Yard Time: High Noon on Mass. Ave.

By Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell with intern Marissa Gunner '28

CAMBRIDGE Mass. - As Gary Cooper learned in High Noon, it’s not until the varmints ride into town guns blazing that you learn who’s willing to stand with you.

Harvard University and its President, Alan Garber ‘77 must be feeling pretty lonely on the dusty streets of Cambridge.

The assault of Pol Potbelly on the University reached a new height when PP’s cadres decided to terminate $2,000,000,000 of Federal grants to Harvard, including those awarded and underway, in mid- molecule. The toll on science, medicine and future health is incalculably bad, including cutting off research in matters of life and death like cancer treatment and research, tuberculosis, infectious disease, crippling neurological conditions like ALS, and environmental health threats.

Harvard President Alan Garber '77 is feeling lonely

The alleged basis for this train robbery is Harvard’s suppose failure to grapple with anti-Semitism, because some a**holes yelled anti-Semitic slurs at those crossing the Yard right after the Hamas terror attack on October 7, 2023. What constitutes an anti-Semitic slur remains open to interpretation, with some tender Semites claiming that any expression of solidarity with the plight of the over 2,000,000 Gazan civilians being systematically bombed and immiserated by the endless brutal Israeli onslaught is anti-Semitic. Others, including plenty of Jews, note that the endless war appears to be designed to accomplish two goals: saving Bibi Netanyahu’s ass from well-founded corruption charges and cleansing Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants, for which many members of the current Israeli government have long advocated. This is a war crime, by the way.

Further, the extortion letter received by Harvard (supposedly in error) demanded that Harvard remake its academic programs, its admissions standards, and its belief in once uncontroversial virtues such as diversity and inclusion to meet the demanding moral standards of a depraved sex offender who had been found liable for sexually assaulting a woman in a department store dressing room.

Harvard pointed out reasonably enough that such demands would in effect destroy the University by imposing a Cotton Mather-like regime of ideological rigidity on what is supposed to be an enterprise devoted to free inquiry (as long as the tenured faculty does not actually have to speak to grubby undergraduates)

Pot Potbelly’s mouthpieces have even said that Harvard owes the creep an apology, although for what is never stated. Some Harvard researchers have even been locked up without being accused of any crime because they did not properly declare 100 grams of dangerous frog embryos at Logan Airport. Thus promising research into the scourge of pancreatic cancer has been interrupted but at least millions of Americans will be saved from the plague of uncontrolled frog embryos that has decimated our inner cities and Appalachian hollers [Is this right, Marissa? – Ed.] [Will get back to you. Big problem set due! – Marissa].

Not content with illegally withholding earned federal research grants, others of PP’s goons have threatened Harvard illegally with loss of its tax-exempt status, a crushing blow to Harvard’s finances mostly because the rich finaglers who have previously coughed up serious money will no longer be able to deduct their contributions from their already exiguous tax obligations. We'll get back to them presently.

This mortal threat is untainted by any pretense of legality, which will not stop PP’s corrupt henchmen at the IRS from trying. Tax-exempt status is not in fact something handed out in the grace and favor of the demented tyrant; it is something to which Harvard is entitled under law. You remember law, don’t you?

Now a University with $53,000,000,000 in the bank is not without resources, and Harvard can afford to pay and has paid fancy lawyers, including former Republican mouthpieces, to state their case and even sue to stop the depredations.

That massive hoard has led some idiots to ask why Harvard can’t just replace the $2 billion in lost grants with its own money. Two rejoinders suggest themselves to even the most limited intelligence: the endowment money is mostly restricted for certain purposes and cannot simply be reallocated at President Garber’s whim (even though he is a notoriously whimsical fellow).

The second more compelling response is: why the f*** should Harvard have to replace federal money to which it is entitled? That’s not how any of this works.

But you know this. Today we want to see who is and who isn’t standing by Marshal Garber and his pitiful band of deputies as they take on the desperadoes of Merde-a-Lardo in their lonely fight for academic freedom and justice.

Some of the most notorious loudmouths amongst the alumni plutocrats so interested in purging the University of Black women and other mortal threats are conspicuous by their silence. What happened to Bill Ackman, last seen preening at the Nerd Ball as a supposed “celebrity,” with his wife, the best-selling author of Megan Markle's autobiography? Did he lose his X password?

