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 A very distant cousin of mine.

The Supreme Court Delivers the Felon a Humiliating Defeat

The economy under the Felon continues to deteriorate with few new jobs created during 2025, consumer prices continuing to rise, and the USA had a record trade deficit - something the Felon's tariffs were supposed to end - and economic malaise being felt by a majority of Americans. Indeed, new polling indicates that 60% of Americans disapprove of the Felon and his policies. Even on immigration enforcement, a majority of Americans oppose the Felon's brutal and illegal actions which have violated literally thousands of judicial rulings. Then, of course, there is the Epstein scandal that shows no signs of going away despite the Felon's bald faced lie that he has been "completely exonerated."  Now, the heretofore complaint U.S. Supreme court has handed the Felon another humiliating defeat by ruling that his tariffs are illegal and cannot be imposed without action by Congress.  In typical lying and contemptuous form, the Felon has lashed out at the six justices ruling against him like a spoiled child and has spewed lies - what else is new? The ruling by SCOTUS is a victory for Americans and constitutional government and, with luck may be a turning point for the Court that seemingly belatedly realizes that its former rulings favorable to the Felon (which I strongly disagree with) have created a monster. Two pieces in The Atlantic look at the Courts rejection of the Felon's illegal tariffs. Here is a summation from one piece:

The ruling is a major victory for the constitutional separation of powers, rule of law, and millions of American consumers and businesses harmed by these tariffs. . . . This decision spared America from a dangerous, unconstitutional path. Under [the Felon's] President Trump’s interpretation of the law, the president would have had nearly unlimited tariff authority, similar to that of an absolute monarch. That undermines basic constitutional principles. The Framers of the Constitution had sought to ensure that the president would not be able to repeat the abuses of English kings, who imposed taxes without legislative authorization.

Here are longer excerpts for the second piece:

In the 1630s, King Charles I tried to tax English people without the consent of their legislature. He lost his head. In the 2020s, Donald Trump tried to tax Americans without the consent of Congress. He just lost his case.

A tariff is a tax. The Trump tariffs imposed in and after April 2025 were projected to raise as much as $2.3 trillion over 10 years. The Constitution assigns authority over taxes, including tariffs, to Congress. It does so for reasons that date back to English constitutional history: An executive who can tax without permission from elected representatives is on his way to becoming a tyrant.

[The Felon] President Trump has had lots of ideas for how to spend the money he collected without Congress. He has offered it to farmers. He has mused about direct cash payments to taxpayers. He has speculated about creating a sovereign wealth fund to invest in companies. He has disregarded the fundamental principle that spending, like taxing, is a power the Constitution assigns to Congress, not the president.

Now we may be on the verge of a regime-changing war against Iran. War-making is also supposed to be a congressional power—but there’s no sign that Trump will allow Congress to vote on his war. In the past, the ultimate check on the president’s war-making powers was Congress’s power over the purse. . . . . if Trump were allowed to tax without Congress, then he might reasonably conclude that he could fight wars without Congress.

Trump’s tariffs were advertised as a revenue source liberated from the restraints imposed by Article I of the Constitution. Had the Supreme Court upheld the tariffs, it would have wrought a constitutional revolution. Instead, the court quashed Trump’s scheme. Like every president before him, if he wants money—for an Iran war or any other purpose—he will have to ask Congress for it.

Trump’s theory was that an emergency-powers law passed in the 1970s allowed him to impose permanent revenue-raising tariffs on anyone for any reason. This argument was always far-fetched. The law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, was part of the post-Watergate reform to reduce presidential emergency powers. The IEEPA reformed the Trading With the Enemy Act passed during World War I. President Franklin Roosevelt had used that law to ban most private ownership of gold bullion in 1933, which even supporters had to concede was a fantastic legal reach. After Watergate, Congress sought to restrain the president by limiting the IEEPA to “unusual and extraordinary” threats to “the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” The law’s powers can be invoked only after a formal declaration of national emergency, and the word tariff appears nowhere among the powers conferred upon the president by the law.

Trump gets very impatient when he’s asked about “affordability.” You can understand why he squirms. The price increases Americans have felt in 2025 and 2026 can be blamed in no small part on Trump’s tariffs. Power bill up? Trump imposed a tariff on the equipment used to generate and transmit electricity. Six-pack of beer more expensive? Trump taxed the beer cans. Kids need new shoes? Trump’s tariffs raised the cost.

The ironic political question for 2026 is whether the U.S. Supreme Court acted in time to save Trump from himself. Whether or not it was the justices’ intention to help Trump, a generally Trump-friendly Supreme Court has offered the president an exit from one of his most unpopular domestic policies. Will he accept the handout? Acceptance would be smart, but humiliating. Trump holds other legal means to disrupt international trade, some of which he used in his first term. But those powers have tighter legal limits than Trump wants. . . . Until and unless a future Congress acts to protect Americans from Trump protectionism, the outlook for U.S. prosperity and security will remain clouded.

