The Pipe Bomber? Never Mind!

When I last looked at the January 6 pipe bomber two weeks ago, I noted that there were two competing stories coming out of one FBI. The best-publicized was that the individual in loose-fitting clothes, hoodie, and mask was a literally moonlighting female Capitol Police officer whom we'll call Ms C, who planted the bombs while wandering around Capitol Hill for an hour on the evening of January 5.

The other story was that it wasn't Ms C, or maybe not even the figure wandering around in the videos at all. Instead, the bombs may have been planted shortly before they were discovered on January 6 by someone completely different. The main problem with this version is that on one hand, we have to discount the figure wandering around the previous evening, and on the other, we have to identify someone else planting the bombs the following morning. We must assume hundreds of man-hours have already been expended searching the relevant video footage for this without result.

But beyond that, this story has been strange from the start. Blaze Media is Glenn Beck's outfit. Beck, a converted Mormon, has always been just a dollar-store Rush Limbaugh, and Blaze Media has never been known for breaking big new stories. New investigative stories typically come from reporters like Catherine Herridge, John Solomon, or Susan Crabtree. The Blaze Media story comes from Steve Baker and Joseph Hanneman, who simply don't have that record.

The second problem is that Baker and Hanneman claim they identified Ms C via "gait analysis", but this doesn't hold water. It implies that some sort of massive AI program reviewed millions of videos of ordinary people walking, compared them to the video on the FBI site of the wandering figure, and lo and behold, it spat out the name of Ms C. I don't think so. I think someone from somewhere in the deep state contacted Baker and Hanneman, said you might want to look at Ms C, and at best, they took a "gait analysis" app and ran it against the FBI video vs one of Ms C walking, and they said doggone it, it's Ms C!

That is, if they did anything like that at all. There's so much hinky about this story that I don't feel compelled to accept any of this. A CBS story from this past Tuesday seems much closer to the circumstances I've surmised:

Multiple sources said that a unit overseen by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard drafted a memo identifying the woman and describing allegations that she had placed the explosive devices outside Democratic and Republican party offices. The memo was written after ODNI was made aware of allegations from an outside source, an ODNI spokesperson said.

ODNI officials said the agency received a tip from a person affiliated with a media organization about potential criminal wrongdoing by an individual believed to be working at an intelligence agency and set about documenting it in a memo.

A copy of the unfinished memo was given to senior staff at the security officer's workplace, sources said.

. . . A short time after the unfinished memo began to circulate, the conservative news outlet, Blaze News, published details similar to those in the draft, including the woman's full name.

But the same CBS News story says that after her employer followed up with Ms C, she

cleared her name by providing an alibi: video of her playing with her puppies at the time the devices were placed, sources told CBS News. The FBI has now ruled her out as a suspect in the 2021 plot, according to three sources — but only after her name circulated on social platforms and a conservative news site.

This seems a little too cut and dried as well. I tend to think there's too much of an effort to wrap up any inconvenient questions and proclaim there's nothing more to see. Sundance at Conservative Treehouse, while more of a conspiracy theorist than I am, makes a convincing case for some sort of deep state agenda here:

However, the CBS narrative doesn’t focus on The Blaze or the reporting of Steve Baker, instead the media hit shifts responsibility to Tulsi Gabbard who is operating outside her intelligence oversight lane and conducting independent investigations which includes information from “outside sources.”

. . . Having followed the operations of these embed “intel officials” the motive for this operation against the office of the DNI is clear. You, me, all of us can see with clear non-pretending eyes, the intent of this op was to change the way Tulsi Gabbard is receiving information and to block the delivery of external sunlight.

There’s no better way for the “Seven Ways from Sunday” domestic group to operate than to seed false information (“whistleblower”) to their target (ODNI). Then work to externalize it (Steve Baker), emphasize it (Glenn Beck), build drama toward it, so that eventually it can then be cited as an example to ensure no further assistance is ever accepted. Isolate – Ridicule – Marginalize.

. . . Notice the script, the emphasis, the narrative as it is performed. All of it is entirely transparent.

But other pieces of the story as they've trickled out still strike me as strangely incongruous and oddly coincidental. Take the Washington Metro fare card that was somehow traced to the pipe bombing -- as I discussed here two weeks ago, the version we're given is that the FBI, maybe the same people who found the wandering figure in the hoodie and mask, or maybe not, combed the video from the prior day and identified someone else, someone completely different, who was wandering around the same area and taking photos of things with numbers on them, dumpsters and such.

This turns out to have been a childhood friend of Ms C's then-next-door neighbor, who'd dropped in from out of town, a real MAGA type whom the neighbor didn't trust, but whom he nevertheless lent his extra Metro card, the one he didn't use, to go down to Capitol Hill and wander around and take pictures of things with numbers on them for a book he was writing. Or something like that. Hey, doesn't everyone keep a second Metro card that they never use?

