Or maybe a memorial to his personal Vietnam

No, they are doing this on purpose. Create obvious fakes, and “release” them along with everything else, just so that if something meaningful gets released they can claim it is fake, too.

This is taking the “dismantling of the administrative state” a bit too literally…

He was shaking so many hands over the holiday, he was using both hands to do it!

Trump Department of Just ICE

Newsom is the Next Man Up. Anyone else who runs in the Primary is really just auditioning for VP.

Recall on Trump? In what scenario would this happen?

God has the final word on Donald Trump. Someday, when he eats his last cheeseburger.

If God issues His Ultimate Recall vote on Trump, Vance immediately becomes President, and the office of the VP becomes vacant.

To fill it, President Vance would need to nominate someone, who would have to be approved by both the House and Senate.

But McConnell started a precedent that says that Congress can keep the position vacant by simply refusing to hold the vote.

Even so, a very good election night for Democrats in the upper chamber would only bring the Senate to 50-50, with a Republican VP serving as the tie-breaker,” he said.

If I were writing the script, I would have the Democrats win that 50/50 split in the Senate, then have the President eat his final cheeseburger. Then, Schumer will invoke the “McConnell” doctrine to sit on the VP appointment and not bring it to a vote at all. We lived without a SC Justice for nearly a year, and they are much more important than the VP.

Or is it building the infrastructure to accommodate them the issue?

It’s this, but that’s only part of the story.

Datacenter companies are very efficient at building new ones now, once they have all the proper permits and can start building it can go from an empty lot to fully functional in a year or two. Maybe longer for the huge hyperscalar ones.

Once they are online, their power demand is comparable to a small city, coming online all at once. But the local utility never had this demand in its plan, so they have to build more capacity to service it, and building a new power plant takes much longer. In the meantime, the demand will outstrip their capacity and the utility will have to buy more power on the open market. This drives up costs for all their customers unless the utility is allowed to charge these customers (whose existence has blown up all their capacity planning) more.

As a side note, they often get advantages and tax breaks because they promise to bring jobs to the area. And the initial construction jobs usually are significant. But once the place is built, it’s ongoing operations only requires a few dozen positions, many of them low-tech and outsourced like site security. The higher-tech jobs (like the network engineering) is often not on-site anyway. A shopping plaza would generate more jobs than a datacenter.

That guy? He wasn’t even born here. Off to CECOT he goes…

They get permission to hate the people they want to hate. See? They think it is a fair deal.

There’s another aspect to this, that eventually the loans have to be repaid. That may involve selling assets, which would expose the seller to capital gains.

However, if the loan is held until the owner of the loan dies, then the estate gets stuck with that bill. But the estate inherits all the assets at a stepped-up cost basis. The assets are still sold to pay off the loan, but very little will be owed in capital gains taxes.

It’s so common that it’s referred to as the Buy, Borrow, Die strategy that the wealthy use to avoid taxes.

Also, the lottery is a tax on those who don’t understand (or are willing to learn) about statistics. Never play.

I bought a ticket this time around, and I understand statistics. I understand that my odds of winning are infinitely better with one ticket than no tickets. But the difference between one ticket and more than one ticket is inconsequential. So one ticket it is.

I also understand the odds of winning Powerball are about 1 in 300 million. So once the jackpot gets over 600m or so, the expected value is high enough to justify buying that one ticket.

So, when I see the jackpot get big, I buy a ticket, and dont get my hopes up.

The process to get your first passport is quite a chore, because you need your original citizenship documents, like that birth certificate with the raised seal, or your original naturalization papers. If you don’t have that you need to go to whatever authority made out your documentation first and request it, which might take a while (and more ID).

But once you have that, renewing it is much easier, because that expired passport can be still be accepted as proof of citizenship, even for some time after expiration. I’ve been able to renew mine online. I just have to fill out the form, send them a fresh picture, and pay the fee.

Pro Tip: for an extra $30, you can get a Passport Card in addition to your passport. It is only valid as a travel document for land and sea travel within North America, but has the same proof of citizenship as a passport book. Everyone who is in the wrong half of the “Peter Griffin in a Fez” scale should carry it on their person at all times.

Yes, the ICE agent will say it’s fake, and confiscate it, but at least you can keep your passport book in a safe place for your family to bring to the detention center to try and get you out.

There’s an app for that!

“An ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien,” said the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee.