What Will Trump Do about Iran? Minneapolis Riots Intensify. Is U.S. Is Sole Superpower? NY Tenant Czar’s Plan to Tank Real Estate Biz. OBGYN Doc Not Clear Whether Men Can Get Pregnant.
Will the United States intervene to help the Iranians throw off the tyranny of the theocratic regime that came to power in 1979?
President Trump has toned down his rhetoric on Iran:
“We have been told that the killing in Iran is stopping, it has stopped, it’s stopping,” he told reporters in the Oval Office Wednesday afternoon. “And there’s no plan for executions or an execution or executions. So, I’ve been told that on good authority. We’ll find out about it.”
This seems highly improbable, but is representative of the regime’s line. Hot Air speculates that the president’s remarks are a head fake. The U.K. Telegraph suggests that the U.S. doesn’t have the assets and that the president fears a months-long war.
“A Historic Opportunity for Regime Change in Iran” is the headline for Andrew McCarthy’s plea at National Review:
What I’ve recommended has been more pithily framed by retired General H. R. McMaster, Trump’s former national security adviser: When we hit back after they strike, make them understand that “we know the return address.” That’s not a call for all-out war, just for being gimlet-eyed that the regime is an incorrigible enemy. …
Pollster and pundit Mark Penn also offers a rationale for direct action and makes a fascinating observation:
In another day, thousands of dead protesters would bring the security council of the UN condemning it — instead Iran is complaining to the UN about Trump and Israel. What a joke the UN has become. It’s a shame that there are no “free Iran” demonstrations on campuses.
Meanwhile, “Mayhem in Minny” is a New York Post headline on a story describing continued anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis. The latest incident to inflame the anti-ICE protesters:
An illegal Venezuelan migrant was shot in the leg by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis after he allegedly fled during a traffic stop and beat the “ambushed” officer with a snow shovel Wednesday evening, the Department of Homeland Security said.
While the man continued to struggle with the officer, two other people emerged from a nearby apartment and allegedly mercilessly attacked the agent with a snow shovel and broom handle, the department said.
The incident caused the riots to intensify. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “denounced ICE for its ‘atrocities’.” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey accused ICE of “creating chaos.” Renee Good, the 37-year-old woman killed by an ICE agent, is the subject of a USA TODAY profile today. Good and God: Good’s former father-in-law made intriguing comments. The ICE agent who shot Ms. Good reportedly suffered from internal bleeding, which would be consistent with being rammed by a car. The Good riots are distracting from the billions of taxpayer dollars in welfare fraud centered on Minnesota’s politically relevant Somali community. That might be an added inducement to riot.
Somebody—I wish I could remember who—called the massive Minnesota welfare fraud the model for a blue state business plan. Columbia law professor and CEO of the New Civil Liberties Alliance Philip Hamburger writes in the Wall Street Journal that the Minnesota fraud was the result of the Supreme Court’s wrongly allowing federal funding of state government:
Many individuals deserve blame for Minnesota’s welfare fraud, but a key underlying failure is institutional. Federal funding of state programs creates a dangerous moral hazard. Washington provides money, but the state controls its disbursement. When the federal government subsidizes states, it lets them spend other people’s money. And the Supreme Court has blessed it all.
The opportunities for corruption are bad enough within any single governing body—federal or state. But when a state can spend federal dollars, political accountability becomes even more tenuous. U.S. voters can’t be expected to monitor each state’s handling of federal funds, and the people of Minnesota clearly don’t worry sufficiently about the misuse of money that isn’t theirs. Not having to foot the bill for improper use of funds, they have little incentive to hold their politicians accountable.
In the wake of the Minnesota debacle, the court should reconsider its gutting of the General Welfare Clause. It could spare us the costs of the increasingly destructive division between federal funding and state control over its distribution.
Government ministers from Denmark and Greenland met yesterday in Washington with Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Not surprisingly, the meeting on President Trump’s demand for Greenland was “frank” and “constructive” but went nowhere. The New York Post comments that Trump’s Greenland gambit is a sideshow the forces of freedom don’t need. The president maintains that Greenland’s strategic location and rare earth minerals make it essential for the future of the U.S. It’s all about U.S. power, argues one commentator.
Speaking of American power, America is once again the sole superpower, according to Arthur Herman, writing in the Wall Street Journal:
It happened after World War II and after the Cold War—and it is happening now. President Trump has thrust the U.S. into another “unipolar moment,” a time when a single great power dominates the globe and crafts a new world order.
The strike against Iran’s nuclear sites, the cease-fire in Gaza, and the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro together show that the U.S. controls the tempo and direction of world events. Which may also come to include regime change in Iran.
It has long been recognized that the U.S. is a superpower, a sovereign state able to exert its influence and force on a global scale. But it now stands alone among the current great powers, with China sliding into a distant second place. …
The most recent era of great-power competition is over, and the U.S. won. History shows, however, that such unipolar moments are fleeting. It is up to the second Trump administration to make sure it doesn’t slip away—that America’s status as the dominant superpower becomes a bridge to a more secure and more prosperous future for the rest of the free world.
New York Mayor and his tenant advocate Cea Weaver (if I were President Trump, I’d probably dub her Cryin’ Cea) have different ideas on how to remake the world. The New York Post has an exclusive on Ms. Weaver’s heretofore unpublicized plan to tank the capitalist housing market:
Footage of Weaver’s past controversial remarks are among the latest to go explode on social media ever since Mamdani tapped the 37-year-old to be his new director of the city Office to Protect Tenants.
“We decided that fighting for rent control was a strategic and critical first step in the fight for full social housing,” she said in a newly resurfaced clip that is going viral on X.
She went on to argue, though, that a push for regulation could potentially “strike a blow to the entire real estate industry at once” by challenging housing as a wealth-building tool.
Looks as if after oral arguments on Tuesday, the Supreme Court is leaning towards preserving women’s sports for—uh—women. Brendan O’Neill of Spiked Online notices the Orwellian logic that led to the Court’s deliberations:
If any kid in the future asks me how nuts things were in the 21st century, I’ll tell them Sharron Davies once had to go to Washington, DC to explain what a woman is. Yes, a British Olympian, one of our national treasures, had to fly 3,700 miles to remind the world that people with penises are men. There she was, on the steps of the US Supreme Court, telling a crowd that people who’ve been through male puberty – ie, blokes – should not play in women’s sports. What a time to be alive!
But can people with penises get pregnant? An OBGYN doc pushed back on this question, refusing to answer when Senator Josh Hawley posed it at a Senate hearing.
You can’t make this stuff up. Most hated mother in America, Casey Anthony, has called the “Minneapolis ICE shooting a crime and ripped Veep Vance for protecting ‘Gestapo’ agents.”
Anyone who’s ever lost a pet must read Karl Rove’s touching “A Good Dog Meets His Maker” today in the WSJ.