And what of nefarious skillionaire Ken Griffin, who let it be known that he was a harsh critic of Harvard last year but now is content to hold forth on matters nearer and dearer to his wallet, like tariffs? Or Lloyd Blankfein '75, who trousered billions at Goldman Sachs and is apparently much too busy unfolding all those bills to support the college that propelled him to the heights of ill-gotten gains?

Will Marshal Alan ride off into the sunset?

Not to mention other Harvard-connected supposed champions of free speech, at least when it was threatened by the menace of wokeosity — where is Demented Alan Dershowitz? Did he forget to plug in his web camera? And great Constitutional scholar Cancun Ted Cruz?

And with the exception of the Pritzker family, we haven’t heard tickety-boo from the legions of billionaire alumni who like to throw their weight around University Hall. Their press agents will tell you that they prefer to work behind-the-scenes. That’s great, but Marshall Garber needs guns in the streets now, not craven finaglers supposed to be quietly influencing bats*** crazy weirdos like penis cosplayer Stephen Miller and Illegally Blonde Pam Bondi or carnival barkers like Linda “A1” McMahon.

Then we have a few Both-Sides middle grounders like former National Review mouthpiece David French, who regurgitates the old whines about Harvard being dominated by the hard left, by which he means people who vote Democratic.  As Harvard does not inquire of one's party affiliation in admission or faculty hiring, for reasons that must be obvious even to Mr. French, it's hard to know what he thinks Harvard can do about the political choices made by its community.  [We aren't linking to his pisspoor column for policy reasons – Ed.] 

Similarly, insufferable Harvard faculty bloviators like Steven Pinker, having whined for the past two years about their supposed plight, have now learned that that there are worse things than hearing snarky remarks at the Faculty Club about the dumb s*** they spout.

The support of these Both Siders comes at a high price. Should Pol Potbelly’s gunmen be run out of Cambridge, not to mention Washington, these same hacks will claim to be owed a seat at the table to propound their reactionary and intolerant drivel. No dice. 

Now some have stood up, most recently a number of other universities who had been content to let Columbia twist in the wind, but have now figured out that if the Trump Regime conquers Harvard, none of them are safe.

There's one big exception: in the backwoods of New Hampshire there lives a small college known at Dartmouth.  We are told it is actually a member of the Ivy League, and considers itself to be a bastion of academic freedom and rigorous scholarship.  So of course it has thrown its support to Harvard, amirite?

According to The Boston Globe, not so much:

A Trump-friendly college?  As they say at Dartmouth on days ending in y, “Beer me!”

It's not just wilderness outposts like Dartmouth or demented loudmouths like Alan Dershowitz who have refused to join Marshall Garber's tiny band of deputies.

Consider the world of immensely rich and powerful law firms, stuffed to the gills with insufferable graduates of the Harvard Law School.  Many of them have shamefully caved to Pol Potbelly, promising hundreds of millions in pro bono time for causes congenial to the Tangerine-Faced Fascist, although whether they will actually swallow what is left of their dignity and commit to defending murderers in uniform like Derek Chauvin remains to be seen.

Those firms have leaked to the press that they did so because they were afraid that they might lose their $20 million a year corporate rainmakers and their finagling clients to other firms.  Which makes notable the courage of a few, like WilmerHale (whose predecessor firm Hale and Dorr had stood up to Joe McCarthy and Pol Potbelly's mentor Roy “I've Got a Secret” Cohn).

Their Boston rival Ropes & Gray, which boasts a lucrative roster of private equity tycoons easily equal to that of Paul Weiss or Skadden, in fact rose to the occasion and signed (but did not draft) Harvard's complaint, at some risk to its fisc.  Perhaps the fact that it has provided legal services to Harvard since the days of President Mather made it awkward for the firm to turn its back on Harvard now.

At least as of today, neither Ropes & Gray nor WilmerHale has dwindled away, which puts the greed and cowardice of their obedient rivals into sharp focus, at least among fancy law students deciding which firm to sacrifice their lives to.

But when you're up against the likes of Pot Potbelly, the entire bent Departments of Justice and Homeland Security and Pete “I'll Text You” Hegseth, Garber's posse seems overmatched, whether measured by number of available gunslingers or Jaeger Bombs.

If Harvard prevails against the heavily-armed thugs lined up against it, we wouldn't blame Alan Garber for throwing his tin badge at the feet of the alumni who abandoned Harvard in its darkest hour and riding off into the sunset.  Just not in the direction of Hanover, New Hampshire. 

UPDATE April 29 – Alan Dershowitz is silent no longer.  He apparently retrieved his phone from between the couch cushions and spoke with his usual incoherence to The Boston Globe.  We won't provide a link for his sad stupid vocalizations, in furtherance of our policy against providing a platform to dumb s***.

On the 250th Anniversary of Patriots' Day, it's the Great Writ vs. the Great S***

By Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki and Immigration Editor Emma Goldman
with Spy Intern Olivia Gunner in Concord, Mass.

CONCORD, Mass. (April 19) – This morning in Concord, Mass. a bunch of cosplaying nerds celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Concord and Lexington by dressing up, tootling on fifes, parading through the streets, and topping it off with glazed crullers and iced regulars at Dunkin' Donuts.

You colonials will never reach Dunkin' Donuts alive!

We've got nothing against remembering the birth of liberty in America but right now we're too busy grieving its death.  

One of the foundations of that liberty is what is referred to as the Great Writ: the writ of habeas corpus which allows anyone detained by the Government to challenge that detention in court.  

That means everyone.  Our framers thought that the writ was so important that they wrote in the Constitution that the American President, their powers carefully enumerated in Article II and constrained there and in every other word of that document, said:

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it. 

Article I, Section 9, Clause 2.

Terror in the apple orchards! (Snapshot via AP)

How's this cornerstone of our liberty and the rule of law doing in Pol Potbelly's reign of terror?

The jury, as they say, is still out.

We start with a brief recapitulation of one of the most notorious outrages:  last month, a law-abiding Turkish woman with legal immigration status as a graduate student at Tufts University in Medford was kidnapped on the streets of Somerville by masked agents claiming to be from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The next day, despite a Federal Court order requiring that she be kept in Massachusetts, she was shanghaied to a jail in darkest Louisiana, where she was tortured by ICE-controlled guards who refused to give her her asthma medication. Fortunately, they did not succeed in killing her.

Her sole offense, according to Pol Potbelly’s jackals, was that she once signed an editorial in the Tufts student newspaper opposing Israel’s unrelenting war in Gaza. 

Once immured in immigration jail in Louisiana her case was assigned to an immigration “judge.”  We use the quotes because despite the name, these people, who have the power to keep noncitizens locked up and eventually deported, aren't judges under Article III. They are in essence hearing officers subject to the tender mercies of their boss, Illegally Blonde Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has already s***canned 20 of them for reasons only known to her.

Feel better?

The Founders thought so little of this system that they listed it as a reason for declaring the independence of the United States:

[King George III] has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the Tenure of their Offices, and the Amount and Payment of their Salaries.

Republicans mistreating detainees?  Unprecedented?...

On Wednesday, that “judge” decided, solely on the basis of an op-ed Ms. Öztürk signed in a student newspaper, that she should be kept locked up.

In the land of the free, these “judges” are supposed to decide whether to keep people detained according to two legal standards: is the person a danger to public safety?  and is she a flight risk who might not show up for future hearings?  

Obviously, this woman, who has never been charged with a crime, is no threat to the safety of the good citizens of Somerville.  Nor is there any reason to think that a law-abiding graduate student, whose continued residence in the country depends on going to class, is going to be a fugitive from justice.

So of course the “judge” sprang her, right:

Um:

“The immigration judge denied bond based on her untenable conclusion that Ms. Öztürk was both a flight risk and a danger to the community,” her lawyers wrote....“The immigration judge’s decision was based solely on the [government] memorandum, which points to no conduct of Ms. Öztürk’s except her co-authorship of an op-ed that the [government] memo asserts had ‘found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus.’”

But have no fear: the Great Write will ride to her rescue:  Yesterday, the Federal District Court in Vermont, refused to dismiss her habeas petition and ordered her returned to Vermont from where the government kidnapped her in violation of an earlier court order.

The Court considered a number of statutes added by bent Republicans and clueless Democrats that strip Federal Courts of power to entertain habeas petitions from noncitizens embroiled in immigration enforcement and concluded that none of them barred a constitutional challenge to Öztürk's arrest and removal to Louisiana. 

Cue fife and drum corps.

Not so fast.  First there is no guarantee that the Pol Potbelly regime will comply with the District Court's order.  It will undoubtedly appeal on an “emergency” basis first to the Second Circuit (which will likely not entertain Illegally Blonde Pam's drivel very long) and then to the Supreme Court which will....  Your guess is as good as ours.

