Former President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday night had dinner with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken antisemite and racist who is one of the country’s most prominent young white supremacists, at Mr. Trump’s private club in Florida, advisers to Mr. Trump conceded on Friday.
Also at the dinner was the performer Kanye West, who has also been condemned for making antisemitic statements. Mr. West traveled to meet with Mr. Trump at the club, Mar-a-Lago, and brought Mr. Fuentes along, the advisers said.
The fourth attendee at the four-person dinner, Karen Giorno — a veteran political operative who worked on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign as his state director in Florida — also confirmed that Mr. Fuentes was there. Attempts to reach Mr. Fuentes through an intermediary on Friday were unsuccessful.
In recent years, Mr. Fuentes, 24, has developed a high profile on the far right and forged ties with such Republican lawmakers as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, largely through his leadership of an annual white-supremacist event called the America First Political Action Conference.
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A Holocaust denier and unabashed racist, Mr. Fuentes openly uses hateful language on his podcast, in recent weeks calling for the military to be sent into Black neighborhoods and demanding that Jews leave the country.

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It is unclear how much Mr. Trump knew of Mr. Fuentes’s well-documented bigotry and extremism before their dinner. In a statement, Mr. Trump said: “Kanye West very much wanted to visit Mar-a-Lago. Our dinner meeting was intended to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about.”
The statement said nothing about Mr. Fuentes’s views.
Even taking at face value Mr. Trump’s protestation that he knew nothing of Mr. Fuentes, the apparent ease with which Mr. Fuentes arrived at the home of a former president who is under multiple investigations — including one related to keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago long after he left office — underscores the undisciplined, uncontrolled nature of Mr. Trump’s post-presidency as he embarks on a third campaign for the White House.
“This is just another example of an awful lack of judgment from Donald Trump, which, combined with his past poor judgments, make him an untenable general election candidate for the Republican Party in 2024,” said Chris Christie, a former governor of New Jersey and onetime close ally of Mr. Trump’s who is considering a candidacy of his own.
In a statement that did not name Mr. Trump but was issued in response to the Fuentes dinner, Matt Brooks, chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition said, “We strongly condemn the virulent antisemitism of Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, and call on all political leaders to reject their messages of hate and refuse to meet with them.”

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Mr. Fuentes, who attended the bloody far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, is best known for running a white nationalist youth organization known as America First, whose adherents call themselves groypers or the Groyper Army. In the wake of Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020, Mr. Fuentes and the groypers were involved in a series of public events supporting the former president.
At a so-called “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington in November 2020, Mr. Fuentes urged his followers to “storm every state capitol until Jan. 20, 2021, until President Trump is inaugurated for four more years.” The following month, at a similar event, Mr. Fuentes led a crowd in chanting “Destroy the G.O.P.,” and urged people not to vote in the January 2021 Georgia Senate runoff elections.
On Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Fuentes led a large group of groypers to the Capitol where they rallied outside in support of Mr. Trump. The next day, Mr. Fuentes wrote on Twitter that the assault on the Capitol was “awesome and I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t.”
At least seven people with connections to his America First organization have been charged with federal crimes in connection with the Capitol attack. In January, Mr. Fuentes was issued a subpoena by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol seeking information about his role in it.
Mr. Christie speculated that hosting Mr. West and Mr. Fuentes served a desire particular to Mr. Trump: “He can’t stand not having attention all the time,” Mr. Christie said. “And so, having someone show up at his club — even if you believe that he didn’t know who Nick Fuentes was — and want to sit with him, feeds the hunger he feels for the attention he’s missing since he left the presidency.”
Mr. West, who ran for president in 2020 and has said he will run again in 2024, posted on Twitter a video in which he described the dinner. He claimed that Mr. Trump was “really impressed” with Mr. Fuentes.
Mr. West also said that he asked Mr. Trump to serve as his running mate and claimed that Mr. Trump spoke derogatorily about Mr. West’s ex-wife, Kim Kardashian.
Citing people close to Mr. Trump, some earlier news coverage of Mr. West’s visit to Mar-a-Lago falsely reported that Mr. Fuentes did not attend the dinner.

