Author: Californiacontrarian

Yes, just as he promised, President Trump is eliminating the Department of Education (DofE). Is this what the people want? Granted those who run the teacher’s unions are against the dismantling of the Department of Education, but where were they as the education stats were tanking?

According to the U.S. Government’s own statistics, the U.S. Government’s Annual Report card, 22% of ALL 8th grade students are COMPLETELY illiterate and …
1 in 3 eighth graders are functionally illiterate, according to the Nation’s Report Card. The worst 8th grade literacy rate EVER recorded.
Is this something the DofE should be proud of?

In 2022, only 26% of all 8 grade students scored Proficient or above in math.
Is this something the DofE should be proud of?

Since its establishment in the late 1970s, the Department of Education has spent more than $3 trillion. Yet according to a White House fact sheet, academic performance has stagnated. Despite a 245 percent increase in per-pupil spending, math and reading scores have declined, and U.S. students consistently rank behind peers in other developed nations.
Is this something the DofE should be proud of?

If the DofE were a business it would have been bankrupt a while ago. It’s failing our youth and deserves to be just an unpleasant memory!
3/24/25

On Sundays I talk about individuals who we can all admire and praise. This week this individual is Jhontel Jackson, a 34-year-old content creator from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. When he drove through his neighborhood, he noticed a collapsed fence that had clearly been neglected for years. The posts were completely rotten, and the entire fence was in desperate need of replacement.
Basically Jhontel had two choices … do something or do nothing.
From The Bright Story:
“Rather than ignoring it, Jackson decided to take action. ‘I saw that she needed help, and I knew that if she could afford a new fence, she would’ve already had one.’

Jackson didn’t know much about the homeowner—just that she was a single mother taking care of her kids and her own mother. However, as he soon found out, the woman had been through much more than just a broken fence. She had recently been in an accident that completely totaled her car and caused serious neck injuries. Adding to her struggles, the woman had also lost her husband about three years ago.
When Jackson offered to build a new fence for free, the woman was taken aback. ‘She was completely surprised that I was willing to do it for free. She was also overwhelmed because she had previously received quotes for the job that were well over $6,000,’ Jackson recalled.
Without hesitation, Jackson went ahead and built the fence for free.

The total cost for the project was ‘just over $2,000,’ a price Jackson was happy to pay. ‘That’s because everything I use is built to last, so they never have to worry about the fence falling over again,’ Jackson said.

After completing the work, Jackson didn’t stick around to see the mother’s reaction. ‘As soon as I was done, I was off to help the next person. That’s just how it goes for me—I rarely get to interact much with the people I help.’

A double bonus … he did it for free, and he didn’t stick around for any accolades!
3/23/25

What are ‘nationwide injunctions?’
FYI from Fox News:
Nationwide injunctions are court orders that prevent the federal government from implementing a policy or law that has a cascading effect impacting the entire country, not just the parties involved in the court case.
Many of us probably do not recall any nationwide injunctions in years past. That would certainly be understandable as there hadn’t been very many of them.
How many have there been in the recent past?
From 1963 through 2020 there had been only 127 of them and 64 occurred during President Trump’s first term from 2017-2020.
There were 32 injunctions issued against the Bush, Obama and Biden administrations collectively since 2001, meaning the first Trump administration was on the receiving end of double the amount of nationwide injunctions than his two predecessors and successor combined, according to the April 2024 edition of the Harvard Law Review.
Are these nationwide injunctions are political? … Is the pope a catholic?
Of the nationwide injunctions during Trump’s first term, 59 of them came from a judge appointed by a president of an opposing party. Hmmm!
The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court somehow felt compelled to comment on this issue even though he and four other Justices recently ducked when they had a chance to address this issue.
From the Epoch Times:
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court declined to take up the administration’s appeal challenging a lower court order requiring the government to disburse $2 billion in foreign assistance.
Justice Samuel Alito said he was stunned by his colleagues’ decision and was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch in dissenting from their denial of the administration’s appeal.
“Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars?” Alito asked. “The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a majority of this Court apparently thinks otherwise.”
Note to Justice Roberts:
“When you have an opportunity to get it hit, you have to at least get in the batter’s box and swing at a pitch. Being critical from the on-deck circle will not suffice!”
3/22/25

Now to start out I need to be clear, before the other day, I had never heard of The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service
(FMCS), and I will wager that none of you did either.