And this was all thoroughly investigated and ruled out as not suspicious. Or something like that. And the guy's then-next door neighbor, just out of the blue, was fingered five years later as maybe the person who was wandering around, completely independently of another guy who was tracked on video taking pictures of things with numbers on them, dropping backpacks with bombs under benches. All of this is completely random and coincidental, nothiong to see here. We're still searching for the suspect.

Except that while I don't normally wander around taking pictures of things like dumpsters with numbers on them, I do watch a lot of true crime shows on TV. One of the most common things you hear is seasoned detectives saying that in their line of work, there's no such thing as a coincidence. Except that when you're investigating two pipe bombs that coincidentally didn't explode on January 6, there are coincidences up the wazoo, but this is perfectly fine.

Another thing I hear pretty frequently is cold case detectives saying when you've got a cold case that ought to be solvable, but it doesn't quite seem to fall into place, you've simply got to go back to the beginning and look at everything one more time. It's hard to think this hasn't yet been done here.

They need to start with Ms C's videotape of her playing with her puppies, but that's just one of a great many things that don't quite fit.

Nervous Nellies

A headline in the normally pro-Trump New York Post: Michael Goodwin: Trump needs to hit the reset button if the GOP wants to win the 2026 midterms:

As he barrels toward the end of his first year back in the White House, the president is beset by slumping poll numbers and a pileup of problems, some of which are self-inflicted.

This is my first big puzzle, the "slumping poll numbers". These are the same polls that were wildly off just a few weeks ago, claiming the New Jersey governor's race was a tossup, and Republicans even had a chance in Virginia. But the outcome was dog bites man; blue states voted blue. Nobody's asking what happened to put expectations so far out of whack. But let's proceed:

Even a gaggle of normally obedient Republicans in Congress are growing restless, and his call for gerrymandering House district lines in red states to pad the GOP advantage in the midterms is in danger of producing the opposite outcome.

This comes after Trump's victory in the Schumer Shutdown on November 10, only a little over two weeks ago, in which Mark Halperin marveled over the Republicans' message discipline throughoput the 41-day standoff. This was not your grandfather's Republican Party. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Was there dissent among Republicans in the 2018 government shutdown?" It answered with specific examples, including:

Opposition to the Funding Bill: In the House, during a December 2018 vote on a spending bill that included $5 billion for the border wall, eight Republicans joined Democrats to vote against it. Some of these dissenting members were concerned about the potential for a shutdown or the general increase in spending.

Concerns over Executive Power: Later, in a separate vote in the Senate in September 2019 related to the use of military funds for the wall (following Trump's national emergency declaration to bypass Congress), eleven Republicans voted to block the president's move, expressing concern over the precedent it set for presidential power. This included Senators like Mitt Romney, Mike Lee, and Susan Collins.

Criticism of Strategy: Some rank-and-file Republican lawmakers were publicly critical of their own party's handling of the situation and the decision to force a shutdown, which became the longest in U.S. history. Some in the conservative Freedom Caucus also had internal disagreements about the timing and tactics of the shutdown fight.

"Normally obedient Republicans"? Since when? Here's another story from just this past Monday:

A senior House Republican reportedly warned that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) shocking resignation is just the beginning, and predicted that what happens next could cost the GOP the majority even before next year’s midterm elections.

“More explosive early resignations are coming,” the unnamed figure told Punchbowl News on Monday. “It’s a tinder box. Morale has never been lower. Mike Johnson will be stripped of his gavel and they will lose the majority before this term is out.”

But other stories don't nesessarily draw the same picture:

Speaker Mike Johnson has told the White House that most House Republicans have little interest in extending the Affordable Care Act's enhanced subsidies, sources familiar with the conversation told CBS News.

Johnson delivered the message in a phone call with senior administration officials as President Trump's advisers were drafting a plan to continue the subsidies for an additional two years. That plan that was initially expected to emerge this week.

The Wall Street Journal first reported Johnson's warning to the White House regarding the lack of GOP House support for the plan. Any White House health care plan would require overwhelming Republican support in the House to be enacted.

It sounds as though there's some sort of productive discussion under way, with some type of consensus emerging that will hold the line against increased spending. On balabnce, this has been a winning issue for Republicans whenever they've been consistent on it. But Goodwin contiinues,

According to Real Clear Politics, his average approval is a mere 43%, while his average disapproval is 54.8%, a spread of minus 11.8 points.

Most troubling, the numbers are far worse on his handling of the economy, which was the issue at the heart of his resounding 2024 victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in all the swing states.

Yet now Trump’s average approval on the economy is a mere 39.5%, against an average disapproval of 57.8%, creating a huge spread of minus 18.3.

Again, Real Clear Politics has yet to explain how its averages were so far off the actual results in the latest elections. Almost all the polls that make up its composites were wildly outside the margin of error, which I discussed in this post. But Goodwin advises,

The big picture suggests he needs a reset, and maybe a rest.