Jaro Pelikan was one of the foremost, if not the foremost, contemporary scholars of Western civilization and Christian doctrinal history. The referenced book describes how Christ "fit in" to and reflected the cultural milieu of each of the last 20 centuries - ie, it's not a book about religion, but about cultural history and how the view of Christ has changed over that time, and how it was reflected it in art, literature, etc. So pretty interesting stuff, from a former Jefferson Prize winner, AAAS president, and the translator of the motto of the Madison Avenue Rod, Gun, Bloody Mary & Labrador Retriever Benevolent Association ("Keep your powder, your trout flies and your martinis dry") into Latin (Semper siccandae sunt: potio Pulvis, et pelliculatio).

In any event, I really enjoyed this introductory paragraph as among the best book setups i've ever read:

"Regardless of what anyone may personally think or believe about him, Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of Western culture for almost twenty centuries. If it were possible, with some sort of supermagnet, to pull up out of that history every scrap of metal bearing at least a trace of his name, how much would be left? It is from his birth that most of the human race dates its calendars, it is by his name that millions curse, and in his name that millions pray."

I did get to wondering though whether there will be a 21st century of preeminence.

The newly elected Pennsylvania Republican State Rep. Brenda Pugh called on officials in Scranton to remove Biden’s name from expressways labeled in his honor after he pardoned former Luzerne County Judge Michael Conahan.
That now-disgraced official was convicted after taking kickbacks in exchange for sending juveniles to jail for committing no crime whatsoever.

Iowa state officials are asking a court to require the federal government to share some Iowans’ citizenship information so the state can determine who is ineligible to vote.



The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in federal court by Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird and Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate.


The Republicans’ lawsuit asks the court to require U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, to “promptly” provide the immigration and citizenship status of each person on a list of 2,176 Iowans provided by the Iowa Secretary of State’s Office.




“The State seeks the information to ensure that its elections were and will be safe and secure,” the lawsuit states. “The ‘purpose authorized by law’ was investigating to determine whether criminal conduct occurred in connection with an election and to ensure the integrity of future Iowa elections.”


Pate’s list was composed of Iowans who live in the United States legally but at some point indicated to the state transportation department that they were not full U.S. citizens. Pate developed the list in his effort to ensure no Iowans without U.S. citizenship attempted to vote illegally in the 2024 elections.


Pate tried to get information on the 2,176 individuals’ citizenship from the federal agency. According to Pate’s office, the agency’s office in Des Moines went over the list and prepared the information sought, but the lead office in Washington, D.C., would not permit the information to be shared with Iowa state officials.


According to the lawsuit, Citizens and Immigration Services told the state in an email it could not release the information to the state because the list of names would “require extensive research and review by multiple oversight offices.”





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“The role of Iowa Secretary of State requires balance between participation and integrity. We have identified solutions that will allow us to verify voter eligibility at registration — not at the time of voting,” Pate said Tuesday in a joint news release with Bird. “The combination of access to the SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) list, citizenship verification already completed by USCIS, and the ability to verify using social security numbers will not only make processes more efficient but will also provide another important tool in our toolbox to safeguard our elections process.”


For the November election, Pate instructed elections officials to require any individual on the list to vote via a provisional ballot, which gave those voters a week to provide proof of U.S. citizenship.


The ACLU of Iowa and the League of United Latin American Citizens of Iowa sued Pate’s office over the policy less than a week before the election, but a federal judge ruled that Pate’s directive could continue.


Some county auditors were able to determine the citizenship of residents in their counties before Election Day. At least 200 Iowans’ ballots were challenged in the state’s most populous counties, according to what those counties’ auditors told The Gazette.


Some auditors discovered examples of noncitizens having voted or registered to vote in previous elections, both of which are Class D felonies in Iowa, punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of $750 to $7,500.


In a statement, the ACLU of Iowa and ACLU National called the Iowa lawsuit “a waste of time and money” and accused Pate of using faulty and dated state data and alleged that due to his directive, “perhaps thousands of naturalized citizens were improperly targeted and challenged at the polls.”