Even more disturbing, even if by some miracle the body-snatchers comply with the Court's orders and send her back to detention in Vermont, she will not be released.

Instead, the Government will continue removal proceedings, including as noted above, the denial of bond already decided by the immigration “judge” from the swamps.

...Well, maybe not

This time, the body snatchers will argue that Federal Court in Vermont is powerless to free her, because federal law strips real Federal Courts of authority over the detention of individuals incident to removal proceedings, like her.

Can this be true?

It can. Thanks to the wonderfully bipartisan efforts of the Clinton Administration and Newt Gingrich's bent Republican House, in 1996, the following provision was added:

“The Attorney General’s discretionary judgment regarding the application of this section shall not be subject to review. No court may set aside any action or decision by the Attorney General under this section regarding the detention of any alien or the revocation or denial of bond or parole.” [8 USC] § 1226(e).

So much for habeas review of lawless determinations to keep innocents like Öztürk from being locked up on the basis of college newspaper articles they wrote.  

But statutes purporting to prohibit resort to the Great Writ have to pass constitutional muster.  The Supreme Court, in reviewing a previous Republican administration to disappear persons into night and fog on the grounds that they were “terrorists,” said the statutory remedy must be effective:

At the outset, the Court acknowledges that the Suspension Clause does not establish an absolute right to seek the writ of  habeas corpus. The Supreme Court has held that Congress may modify or eliminate the right to seek the writ if Congress provides “a collateral remedy which is neither inadequate nor ineffective to test the legality of a person’s detention.” ... If such a substitute is crafted by Congress, courts must then determine “whether the statute stripping jurisdiction to issue the writ avoids the Suspension Clause mandate because Congress has provided adequate substitute procedures for habeas corpus.” ... (quoting Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. 723, 771 (2008)).

Ozturk v. Trump, No. 2:25-cv-374 (D. Vt. Apr. 18, 2025) (slip op. at 33-34) .

(Fun fact: over 95% of the people whom Bush and Cheney said were the world's worst terrorists have been released without any apparent harm to anyone.)

When Ms. Öztürk was denied release by that so-called judge in Louisiana on the basis of nothing but a naked assertion by the body-snatchers and her student newspaper submission, do you think she got an effective remedy which protected her constitutional rights, including her First Amendment right to free speech?

Us neither. Which is why the Vermont Court should order not only order her returned to Vermont, but release her because the immigration court was not, at least in her case, an effective alternative to habeas and thus unconstitutional under the Suspension Clause.

What the bent Supreme Court would say is anyone’s guess. All the lower courts can do is try to prop up the rule of law for as long as they can.

In the battle between The Great Writ v. The Great S***, the outcome is very much in doubt. 

If the Supreme Court eventually rubber-stamps lawless and fact-free decisions of DOJ employees in the back bayous of Louisiana, the only wispy remainder of our liberty left will be a bunch of cosplayers at the Rude Bridge advancing through the streets of Concord and Lexington until they reach the Mass. Ave. Dunkin' Donuts.

Happy Patriot's Day!  

A Passover Report from the Middle East: Bombs Away!

 

By Hebraic Affairs Editor A. Cahan with Military Editor Douglass MacArthur

With the economy and democracy itself in the United States on the verge of collapse, it’s sometimes hard to keep up with what’s going on in the rest of the world.

It’s not good.

The world has apparently forgotten that since the Hamas terror attack of October 7, 2023 which killed 1,139 Israelis, most civilians, and took another 250 hostage, Israel and Hamas have been embroiled in a war in Gaza that has so far killed over 50,000 Gazans, again mostly civilian, and left over 2,000,000 people homeless, traumatized, and starving.

While most living hostages have been released in exchange for the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners, at least 24 Israelis are thought to be still living in increasingly dire captivity. Just like the remaining civilian population of Gaza.

Gaza 2025: it's no worse than...

