Maybe if he threw in a couple of Hunter paintings as part part of the deal

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Joe Biden ‘having trouble booking gigs’ with $300K per speech asking price 

WASHINGTON —

Former President Joe Biden’s attempt to bill $300,000 per speaking appearance is finding few takers, The Post has learned — as some of his own former aides say it’s time for the 82-year-old to leave the spotlight for good after reminiscing about “colored kids” Tuesday in his first public address since leaving office.

A source familiar with Biden’s faltering speaking career said that the 46th president’s standard pitch is $300,000 — 25% below Barack Obama’s $400,000 asking price upon leaving office in 2017.

It’s unclear how negotiable Biden’s rate is.

If travel is required, a private jet and expenses for five staffers also is expected for Biden, who has been repped since leaving office by the Creative Artists Agency.

Union welfare

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The Trump Administration Could Finally Put an End to California's High Speed Rail

Intended to run from Los Angeles to San Francisco and voter-approved for a $30 billion total cost, the project will now be a train from nowhere to nowhere, and the revised estimated cost, surely to be exceeded, is now $100 billion. Governor Noisome and his union supporters want the rest of the country to bail it out; others don’t.

…. [R]ecently we've learned about ongoing funding problems with the project which needs another $7 billion by next summer to keep going.

During a budget hearing focused on transportation in the State Assembly on Wednesday, Helen Kerstein with the California Legislative Analyst's Office told lawmakers the project faces a $7 billion budget gap and the funds need to be secured by next June. If not, Kerstein said it will create yet another delay for plans to finish the project's first segment between Merced and Bakersfield.

"There is no specific plan to meet that roughly $7 billion gap, we also think there is some risk that gap could grow," Kerstein said. "This isn't a way out in the future funding gap. This is a pretty immediate funding gap."

That's a very immediate funding deadline for a rail project that isn't scheduled to be operational this decade. That has led to a call for the state to finally cut its losses on this project.

A new report from the conservative advocacy group Unleash Prosperity calls for an end to federal funding for California's high-speed rail project and for the project's scope to be truncated to protect taxpayers...

"It's been a 25-year boondoggle now and the cost of this was supposed to be roughly $30 billion when the voters approved a referendum for this in California," Steve Moore, economist and co-founder of Unleash Prosperity, told FOX Business in an interview. "The latest estimates are now well over $100 billion, so that's a more than tripling of the cost of this big rail project."...

"The other obvious problem is that the whole idea of the high-speed rail was to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco, two huge metropolitan areas with huge populations. Well, because of a lot of geographical problems with getting through the mountains, they can't do that, so it's not going to start or end in San Francisco. So the ridership, if it ever gets built, is going to be multiples lower than what it was supposed to be when the whole thing was first designed," Moore added.

The Trump administration wants to cut off all future federal funding which means California would have to come up with that money on its own.

The Transportation Department duly began an investigation in February into $4.1 billion in grants awarded under former President Joe Biden, echoing Trump’s efforts in his first term to withdraw a $1 billion grant awarded by the Obama administration.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said during a Wednesday appearance on Fox Business that the Federal Railroad Administration is close to wrapping up the investigation and that if “what many people have reported on is true, we’re gonna pull the funding for this boondoggle endeavor.”

And who does like it?

…. [T]he only group that seems truly happy about this boondoggle are the unions. This has been great for them. They want many more years of over-spending with no end in sight.

Union leaders have made it clear that maintaining high-speed rail’s slice of the pie is their top priority. The project has employed nearly 15,000 union workers since construction started in 2015, more than any other infrastructure undertaking in the country.

“We believe it’s worked extremely well,” said Chris Hannan, president of the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California. “We’d like to see it get reauthorized for a longer period of time to help us have even more vision as we’re building out the state of California.”

I wondered whether Trump/DOGE wasn't acting precipitously here; then I looked up who was running this "bipartisan" organization

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DOGE Strikes Again: Staffers at This Federal Agency Were Just Placed on Leave

Agency staff at AmeriCorps received notices this week that they were being placed on leave "effective immediately." This came after President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) visited the agency's headquarters.