In any event, it’s time to tighten the focus and follow a more methodical approach so the most important things get sufficient presidential attention.

What puzzles me is that just in the past few weeks, Trump has scored a major victory in ending the Schumer Shutdown and securing the resignation of a high-profile "normally obedient Republican". The main focus of the anti-Trump resistance has been to resurrect the question of whether Trump is some sort of subversive, this time giving the military illegal orders. Hysterical allegations -- that he's a Russian asset, that he's a rapist, that he's a pedo, that he's trying to get revenge on his enemies, that he's giving the military illegal orders -- have historically failed to gain traction.

I keep saying it's a major miscalculation to underestimate the guy.

The Case Of Sen Kelly

BREAKING: The Department of War is reportedly considering recalling Sen. Mark Kelly (D) to active duty for possible court-martial after he urged U.S. troops to defy orders from Trump and Hegseth. pic.twitter.com/W8q2a3iMlL

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) November 24, 2025

The received opinion, via the Sacramento Bee, goes like this:

Truthful speech is protected by the First Amendment and should not be the basis for accusing people of sedition, let alone threatening the death penalty. This seems obvious, but on Thursday, Nov. 20, President Donald Trump responded to a video by six members of Congress by posting: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

What did the members of Congress do to deserve this threat of capital punishment? They posted a 90-second video on social media that spoke to members of the military and intelligence communities about their oath to the Constitution. The part of the video that drew Trump’s ire was this remark: “This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens. ... Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders. ... No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

So what is Trump doing here? As I've been saying, it's a mistake to jump to the conclusion that he's impulse-driven, unless we attribute considerable discernment to his impulses, which in recent weeks have given him clear victories over the Schumer Shutdown and Rep Taylor Greene. Let's refer once more to the business-school analysis of his negotiating style that I've used in a number of posts here:

My argument is that Trump’s coercive negotiation style is best understood through the prism of his four public roles: observer, performer, controller, and disrupter.

. . . [U]sing observation to facilitate a mutual gains approach is not what Donald Trump has in mind when he prepares for a negotiation. Speaking on a television talk show in 2009, he emphatically told the audience that one key to a successful negotiation is “to be able to size up your opponent”. . . . He prepares for a negotiation by learning as much as possible about the other side’s strengths and vulnerabilities.

As much as Trump watches others, he is aware of being watched: “life is a performance art,” he wrote [in] Think Like a Champion.

. . . Trump’s fighting style has received considerable attention: “That’s just my makeup,” he explained in The Art of the Deal. “I fight when I feel I’m getting screwed, even if it’s costly and difficult and highly risky”. “I love fighting … battles,” Trump said recently.

. . . Trump the disrupter is instinct‐driven. “Listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper”. He repeated this advice ten years later. “The chosen few,” he wrote, “can just go with their gut”. Trump the disrupter is also action‐oriented: “If you’re going to achieve anything, you have to take action”.

The congresspeople who posted the video urging military members not to follow "illegal" orders was tailor-made for Trump's strategy. He immediately jumped on it in his roles as performer and disrupter:

“It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand — We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET,” the president wrote in one Truth Social post Thursday morning (Nov 20), linking to an article about the video from the Washington Examiner.

“This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???” Trump wrote in another post.

In a third, he wrote: "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!"

But it's worth pointing out that Trump as observer had already been at work. The Democrat who had the most to lose in making the video was Sen Mark Kelly:

Because Kelly was a senior officer who retired from the Navy, he is required to remain available for recall to the military by law. The other five lawmakers, Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Reps. Jason Crow, Maggie Goodlander, Chris Deluzio and Chrissy Houlahan, are not eligible for recall to a military service.

The recall can also be for the purpose of court martial for violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to which Kelly continues to be subject as a retiree. Kelly issued a bombastic reply:

When I was 22 years old, I commissioned as an Ensign in the United States Navy and swore an oath to the Constitution. I upheld that oath through flight school, multiple deployments on the USS Midway, 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm, test pilot school, four space shuttle flights at NASA, and every day since I retired – which I did after my wife Gabby was shot in the head while serving her constituents.

In combat, I had a missile blow up next to my jet and flew through anti-aircraft fire to drop bombs on enemy targets. At NASA, I launched on a rocket, commanded the space shuttle, and was part of the recovery mission that brought home the bodies of my astronaut classmates who died on Columbia. I did all of this in service to this country that I love and has given me so much.

Sec Hegseth replied,

So “Captain” Kelly, not only did your sedition video intentionally undercut good order & discipline…but you can’t even display your uniform correctly.

Your medals are out of order & rows reversed. When/if you are recalled to active duty, it’ll start with a uniform inspection. https://t.co/rsSyrPcmbg

— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) November 25, 2025

Intriguingly, legacy media hasn't been giving the other Democrats an easy ride:

Slotkin faced questions during an interview Sunday on ABC's "This Week" about the recent reaction to a social media video she and five other Democratic lawmakers made encouraging service members to "refuse illegal orders."

