A Venezuelan military ship entered a major offshore oil and gas field off the coast of Guyana early Saturday, approaching an ExxonMobil contracted vessel, according to Bloomberg. This incident comes days after President Trump canceled a key oil deal with Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela, citing its failure to repatriate an adequate number of illegal aliens from the US.

X user News Source Guyana posted a video showing the armed Venezuelan patrol boat probing the waters around the Exxon contracted ship in the Stabroek Block (Oil & Gas Field). 

News Source: Authorities in Guyana at the Government level and at the level of Exxon Mobil are probing the presence of a Venezuelan Military vessel in Guyana’s waters sailing close to drill ships and other vessels in the Stabroek Block where oil production is taking place. pic.twitter.com/9YsmfWft8X

— News Source Guyana (@newssourcegy) March 1, 2025

The US State Department wrote on X the incident was unacceptable:

“Venezuelan naval vessels threatening ExxonMobil’s floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) unit is unacceptable and a clear violation of Guyana’s internationally-recognized maritime territory. Further provocation will result in consequences for the Maduro regime. The United States reaffirms its support for Guyana’s territorial integrity and the 1899 arbitral award.”

Venezuelan naval vessels threatening ExxonMobil’s floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) unit is unacceptable and a clear violation of Guyana’s internationally-recognized maritime territory. Further provocation will result in consequences for the Maduro regime. The…

— Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs (@WHAAsstSecty) March 1, 2025

Another video of the incident.

Video donde observamos al ABV “Guaiquerí” de la Armada Bolivariana de Venezuela frente a un Buque de perforación petrolera. Posiblemente sea en el Campo “Payara” del bloque “Stabroek” en aguas por delimitar entre Guyana y Venezuela #1Mar #Mimapa https://t.co/8ymmJO0WX9 pic.twitter.com/MdkrOCNNGe

— Mi Mapa de Venezuela incluye nuestro Esequibo (@AntroCanal) March 1, 2025

Exxon discovered Stabroek in 2015. It produces 650,000 barrels daily and is situated in heavily disputed waters with Venezuela.  

Guyana’s President, Irfaan Ali, stated that the Venezuelan military vessel radioed the Exxon-contracted ship, declaring that the area lies within disputed international waters.

“During this incursion, the Venezuelan vessel approached various assets in our exclusive waters, including FPSO Prosperity,” Ali said, referring to one of the Exxon-contracted vessels.

The Organization of American States stated, “Such acts of intimidation constitute a clear violation of international law, undermine regional stability, and threaten the principles of peaceful coexistence between nations,” adding it “unequivocally condemns the recent actions of Venezuelan naval vessels.”

The incident follows Trump’s decision to reverse the concessions of an oil transaction agreement dated Nov. 26, 2022, with Venezuela, citing Maduro’s failure to repatriate enough migrants.

We are hereby reversing the concessions that Crooked Joe Biden gave to Nicolás Maduro, of Venezuela, on the oil transaction agreement, dated November 26, 2022, and also having to do with Electoral conditions within Venezuela, which have not been met by the Maduro regime.…

— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) February 26, 2025

Not a smart move, Maduro. 

Authored by Alastair Crooke,

The bits are falling into a distinct pattern – a pre-prepared pattern.

Defence Secretary Hegseth at the Munich Security Conference gave us four ‘noes’: No to Ukraine in NATO; No to a return to pre-2014 borders; No to ‘Article 5’ peacekeeper backstops, and ‘No’ to U.S. troops in Ukraine. And in a final flourish, he added that U.S. troops in Europe are not ‘forever’ – and even placed a question mark over the continuity of NATO.

Pretty plain speaking! The U.S. clearly is cutting away from Ukraine. And they intend to normalise relations with Russia.

Then, Vice-President Vance threw his fire cracker amongst the gathered Euro-élites. He said that the élites had retreated from “shared” democratic values; they were overly reliant on repressing and censoring their peoples (prone to locking them up); and, above all, he excoriated the European Cordon Sanitaire (‘firewall’) by which European parties outside the Centre-Left are deemed non-grata politically: It’s a fake ‘threat’, he suggested. Of what are you really so frightened? Have you so little confidence in your ‘democracy’?

The U.S., he implied, will no longer support Europe if it continues to suppress political constituencies, arrest citizens for speech offenses, and particularly cancel elections as was done recently in Romania. “If you’re running in fear of your own voters”, Vance said, “there is nothing America can do for you”.

Ouch! Vance had hit them where it hurts.

It is difficult to say what specifically most triggered the catatonic European breakdown: Was it the fear of the U.S. and Russia joining together as a major power nexus – thus stripping Europe from ever again being able glide along on the back of American power, through the specious notion that any European state must have exceptional access to the Washington ‘ear’?

Or was it the ending of the Ukraine/Zelensky cult which was so prized amongst the Euro-élite as the ‘glue’ around which a faux European unity and identity could be enforced? Both probably contributed to the fury.

That the U.S. would in essence leave Europe to their own delusions would be a calamitous event for the Brussels technocracy.

Many may lazily assume that the U.S. double act at Munich was just another example of the well-known Trumpian fondness for dropping ‘wacky’ initiatives intended to both shock and kickover frozen paradigms. The Munich speeches did exactly that all right! Yet that does not make them accidental; but rather parts that fit into a bigger picture.

It is clear now that the Trump blitzkrieg across the American Administrative State could not have been mounted unless carefully pre-planned and prepared over the last four years.

Trump’s flurry of Presidential Executive Orders at the outset of his Presidency were not whimsical. Leading U.S. constitutional lawyer, Johnathan Turley, and other lawyers say that the Orders were well drafted legally and with the clear understanding that legal challenges would ensue. What’s more, that Trump Team welcome those challenges.

What is going on? The newly confirmed head of the Office of Budget Management (OBM), Russ Vought, says his Office will become the “on/off switch” for all Executive expenditure under the new Executive Orders. Vought calls the resulting whirlpool, the application of Constitutional radicalism. And Trump has now issued the Executive Order that reinstates the primacy of the Executive as the controlling mechanism of government.