Reportedly, DOGE promised to cut the agency’s workforce “up to 50 percent or more.” When the notices went out, they were sent to hundreds of the agency’s 650 full-time staffers. 

I’m sure the organization has achieved some good things since it was created in 1993, but I also suspect that, like every other federal agency, and it has become bloated and partisan. Slash away.

According to Wikipedia, there are supposed to be a total of 26 directors, 15 of whom are appointed by the President. Of those 8, “no more than 8 may be affiliated withe the same political party”. Nothing in the enabling language says there must be members of another political party, so I suppose that, technically, the rules are being complied with by simply leaving some seats vacant. But the results are exactly what you’d expect for this type of organization.

The Greenwich gift that keeps on giving

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TayTay was on Hannity last night. Even the 30 seconds I wasted on it isn’t worth your attention, so I’m not posting it here. But this guy’s question is pretty good:

"But who will make our linoleum? Pick our fruit? Empty our bedpans?”"

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This is why we can’t have nice things — thanks, you orange-headed bastard!

Georgia Factory Used Forced Labor of Trafficked Chinese Migrants

Federal officials said that around 60 Chinese nationals were being held in tiny rooms and forced to work long hours in the flooring manufacturing plant.

At least our Democrats and their flying monkeys on the bench are doing there best to bring Kilmar back so he can resume supplying sex slaves*, but man does not live by prostitutes alone; what about all our other needs and wants that must be met, tasks American citizens and legally documented workers won’t do for cheap? As Representative Jaypal has noted, if illegals aren’t around to pick our vegetables, collect garbage, clean bathrooms and care for old people at subminimum wages, we’d all have to either pay much more money or live in soiled diapers as we slowly sank into a sea of trash and starved to death.

Hank, “Tip Over Guam” Johnson shares his pal Jay’s concern: In addition to his fear that too many illegals lined up at the border will cause Texas to slide into the Rio Grande, he frets that, without Biden’s Army, strawberries will rot on the ground and bedpans will overflow.

Georgia Rep. Hank Johnson, a Democrat, said Wednesday that immigrants "coming across" the border are needed in America for construction efforts, to "put food on our table," and to clean up hospitals.

"We would have nobody taking care of the building, the construction of our homes," he added. "We wouldn't have anybody cleaning up in the hospitals….”

Projection much?

Moments earlier, Johnson said Republicans enjoy seeing immigrants "lined up at the border because they know that's a stream of labor ready to be exploited with cheap, if any, compensation."

"I mean, if you could get back to slavery you would gladly do so," Johnson told the Republicans on the committee. "But if you could pay people $1 an hour, you'd settle for that. That's the race to the bottom that we have with immigrants lined up at the border and trying to get in and go to work."

Nancy Box Wine agrees:

PELOSI SAYS FARMERS NEED ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS ‘TO PICK THE CROPS’ IN FLORIDA

* Related story about the Left’s new poster child, the wife beating MS-13er Kilmar Abrego

Biden’s FBI Ordered TN Highway Patrol to Release ‘Maryland Man’ Recently Deported to El Salvador After He Was Detained in 2022 Traffic Stop on Suspicion of Human Trafficking

The Tennessee Star learned on Wednesday that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an alleged member of the Central American gang Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) who was deported to El Salvador under President Donald Trump amid legal action claiming the removal was by mistake, was suspected of being engaged in human trafficking by a Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP) officer who detained him in December 2022, leading the THP to contact the FBI for guidance. Within two hours, the FBI ultimately requested the THP release Garcia and the passengers in his vehicle. THP complied with the request.

The Star learned from sources familiar with the incident that Abrego Garcia was stopped for an unknown reason on December 6, 2022, and that the THP officer responsible for the stop immediately discovered Abrego Garcia was transporting seven passengers, with eight individuals inside the vehicle.

During a nearly two-hour traffic stop, the THP officer determined that Abrego Garcia (pictured above) was operating the vehicle without a valid driver’s license and began searching for information about him.

One source told The Star that THP ultimately discovered Abrego Garcia was on a terrorist watch list, but could not locate Abrego Garcia on a deportation list. Another source told The Star that THP did not discover Abrego Garcia on a terrorist watch list but that another one of the seven passengers in the vehicle may have been on a terrorist watch list.