After the wholly-intentional collapse of the interim cease fire, Israeli forces have returned to Gaza, unleashing fresh waves of death and destruction. To give you a taste of the enormity of the violence, here’s one day’s summary of events from The Guardian:

• At least 29 Palestinians, including children, were killed on Wednesday from an Israeli strike in the Shujaiya area of Gaza City, local health authorities said. Medics said dozens of others were injured in the attack that hit a multi-floor residential building in the eastern suburb of Gaza City. They said many were still believed to be missing and trapped under the ruins of the building. The strike damaged several other houses nearby....
• The Israeli military said in a statement it struck a senior Hamas militant responsible for planning and executing attacks from Shujaiya in northern Gaza, whom it did not identify. ....The Gaza health ministry said on Wednesday that at least 1,482 Palestinians have been killed since Israel resumed intense strikes on the Gaza Strip on 18 March, taking the overall death toll since the start of the war to 50,846....
• United Nations (UN) secretary general António Guterres said on Tuesday that Gaza had become “a killing field” because Israel has continued to block aid, an accusation an Israeli official quickly denied, saying there was “no shortage” of aid. “More than an entire month has passed without a drop of aid into Gaza. No food. No fuel. No medicine. ...,” Guterres said in remarks to journalists. Six weeks since Israel completely cut off all supplies to the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip, food stockpiled during a ceasefire at the start of the year has all but run out. “All basic supplies are running out,” said Juliette Touma from ....Unrwa. She said: “Every day without these basic supplies, Gaza inches closer towards very, very deep hunger.” ...
• The mother of an Israeli soldier held hostage in Gaza told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that she fears that Israel’s renewed bombardment of the territory puts his life at even greater risk. “Our children are in danger,” Herut Nimrodi told AFP during an interview. Her son, Tamir, who turned 20 in captivity, is one of 24 hostages believed to be alive, though no proof of life has been sent since his abduction. . . .

And if there’s one certainty in the Middle East, tomorrow will be worse.

Without justifying or excusing the horrific October 7 attack (unlike some of our former friends), we focus today on the continuing carnage and destruction being carried out by Israel Defense Forces at the direction of President for Life Bibi “Melech” Netanyahu and with the connivance of US President Pol Potbelly, whose sadistic love of pain and torment is too well known to require extensive recapitulation. Just ask E. Jean Carroll.

As the Guardian summary notes, Israel has been blocking all humanitarian aid, including stuff like food, from entering Gaza for over a month to put pressure on Hamas. Israel claims that this is no biggie because Gaza has plenty of food and Hamas is stealing it anyway.

The aid organizations on the ground report hunger and scarcity. And if Hamas is stealing the food, then blocking aid won’t put pressure on them, will it? It will just increase suffering and starvation.

If the starvation and bombing weren’t bad and illegal enough, Israel is continuing to order hundreds of thousands of Gazans to leave what's left of their homes again and again supposedly to help them hunt down Hamas, an activity they have not succeeded at over the past 18 months.

The Israelis claim that Hamas embeds itself with the civilian population, which to the Israeli apparently justifies any level of violence in Gaza no matter how many civilians die. How it justifies attacking marked ambulances with lights flashing is another question that has given even Israel pause.

The endless assault on civilians has many Israelis, including veterans of its air force, wondering if the purpose of these attacks is actually to destroy Hamas, a legitimate military target, or something else:

And the hostages themselves:

The go-back-to-Gaza gibe demonstrates that the hostage-based justification for endless war is but a pretext.  Many fear that Israel’s real goal is to force the civilian population of Gaza to leave, although they have no place to go. This goal is shared by the corrupt demented Russian-owned stooge currently serving as President of the United States:

Mr. Netanyahu and his government say they are serious about [Trump’s] idea but emphasize that they are speaking about facilitating the “voluntary” migration of Palestinians, in an apparent attempt to avoid any suggestion of ethnic cleansing. Critics say that it would hardly be voluntary if Gazans left, regardless, given that so many of their homes have been smashed to rubble.

Those critics, always carping about something.

While Israelis robustly debate the value of continued civilian carnage in Gaza, American Jews are supposed to fall into line and parrot only extremist Likud talking points.

The chief rabbi of the large mainstream Conservative synagogue in St. Louis, B’nai Amoona, has said “there do not appear to be any ‘innocent civilians’ in Gaza.”

There also does not appear to be any connection between this monstrous rationalization for indifference to civilian death and suffering and Jewish values. That didn't seem to bother his devout halachic congregants much:

But the incident also reveals the extent to which remarks like Abraham’s have become accepted in the range of Jewish discourse. B’nai Amoona’s president backed the rabbi publicly and in a message to congregants, and while Abraham took down the post at the president’s behest, he did not disavow its contents in subsequent statements to the congregation and to the Forward. 