Vaught, who was in OBM in Trump 01, is carefully selecting the ground for all-out financial war on the Deep State. It will be fought out firstly at the Supreme Court – which the Trump Team expect confidently to win (Trump has the 6-3 conservative majority). The new régime will then be applied across all agencies and departments of state. Expect shrieks of pain.

The point here is that the Administrative State – aloof from executive control – has taken to itself prerogatives such as immunity to dismissal and the self-awarded authority to shape policy – creating a dual state system, run by unelected technocrats, which, when implanted in departments such as Justice and the Pentagon, have evolved into the American Deep State.

Article Two of the Constitution however, says very bluntly: Executive power shall be vested in the U.S. President (with no ifs or buts at all.) Trump intends for his Administration to recover that lost Executive power. It was, in fact, lost long ago. Trump is re-claiming too, the Executive’s right to dismiss ‘servants of the State’, and to ‘switch off’ wasteful expenditure at his discretion, as part of a unitary executive prerequisite.

Of course, the Administrative State is fighting back. Turley’s article is headlined: They Are Taking Away Everything We Have: Democrats and Unions Launch Existential Fight. Their aim has been to cripple the Trump initiative through using politicised judges to issue restraint orders. Many mainstream lawyers believe Trump’s Unitary Executive claim to be illegal. The question is whether Congress can stand up Agencies designed to act independently of the President; and how does that square with the separation of powers and Article Two that vests unqualified executive power with one sole elected official – the U.S. President.

How did the Democrats not see this coming? Lawyer Robert Barnes essentially says that the ‘blitzkrieg’ was “exceptionally well-planned” and had been discussed in Trump circles since late 2020. The latter team had emerged from within a generational and cultural shift in the U.S.. This latter had given rise to a Libertarian/Populist wing with working class roots who often had served in the military, yet had come to despise the Neo-con lies (especially those of 9/11) that brought endless wars. They were animated more by the old John Adams adage that ‘America should not go abroad in search of monsters to slay’.

In short, they were not part of the WASP ‘Anglo’ world; they came from a different Culture that harked back to the theme of America as Republic, not as Empire. This is what you see with Vance and Hegseth – a reversion to the Republican precept that the U.S. should not become involved in European wars. Ukraine is not America’s war.

The Deep State, it seems, were not paying attention to what a posse of ‘populist’ outliers, tucked away from the rarefied Beltway talking shop, were up to: They (the outliers) were planning a concerted attack on the Federal expenditure spigot – identified as the weak spot about which a Constitutional challenge could be mounted that would derail – in its entirety – the expenditures of the Deep State.

It seems that one aspect to the surprise has been the Trump Team’s discipline: ‘no leaks’. And secondly, that those involved in the planning are not drawn from the preeminent Anglo-sphere, but rather from a strand of society that was offended by the Iraq war and which blames the ‘Anglo-sphere’ for ‘ruining’ America.

So Vance’s speech at Munich was not disruptive – merely for the sake of being disruptive; he was, in fact, encouraging the audience to recall early Republican Values. This was what is meant by his complaint that Europe had turned away from “our shared values” – i.e. the values that animated Americans seeking escape from the tyranny, prejudices and corruption of the Old World. Vance was (quite politely) chiding the Euro-élites for backsliding to old European vices.

Vance implicitly was hinting too, that European conservative libertarians should emulate Trump and act to slough-off their ‘Administrative States’, and recover control over executive power. Tear down the firewalls, he advised.

Why? Because he likely views the ‘Brussels’ Technocratic State as nothing other than a pure offshoot to the American Deep State – and therefore very likely to try to torpedo and sink Trump’s initiative to normalise relations with Moscow.

If these were Vance’s instincts, he was right. Macron almost immediately summoned an ‘emergency meeting’ of ‘the war party’ in Paris to consider how to frustrate the American initiative. It failed however, descending reportedly into quarrelling and acrimony.

It transpired that Europe could not gather a ‘sharp-end’ military force greater than 20,-000-30,000 men. Scholtz objected in principle to their involvement; Poland demurred as a close neighbour of Ukraine; and Italy stayed silent. Starmer, however, after Munich, immediately rang Zelensky to say that Britain saw Ukraine to be on an irrevocable path to NATO membership – thus directly contradicting U.S. policy and with no support from other states. Trump will not forget this, nor will he forget Britain’s former role in supporting the Russiagate slur during his first term in office.

The meeting did however, underline Europe’s divisions and impotence. Europe has been sidelined and their self-esteem is badly bruised. The U.S. would in essence leave Europe to their own delusions, which would be calamitous for the Brussels autocracy.

Yet, far more consequential than most of the happenings of the past few days was when Trump, speaking with Fox News,after attending Daytona, dismissed Zelensky’s canard of Russia wanting to invade NATO countries. “I don’t agree with that; not even a little bit”, Trump retorted.

Trump does not buy into the primary lie intended as the glue which holds this entire EU geo-political structure together. For, without the ‘Russia threat’; without the U.S. believing in the globalist linchpin lie, there can be no pretence of Europe needing to prepare for war with Russia. Europe ultimately will have to come to reconcile its future as a periphery in Eurasia.

Authored by Stephen Soukup via American Greatness,

This past week, the venerable Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator for The Financial Times, used his column to declare the Trump administration and, by extension, the United States “the enemy of the West.” “Today,” Wolf wrote, “autocracies [are] increasingly confident,” and “the United States is moving to their side.” According to the subhead on the column, “Washington has decided to abandon…its postwar role in the world.” Meanwhile, Wolf cites the (in his estimation) august Franklin Roosevelt, as he complains that the United States “has decided instead to become just another great power, indifferent to anything but its short-term interests.”

The ironies here—as well as the historical ignorance—abound.

To start, one would imagine that Wolf, an educated man with two degrees from Oxford, might know that it was his countryman (and two-time Prime Minister), Henry John Temple (i.e. Lord Palmerston), who declared in a speech in the House of Commons that “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” Wolf might also be expected to know that this statement was repeated—more famously and more pithily—by Henry Kissinger, perhaps the quintessential American diplomat in the supposedly vaunted postwar order. Kissinger, like Palmerston and Trump (apparently) understood that a nation that pursues anything other than its interests is foolish, faithless, and, in time, doomed.

