshall is getting Iraq II vibes about the Greenland Discourse:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/greenland-discourse-is-starting-to-have-that-pre-iraq-war-vibe

Too many people are sticking to NIMBYism.

My opinion on immigration is that relatively free and open immigration happens at times of elite consensus that relatively free and open immigration is a good thing. When you have at least one group of elites that believe that this is not a good thing or believes they can benefit from xenophobic feeling than you aren't going to have free and open immigration.

There needs to be a way to convince people to be more pro-immigrant. I think that globally, the developed world is turning against immigration. I don't like it but it is where popular sentiment lies. At the same time going "racist, racist, racist" at people skeptical of immigration has not exactly worked as a strategy.

There are editorials claiming that Donald is a Dove even though he is announcing is plans to take back the Panama Canal, redo the War of 1812, and add Greenland while he is at it.

I just remembered, Dr. Marya's actually accusation was that "Zionist" doctors are the cause of global health inequality. There is so much obvious anti-Semitism in this statement, and anybody with half a brain cell should be able to figure out that by Zionist she means Jews, and is basically doing a blood libel. She and her defenders utterly refuse to get it and raise their fists in blood thirsty defiance when you point out to them.

This is acutally from September 2024 but Dr. Rupa Marya, infamous off the wall chart linking inflammation to colonials and saying that "Zionist" doctors, was put on leave by USCF Medical School for accusing an Israeli student in her class of "genocide" on social media.

https://www.kqed.org/news/12006193/ucsf-campus-faces-uproar-after-doctor-allegedly-targets-israeli-student-on-social-media

Dr. Marya is naturally very self-righteous about this and not understanding that she committed deadly anti-Semitism but she and her like would be screaming bloody murder at the top of their lungs for racism against any other group they care about. These people are so disgustingly self-righteous and stupid that no matter how many times Jews or anybody carefully explain what they are doing is wrong and racist, they just don't get it.

I'm inclined to agree but the argument against us is that the reason the world is in such a mess is because people to strive for perfection enough but get distracted by pain relievers.

I think a lot of the health advice is saying do 10 in hopes of getting most people to do a 5 to 7. There are also lots of people with a firm belief in human perfectibility. Living the most healthy life is possible and they can't comprehend why every human doesn't want to do this.

Moral panics never depended on facts and numbers.