THP subsequently called the FBI, which was then led by former Director Christopher Wray under the Biden administration. The FBI instructed the THP officers at the scene to capture photographs of all eight people in the vehicle and document its contents.

Once the photographs were captured, this source told The Star that the FBI requested THP release all eight individuals and that the THP officers complied with this request.

The Star learned that the circumstances of the stop made the THP officer responsible for the stop concerned that Abrego Garcia was engaged in human trafficking, but that Abrego Garcia and his passengers were nonetheless released at the request of the FBI.

Justice Pusillanimous

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By David Strom, who is always worth reading:

The Irony of Chief Justice Roberts' Caution

John Roberts is famously reluctant to make sweeping, final decisions that will rock the boat. 

It's not that he hasn't allowed a few such decisions to occur--abortion being one case--but as a rule, Roberts is famously cautious about rocking the boat, preferring the most incrementalist approach with decisions tailored to make rulings as narrow as possible. The goal, writ large, appears to be husbanding the fragile credibility of the court by keeping it as far away as humanly possible from controversial political issues--an impossible task given the Court's position in the grand scheme of government--and when forced to make decisions to rule as narrowly as possible. 

The problem is that in normal times, the cases that come to the court are often highly divisive political issues--the tough cases requiring the tough calls--and in times like these, when lawfare is the rule of the day, the Chief Justice's role requires herding the judicial cats and slapping down District Court Judges who seem to believe that they are more important and powerful than the President of the United States. 

Liberal activists have been judge-shopping, finding radical judges willing to impose outrageous nationwide rulings on issues over which any sane person understands they have no jurisdiction. The most outrageous case, of course, is Judge Boasberg's fight with the Justice Department, which has been elevated to the point where he is threatening to put Justice Department officials in jail for contempt. 

[Rest of the post]

NONE of that case law deals with a contest between two branches of the federal government where the Exec. has been dragged into Court without jurisdiction, the court does not appropriately establish that it has jurisdiction, and the court then issues an unlawful order directing the Executive branch to act in a particular manner.

SCOTUS is going to need to defuse this bomb that Judge Boasberg has started the timer on.

Strom (continued):

If we abstract from the details of the case and go to the heart of the matter--the balance of power between the Judicial Branch and the Executive--the failure of Roberts to rein in Boasberg becomes clearer. 

No Chief Executive can or will tolerate having District Court Judges have plenary veto power over every decision they make. As a practical matter, this makes the Judiciary the Executive, at least through veto power. Judicial review is a longstanding and important part of our system of government, but it has never been seen as a plenary power. The Courts recognize that they perform a different function than the Executive, and if the Executive exceeds its power, the remedy is rarely preemptive but comes after. 

This is especially true the closer you get to the core powers of the Executive, such as national security. Judges don't get to decide these matters--they defer to the Executive. 

Boasberg and his #resistance compatriots have armed a political nuclear bomb. The more the courts interfere with the core powers of the Executive, the more reasonable it becomes for the Executive to challenge the power of the courts. The Courts, after all, are as bound by the Constitution as the other two branches of government. What has allowed the courts to exercise ENORMOUS power is the faith that they have fealty to the Constitution and their duty to stay in their lane. 

The District Courts have not been staying in their lane. Quite literally, the courts have been violating their own constitutional duties and exceeding their powers. 

This is a disaster because, in principle, judicial review is a good check on the natural excesses of anybody or any Body exercising power. But Judges are no less human than presidents, and they, too, can exceed their powers. 

Roberts is responsible for protecting the Judicial system and the balance of powers by reining in these rogue judges who are trying to blow up the division of powers. 

People have been begging Roberts to do this, not solely because they support Trump (many don't, or at least not always), but because the Judicial Branch's power rests solely on moral authority. Erode that moral authority and you will eventually destroy the foundation of the judiciary's power. 

Roberts should quit pussyfooting. Draw a line in the sand. ….

Related:

A (partial) list of the Federal Judges Thwarting Donald Trump

Published Mar 19, 2025 at 4:14 PM EDT