What bothers Wolf, it would seem, is that American interests are diverging from British and continental European interests. That is unfortunate, but it is also more than likely the case that this divergence is the result of Britain and Europe’s abandonment of the principles, values, and ambitions the allies once shared, rather than the other way around. For example, Wolf criticizes the speech given by J.D. Vance in which the vice president defended the traditional American dedication to free speech and attacked the British and European rejection of that principle. Yet again, Wolf might be expected to know that the American preoccupation with this and all other negative rights is something the nation’s Founders inherited from their British forefathers. If the two nations now differ on the importance of this fundamental right, then that’s hardly Vance’s, Trump’s, or any other American’s fault.

More ironies are found in Wolf’s praise of the now-dying postwar order and his citation of FDR as the architect of that order. While Wolf is correct that Roosevelt was one of two Americans most responsible for the creation of the postwar order, he is wrong in believing that the order was virtuous by design and that it played out precisely as Roosevelt intended. Indeed, he couldn’t be more wrong if he tried.

Almost from the moment the United States entered World War II, Roosevelt was planning how best to achieve the goal he inherited from his former boss and Progressive predecessor, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson’s goal, of course, was “global governance” under the League of Nations, a goal that the U.S. Senate, mercifully, denied him. Regrettably, Roosevelt shared Wilson’s dream. The political scientist and historian of the Cold War, Amos Perlmutter, wrote that Roosevelt’s “vision for a postwar world was neo-Wilsonian, totally at odds with reality. He would help create a new international order, presided over in an equal partnership by the two emerging superpowers, the United States and the USSR, and buttressed by the newly created world organization, the United Nations.” Like Wilson, Roosevelt sought to fix the world by bringing the whole of it under the control of a handful of its most benevolent and brilliant men—himself included, naturally.

The catch, of course, was that in order to believe that he could effectuate his plan for the postwar global order, Roosevelt also had to believe that it would be received positively by the man who turned out to be the most proficient mass murderer in the war, Josef Stalin. Remarkably, Roosevelt did, in fact, believe just that. He repeatedly told his staff and others that he was convinced that the man he affectionately called “Uncle Joe” would eagerly welcome his friendship and American entreaties to share governance of the world jointly. They would, he believed, be the closest of allies and the best of friends. In 1943, before ever even meeting Stalin, FDR told his first ambassador to the USSR, William Bullit, that “I have just a hunch that Stalin doesn’t want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world democracy and peace.”

Roosevelt approached the end of the war and Yalta in the same state of delusion. He went, hat in hand, to beg Stalin to join him in his plan to rule the world together as the benevolent co-victors and co-representatives of the triumphant political left. As history shows, Roosevelt gave Stalin everything he wanted at Yalta, in the vain hope that the two could be friends and work together. History also shows that FDR was never disabused of this fantasy and, as a result, set about trying to put it in place.

To this end, Roosevelt put his best men on the job of ensuring the creation—and the successful ratification by the Senate—of the United Nations. Among these best men were his Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and an aide on whom Roosevelt relied heavily while at Yalta, the director of the Office of Special Political Affairs, a man named Alger Hiss.

Many years of work went into creating the United Nations and planning its charter, and many prominent Americans—including Stettinius and Dulles—had tremendous input into the documents.  In the end, though, it was Hiss, the Soviet spy, who ensured that the United Nations was born. Hiss was the primary author of the United Nations Charter and attended the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco as part of the official American delegation headed by Senator Arthur Vandenberg. Among other things, Hiss was tasked with ensuring Vandenberg’s support and compliance—both in endorsing the U.N. Charter at the conference in San Francisco and then shepherding it successfully through the Senate ratification process.

The United Nations was the most critical step in transforming the world at the end of the war. But it was only the first step. For the better part of a century, the leftist secular intellectuals and the Utopian pietists colluded to push the notion of “global governance” on an unwilling and uninterested globe. In 1945, however, with the Utopians victorious in the West and murderous but canny cynics victorious in the East, the Wilsonian-pietist dream at last became a reality. The entire postwar period—from Roosevelt’s attempts to court Stalin at Yalta and beyond to the establishment of the United Nations, the World Bank, and International Monetary Fund; from Truman’s speech on the Greek crisis to the formulation of the policy of containment; from the war in Korea to the Marshall Plan—is perhaps best understood as the story the American Left’s attempts to nurture and encourage world government, and to consolidate power under beneficent American leadership.

This world order—which inarguably produced the wars in Korea and Vietnam and arguably contributed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—is the world order Trump and Vance are supposedly abandoning and which Martin Wolf wishes so desperately to preserve.

I can’t say with any degree of certainty that any new, new world order will be particularly grand, but I can say that the old, new world order was, at best, a happy accident that only nearly resulted in the nuclear destruction of the entire planet – and which might not be so lucky next time.

Not all people who are attracted to government employment are searching for a cushy job with limited work load and even less oversight, but most aren’t working for agencies like the IRS, ATF or USAID because of patriotic duty.  In reality, federal bureaucrats act as if they’ve found a cheat code to life.  And until the arrival of Elon Musk’s DOGE audits, that assumption was generally true.   

As Dan Aykroyd’s character Ray Stantz notes in the movie Ghostbusters: 

“Personally, I liked working for the university. They gave us money and facilities. We didn’t have to produce anything. You’ve never been out of college. You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector … they expect results!”

For decades it’s been a running joke that government employees do very little while collecting a generous paycheck.  For American taxpayers, however, the joke’s not so funny.  DOGE audits have exposed considerable waste and fraud within the system.  Apologist in the media argue that most of this information was available to anyone willing to look, but this is a misrepresentation of the bigger problem. 

Until recently no one had collated spending data in way that is easy for the average American to reference and track.  In fact, digging up this information is made as frustrating as possible, likely to dissuade people from investigating for themselves.  The Government Accountability Office doesn’t do it; if anything they pretend to scrutinize various agencies while covering for their mismanagement.  When it comes to government waste the phrase that leaps to mind is “hidden in plain sight”.  