A slightly more sophisticated apologia for depraved indifference to the lives of Gazans civilians comes from those of the Jewish persuasion arguing that what Israel is doing is no worse than what we did to Germany in World War II:when our bombs (and British ones) killed and injured plenty of German civilians.  A column by the reliably-loathsome Bretbug in The New York Times last year argued that we should not worry about the death toll of Gaza civilians because, as with the bombings of World War II, the underlying conflict was “existential.”

...the bombing of Dresden!  So that's OK then!

That's not how the international law of war works.  But without even comparing and contrasting the bombing campaigns of the U.S. and Britain in World War II and that of Israel in Gaza today, we have to raise one simple question:  What the f*** difference does it make?

We can debate similarities and differences between historical events.  We can even point out that after V-E Day America reconstituted Germany as an independent state, without any American settlers stealing German land.  We can also point out that no one has ever asserted that Roosevelt prolonged World War II to remain in power and avoid punishment for his many crimes.  And as others have said, if the best defense of Israel's campaign in Gaza is that it is no worse than Dresden, that's not too terrific.

But it is no answer to Israel's callous indifference to civilian life as evidenced by its endless and brutal war on Gaza that maybe it resembles the Punic War.  Israel's brutal, if not sadistic, conduct has to be judged on the basis of our current understanding of law and morality, including the postwar Geneva Conventions on the rights of noncombatants.

The reality is that Israel's indifference, and that of American Jewish leaders, to the suffering of Gaza's civilians is both immoral and contrary to Jewish law and values, according to the liberal Zionist group J Street:

We strongly oppose the decision by Prime Minister Netanyahu to reignite this horrific war. This decision flies in the face of pleas from freed Israeli hostages, families of those still held in Gaza and top Israeli security experts. It will put every remaining hostage’s life at risk while thrusting families in Gaza back into the crossfire of a brutal war which has killed far too many.

Endless war and an endless siege will not be effective in freeing the hostages or making Israel safer. Every day, renewed fighting puts more lives in danger, empowers extremists and isolates Israel further from global support – including among Jews worldwide. 

But you don't have to take it from a liberal Jewish lobbying group. There's higher authority, as some of you may have heard last night at Seder:

Our rabbis taught: When the Egyptian armies were drowning in the sea, the Heavenly Hosts broke out in songs of jubilation.  God silenced them and said, “My creatures are perishing and you sing praises?”....Our rabbis taught: God is urgent about justice, for upon justice the world depends....

CCAR Passover Haggadah at 48-49 (quoting Talmud).

And those Egyptians were armed combatants, not mothers and babies crushed under hundreds of tons of rubble. 

The resumed brutal war in Gaza is existential all right: it is a war over the existence of Judaism as a moral force in the world.

The battle is not going well.

A self-destructive war started for no good reason? Who could have seen that coming?

By Finance Editor Samuel Insull with Meta-content Generator A.J. Liebling

By now, we are all aware that the actions of one corrupt depraved demented Russian-owned stooge have destroyed the global economy, sent the United States spiraling downwards into the first period of stagflation since the oil shocks of the 1970’s, and wiped out trillions of dollars of shareholder value.

Gripped by a strange vindictive lust to tank an economy that was on January 20, 2025 the envy of the world, the Tangerine-Faced Fascist decided to impose ridiculously random punitive tariffs on the entire civilized world, and even some places where civilization hasn’t reached, like the Heard Islands, which are inhabited only by penguins who apparently are living huge from ripping off US workers, and catching fish in the chilly waters of the sub-Antarctic ocean.

The penguin enemies will not replace us

It’s hard to find anyone who supports this insane self-immolation other than the usual gang of Republican grifters, plug-uglies and otherwise unemployable shills, hacks and weirdos.

And even supposedly stalwart Republicans are having trouble swallowing the s*** smorgasbord. The insanely reactionary, pro-greed anti-worker Wall Street Journal Editorial Page on Wednesday issued a scathing critique of President Donald Trump’s so-called Liberation Day announcement vowing sweeping new tariffs on countries worldwide:

In a sharply worded editorial headlined “Trump’s New Protectionist Age,” the newspaper’s conservative board warned of multiple ways the tariffs could backfire on Trump that the president “isn’t advertising.”

The board pointed to a range of possible repercussions, including potential retaliation from foreign governments, higher prices for American consumers, economic pain for U.S. exporters, and “the end of U.S. economic leadership.”