While shadows dim the future, the sun shone today. U.S. stocks surged after Trump’s Supreme Court defeat. American consumers may soon feel the benefit. Liberated from this approach to economic warfare, relations with allies may recover some of their former cordiality. And unlike the case of Charles I, all of this was accomplished while allowing America’s president to lay his unsevered head on his pillow tonight.

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CBS Is Being Destroyed Before Our Eyes

Like Adolph Hitler and his Nazi regime, one of the goals of the notoriously thin-skinned Felon is to censor journalists and news outlets to prevent unflattering true and accurate, and often damning coverage of the Felon's misdeeds and horrific and cruel policies.  Part of this effort is being done by threatening bogus lawsuits, intimidation by the Felon stacked FCC, and threatening to impede mergers unless the desired censorship is achieved.  Sadly, some billionaires who are either pro-Trumpers or simply soulless and greedy individuals who put increasing their already staggering wealth above all else.  Hence we see Jeff Bezos destroying the Washington Post - I canceled my subscription some time ago - and David Ellison seemingly similarly destroying CBS as his right wing appointee, Bari Weiss pushes to turn the network into another Fox News imitator.   The irony is that CBS, which already in last place of the big three networks, is shedding both respected journalists and viewers (other than CBS Sunday Morning, we no longer watch the network).  All of the focus of these billionaires is aimed at pleasing the Felon with no thought to the longer term after the Felon has exited the scene - he will be 80 in June - and what censorship now may mean in the future. A piece at Salon looks at the destruction of CBS.  Here are excerpts:

In the span of months, one of America’s most storied broadcast institutions has managed to alienate its most recognizable late-night host and lose one of its most respected journalists, all while inviting scrutiny over whether it is voluntarily bending the knee to political pressure from the Trump administration. The optics are catastrophic.

CBS looks to have made a strategic blunder when it announced plans last year to cancel “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” but decided to keep host Stephen Colbert on air until May 2026. The decision created a lame-duck host with a nightly platform and a growing sense of grievance. On Monday, Colbert told his studio audience that CBS lawyers had called his show “in no uncertain terms” to block an interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. According to Colbert, the network didn’t just want to censor the content — it wanted to censor the censorship itself, informing him that he couldn’t even mention that he’d been prohibited from airing it. 

“Because my network clearly doesn’t want us to talk about this,” he told his audience, “let’s talk about this.” He ultimately posted the interview to YouTube, where it has since drawn more than 5.2 million views — far more than it ever would have attracted as a routine late-night segment.

It’s amazing how long we’ve known about the Streisand effect, the phenomenon where an attempt to censor or suppress information ends up drawing more attention to it, yet institutions still can’t resist stepping on the rake. CBS handed the shovel to the very man they were trying to bury, and he dug himself out. Colbert knows he has nothing to lose now. It’s worth noting that his public criticism of CBS parent company Paramount Skydance’s $16 million to settle Donald Trump’s lawsuit over a 2024 “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris — a lawsuit that legal scholars widely regarded as meritless —  is widely believed to be the real reason CBS canceled “The Late Show.” 

The pretext CBS used to object to Colbert’s interview with Talarico originated from a January notice from the Federal Communications Commission issued by the agency’s chairman, Brendan Carr, a Trump ally who has spent his tenure weaponizing regulatory ambiguity to intimidate broadcasters. The notice warned that late-night and daytime talk shows could no longer assume they qualify for the “bona fide news exemption” from the equal time rule, a protection that has been in place since Jay Leno’s producers won it in 1996. Carr hasn’t formally repealed the exemption. He has merely threatened to — and watched as networks trip over themselves to comply with a rule that doesn’t yet exist. Colbert put it plainly on air: CBS was “unilaterally enforcing” guidance that had not been made law. No one forced their hand; they just folded.

The FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, Anna Gomez, also called out both the network and the Trump administration. Gomez wrote on X that CBS’s decision is “yet another troubling example of corporate capitulation in the face of this Administration’s broader campaign to censor and control speech” and made clear that “the FCC has no lawful authority to pressure broadcasters for political purposes or to create a climate that chills free expression.” 

Layered on top of all of this is the arrival of Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Weiss built her brand at The Free Press as a contrarian voice fluent in the grievances of people who believe mainstream media has become too liberal. She was installed by David Ellison after his acquisition of Paramount and almost immediately began leaving her mark with shifts in content and reports of chaotic decision-making behind the scenes. 