From the Federal Register:
“The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, created in 1947, is an independent agency whose mission is to preserve and promote labor-management peace and cooperation. Headquartered in Washington, DC, with two regional offices and more than 70 field offices, the agency provides mediation and conflict resolution services to industry, government agencies and communities.
The Agency helps build better relationships through joint problem-solving and constructive responses to inevitable conflict. In turn, this improves the ability of organizations to create value for customers, shareholders and employees alike, and substantially benefits the national economy. The Agency concentrates its efforts on assisting employers and employees in coping with the demands of a rapidly changing workplace.”

So much for what FMCS was designed to do.

From Luke Rosiak at The Daily Wire, 3/19/25:
“The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) occupied a nine-story office tower on D.C.’s K Street for only 60 employees, many of whom actually worked from home, prior to the pandemic. Its managers had luxury suites with full bathrooms; one manager would often be ‘in the shower’ when she was needed, while another used her bathroom as a cigarette lounge. FMCS recorded its director as being on a years-long business trip to D.C. so he could have all of his meals and living expenses covered by taxpayers, simply for showing up to the office.
FMCS is a 230-employee agency that exists to serve as a voluntary mediator between unions and businesses. As an “independent agency,” its director nominally reports to the president, but the agency is so small that in effect, there is no oversight at all — and it showed, becoming a real-life caricature of all the excesses that the Department of Government Efficiency has alleged take place in government.

“FMCS seemed, quite clearly, to exist for the benefit of those on its payroll, and not much else. One employee told me: ‘Let me give you the honest truth: A lot of FMCS employees don’t do a hell of a lot, including myself. Personally, the reason that I’ve stayed is that I just don’t feel like working that hard, plus the location on K Street is great, plus we all have these oversized offices with windows, plus management doesn’t seem to care if we stay out at lunch a long time. Can you blame me?’”

President Trump just shut it down. Who will miss the FMCS? Probably only its employees!
3/21/25

I just read in my local “newspaper” that President Trump is “going after judges!” How dastardly!
Who is he “going after?”

First: District Court Judge James Boarberg who commanded that a plane headed to Central America with multiple members of the Tren de Aragua gang on board.

Second:
From Daybreak Insider
“Judge Theodore Chuang’s ruling in favor of 26 current and former USAID workers seeks to “delay a premature, final shutdown” of the agency while litigation continues (Hill). Eric Daugherty: A judge just ordered Elon Musk’s DOGE to all but fully reinstate USAID after they dismantled it. That’s right. A judge is now singlehandedly running the executive branch.”

Now here is my question.How did it happen that two obviously left-leaning judges were selected for these two cases? To me it sounds like a “S vs S” situation. … “Serendipity vs Skullduggery.”
Even though this could possibly be “serendipity,” my money is on the latter, and I believe that it should be looked into.
3/20/

Has there been a change in the path to citizenship and the issuing of green cards to some individuals? It appears to me that in some cases there is quite a dichotomy. Let me elaborate. A friend of mine has a son who has been teaching in Guatemala for many years. At some point he married a Guatemalan woman and subsequently they had a baby girl. The baby is now five years old and at this point the wife cannot legally come to the U.S. The five year old and the father can both come to States legally, but the wife cannot. She has been trying to come to the U.S. legally for at least five years, and thus far … nothing!
Now contrast this to Mahmoud Khalil. I am sure that most are familiar with him. He came to U.S. on a student visa. He enrolled at Columbia University, and within only a few years was able to get a green card. At the present time he is in the process of being deported because of his antisemitic actions at Columbia. Those on the left are bellyaching because he is married to a U.S. citizen, and at the present count nineteen law firms are vying to come to his rescue.
My question is why the dichotomy between and Mahmoud Khalil, and the Guatemalan wife who has been attempting to do everything legally. She has been waiting in line for years to get to first base, while Khalil has been fast-tracked to a green card. Both are married to a U.S. citizen, and as best I can tell, no law firms are standing in line to plead her case.
This makes me wonder how Khalil was able to move so rapidly through the process from student visa to green card.
Can anybody explain the dichotomy between Mahmoud Khalil my friend’s daughter-in -law? Is there something fishy going on? Did Khalil or a backer of his expedite his receiving a green card? Did any cash change hands? Does this suspiciously sound like a quid-pro-quo situation?
3/19/25

Agree or disagree with the following … a drop in the price of eggs is a good thing. Undoubtedly, a good thing.
From the Epoch Times Morning Brief:
Egg prices in the United States have dropped by $1.85 since the Trump administration unveiled a plan to combat bird flu and reduce costs, according to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.
The Department of Agriculture reported that, having stopped culling defenseless hens for bird flu mania, the price of eggs is falling. A dozen eggs now costs less than when Trump took the oath … now just over$6.00 a dozen.