The Petersen Institute, founded by reactionary plutocrat Pete Petersen to advocate fearlessly for tax cuts for the rich and starvation for the poor said: 

The always wrong and always screaming stock tout and former Crimson Editor Jim Cramer ‘77 admitted for once he was played for a schmuck:

Source: CNN Business

If you feel like a sucker Jim, imagine how all those people who ever took you seriously feel? All 28 of them.

The Atlantic, run by well known chat room participant Jeffrey Goldberg, has editorialized against tariffs, noting:

Michael Cembalest, the widely read analyst at JP Morgan Wealth Management, wrote that the White House announcement “borders on twilight zone territory.”

Former Republican White House functionary David Frum slammed the tariffs (in Goldberg's esteemed pubulication) and invited his fellow Canadians to take up smuggling.

And our Wonderful Republican Ally Billy Kristol said:

Source: The Bulwark

We'll get back to destruction in the name of liberation shortly.

It turns out that the basis for these inflationary and job-killing tariffs was even stupider than the most severe critic could have imagined. The tariff rates were calculated by an AI bot that divided the US trade deficit with say the Falkland Islands by the total exports to the US from that territory. This of course principally disadvantaged poor countries who export to the US but are too poor to buy our iPhones and remakes of “Snow White,” like Madagascar. That’s not a rip-off; that’s global inequality on parade.

Let Paul Krugman, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on global trade, explain it:

So what do we know about how the Trumpists arrived at their tariff plan? Trump claimed that the tariff rates imposed on different countries reflected their policies, but James Surowiecki soon noted that the tariffs applied to each country appeared to be derived from a crude formula based on the U.S. trade deficit with that country. Trump officials denied this, while at the same time the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a note confirming Surowiecki’s guess.

The stupidity is one point but the real point is the fecklessness.  The Tangerine-Faced Grifter and his spineless Republican toadies don't care how tariffs are calculated.  They only care about flaunting the power to impose them and their corrupt desire to trade exemptions for personal gain. 

But perhaps the most absurd complaints are from those who claim they never saw this coming:

following Trump's unveiling of what some said were larger-than-anticipated tariffs - and in the midst of the market selloff that followed - many of the same individuals said their main takeaway was a sense of heightened risk and plenty of unanswered questions.

"This is bigger than I expected; bigger than anyone really expected," said Mark Spindel, chief investment officer of Potomac River Capital. "And the market is reacting accordingly." 

These Masters of the Universe sure surprise easily.

Some have pointed out correctly that the Tangerine-Faced Destroyer had repeatedly promised tariffs during the campaign, so his decision to do what he promised should hardly have come as a surprise.

But there's another reason not to be gobsmacked by Republican efforts to blow up the world for vanity and sadism gratification.

We'd remind you that the previously Republican President, an alcohol-demented ne'er-do-well and nepo baby named George W. Bush did the same thing just over twenty years ago.

Idiot Republican going to war for no reason?
Who saw that coming?

Without any credible justification and accompanied by lies and smears of anyone who dared question his idiotic decision, he took his country into a pointless and bloody war of choice against  a country that posed no threat to the United States.  Unlike the Heard Islands, it was full of people, 400,000 of whom subsequently died to appease the vanity of George Bush and his band of bros. 

Like the Tariff War of 2025, the Iraq War alienated our allies, emboldened our enemies, cost our country over $2 trillion and accomplished nothing.  And that's even before getting to the torture and war crimes which the Bush Administration claimed it had the authority to impose under its theory of an all-powerful Executive.

Sound familiar?

Funny how those inveighing against the insanity and futility of the Tariff War supported the equally stupid and futile misadventure in Iraq. 

Frum, Goldberg, Kristol: all Iraq warmongers.

Now they are supposedly our friends, having failed to reckon with or apologize for their previous embrace of imperial Republican sanity (Frum being an exception).

We're beginning to wonder if the Republican playbook – heavy on grandiose and violent conceptions of an all-powerful Executive unchained by petty things like law and morality – hasn't changed much since the invasion of Cambodia (R. Nixon, 1970).

In fact, both the Iraq and Tariff Wars suggest that the long-standing Republican conception of tyrannical unchecked Executive power is fatally flawed.   

Which is why the only ones surprised were the Republican flacks and plutocrats who bought into it until it bit them in the face.