“Waste” and “fraud” are the only words to describe the situation with federal employment – In 2024 there were over 3 million workers, the most since 1994, collecting around $270 billion annually (including benefits).  Federal supervisors are incentivized to give average to outstanding employee performance reviews in order to avoid employee and union backlash, as well as negative attention for their department.  It is often noted that government work has bred a culture of “conflict avoidance”.  In other words, merit is not their top priority.

In the past various establishment media outlets have admitted to this trend.  The Washington Post in 2016 noted that only 0.1% of federal employees ever get a negative performance review.

In 2013 the Government Accountability Office was tasked to review federal performance management systems across the 24 CFO Act agencies. After reviewing OPM data for calendar year, the GAO reported that more than 99% of non-Senior Executive Service employees received a rating of fully successful or higher.  This is simply not credible.

If anything, federal workers should be subject to more scrutiny and should have to present tangible results on a regular basis.  The GAO’s data was ignored because that’s how the GAO works, and the easy security of federal employment continued without disruption.  This is why the actions of DOGE are triggering government workers so hard – They have never faced true meritocracy before. 

Many of them have never worked in the private sector and don’t understand that they are in fact subject to review and to firing if they don’t meet the standards of their employers (the American people).  They think they are untouchable.  They think performance reviews are tyranny.  They think they shouldn’t have to answer to anyone.

Government employee compares replying to an email to “what I imagine living in North Korea to be like” pic.twitter.com/XDbDw9YJe1

— Ana Mostarac (@anammostarac) February 27, 2025

The level of panic and indignant behavior among fed workers over a simple email from DOGE asking “what they accomplished last week” tells us everything we need to know about the bureaucrat culture.  The email, which should take anyone 10 minutes to answer, is treated as “harassment” and a “distraction” from their work.

Federal worker says she got behind on all her work because she was “threatened and harassed” by the simple email asking for 5 tasks she completed that week.
pic.twitter.com/0hxmWcNO2v

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 28, 2025

Keep in mind, the email was not necessarily meant to act as a performance indicator; it was a test to see who responds and who does not.  The people who refused to respond simply outed themselves as a potential problem to be removed later.  For those that are being fired for poor performance the claim of “outstanding reviews” under the previous administration don’t hold water.  As noted, it’s proven that the government maintains a participation trophy culture – Everyone is a winner no matter how incompetent. 

The concept of meritocracy is so alien to the federal system that basic job requirements common to almost every company in the country are seen as acts of abuse.  Add in the freak show of DEI hiring and you have a recipe for financial disaster. 

It’s not unfair to compare the waste within the government to the waste at the original Twitter.  Musk eliminated 80% of twitter staff after purchasing the platform and the company actually functioned better without them.  We will probably see the same results with the federal system over time. 

Authored by Robert Gore via StraightLineLogic.com,

The best way to understand Trump is also the simplest: he’s a businessman. From that perspective, little of what he’s doing is as inexplicable or surprising as many make it out to be. The inexplicability arises from general ignorance of business. Most Americans have little knowledge or understanding of how private American businesses work, although they generates the majority of the U.S.’s $29 trillion GDP and employ many of them.

Trump is now CEO of the federal government. That enterprise has over $36 trillion in direct liabilities and unfunded liabilities in the hundreds of trillions. Its cost of credit is rising and debt service is taking an ever-expanding share of its revenues. Self evidently, it cannot continue on its present course.

The common element of successful business turnarounds is that they don’t emerge from slow, incremental changes from within the system. Somebody comes in and administers shock therapy. Turnaround artists are never popular. Lots of people are fired, unprofitable operations discarded, finances tightened, business philosophies rethought, and the company’s direction radically reset. Because the company’s situation is dire, this all has to be done quickly, with shareholders howling and creditors pounding at the door.

It begins with the numbers. In failing enterprises, they often reek of falsification, self-dealing, and corruption. You analyze the numbers and you keep asking questions until you uncover the real answers. What Musk and DOGE are doing would be standard operating procedure in a comparable business situation; indeed Musk did the same thing when he took over Twitter. Applied to government, it’s considered revolutionary, but how many politicians or bureaucrats have ever run a business?

That the Department of Defense has never passed an audit and the Federal Reserve tenaciously resists one tells you all you need to know about the government’s numbers. Finding the “anomalies” is like shooting fish in a barrel. Resolving them invariably uncovers sordid secrets. Secrecy is the decaying dreck that feeds swamp corruption. Publicly, swamp creatures are screaming about “democracy” and DOGE access to the government’s sacred information. Privately, they’re checking into overseas bank accounts, defense attorneys, and realtors while updating their LinkedIn profiles.

There are valid security, cybersecurity, and legal, even Constitutional, concerns about the way DOGE is operating that would not be present in a business situation. DOGE’s victims can be counted on to litigate these issues and courts may well impose restrictions. There will also be pushback from within the bureaucracy, even from Trump appointees. Kash Patel has already told FBI employees not to file Musk’s what-I-did-last-week emails. Courts and pushback could derail the project, in which case, revolution would be the only avenue left to defeat the Blob.

At Twitter, Musk fired 80 percent of the workforce, reflecting business wisdom that 20 percent of any workforce does 80 percent of the work. For government, those figures should be revised to 10 and 90. However, is any of the work useful? It’s often counterproductive, producing results contrary to its stated purpose. Government-declared wars on poverty, drugs, and terror produced more impoverishment, drug-addiction, and terrorists, wasting billions. Those “war fighting” agencies and many others should be terminated.

Trump has decided that Operation Ukraine must be terminated. The sunk cost fallacy—throwing good money after bad—has cost the U.S. government trillions, particularly in its military endeavors. The fallacy justifies future spending, and in the case of the military, more destruction and death, on a failing project (like Afghanistan) by citing money already spent and lives already lost—sunk costs. Those costs are irrelevant in deciding whether to continue a project; only the probability of future success matters.

Businesspeople who throw good money after bad go bankrupt. They don’t have fiat money or tax dollars to perpetuate their mistakes. Trump’s not going to throw more money down the Ukrainian rathole. He’s talking about cutting the military budget in half, and the only way to do that is to forego these forever fiascos. The money already spent on Ukraine cries out for an illuminating line-by-line audit. If it happens, watch the cockroaches scatter, including the Bidens and the Clintons.

