Coffee, Tea, or ONT?

Evening Horde! The ONT is a great way to end the day, but how do you start one?

Can't Dodge The DOGE

Trump signs off on DOGE audit of IRS

President Donald Trump on Thursday threw his support behind the Department of Government Efficiency investigation into alleged fraud and waste at the Internal Revenue Service.
Trump has long railed against the IRS, repeatedly claiming on the 2024 campaign trail that the office improperly targets conservatives for political reasons. After entering office in January, the president proposed closing down the IRS and replacing it with a new External Revenue Office. The president and his allies claim that revenue coming in from new Trump-era tariffs would sufficiently offset the loss of federal income taxes.
Gavin Kliger and other DOGE officials reportedly arrived at IRS headquarters Thursday afternoon, just before Trump’s Oval Office signing ceremony for his new reciprocal tariff agenda.

How does that make you feel? Auditing the IRS. I swear to you...

Making Gas Cans Great Again

Chip Roy introduces bill slashing gas can regulations

Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas introduced a bill Thursday that would repeal gas can regulations implemented under President Barack Obama's administration. In the early 2000s, the vents in gas cans were removed due to a series of environmental regulations aimed at reducing vapor emissions. The vents by design prevented a vacuum from forming inside the gas can and would allow the gasoline to pour out smoothly. But after the regulations were implemented and the vents were removed, the stream of gasoline poured unpredictably and often spilled, hindering a once simple and efficient design. Roy's bill would do away with these unnecessary regulations, restoring the functionality of gas cans. "Pointless government regulations have ruined many commonsense products, and everyone knows it," Roy told Blaze News. "The federal government does not need to be involved in every aspect of our lives, and we never needed them involved in our gas cans."

All I can say is “It's about time”. Any time I find a pre-Obama gas can at a yard sale, I buy it. It would be nice to be able to just buy cans that work.

Bet You're Hearing Jim McKay In Your Head Right Now

The crashing, ‘agony of defeat’ skier visits St. Louis from Slovenia

As I sat across from Vinko Bogataj at a St. Louis coffeeshop, I just kept thinking — how the hell is he here today? Not because the 74-year-old man lives in a small village in Slovenia, but, like — how did he survive that crash in the first place? See, Bogataj is “the agony of defeat” guy. For sports fans of a certain generation, he was a notable part of their world (well, wide world). From the early 1970s until the late 1990s, Bogataj was featured in the opening to the TV show “Wide World of Sports” on ABC. The program was as much a part of American Saturdays as college football and “SNL.” And before every show, the narrator said: “Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport — the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” The accompanying footage, timed with “the agony of defeat,” showed the then-Yugoslavian skier during a jump. At a dangerously high speed downhill, he lost his footing and violently wiped out, his skis whipping around almost like a propeller. He sailed off the side of the slope, taking down a huge sign with him. He crashed into the snow and his entire body bounced again and again down the mountainside.

The human drama of athletic competition.

Federalism

Fifty Shades of Freedom

As every high-school civics student knows, federalism divides political power between the Beltway and each of the 50 states. Washington, D.C., handles the truly national issues (international treaties, national defense, printing money, etc.) while the states should handle the rest. This allows each state to tailor laws to its needs while the feds ensure basic civil rights and constitutional norms are protected.
California can follow the economic wisdom of Venezuela, while Florida can dump red tape into the wood chipper. Utah can limit easy access to booze and weed, while Vermont can subsidize shot glasses and rolling papers. Best of all, it’s easier for a state’s residents to register their wishes with local leaders—or rent a U-Haul if they disagree.
Back in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville was one of the first Europeans to praise this decentralized system. It let the national government focus on “a small number of objects ... sufficiently prominent to attract its attention” and left “secondary affairs” to governments more accountable to the people. These days, however, Washington focuses much of its attention on not so “prominent objects”—like cowboy poetry, the circumference of dill pickles and light bulbs

I don't know if we can restore balance to the system, for one thing, we'd need to repeal the 17th Amendment. I would also like to go back to the patronage model of civil service. When people vote for a change, they should get it, not have it blocked by unelected bureaucrats.

2 On The Law

Anti-Trump judges sparked a legal crisis

JD Vance caused a firestorm on Sunday when he posted on X, formerly Twitter: “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
The vice president’s remarks came in response to the growing list of lower-court judges who have attempted to halt the new administration’s agenda with a slew of injunctions. They have directed Team Trump to release federal grants to nonprofits that the administration has frozen for auditing, for example, and blocked the administration from applying its interpretation of the 14th Amendment, according to which children born to illegal immigrants aren’t automatically entitled to US citizenship.
Vance hit back at the judges for trying to restrict the president in his own sphere and overriding his decisions as to how best to carry out the law (the execute in the “executive branch”). As the Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule put it an X post, reshared by Vance, “judicial interference with legitimate acts of state, especially the internal functioning of a co-equal branch, is a violation of the separation of powers”.

About Those 'Co-Equal' Branches of Government...

Once again, a lawful executive order on “immigration” has been blocked by a couple of federal judges. To the Left, of course, this is a triumph of “representative democracy” but to the rest of us it’s anything but. The idea that a single federal judge, anywhere, can — for any reason, or no reason at all — frustrate the legitimate functioning of the executive branch makes absolutely no sense, except in the political sense.

So this battle over Trump’s “Muslim ban” offers us a handy occasion to school the federal judiciary in the constitution, and to remind it that it’s skating on very thin ice indeed if it continues down its partisan path. Because, far from being a “co-equal” branch of government, almost the entirety of the federal court system is a creature of Congress, and can be restructured or abolished at any time. Don’t believe me? Take a look at Article III,

The relevant text is:

“The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.”

Only SCOTUS “shall” be established. All the other courts were created by congress, which means they can be dissolved or limited by congress.

Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by Baron Trump:

Finally, on a personal note, I want to thank everyone deeply for all of your thoughts and prayers about my sister. She passed away last weekend, and her organs have already saved several other lives. You'll never know how much all of y'all's support means to my family.

posted by WeirdDave at 10:00 PM

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