"Do you believe President Trump has issued any illegal orders?" host Martha Raddatz asked.

"To my knowledge, I am not aware of things that are illegal, but certainly there are some legal gymnastics that are going on with these Caribbean strikes and everything related to Venezuela," Slotkin responded.

Elsewhere,

NBC’s Kristen Welker on Sunday asked [Sen Amy] Klobuchar what specific “illegal acts” the seditious Democrats were referring to in the viral video.

“I wonder, do you know what the specific, illegal acts are that your democratic colleagues were referring to there?” Kristen Welker asked Klobuchar.

Klobuchar could not answer Welker.

. . . “If their commander were to tell them, hey go out on the streets… and do this and that, that’s not following the order that is in law,” Klobuchar said.

The allegations against Kelly are beginning to push other Democrats over the edge. Arizona Sen Ruben Gallego posted a video while driving:

This is f*cking insane. We should all point out how f*cking insane this is. Hey, this is Ruben Gallego, I’m traveling through Arizona right now, and I just see the news that Department of Defense is starting investigation against my seat mate, Mark Kelly. this is f*cking insane. We should all point out how f*cking insane this is. And, you know, these guys are trying to say that they’re not acting like fascists, they’re not trying to give as much power to this president as a king, that they should stop acting like it.

Trump as observer, performer, controller, and disrupter has deliberately provoked a donnybrook, the sort of thing that by his own admission he loves. And although he made his initial allegations with characteristic hyperbole and bravado, there's substance behind them, as former CIA operations officer Bryan Dean Wright pointed out to Jesse Waters:

[I]f you watch the video again, one of the first things that [Sen Slotkin] and the others do is they establish credibility and authority. They talk about who they are, working for the CIA and working for the military. They then move into the next phase of the propaganda message, which is, there’s a crisis. They create a crisis for the listeners inside the FBI and the CIA and the military, and they say that there is a threat, not just abroad, like we might face with China or Russia or al-Qaeda, but inside of the country. The threat is here. Who’s that threat? Donald Trump.

It looks like there might be serious grounds for a court martial for Sen Kelly in this case. I keep saying over and over that it's a big mistake to underestimate Trump. And let's face it, he's enjoying himself doing this. No wonder he doesn't take a salary.

Cameras Are Everywhere. Deal With It.

A typical event in the On Patrol: Live TV show involves a cop pulling a driver over for suspected DUI. The cop walks up to the driver's window and requests that the driver step out. All of a sudden, the driver notices there's a guy with a big camera filming the scene and realizes what this could mean: their face will be on national TV with a show that leads its time slot in the 25-54 demographic, which is another way of saying that by the next day, their DUI arrest will be all over town.

"I don't want to be filmed!" the driver protests. "I demand that you stop filming!"

"It's just a documentary," the officer usually replies. "They're just filming a documentary."

The other night, a driver protested more than usual, which had no impact. "Anyone can film out in public," the officer continued. "They can film you, you can film us. That's the law." Which is another way of saying cameras are everywhere. Deal with it.

This seems to bother libertarians more than just about anyone else, which is puzzling, since libertarians generally favor the fewest possible restraints on individual conduct. They'll argue all day for your right to film police activity, but they'll resist to the end the right of the police to film you, for pretty much the same reason a driver doesn't want anyone filming him failing a field sobriety test in front of a national audience.

Back in the day, local newspapers regularly printed the police blotter with news like "Mr Silas Murray of Sparta Center was booked Tuesday night for DUI", but apparently this wasn't the same thing as having your picture published, or maybe people seeing you on national TV falling over during the one-leg-stand test. The easiest way to prevent this, of course, is simply prudent behavior like not drinking and driving.

But now the long-standing libertarian objection to red light cameras has morphed into a more general panic over automated license plate readers.

The Associated Press is shocked, shocked, to discover that Customs and Border Protection has expanded their surveillance network beyond the “100 miles inland from every border” as authorized in the Patriot Act.

Worse yet is their stunned research showing license plate readers (APLR’s) are being connected to various other public and private sector mechanisms to identify travel patterns of U.S. citizens and collate them to facial recognition software applications.

. . . [Conservative Treehouse] has been writing about this surveillance issue for well over a decade. The introduction of Palantir facial recognition, to the overall database of social media information and private identity information, now makes it very easy for the government to simply point a camera at your face and get every scintilla of information about us [sic].

Almost all of the privacy advocates have given up trying to resist the outcome. However, I am not one of them. All it will take is a small mistake in the AI development programming, and people will see quickly just how dangerous this is.

A story at KPBS San Diego suggests the general level of panic:

The nondescript black cameras are mounted near each entrance of the Las Americas Premium Outlets, capturing the license plate, make and model of every car that enters the mall parking lot.

