It pretty much says it all.
H/t Ralf Longwalker
And this:
This
Reply
Monthly Archives: June 2025
California’s Problem
Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed into law a resolution rescinding the Biden administration’s EPA’s last-minute waiver for California to mandate more stringent rules for gasoline and battery cars than the Federal government’s—and that EPA’s—rules. That Biden EPA waiver allowed California to mandate only battery cars to be sold in California; average Americans who also are citizens of California would be required to buy battery cars after 2035 if they wanted another car, whether they wanted a battery car or not. The interstate market for transportation vehicles being what it is, that would have been tantamount to a requirement for all of us average Americans all across our nation to buy only battery cars after 2035.
Hours later, California’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom led a lawsuit against the Trump administration asking a Federal court to find the waiver rescission…unconstitutional.
Newsom called it “the latest illegal action by a president who is a wholly-owned subsidiary of big polluters.”
Newsom’s Progressive-Democrat State AG Rob Bonta:
We will continue to fiercely defend ourselves from this lawless federal overreach[.]
How dare our elected representatives act against the wishes of California? That’s illegal.
It’s plainly unlawful for Congress to pass a national law of which the State of California disapproves.
Newsom and his syndicate bleat about an allegedly lawless Trump administration. The real lawlessness, though, is Newsom’s claim that a waiver granted by a government agency cannot be rescinded by the elected representatives of the United States, the Congress and the President.
That’s lawlessness, and it’s instructive of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s use of a Newspeak Dictionary to cloak their claims. This is what we can look forward to the moment the Progressive-Democratic Party returns to power.
What He Said
This quote isn’t the main point of the Power Line post, but it’s spot on in its own right.
Trump had said over and over again that he would not allow Iran to get a nuclear bomb. He said he’d prefer to do it the easy way, through diplomacy, and he let Steve Witkoff offer the Iranians the most generous terms they were going to get. He held the Israelis back until he had given the talks a chance to run their course. But he gave the Iranians a clear deadline, and he also said again and again that if they didn’t agree to his deal, he’d have no choice but to do things the hard way.
The Tablet article from which the above is cited in Power Line is behind a paywall, so h/t Power Line for bringing this much out.
In any event, Park MacDougould, the author of the Tablet piece, is spot on.
Bad Idea
Socialist Senators Bernie Sanders (I, VT) and Angus King (I, ME) are proposing a new law that would
ban pharmaceutical manufacturers from using direct-to-consumer advertising, including social media, to promote their products.
This is a bad idea. Not just singly bad; it’s bad on three grounds.
One is the ground of free speech. We don’t get to ban speech based on who’s doing the speaking any more than we get to censor speech based on what’s being said. That includes pharmaceutical companies that want to advertise their wares, so long as they don’t misrepresent them. Truth in Advertising laws, though, are agnostic regarding both advertisers and products.
Our nation went over who is allowed to advertise when lawyers wanted to engage in direct advertising, including via television ads, lots of years ago. Our courts, and we as a nation, came down on the side of free speech when we all decided lawyers advertising was entirely jake. The worst that got us is ads like The Texas Hammer‘s.
It’s a bad idea because it’s insulting to us average Americans. We are not as droolingly imbecilic as these two Wonders of the Left insist that we are. We are fully capable of deciding for ourselves whether we want to take pharmaceutical company’s word at face value or our doctor’s advice. Certainly the advertisements can lead us to peppering our doctors with questions, but we should be doing that, anyway, regarding his diagnoses and proposed treatments. That some of us are foolish enough to remain willfully ignorant about our own health and blithely (and blindly) accept our doctor’s word unquestioningly is between us and our doctors. It’s no excuse for government censoring other parties.
That brings me to the third reason this is a bad idea. It’s not government’s role to protect us from ourselves, or even from each other except on criminal matters. Government’s role is to protect us from external criminal elements and threats to our nation as a whole. It’s not even the Federal government’s sole role to protect us from domestic criminal elements—that is primarily the role of each of our several State governments, with help from the Feds only when invited in by the States.
This is a move that only Socialists and their monarchist Progressive-Democratic Party ally could love.
Newspeak and Immigration
A letter writer in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section used his copy of the Newspeak Dictionary to mischaracterize what’s going on with the Trump administration’s deportation drive. He started out supposedly on the right path:
Like many others, I support deporting people who are here illegally and have committed serious crimes.
But that turned out to be merely his distracting lead-in to his mischaracterization:
Deporting people who have committed no crime—especially those who have been here for a long time—is morally corrupt.
The ones being deported have, though, committed a crime: they broke, or snuck, into our nation illegally. That crime stands whether the illegal aliens have been here a short time or a long time, and there is no statute of limitations on the crime of crossing our borders illegally.
Another reliance by this letter writer on his Newspeak Dictionary:
Millions of migrants work for low wages in service and agricultural industries.
They are not migrants. They ceased to be migrants when they entered Mexico or Canada illegally under those nations’ laws. Even if having legally entered those nations and thereby maintained a legitimate claim to be migrants, when they entered our nation illegally under our laws, they ceased to be migrants. Entering Mexico, Canada, or our nation illegally makes them illegal aliens. Full stop.
White washing the question, distorting reality via Newspeak-ism, counting illegal aliens as not illegal or as having committed no crime, is not the answer to our immigration problem; it merely encourages the flow of illegal aliens. The correct answer is two-fold: remove the illegal aliens, and streamline our legal immigration laws to enable faster vetting and to ease visa quota limits.
A first step already has been taken by Executive Order, but it badly wants codification into law (with a sunset limit in this case) by Congress. That step, emphasized again by HHS Secretary Kristi Noem at her Thursday press conference, is the offer to all of the illegal aliens currently present the opportunity to take themselves back to their home country, on arrival at which we will give them $1,000 of American taxpayer money, and then they will have the opportunity to return to the US legally, with all associated opportunities, including critically, no longer having to look over their shoulders for ICE, and being able to get onto a path to citizenship if they wish. The backstep here, though, is if they don’t take this opportunity and are caught and deported, their departure will be permanent; they will be barred from ever coming here again.