In January, Weiss announced 19 new paid contributors to CBS News with evident excitement, describing them as experts who would appear across the network’s broadcasts and digital platforms. Among them was Dr. Peter Attia, a wellness influencer and longevity podcaster with a large online following and a heterodox approach to medicine that has made him popular in right-leaning media. Three days after Weiss announced Attia’s hire, the Department of Justice released a new trove of the Jeffrey Epstein files — in which Attia’s name appeared more than 1,700 times. The emails were not ambiguous. In a June 2015 message, the wellness influencer wrote to Epstein that the worst part about being his friend was that “the life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul.” In another exchange from 2016, Attia made a crude sexual joke directed at the convicted sex offender. The files also revealed that Attia had, on at least one occasion, chosen to spend time with Epstein rather than visit his infant son, who had been hospitalized after entering cardiac arrest.

What followed inside CBS News was, according to multiple reports, a battle. Weiss refused to fire Attia because she saw it as “giving in to the ‘mob,'” while senior Paramount executives took the position that a man with hundreds of documented email exchanges with an accused child sex trafficker could not function as a credible expert contributor on a broadcast network. The situation reportedly required escalation to Ellison himself to resolve. (Notably, Weiss reports directly to Ellison — not to the head of CBS News nor to the president of Paramount.) Weiss’ reported rationale — that Attia’s “contrarian voice” was too valuable to lose — reveals that in her editorial calculus, the network’s credibility with its audience is less important than her commitment to a particular brand of heterodoxy.

Early on, Weiss also expressed interest in wooing “60 Minutes” contributor Anderson Cooper away from his full-time role at CNN to anchor the “CBS Evening News,” before she settled on Tony Dokoupil. Cooper, in the end, chose to leave CBS entirely. . . . As one insider put it, Cooper “wasn’t comfortable with the direction the show was taking under Bari, and is in a position where he doesn’t have to put up with it.” 

Cooper’s reported judgment is a devastating verdict on the Weiss era from a nationally-known and widely-respected veteran correspondent, and comes one week after producer Alicia Hastey walked out of CBS News with a damning farewell note calling the newsroom atmosphere one of “fear and uncertainty.”

Cooper’s exit raises questions about the future of “60 Minutes.” Other veterans like Lesley Stahl and Scott Pelley have already spoken publicly about concerns over the state of CBS News and its changing newsroom standards. Longtime “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens resigned months earlier, making it clear that he believed the program’s editorial independence was under strain. The institution is not just losing talent; it is losing the credibility built over decades that no roster of podcasters can replace.

What we are watching is the systematic dismantling of institutional independence in real time at one of the most historically significant news and entertainment corporations in America. Stephen Colbert is leaving in May. Anderson Cooper is already gone. What CBS should be asking itself is not how to manage the departure of the people who made it matter, but whether anyone left in the building still believes the mission is worth defending.

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What Prince Andrew's Arrest Says About America

When the thirteen colonies broke away from the United Kingdom, the government they established barred monarchs and aristocratic titles.  Moreover, they held the concept that no one was above the law and the president and other high officials were barred from receiving large gifts and "emoluments" from domestic or foreign sources. Fast forward over two centuries and we see on daily display the Felon's complete violation of this ban and corruption on  a scale that the Founding Fathers likely could not have imagined. Worse yet, the Felon views himself as a monarch of sorts who is above the law - ignoring the law has long been a benchmark of the Felon's life and business practices - and he has his Department of Justice hard at work protecting him and his wealthy cronies and fellow misogynists from consequences for their long time association (and seeming crimes) with Jeffrey Epstein.  Ironically, in the United Kingdom, rather than America, we see the concept that no one is above the law playing out with the arrest of former Prince Andrew - the first member of the royal family to be arrested in 400 years. Where the arrest will lead no one knows, but the events in the UK demonstrate that the rule of law in America arguably no longer applies to the rich and connected. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the juxtaposition and the failure of America to confirm that no one is above the law:   

On Tuesday, November 30, 2010, at 2:57 p.m., Prince Andrew—as he then was—received details of his upcoming trips as Britain’s official trade envoy: Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Vietnam, Singapore. At 3:02 p.m., he forwarded the entire email to Jeffrey Epstein.

At dawn today, that stupid and unethical decision—and many others like it—finally caught up with him. Police arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on the morning of his 66th birthday, on suspicion of misconduct in public office, and are now searching his homes. Prosecutors have not yet released specific charges, which are thought to relate to Andrew passing on sensitive government information to Epstein. The offense carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. His brother, King Charles III, was not officially informed in advance, but had signaled that the royal family would cooperate with any police inquiry.

Charles had already stripped Andrew of his title after the latest batch of Epstein files dropped, because the newly released emails proved beyond doubt that Andrew had lied about breaking off contact with Epstein, a convicted sex offender, in 2010. The disgraced former prince had also been evicted from his lavish residence in Windsor, just outside London, where he had lived effectively rent-free for many years. “Let me state clearly: the law must take its course,” Charles wrote in his statement on the arrest, adding: “Meanwhile, my family and I will continue in our duty and service to you all.”