“As soon as you come in, it's in the system,” said a former worker with Simon Property Group. The company is the largest owner of shopping malls in the country, including Las Americas, the sprawling complex next to the San Ysidro border crossing.

At first, he embraced the automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras from Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based surveillance technology company. The former employee believed the ALPR system would help address shoplifting and solve serious crimes that occasionally happened around the mall, like robberies and vehicle theft.

And then he realized the power — and scope — of the license plate surveillance system. Flock can help users analyze patterns of movement and potential associations between drivers. And Simon Property Group gave several law enforcement agencies open access to search and receive notifications from its ALPR system.

“If people knew more about it, I would say people will obviously be pissed off,” he said. “Nobody wants big brother watching you on every single little thing.”

During the George Floyd riots, our neighbor put up a big WE BELIEVE BLACK LIVES MATTER AND ALSO BLAH BLAH BLAH sign in their front yard. I very briefly cogitated somehow spiriting it away in the dead of night until I almost immediately realized that, dead of night or no, my action would be caught by a minimum of three cameras from three different points of view, with my face clearly recognizable, and I thought better of any such project. Thus did cameras reinforce ordinary prudence.

Soon enough, the neighbors put the house on the market, and the realtor spirited the sign away in furtherance of making the property saleable. On camera or not, this was perfectly fine. It began to strike me that in almost any conceivable situation, cameras tend to enforce appropriate community expectations. If you think your actions will be on camera, you think twice. The KPBS story continues,

The use of license plate reader technology has long been a flashpoint between law enforcement and privacy advocates.

In recent years, California has established certain guardrails for ALPR networks owned by police departments and other public entities, including restrictions on how the data can be shared. The systems are also subject to public records requests.

But those safeguards don’t apply to the many private businesses — including Home Depot, Lowe's, the Southwestern Yacht Club, Fashion Valley mall and homeowners associations — that give police access to their license plate readers.

These private systems effectively serve as a wide-ranging extension of law enforcement's surveillance apparatus — even though the private businesses are not subject to the same public scrutiny and transparency requirements.

Wait a moment. Why would an upscale retailer, a big-box store, or an HOA want to install license plate readers? Almost certainly to deter theft, vandalism, or other potential crime. Should any such occur, store security or the HOA would indeed share such information with the police, along with other security video they have irrespective of the ALPR. If the video isn't clear enough to get a plate number, the ALPR could certainly help. It's possible that retailers could make other potential use of the information for marketing or whatever, but certainly the primary use would be to deter crime.

But why would an ordinary solid citizen be worrying about whether where he drove could wind up in someone's data base? Is he really worried that a trip to Home Depot could be used against him? They've already got his receipt and the card he used to pay, and they've already got video of him in the checkout line. This would only be a problem if the cops were trying to trace the shovel he used to bury a body, not if he were picking up some spackle.

The real problem we see often enough is that some solid citizens drive to the wrong part of town for the wrong reasons. They get caught at this often enough anyhow, but this could make tracking them just that much easier. Or they go to motels over a long lunch for trysts, or they say they're going someplace for a business meeting and wind up someplace else with someone else. I suppose license plate readers make these people nervous, but they really ought to recognize that technology has already been way ahead of them for a very long time.

Cameras are everywhere. It isn't Big Brother, it mostly just reinforces ordinary prudence.

So, MTG Is Resigning -- Why?

Q: “Are you willing to forgive Congresswoman Taylor Greene?”

TRUMP: “Forgive for what? I just disagreed with her philosophy … I think she's a nice person.”
pic.twitter.com/SWBYdjn4LV

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) November 22, 2025

It's worth linking yet again to the very insightful business-school analysis of Trump's negotiating strategy to get a clearer idea of what's going on regarding Marjorie Taylor Greene's resignation announcement.

Trump also uses generosity, particularly compliments, to enhance his leverage. “I know that no matter how tough somebody is, he or she will always remember support you’ve given or a favor you might have done in the past,” he wrote in one of his books.

From the X post above, we can see that Trump is being unexpectedly generous with Rep Greene, having called her a "traitor" only a few days earlier. Why? It looks like she's going to give him exactly what he wants, her resignation from Congress. Now he doesn't even need to primary her. As long as she goes through with it on January 5, he's copacetic.

Especially if she just goes away as a prominent figure in the supposed MAGA civil war, which it looks like she'll also do. So the first big takeaway here is that Trump has succeeded in giving her a structured choice.

If his counterparts do have options, he uses threats to denigrate the value of these alternatives, thus presenting them with a structured choice: either accept his offer (which, as performer, he promotes with his typical bravado), or face his unpredictable ire (disrupter). Accepting Trump’s offer often puts the other parties in his debt, and he can be expected to threaten retribution if they do not reciprocate (disrupter).

Looking at Rep Greene's career, I'm surprised at how little attention has been paid to her marriage, which ended after 27 years when her husband filed for divorce in 2022.