It appears that Trump and team have decided that unipolarity—the foreign affairs equivalent of monopoly—must give way to multipolarity—the foreign affairs equivalent of oligopoly. As a businessman, Trump undoubtedly prefers monopoly, but reality requires recognition of competitors who are too big to eliminate.

Trump now acknowledges Russia as a peer oligopolist, and obviously, so, too, is China (see “Russia and China Are Facts of Life,” SLL, 1/28/25). It’s always a risk trying to guess Trump’s thinking. However, he apparently wants to settle the ugly Ukraine business quickly and get on with the three-party oligopoly in which the oligopolists sometimes cooperate and sometimes compete—hopefully economically and diplomatically, not militarily. Blood, as businessman Virgil Sollozzo noted in The Godfather, is a big expense. Oligopoly may well have been Trump’s thinking back in his first term (see “The Eagle, the Dragon, and the Bear,” SLL, 6/21/18). However, the Russiagate hoax prevented him from even making overtures in that direction.

Everyone else, including Europe, will be second- or third-tier, although jockeying for markets and securing favorable arrangements for extracting resources will be important aspects of oligopolistic competition. Like many oligopolies, there will be a territorial dimension. Without admitting it, Trump will cede Eurasia to China and Russia while shoring up the U.S. base in North and South America. That may be the thinking behind Trump’s rhetoric concerning Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal. Africa and the poles will be open territory over which the oligopolists will compete.

The Middle East and Israel have bedeviled presidents since Truman. If it had no oil, the Middle East would be a desert backwater, an oxymoron. The U.S. has plenty of oil and natural gas. It could buy Middle East oil when prices were favorable and otherwise stay out of the region. However, there is the relationship with Israel, which gets far more from it than the U.S. That’s intolerable from a business perspective, but it’s a political necessity for Trump. The relationship could destroy Trump’s presidency if the two countries wage war on Iran. Given Iran’s ties with Russia and China, such a war could escalate to World War III.

While Trump’s business perspective brings fresh thinking and some honesty to government, there are times when it’s grossly inappropriate. Since 1948, Palestinians have been squeezed into ever-smaller areas in the land formerly known as Palestine, and it’s clear that Netanyahu and Trump want them completely evicted. Getting rid of them and turning Gaza into a luxury beach resort may have a cold-blooded business logic to it, but it’s a patently unjust solution for the Palestinian “problem.” The Trump Gaza video recently released on Truth Social is beyond grotesque.

Back at home, Trump and many Americans understand that the U.S. government is a rathole. Indeed, it’s been common knowledge since Roosevelt’s New Deal, which turned a recession into a Great Depression on the moronic mantras that government bureaucrats are omniscient and government spending is the key to prosperity. Unfortunately, the average American has no power to force the government to disclose information or change its ways. Turnarounds are top-down affairs, which is why so much hope rests on Trump, Musk, and DOGE.

You can’t cut costs to prosperity; successful turnarounds require new revenues. In the case of a government turnaround that doesn’t mean government finds new ways to soak the productive private economy. It means government gets out of the way and lets entrepreneurs, capitalism, and markets do their revenue- and wealth-generating thing. Laws, regulations, and bureaucratic extortion are barnacles encrusting the U.S.S. Economy, stopping it dead in the water. Neither inflation-adjusted private-sector incomes nor the real economy have grown in years. (The public sector has made out nicely, though.)

If Trump and Musk fire government employees, but thousands of laws and regulations aren’t blowtorched, their efforts will come to naught. Legislation drafted by the ignorant stifles industries they don’t understand. Many businesspeople have to “politely” explain to regulators the business they presume to regulate.

That their taxes pay the salaries of these parasites, often with additional “taxes” levied under the table, compounds the absurd injustice. Large, connected, crony-socialistic enterprises can absorb the costs, gaming the system to subsidize themselves and stifle the competition. Ultimately, it’s the much-heralded but much-abused entrepreneurs and small businesses who are crushed. Europe has snuffed out its innovation and economic dynamism almost entirely. The U.S. is well down the same path.

Unfortunately, Trump wants the government to “help” business instead of simply getting out of its way. Business will supposedly thrive behind tariff walls, but its going to be the large, crony-socialistic enterprises that benefit. Trump’s Stargate project will throw half a trillion dollars at well-heeled Silicon Valley outfits to develop AI. China’s DeepSeek and Musk’s latest iteration of Grok has made Stargate obsolete before it spends its first dollar. The one thing Trump and team can do that will help all business is slash spending, reducing the government’s drain on the economy and the national debt’s upward pressure on interest rates.

Honest, successful businesspeople—and the U.S. still has plenty—must deal with reality. They have to produce a good or service at a cost less than what the market will pay for it. The miracle of profit propels production and progress. Yet, it’s the villain in the unreal worlds of government, academia, and mainstream media and entertainment, none of which would survive a day if somebody out there wasn’t generating profit. America is built on profit, not politics. General recognition of that fact would restore some sanity in what’s loftily called the “national discourse.”

The business of America has been and must be business. Trump can’t elucidate an Ayn Rand-type defense for the morality of free enterprise, production, and profit. However, he realizes that the productive element of society is supporting its own parasitic destroyers. Nor can he elucidate a John Quincy Adams-type defense of a foreign policy in which America minds its own business. However, he apparently recognizes that the empire cannot be sustained.

It remains to be seen if Trump and team can turn around America at home and abroad. They’re taking on a powerful Overclass that produces far less than it takes, destroys far more than it creates, and will fight tooth-and-nail to preserve its sinecures. One thing is clear. Without recognition of hard realities and a dramatic turnaround, America’s government will go the way of other failing enterprises that couldn’t change course, sooner rather than later.

A week after the Trump administration fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and five more senior Pentagon officers, another head rolled on Friday as the three-star commander of the Defense Health Agency (DHA) retired — with sources telling Reuters that retirement was forced on her. 

