Closing the tabs …
.@POTUS: “I didn’t like last night. I wasn’t happy with it. We’re in the midst of talking peace and missiles were fired. And I was not happy with it.” pic.twitter.com/aSdPhsaOP0
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 24, 2025
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According to Bloomberg, U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff is expected to raise the issue of Ukraine’s right to maintain its own military with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their upcoming discussions.
Ukraine and European allies stressed that Kyiv must have the ability to adequately equip and man its own army, but Putin would have to concede on his goal of demilitarizing Ukraine.
However, it would present a significant change in the U.S. approach to negotiations, which until recently have given the impression of seeking to appease Russia in order to bring Putin and his team to the negotiation table. Now, the administration appears to be trying to find concessions on both sides.
Ed: Well, Putin just demonstrated the necessity of this concession, no? I suspect Trump is upping the ante on this point as a way to pay Putin back for attempting to embarrass him. That’s why Trump is “not happy” about that missile volley at Kyiv.
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President Trump on the Russia-Ukraine War: “I don’t know that you can ever say there’s gonna be a winner to this because so many lives have been lost…
…Biden was president when this war happened, but I’m trying to put out the fire. I think we will be successful…we will… pic.twitter.com/9eNnOkwdFH
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 24, 2025
Ed: There isn’t going to be a winner. Had Putin’s invasion succeeded in 2022, he would still be fighting a massive insurgency as the ethnic Ukrainians would never have sat quietly.
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President Trump is targeting Democrats’ main fundraising platform, in an extraordinary effort to challenge the opposing party’s political infrastructure.
Trump is planning to sign a memorandum Thursday that directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate ActBlue, which revolutionized liberal fundraising by giving small-dollar donors an easy way to contribute to campaigns and causes.
Three Republican-led congressional committees alleged this month that ActBlue has “a fundamentally unserious approach to fraud prevention.” GOP lawmakers have demanded additional documents related to a string of recent resignations by top executives.
Ed: It might have been smarter politically to just have Bondi take this up on her own initiative. However, a handful of state AGs are already investigating ActBlue over potential corruption and campaign finance violations, so this isn’t out of the blue … pun intended. In the end, I suspect the organizers behind ActBlue will launch a different platform with the same goals, if not the same policies.
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Our ActBlue investigation found retirees unknowingly listed as donating tens of thousands, marked “small” on ActBlue, but reported much higher to the FEC. Now, even the White House is paying attention.
When investigative journalism exposes truth, action follows. https://t.co/ahMRkgiLXj pic.twitter.com/gp216lojai
— O’Keefe Media Group (@OKeefeMedia) April 24, 2025
Ed: This demonstrates why ActBlue really should get investigated at the federal level. And also why it’s probably not a great idea to contribute to outside PACs generally. If you want to donate, donate directly to campaigns or to party organizations.
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“As we’ve moved from one administration to another and the Trump administration tries to find its footing, many still see our leaders as unresponsive to their main concerns,” says Republican pollster Daron Shaw, who conducts Fox New surveys with Democrat Chris Anderson. “Partisans have flipped, of course, so now it’s Democrats who are most worried, but many Independents and Republicans are also skeptical their economic fears are being addressed.”
Nearly three-quarters (72%) believe tariffs will drive up the cost of products, including majorities of Democrats (88%), independents (76%) and Republicans (55%). A record 55% think tariffs hurt the economy and a plurality say they hurt U.S. jobs (44% hurt vs. 36% help). Two-thirds worry a trade war with China could escalate into a military confrontation.
Ed: To some extent, this is measuring the knee-jerk reaction. However, part of this knee-jerk reaction is the impression that the administration is making the strategy up as it goes along. That does not build confidence, and while the midterms are still more than a year away, Trump and the GOP need these trends to go back in the right direction eventually to give themselves another two years to complete their agenda.
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BREAKING: 🚨 THE UK IS ABOUT TO TRY AND “DIM THE SUN” 🚨
Yes, you read that right.
🌫️ In the next few days, Britain will begin geoengineering experiments to block sunlight from reaching the earth — in a scheme straight out of a dystopian sci-fi novel.
💰 Funded and championed… pic.twitter.com/RJok1jdne3
— Jim Ferguson (@JimFergusonUK) April 24, 2025
Ed: Gotta love all the handwringing over the moral implications of killing people. For the radical enviros, that’s a feature, not a bug. They’re still obsessing over population growth. They want depopulation on a mass scale, so don’t buy this claim that they care about the deaths they cause.
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On top of being ineradicably skeptical about the global climate “agenda,” I am also a 44-year-old layman with a lifetime’s worth of apocalyptic science-fiction reading under my belt, and thus perhaps not the ideal person to judge such endeavors. I’m the sort of hopelessly risk-averse naif, after all, who would have told you it was a bad idea to encourage Chinese military scientists to recklessly engage in gain-of-function research with deadly viruses in a poorly secured lab. So what do I know?
But it’s hard not to wonder at a scientific method that, in the words of commentator Gregg Easterbrook, responds to mere uncertainty about climate with “let’s tamper with the source of all life.” I certainly remember being lectured constantly by my eco-conscious grade-school that aerosols were in fact deadly poison: dissipating the ozone layer, immiserating the Third World, killing off the globe’s most lovably vulnerable creatures, etc. Now I guess we’re going to inject them straight into the sky to block out the sun.
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I was today years old when I learned Britain suffers from too much sunlight. https://t.co/d57Jz6Kf2W
— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) April 23, 2025
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Over 4,000 IDF reservists sent a letter to Defense Minister Israel Katz on Thursday demanding that he order a full-scale crushing invasion of Gaza to finally finish off Hamas.
The list includes five brigadier-generals, including Erez Viner, who until very recently had left the planning of Gaza operations for the Southern Command.
It also includes 16 colonels, 90 lieutenant-colonels, 250 other officers, and more than 3,000 regular reserve soldiers.The premise of the letter is that the government promised it would replace IDF chief Herzi Halevi with Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir to order a far more aggressive simultaneous conquest of all of Gaza all at once, as opposed to the staged, slower invasions that characterized the war previously.
Ed: Slow and staged gets more of your forces killed. Either commit to war or pull out. That’s good advice, and it’s interesting to see the rank and file show more esprit d’corps than Israeli leadership.
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This. Is. Insane. https://t.co/q4zQMWMQFX
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) April 24, 2025
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“A number of judges have seemingly adopted a constitutional meta-principle: what a past President did, President Trump may not undo.”
So wrote Harvard Law professor and constitutional scholar Adrian Vermeule on Friday after a district-court judge issued yet another lawless nationwide injunction meant to handcuff Trump and halt his agenda.
It’s a criticism the Supreme Court, and particularly Chief Justice John Roberts, must take to heart.
Ed: Be sure to read this entire essay from Glenn Reynolds. The Supreme Court either has to act with the full authority of Article III power to end these practices, or watch Congress do it for them eventually.
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