Marjorie Taylor Greene's husband has filed for divorce after 27 years of marriage to the Georgia representative, according to court records obtained by PEOPLE.

Perry Greene, who wed Marjorie in August of 1995, claimed his marriage with her was "irretrievably broken."

. . . The petition clarified that Perry and Marjorie "previously separated and remain in a bona fide state of separation."

The cause was apparently repeated infidelities on her part. She also faced attacks from Trump confidante Laura Loomer, who accused her of hiring illegal aliens in her family's construction business:

Why is @mtgreenee such a two faced, lying political prostitute?

I oppose H1Bs and illegal immigration, but it was Marjorie Traitor Greene who spent Christmas in 2024 defending H1Bs. It was MTG who said we need to give jobs to illegal Aliens so she can keep having the ability to hire illegal aliens to work at her construction company.

Now she’s pretending like we don’t have the receipts.

What Greene faced was the potential for more such attacks, giving her the structured choice of getting out of Trump's way or risking terminal damage to her reputation. Scott Pinsker offers some perspective on why Greene announced her resignation on a Friday night:

in a press release about bad news or an embarrassing situation, you don’t want to include any memorable quotes or snappy one-liners. Now’s not the time to write like Hemingway. Instead, you roll in the opposite direction and make everything as boring as possible.

That’s because you wanna kill the story. Therefore, boring is better.

Another tactic is the Friday evening news dump: When you’ve got something bad to announce, don’t do it Monday morning! That’s when news organizations can dedicate their resources to scrutinizing all the sordid, humiliating details. If you release it Monday morning, it’ll be on the menu for the rest of the week!

Do it on a Friday evening, when Americans are less likely to watch the news at all.

But the best time of all is the Friday before a big holiday weekend. During major holidays like Christmas, Independence Day, Memorial Day — and, of course, Thanksgiving — the American people are distracted. We’re focused on other things.

. . . And this brings us to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), one of the most media-savvy members of congress. From Fox News to CNN to The View, since assuming office on Jan. 3, 2021, the most dangerous place in D.C. is between Greene and a camera. From national TV interviews to on-set visits to Tucker Carlson’s podcast, she’s certainly not media-shy.

So why would she announce her resignation at 8:01 p.m. on the Friday before Thanksgiving?

If her goal was maximizing publicity, it would’ve been smarter to make her announcement on the Monday morning after Thanksgiving — not the Friday preceding it.

From her sketchy personal life to whether the family construction business exploits illegals to how her net worth rocketed to $22 million while she was in Congress, she was looking at nothing but downside if she continued to get crosswise with Trump. The sorts of things that could come out would be unpredictable but likely catastrophic, and they could start coming out any day. Pinsker continues,

I know there’s speculation that MTG might be setting up a run for president. Or maybe she’ll follow through with her threat of running for the Senate. After all, that’s what ambitious politicians tend to do: They always run for higher offices.

But I don’t think so. If those were her plans, she’d want more eyeballs — not fewer. This PR strategy doesn’t make any sense.

Unless she’s dropping out of politics for good.

I think she’s done. I don’t know if there’s any truth to AOC’s comments about MTG making millions on insider trading, but I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s some legal scandal, too.

According to Chrome AI mode,

Marjorie Taylor Greene's estimated net worth increased from approximately $700,000 before she took office in January 2021 to around $22 million by early 2025. This increase in her estimated net worth largely stems from the appreciation of her assets, particularly her majority ownership in her family's construction business, Taylor Commercial, Inc., along with stock investments and book royalties, not directly from her congressional salary of $174,000 per year.

Certainly more questions could come out about this as well. As the business school analysis puts it, Trump prefers to negotiate with people who have no options. We see this carried out week after week in his second term.

Yet Again, It's A Major Mistake To Cubbyhole Trump

As Ludwig Wittgenstein would put it, the solution to the problem is seen in the disappearance of the problem. I was drawn to Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene's announcement of her resignation, in particular that she mentions Epstein prominently:

I never changed or went back on my campaign promises and only disagreed in a few areas like. . . demanding the release of the Epstein files.

Just last Sunday, she said the growing animosity between her and Donald Trump “has all come down to the Epstein files.”

“I have no idea what’s in the files. I can’t even guess,” Greene added. “But that is the question everyone is asking is why fight this so hard?”

Greene, a former close ally of Trump, has come under fire from the president in recent weeks over her push to release federal files related to Jeffrey Epstein files, a trove of documents presumably detailing the disgraced financier’s crimes, including who may have known about or been involved in those crimes.

It appears that by late last week, Trump had lost patience with Rep Greene, and the same day as she made the remarks quoted above, he endorsed the Epstein Files Transparency Act via a post on Truth Social, and following votes in both houses, he signed it into law on Wednesday. This brought to mind some homespun advice I heard many years ago, but I can't remember exactly where it came from: "Don't give them a wall to bounce their ball off of."