As DHA commander, US Army Lt. Gen. Telita Crosland oversaw a vast medical system serving more than 9.5 million service members, retirees and family members around the world via more than 700 hospitals and clinics with a staff of more than 130,000 service members, civilian employees and contractors.  

News of her sudden retirement broke Friday morning, with acting Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Stephen Ferrara notifying DHA service members and civilian employees. In an email obtained by ZeroHedge, he wrote:  

“This morning, Army Lieutenant General (LTG) Dr. Telita Crosland, the fourth Director of the Defense Health Agency (DHA), is beginning her retirement. I want to thank LTG Crosland for her dedication to the nation, to the Military Health System, and to Army Medicine for the past 32 years. I have designated Dr. David Smith, the Acting Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, as the Acting Director of the DHA while the Department conducts the normal nomination process.”

On Friday evening, Reuters was first to confirm universal suspicions that Crosland’s sudden retirement wasn’t her idea, with both a current and former official saying she was ordered to retire. The officials, spoke to the news agency on condition of anonymity, said she was not given a reason for being pushed out of the military after a career spanning more than 30 years. A West Point graduate who started her Army service as a Medical Corps officer in 1993, Crosland was given the DHA command after serving as the Army’s Deputy Surgeon General. 

While specific reasons for Crosland’s retirement have yet to surface, leftists were quick to race to their own predictable, knee-jerk conclusions. Here’s a sampling from the r/fednews subreddit, which is the center of the universe for federal employees wailing about Trump’s shrinking and restructuring of the US government workforce: 

• “She had too much honor and integrity for this administration, so they shoved her aside for a nice, obedient white man.”
•  “She is far too not a white man.”
• “Anyone still pretending these aren’t racist fascists are fools.”
• “One more racially-motivated dismissal.”
• She definitely was removed for being a POC and a female.” 

Crosland’s forced resignation capped a week of momentous moves by the Trump administration vis-a-vis the Pentagon.

• Last Friday brought an extraordinary mass-firing that took out the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff USAF Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., Chief of Naval Operations Adm Lisa Franchetti, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff James Slife, and the judge advocates general of the Army, Navy and Air Force.   
• Wednesday gave us a court filing in which the Department of Defense declared that it’s about to initiate a fast-paced program to ferret out transgender military members and discharge them from the military  

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

Gun owners in the nation’s capital are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the District of Columbia’s ban on magazines with more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

The petition in Hanson v. District of Columbia was docketed, or officially accepted for filing, by the court on Feb. 28. The respondent, the District of Columbia, was directed to file a response by March 31.

The district enacted the Firearms Registration Amendment Act of 2008 after the Supreme Court invalidated the city’s sweeping restrictions on gun ownership in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). In Heller, the nation’s highest court determined that individuals have a right to possess firearms for lawful purposes, including self-defense at home.

The statute made it a felony-level offense to have a magazine that could hold more than 10 rounds. A violation can result in a prison term of three years and a fine of $12,500. District officials say the law is needed to protect the public.

Lead petitioner Andrew Hanson and co-petitioners Tyler Yzaguirre, Nathan Chaney, and Eric Klun, who all have concealed carry pistol licenses in the District of Columbia, possessed magazines holding more than 10 rounds outside D.C. and said they would use their magazines for lawful purposes in the district if the 10-round limit did not apply.

Hanson argues in the petition that the district’s magazine cap is unconstitutional according to a test the Supreme Court articulated in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), which recognized a right to bear arms in public for self-defense.

Weeks after Bruen was decided, the petitioners sued the District of Columbia, asking for a declaration from a federal district court that the magazine cap ran afoul of the Second and Fifth Amendments.

U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras issued an April 2023 decision that denied Hanson’s request to block the law on constitutional grounds. Contreras found that the local law adheres to the U.S. Constitution.

The judge found that the District’s ammo limitation, which was aimed at promoting public safety, was justified. The ban constituted “an attempt to mitigate the carnage of mass shootings in this country.”

“Just as states and the District enacted sweeping laws restricting possession of high-capacity weapons in an attempt to reduce violence during the Prohibition era, so can the District now,” Contreras said.

Hanson appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which on Oct. 29, 2024, voted 2-1 to deny a request for a preliminary injunction against the statute.

“For 15 years, District law enforcement has operated and been resourced with the magazine cap in place,” and an “‘erroneously issued’ preliminary injunction suspending its law could drastically compromise the District’s ability to enforce its magazine cap far into the future” and allow the district to be inundated with large-capacity magazines during the life of the injunction, the court said.

Circuit Judge Justin Walker dissented.

In Heller, Walker said, the Supreme Court determined “that the government cannot categorically ban an arm in common use for lawful purposes.”

“Magazines holding more than ten rounds of ammunition are arms in common use for lawful purposes. Therefore, the government cannot ban them,” Walker wrote.

The Supreme Court should take up the case because the D.C. Circuit Court’s ruling is inconsistent with Heller, which “protects the possession and use of weapons that are ‘in common use at the time,’” according to the petition.

Even though the panel acknowledged that magazines containing 10 or more rounds are “in common use,” it found they were “particularly dangerous” and compared them to fully automatic machine guns.

The petitioners asked the Supreme Court to consider if the Second Amendment “allows a categorical ban on arms that are indisputably common throughout the United States and overwhelmingly used for lawful purposes (generally) and self-defense (specifically).”

Petitioner Yzaguirre, who is president of the Second Amendment Institute, said he’s optimistic about the petition’s prospects.

“It’s time for the Supreme Court to take its next landmark Second Amendment case,” he told The Epoch Times.

“The days of tyrannical elites restricting ‘We the People’ from exercising our God-given rights to self-defense must come to an end,” Yzaguirre said.

The Epoch Times reached out for comment to District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb. No reply was received by publication time.

Authored by Frank Shostack via Mises.org,

According to the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), money is something decided by the state. The MMT regards money as a token. For instance, when an individual places a coat in the cloakroom of a theater, he receives a tin disc or a paper receipt. This receipt or a disc is a proof that the individual is entitled to demand the return of his coat.