Agree or disagree with the following … a drop in the price of gas is a good thing. Undoubtedly, a good thing.
From Forbes:
The average price of gasoline in the U.S. dropped for the third straight week, falling to $3.03 per gallon, according to GasBuddy—reaching the lowest average price for the month of March since 2021.
The price fell 0.6 cents from last week’s average of $3.04, and is down 8.9 cents from one month ago and 36.7 cents from a year ago, hitting the lowest March price in four years, GasBuddy reported Monday.

Agree or disagree with the following … a drop in the rate of inflation is a good thing. Undoubtedly, a good thing.
From Newsweek, 3/11/25:
“Inflation plummeting, new data shows.” The inflation rate has plunged to its lowest point since December, 2020— when Trump was last in office. Recall that Biden-flation peaked at over 11.5% back in June 2022!
Newsweek cited Truflation, a blockchain-based provider of real-time economic data. The non-governmental service reported yesterday that inflation has slowed to around 1.3%, falling below the 1.5% mark at the start of March, less than half of December’s 3.1% rate. Inflation is also now well below the Trump team’s stable target of 2%. Even though Trump promised that inflation would come down, however to me the amazing thing is how rapidly inflation has come down. Undoubtedly, a good thing.
3/18/25

In 2021 the Taliban overtook the equipment after the botched 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal done so by former President Joe Biden.
From Townhall:
“Now President Donald Trump is demanding the return of a staggering $7 billion in U.S. military gear left behind during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan under the Biden administration. Trump has called on the Taliban to recover the equipment, which includes advanced weapons, vehicles, and other critical resources. The request has sparked debate with Trump arguing that the gear should never have been abandoned in the first place. However, the Taliban is refusing to give it back to its rightful owners.”
How will Trump deal with this challenge?
It will certainly be interesting!
3/17/25

Some would say that playing a musical instrument outside in a war-zone is crazy, but to Vedran Smailovic it was patriotic.
From the Epoch Times:
It was May 28, 1992, the early days of the Bosnian War. Into the dust and debris of Vase Miskina Street in Sarajevo strode a strange figure, carrying an instrument case and impervious to the distant rumble of explosive shells battering the city.
He wore a tuxedo, as though he was on stage at a posh concert hall instead of walking through a warzone where the only backdrops were the husks of bombed-out buildings.
The musician stopped in the middle of the hollowed-out marketplace, set up a plastic folding chair, and took his cello from its case. He seemed to be plucked from another world, a saner time, and dropped into the nightmare of the siege of Sarajevo like a falling star.
Surrounded by broken stone and twisted metal, his eyes deepened, and he began to play Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor.

With his music, the cellist, Vedran Smailovic, honored the dead, not because he knew them, but because they were his fellow human beings. He repeated this performance every day for 22 days, in honor of the 22 innocent victims killed by a mortar shell that exploded there the day before, on May 27.

This simple act of defiance turned him into a legend the world-over: “the cellist of Sarajevo.”
3/26/25

A question recently came to my mind about the validity of then President Joe Biden’s blanket pardons. I know the Dems will call my concern frivolous, but hear me out, as I have three separate concerns.
First: Is there any past history of any other President issuing pardons for things for which an individual has not been found guilty and furthermore has not even yet been charged? … No!
Think momentarily about the absurdity of this. For instance if it is learned next week that one of those pardoned individuals might have participated in a murder or a plot to commit murder, would Biden’s pardon cover it? Or on a more mundane level if it is discovered that a pardoned individual has accumulated thousands of dollars in parking tickets, should we just assume “abracadabra” that Biden’s blanket pardon covers these also and just ignore them?

Second:
While Joe Biden may have signed all of those pardons, did he actually know what he was signing? Remember that President Biden vowed not to ever pardon his son, Hunter. What happened?
Special counsel Robert Hur released a 388-page report on President Biden’s retention of classified material, finding the president frequently showed limitations with his memory and recall.
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote.
“Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
Note that Hur specifically referenced Biden’s “poor memory” as well as questioning his “mental state of willfulness.”

Third: is it possible that Joe Biden’s signature on all or some of his pardons was made by an autopen? Is there a way to tell if signatures have been made by an autopen? Possibly, as autopen signatures are usually of the same thickness and pressure throughout, and resemble a signature in black marker pen. Uniformity of the signature is typical of autopen signatures.
If some of these pardon signatures were in fact made by an autopen, are the pardons legal? Could there have been more than a singular autopen signature which, of course, would be more difficult to identify which are valid and which are not. If an autopen signature was used even once, was Joe Biden even aware of what he had supposedly signed?

So in conclusion I am dubious of the validity of President Joe Biden’s multiple pardons. … Hmmm!
3/15/25