I asked Chrome AI mode, "What does 'Don't give them a wall to bounce their ball off of' mean?" It answered,

"Don't give them a wall to bounce their ball off of" is an idiomatic expression that means you should not give someone a reaction, an argument, or any material that they can use to continue a conflict, disagreement, or provocation.

It is a metaphorical way of saying:

. . . Starve them of attention: By not reacting, you deny them the satisfaction or fuel they are seeking.

The advice is often used in situations where someone is trying to bait you into an emotional response or a fight. By remaining calm, silent, or simply refusing to participate, you effectively end the interaction because the other person has no "surface" off which to bounce their ideas or accusations.

Greene's response, two days after Trump signed the bill, was to announce her resignation from Congress. I can only surmise that, given the angry and vengeful tone of her announcement, she had been utterly thwarted in a bid for attention that she'd expected to propel her into much higher levels of influence and prominence.

It has been unfair and wrong not only to me but especially to my family, but it's been wrong to my district as well. I have too much self-respect and dignity, I love my family way too much, and I do not want my sweet district to have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the president that we all fought for, only to fight and win my election while Republicans will likely lose the midterms and in turn be expected to defend the president against impeachment after he hatefully dumped tens of millions of dollars against me and tried to destroy me. It's all so absurd and completely unserious. I refuse to be a battered wife hoping it all goes away and gets better.

Boy, is she mad. But what's she so mad about? Didn't she just win and force Trump to do a 180 on the Epstein files? She ought to be doing a victory lap on the talk shows, maybe do an encore on The View. Apparently not. Somehow Trump just stole her thunder, stole her spotlight. I guess I'd be just as mad if I were she; he made her so mad, she ended her career. I guess the alternative would be to do what Elon Musk did after he tried to play the Epstein card: eat humble pie, admit his own miscalculation, and play by Trump's rules.

But the solution to Trump's Marjorie Taylor Greene problem is seen in the disappearance of the Marjorie Taylor Greene problem. Just like that!

The same thing seems to be happening with New York Mayor Mamdani.

Zohran Mamdani’s high-stakes White House meeting turned into a Freaky Friday lovefest – as President Trump lauded the socialist mayor-elect and predicted he’ll make New York City great again.

A sitting Trump, with Mamdani standing by his side behind the Resolute Desk, heaped praise on the democratic socialist, jovially touching his arm as he helped him dodge tough questions and unexpectedly predicted his mayoralty will be a success.

. . . Trump’s predicted civility exceeded expectations as he fielded some of the tough questions directed at Mamdani and praised his surprising election victory.

. . . The cordial summit arguably puts more pressure on Mamdani to deliver his sweeping promises to lower costs for New Yorkers – and elevates the socialist as a Democratic leader.

New York political insiders were equal parts dumbfounded and amused by how the faceoff played out, with one calling it a “kiss-ass fest.”

Trump basically just knows the homnespun truth, "Don't give them a wall to bounce their ball off of." The results can be astonishing.

Pope Leo On The USCCB Special Message

On Tuesday, Pope Leo made a statement that endorsed the "Special Message" the USCCB issued the week prior. According to the USCCB,

Pope Leo told reporters in Castel Gandolfo that the pastoral message is "a very important statement. I would invite especially all Catholics, but people of goodwill, to listen carefully to what they said."

"No one has said that the United States should have open borders," the pope said. "I think every country has a right to determine who and how and when people enter."

However, he said, in enforcing immigration policy "we have to look for ways of treating people humanely, treating people with the dignity that they have."

"If people are in the United States illegally, there are ways to treat that," he said. "There are courts. There's a system of justice," but the system has "a lot of problems" that should be addressed.

The video I saw strongly suggested Leo was repeating what had been prepared for him, and I've got to think he isn't familiar with the actual conditions imposed on the migrants by the processes through which they're brought into the country, as well as the conditions under which they live and work once they've been brought in. The efforts of the Trump administration have in fact been to alleviate the inhumane and undignified conditions imposed on them. For instance, via Reuters,

U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics show apprehensions at the southwest border, an indicator of the number of migrants trying to cross, are down nearly 90% to their lowest level since 1970.

As a result, the corridor between San Diego and Tijuana, one of the busiest international crossings in the world, has dramatically transformed in less than a year. Major concentrations of migrants in squalid conditions have largely disappeared. A San Diego transit center that once served as a makeshift migrant depot has returned to normal. A dusty gathering spot hemmed in by 30-foot (9.1-meter) border walls, where asylum-seeking migrants amassed to turn themselves in to U.S. officials, is once again nothing more than a vacant outpost. Across the border in Tijuana, migrant shelters suddenly have empty space.

Once they're settled in the interior, a common business model takes over that relies on a form of permanent indenture. For instance, just this week:

A Michigan couple has been arrested and charged with allegedly hiring hundreds of undocumented workers while bringing in tens of millions of dollars for their plumbing business.