According to the MMT, the material used to manufacture the tokens is irrelevant—it can be gold, silver, or any other metal or it can even be paper. Hence, the definition of money, according to the MMT, is what the state decides it is going to be. MMT posits that the value of money is the outcome of the state that forces people to pay taxes with the money tokens that the state has decided upon. The state taxes have to be paid with the money tokens issued by it. The state also has the ability to control the value of money through its declaration of how much it is willing to pay for a certain commodity produced by the private sector.

In the MMT framework, the token money is seen as a receipt on the economy’s resources. A token money held by an individual is regarded as his claim on a portion of resources. Individuals have exchanged goods and services for a receipt given to them by the government. Individuals who have generated goods and services are acknowledged for this by the tokens issued to them by the government.

However, could the sovereign state effectively require individuals to use tokens in the transactions among themselves? Why would anyone accept a fiat-token as a payment simply because the government accepts these tokens as tax payments? To answer these questions, we have to define money.

Defining Money

To establish the definition of money, we have to ascertain how a money-using economy evolved. Money emerged as a result of the fact that barter could not support a complex, modern market economy. The distinguishing characteristic of money is that it functions as the general medium of exchange. It has evolved from the most marketable commodity. On this Rothbard wrote,

“… just as in nature there is a great variety of skills and resources, so there is a variety in the marketability of goods. Some goods are more widely demanded than others, some are more divisible into smaller units without loss of value, some more durable over long periods of time, some more transportable over large distances. All of these advantages make for greater marketability. It is clear that in every society, the most marketable goods will be gradually selected as the media for exchange. As they are more and more selected as media, the demand for them increases because of this use, and so they become even more marketable. The result is a reinforcing spiral: more marketability causes wider use as a medium which causes more marketability, etc. Eventually, one or two commodities are used as general media—in almost all exchanges—and these are called money.”

Money is the thing that all other goods and services are traded for. This fundamental characteristic of money must be contrasted with other goods. For instance, food’s characteristic is that it supplies the necessary sustenance to human beings and people may like the taste. Capital goods’ characteristics is that it permits the expansion of the infrastructure that, in turn, permits the production of a larger quantity of goods and services. Contrary to the MMT, the essence of money has nothing to do with tax payments to the government.

Money functions as a general means of exchange. People pay with goods and services for other goods and services with the help of money. Money facilitates the payments of one good for another good. Also, contrary to the MMT, money is not a claim on resources, but the general medium of the exchange. In his writings Carl Menger raised doubts about the soundness of the view that the origin of money is government proclamation. According to Menger,

“An event of such high and universal significance and of notoriety so inevitable, as the establishment by law or convention of a universal medium of exchange, would certainly have been retained in the memory of man, the more certainly inasmuch as it would have had to be performed in a great number of places. Yet no historical monument gives us trustworthy tidings of any transactions either conferring distinct recognition on media of exchange already in use, or referring to their adoption by peoples of comparatively recent culture, much less testifying to an initiation of the earliest ages of economic civilization in the use of money.”

Mises similarly explains the acceptance of money. In his writings, Mises had shown how the value of money is established. Mises began his analysis by noting that today’s demand for money is determined by yesterday’s purchasing power of money. Consequently, for a given supply of money, today’s purchasing power is established. Yesterday’s demand for money was fixed by the prior day’s purchasing power of money. So, for a given supply of money, yesterday’s price of money was set. The same procedure applies to past periods.

By regressing through time, we will eventually arrive at a point in time when money was just an ordinary commodity where demand and supply set its price. The commodity had an exchange value in terms of other commodities (i.e., its exchange value was established in barter). On the day a commodity becomes money, it already has an established purchasing power or price in terms of other goods. This purchasing power enables us to set the demand for this commodity as money. This process sets its purchasing power on the day the commodity starts to function as money. Once the price of money is established, it serves as input for the establishment of tomorrow’s price of money. It follows then that, without yesterday’s information about the price of money, today’s purchasing power of money cannot be established.

With regards to other goods and services, history is not required to ascertain present prices. A demand for these goods arises on account of the perceived benefits from consuming them. The benefit that money provides is that it can be exchanged for goods and services. Consequently, one needs to know the past purchasing power of money in order to establish today’s demand for it.

Applying the Mises’s framework—also known as the regression theorem—we can infer that it is not possible that money could have emerged as a result of a government decree, government endorsement, or social convention. The theorem shows that money must have emerged as a commodity. According to Rothbard,

“Money is not an abstract unit of account, divorceable from a concrete good; it is not a useless token only good for exchanging; it is not a ‘claim on society’; it is not a guarantee of a fixed price level. It is simply a commodity.”

MMT and Wealth Generation

In the MMT world, where money is generated by the government and—given that the government is able to inflate freely as much money as it requires—then, by implication, the government has command over unlimited amounts of wealth. If the government determines what should be regarded as money and what its value is, this also means that the government dictates the rate of exchanges between money and goods and services. This means that prices are set by the government and bypasses the free market forces. Economic theory shows that such conduct leads to the inefficient use of resources and, in turn, to economic instability and impoverishment.

MMT holds that the role of government policies should be to prevent the emergence of a situation where “idle resources” and unemployment emerge. According to MMT, the key here is to boost the overall demand for goods and services to lift economic growth, eliminate unemployment, and make the full use of resources. This can be achieved by running large budget deficits financed by printing plenty of money. In the MMT world, money printing is not a problem as long as there is unemployment and unutilized resources.

Conclusions

In MMT, money is what the government decides it is. MMT believes that because people are forced to pay taxes with the government’s token money, that the government establishes the value of money. This, in turn, makes it a medium of exchange in the private sector also. Without a freely-established money, it is impossible to form the free rate of exchanges between money and goods and services. Consequently, this makes it impossible to have an efficient allocation of scarce resources. This sets the foundation for economic misery.

Washington, DC, painted “BLACK LIVES MATTER” across two blocks of 16th Street, near the White House, during the 2020 color revolution riots, fueled by radical leftist, taxpayer-funded NGOs. Each of the 16 bold yellow letters spans the width of the two-lane Street, creating a massive display of toxic wokeness—one that House Republicans may soon move to scrub.