In the United States, the Epstein affair is still seen primarily as a sex scandal. The financier was well known as a man who could easily find women—“no one over 25 and all very cute,” he told Elon Musk—to go on dates with his rich friends. (“Pro or civilian?” Steve Tisch, a co-owner of the New York Giants, asked about one such woman.) But here in Britain, this is a corruption scandal—and not just because Andrew sent Epstein confidential information about investment opportunities in Afghanistan. The police recently searched two addresses linked to Peter Mandelson, a former government minister and an ambassador to Washington who also lied about the extent of his friendship with Epstein.

During his time in government in the late 2000s, the files show, Mandelson forwarded market-sensitive emails to Epstein, on subjects such as the eurozone bailout of Greece, mixed in with laddish banter and discussions about how Mandelson might make money after leaving office. Mandelson has already been stripped of his seat in the House of Lords and his affiliation with the Labour Party; for a few hours, many in the press corps thought the scandal might bring down Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who had bafflingly appointed Mandelson as U.S. ambassador, despite his long record of other scandals. In the end, Starmer’s chief of staff, who had recommended Mandelson for the job, stepped down instead.

The allegations against Andrew date from a similar period, when he was a trade envoy for the British Foreign Office. That job turned out to involve flying around the world in high style—often to places run by oligarchs, dictators, and fellow royals, on the basis that they would be flattered to deal with a prince. Once there, he might also take the opportunity to watch, say, a Formula One race or have a few rounds of golf. Attractive young women seem to have been present at many of these events. Foreign intelligence services must have regarded Andrew’s appointment in 2001 as a gift from the heavens.

In 2007, for example, he sold his white elephant of a mansion, Sunninghill, which his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, had given him as a wedding present. A Kazakh oligarch paid millions over the asking price, and then never moved in.

The problem for the royal family was that Andrew and his then-wife, Sarah—known in Britain as “Fergie,” after her unmarried name—had no discernible talents but extremely expensive tastes. . . . .The couple separated in 1992, but Sarah continued to use her title, the Duchess of York, to boost her commercial ventures. In 1995, Buckingham Palace refused to pay off any more of her debts, and issued a statement saying that “the Duchess’s financial affairs are no longer Her Majesty’s concern.”

After this, despite making millions of dollars from her series of children’s books, Fergie went crawling to Epstein for loans. . . . . Both she and Andrew were tethered to Epstein by their greed and entitlement. They wanted millionaire lifestyles. More than that, they felt that they deserved them. Why? Because of an accident of birth in one case, and a fortuitous marriage in the other. The couple have been divorced for three decades but have never really moved on, possibly because they are mirror images of each other.

Until 2022, he also benefited from the protection of his mother. Andrew was widely perceived to be the late Queen’s favorite child: Charles was sensitive, unlike his parents, who had been raised as emotionally stunted aristocrats; Anne, a tougher, horse-mad child, was Prince Philip’s pet; Edward, like many youngest children, benefited from his parents softening with middle age. But no one really knew what to do with Andrew, who was nicknamed “Baby Grumpling” because of his temper.

Over the years, the late Queen had repeatedly smoothed Andrew’s way in life. But even she could not save him after his disastrous decision to give an interview to the BBC in 2019 about his connection with Epstein. He presented a portrait of blithe privilege, denying a deep connection with the financier by saying he had hosted him only for a “straightforward shooting weekend.” He claimed to have spent three days with Epstein in New York in 2010 for the sole purpose of breaking off their friendship. This was unbelievable at the time, and has now been debunked by the latest files. “Keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!!” a 2011 email from Andrew declares. The revulsion at his appearance on the BBC prompted his mother to strip him of his ceremonial titles and retire him as a “working royal.”

Charles has gone even further—supported by his son Prince William. Both the king and his successor believe that Andrew’s actions could destroy the royal family, and they are keen to amputate him from the Windsors and cauterize the wound. None of the statements from Buckingham Palace has carried the slightest hint that they believe Andrew has been wronged by a witch hunt. The king’s last statement before today included a telling line: “Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and sympathies have been, and remain with, the victims of any and all forms of abuse.”

All this presents quite a contrast with the U.S., where the fallout from contact with Epstein has largely been restricted to second-tier names—some of whom are provably guilty only of being chummy with a sex offender, which is not itself a crime. Like Andrew, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also claimed to have broken off contact with Epstein . . . . However, Lutnick has the fortune to work for Donald Trump. The [Felon] president is unlikely to request that anyone resign for being friendly with Epstein, since that would apply to him, too.

The former Prince Andrew acted as he did because he lived in a world in which someone like him never faced consequences. That isn’t true anymore. “Nobody is above the law,” Starmer said in response to the news. In Britain, at least, that might actually be true.

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