. . . The feds say that between January 2022 and December 2024, the couple employed around 253 people, of which only six were legally present and allowed to work in the U.S.

. . . According to the complaint, the defendants collected the passports of the workers and housed them in overcrowded houses and hotel rooms.

Between Jan. 1, 2022 and Aug. 7, 2025, feds say the plumbing company generated around $74 million in customer revenue.

This pattern appears nationwide:

Charlotte, N.C., is making headlines this week because dozens of construction sites have gone silent. ICE swept through the region, and the labor force evaporated almost instantly. A major American city discovered, in real time, that its building boom was being held together by workers who couldn’t legally be there. Watching that footage hit me hard, because I’ve seen it before — not on the evening news, but in the slow collapse of my own childhood community.

. . . Farmers who had paid teenagers and local laborers fair wages realized they could hire adults from Mexico and Central America for far less and house them in the kinds of conditions Americans would never tolerate: eight men to a sagging, leaking trailer with no electricity, no running water, no insulation. They were paid in cash, they didn’t complain, they worked year-round, and they had no leverage because they knew their employers could always get them deported.

The writer concludes,

And through all of this, politicians, pundits, and corporate lobbyists kept repeating the same line: “Americans just won’t do these jobs.” . . . Americans didn’t suddenly lose their work ethic. The jobs were taken from them — not by immigrants directly, but by American employers who built a business model on illegal labor and by a federal government that looked the other way for forty years.

What Americans “won’t do” are jobs that have been made illegal in everything but name — jobs where wages have collapsed to exploit desperation, where safety standards are ignored, where workers are paid off the books, where insurance and taxes are bypassed, and where living conditions violate every regulation on the books. When the floor is lowered that far, legal workers cannot enter the market at all. That isn’t laziness. That’s math.

This business model first surfaced last year, when the problem of Haitian migrants working in sweatships in Springfield, OH hit the media. At that time, it became clear that the issue wasn't just individual greedy employers, it extended to landlords who evicted middle-class tenants so they could rent the units to occupants who would overcrowd them more profitably. As it happened, NGOs, often Catholic, facilitated the process by recruiting candidates in their home countries and flying them in.

If the migrants needed housing, the NGOs paid the slumlords directly. If they needed jobs, they became employment agencies for the sweatshops. If they needed cars, they paid used car dealers who'd sell junk cars to the migrants without drivers licenses, registration, or insurance. All the time, the NGOs were getting humanitarian awards and collecting an administrative skim.

The local migrant ecosystems that relied on Haitian and Venezuelan migrants in particular were created by he Biden administration's extension of "temporary protected status" to migrants from countries including Haiti, Venezuela, and El Salvador. The status of these migrants was often erroneously portrayed as "legal", when it was only a temporary provision. By terminating it, the Trump administration simply eliminated this large-scale exploitation and forced businesses to revert to a fair-wage business model:

Springfield businesses, big and small, are struggling in the aftermath of thousands of Haitians fleeing the town after the Trump administration’s termination of the humanitarian parole program for citizens of several countries, including Haiti, in June. On top of that, the government has ended temporary protected status, affecting the immigration status of more than half a million Haitians, which comes into effect on or before 5 February 2026.

This in fact appears to be the issue behind this sentence in the USCCB "Special Message" linked yesterday, "We lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status." This missates the situation that the "temporary protected status" was never permanent, and it also neglects to note that the Catholic NGOs that were enabling the exploitation of migrants and disruption of communities also lost the federal funding they were using to do this.

The economic reality of immigration waves is that they lower wages. The repeated instances of systematic resettlement of third-world low-wage workers in US communities show that they benefit certain employers and other local businesses at the expense of social cohesion and overall prosperity. When the low-wage workers disappear, either permanently, as in Springfield, OH, or temporarily, as in Charlotte, NC, it displays the distortion these policies place on local economies. I asked Chrome AI mode to explain what the current pontiff's namesake, Leo XIII, advocated in his encyclical Rerum Novarum. It answered in part,

• Right to a Just Wage: Wages should not be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved worker and their family in reasonable comfort. This concept laid the foundation for the idea of a "living wage" in Catholic social teaching.
• Right to Rest and Reasonable Working Hours: Workers have the right to reasonable hours, adequate rest periods, time off for religious obligations, and shouldn't be forced to work on Sundays or holy days.
• Right to Safe Working Conditions: Employers are obligated to provide work suited to each person's strength, gender, and age, ensuring health safeguards and safety from bodily harm. He specifically condemned child labor in factories as it interferes with education and proper development.

Pope Leo seems to be unaware that the US bishops, in some measure due to the influence of Catholic NGOs that are enabling low-wage policies that are hurting both native and migrant workers, are pushing him into a position that contrdicts Catholic social justice principles.