“The House Oversight Committee and the Trump Administration are working on delivering a number of reforms to make our nation’s capital safe and end left-wing pet projects. This includes addressing partisan abuses by the District government such as Black Lives Matter Plaza,” House Oversight Committee chair Rep. James Comer (R-Ky) stated, quoted by the New York Post. 

In 2020, painters were contacted by far-left Mayor Muriel Bowser … 

… a few months after BLM riots unleashed color revolution chaos nationwide.

“President Trump has made rooting out woke ideology from the federal government a top priority. The committee declined to say which other projects could be on the chopping block,” NYPost said. 

Let’s not forget that the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation once trumpeted its Marxist desire to dismantle America and war on the nuclear family by saying on its website: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another.” 

“Mayor Bowser and Democrat-run Washington, D.C. are focused on virtue signaling and spending taxpayer money to paint Black Lives Matter instead of the record spike in homicides, carjackings, and other violent crimes,” said Arkansas GOP Sen. Tom Cotton, adding, “Washington DC’s failures are a reminder why the city must never become a state.” 

How Congress plans to override decisions from the local government may fall under the Home Rule Act of 1973. This act was invoked in 2023 when Congress struck down a law passed by the far-left DC city council, which would have weakened maximum penalties for violent crime in the crime-ridden metro area.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

We have previously discussed polling showing the media at record lows in public trust. Well, the latest survey from Gallup shows that the media hit another all-time low. What is most impressive is that plummeting readers, revenues, and layoffs have done little to convince the mainstream media that the problem is not the public but themselves. The only institution with a  lower level of public trust is Congress, and that says a lot. It is like beating Ebola as the preferred communicable disease. Some 69 percent of Americans now say that they have no or little trust in the media. 

Only 31 percent say that they have a great deal or fair amount of trust. The trending line looks like the sales of buggy whips after the introduction of the Model T Ford. Gallop put it into sharp terms:

“About two-thirds of Americans in the 1970s trusted the “mass media — such as newspapers, TV and radio” either “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to “[report] the news fully, accurately and fairly.” By the next measurement in 1997, confidence had fallen to 53%, and it has gradually trended downward since 2003. Americans are now divided into rough thirds, with 31% trusting the media a great deal or a fair amount, 33% saying they do “not [trust it] very much,” and 36%, up from 6% in 1972, saying they have no trust at all in it.”

In my book, The Indispensable Right, I discuss how journalists and journalism schools have destroyed their own profession by rejecting objectivity and engaging in open advocacy journalism. The mainstream media has long echoed the talking points of the left and the Democratic Party, particularly in its one-sided coverage of the last three elections.

While Bob Woodward and others have finally admitted that the Russian collusion coverage lacked objectivity and resulted in false reporting, media figures are pushing even harder against objectivity as a core value in journalism.

We have been discussing the rise of advocacy journalism and the rejection of objectivity in journalism schools. Writers, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including President-elect Joe Biden and his key advisers. This movement includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy.

Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll decried how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation. In an interview with The Stanford Daily, Stanford journalism professor Ted Glasser insisted that journalism needed to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice.” He rejected the notion that journalism is based on objectivity and said that he views “journalists as activists because journalism at its best — and indeed history at its best — is all about morality.”  Thus, “Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”

The Washington Post’s former executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward released the results of their interviews with over 75 media leaders and concluded that objectivity is now considered reactionary and even harmful. Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle said it plainly: “Objectivity has got to go.”

Lauren Wolfe, the fired freelance editor for the New York Times, has not only gone public to defend her pro-Biden tweet but published a piece titled “I’m a Biased Journalist and I’m Okay With That.” 

Former New York Times writer (and now Howard University Journalism Professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones is a leading voice for advocacy journalism. Indeed, Hannah-Jones has declared “all journalism is activism.”

This is why the whole “Let’s Go Brandon” chant was as much a criticism of the media as President Biden.

There is clearly an effort by owners like Jeff Bezos to change this culture rather than bankroll newspapers like the Washington Post vanity projects for the left.

Robert Lewis, a British media executive who joined the Post earlier this year, reportedly got into a “heated exchange” with a staffer. Lewis explained that, while reporters were protesting measures to expand readership, the very survival of the paper was now at stake:

“We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it. It needs turning around,” Lewis said. 

“We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”

The response from staffers was to call for the new editors to be fired.  One staffer complained, “We now have four White men running three newsrooms.” The Post has been buying out staff to avoid mass layoffs, but reporters are up in arms over the effort to turn the newspaper around.

The question is whether viewers and readers can still be brought back into the fold. New media is expanding as citizens have looked elsewhere for news. In the meantime, some media outlets and organizations seem to have doubled down on the bias. Just last year, Washington Post reporter Cleve Wootson Jr. appeared to call upon the White House to censor the interview of Elon Musk with former President Donald Trump. The newspaper did not say a thing about the incongruity of one of its leading reporters calling for censorship.

After Trump was elected, NBC selected Yamiche Alcindor to return to the White House despite a history of alleged bias.  Alcindor, who also worked for PBS, was criticized for often preceding questions with attacks on conservatives or over-the-top praise for Joe Biden or Democrats. While others saw raw political bias, Alcindor explained that it was her job to use journalism to bend the “moral arc toward justice.”

Recently, the White House Correspondent’s Association picked an anti-Trump comedian who promptly encouraged Trump not to come to the dinner, saying that no one wants to be in the same room with him.

In the meantime, “J schools” continue to dismiss objectivity and crank out journalists who are told to embrace activism as the public flees legacy media for new media.

For the moment, it seems like journalists are content to write for each other and about 30 percent of the public. The echo chamber is getting smaller and smaller. So are the staffs on the outlets. Without public trust, the media is just talking to itself as the public turns to citizen journalists and new media on blogs and social media.

As someone who has worked for three networks and written as a columnist for three decades, the decline of American media has been painful to watch. The industry has operated like a ship of fools with no regard for their viewers or readers. However, we need the media. The press plays a central role in our democracy as reflected in the press protections afforded under the First Amendment.

The effort to break this culture at outlets like the Post and L.A. Times is encouraging, but these polls indicate that time is of the essence.

*  *  *

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”