"Studies, journalistic efforts, and repeated attempts by government officials in Iowa and nationally have found very few noncitizens who have voted out of the many millions of people who vote,” the ACLU statement said. “This wasteful lawsuit isn’t going to change that. State leaders should spend their time on actual problems that face our state.”


Bird, in the joint news release, said her office filed the lawsuit to force Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration to release “the election integrity data that it has been hiding from Iowa.”


“The Biden-Harris administration knows who the hundreds of noncitizens are on our voter rolls and has repeatedly refused to tell us who they are. But the law is clear: voters must be American citizens,” Bird said in the statement. “Together, with the (Iowa) Secretary of State, we will fight to maintain safe and secure elections that Iowans can count on.”


When asked why the state did not file the lawsuit before the election, when a ruling in its favor could have produced the citizenship information in time to be useful for the Nov. 5 general election, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Secretary of State’s Office said it had hoped the federal government would deliver the information without the state “having to resort to a lawsuit.”


The spokeswoman said Pate’s office would “continue to ask for the information and exhaust every avenue available to us.”


The lawsuit asks the court to require the federal agency to “promptly” provide the immigration and citizenship status of all 2,176 individuals on Pate’s list without cost, and cover the state’s attorney fees and other litigation costs.


In the lawsuit, the state claims there are 65,000 people registered to vote in Iowa whose citizenship the state cannot verify. There are nearly 1.8 million active registered voters in Iowa as of Dec. 1, according to Iowa Secretary of State figures.


“The federal government has those resources,” the lawsuit states. These are individuals who registered to vote in Iowa without using an Iowa-issued driver’s license or ID card, according to the lawsuit.


“Those voters have never had their citizenship status verified,” the lawsuit says. “Thus, it is possible for a non-U.S.-citizen to register to vote without using a driver’s license or ID card.”

Borlant's family was originally from Ukraine and settled in France, only to be marginalized and discriminated against there. After the start of WW2 Henri, his father, one brother, and one sister were arrested and sent to Auschwitz. His mother and seven siblings remained in France and survived the war while in serving in the French Resistance. After the war he studied to be a MD and started a career, and in later years spoke tirelessly about his time in Auschwitz, and what ever present hunger and terror.
https://www.jpost.com/international/article-832103

Hydroxycholoroquine...

Politico Europe reports:

Nearly 17,000 people may have died after taking hydroxycholoroquine during the first wave of COVID, according to a study by French researchers. The anti-malaria drug was prescribed to some patients hospitalized with COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic, “despite the absence of evidence documenting its clinical benefits,” the researchers point out in their paper, published in the February issue of Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy.
Now, researchers have estimated that some 16,990 people in six countries — France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the U.S. — may have died as a result. In fact, they say the figure may be far higher given the study only concerns six countries from March to July 2020, when the drug was prescribed much more widely. It was also considered something of a “miracle cure” by the then-U.S. President Donald Trump, who said: “What do you have to lose? Take it.”

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What if you need to tell someone that they are bad at their job in a harsh, direct tone?
I’m stuck inside watching Parks & Rec, and their ads are running constantly.

Long live President Musk. Make Germany German again.

Alfords hiring by the U of Nevada as their head coach appears imminent.
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A bipartisan framework to put off a government shutdown appeared to hit snags over the weekend, and lawmakers continued bickering Monday over a federal funding bill that will lay the groundwork for the early days of the incoming Trump administration.

Without new legislation, government agencies will shutter just after midnight early Saturday. Lawmakers are on the cusp of approving a stopgap bill to extend federal funds into mid-March, but new disputes over farm aid and disaster recovery spending have stalled progress near the final stages.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) was widely expected to roll out a bipartisan bill over the weekend to tee up a midweek vote; lawmakers are eager to bolt from Washington to get home for the holidays.

The legislation would push out the government shutdown deadline by three months and include up to $100 billion of assistance for natural disaster survivors and a year-long extension of the major agricultural policy and antipoverty law known as the farm bill.

But during last-minute negotiations, the speaker attempted to tack on more financial assistance for farmers, according to two people familiar with the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Democrats responded by seeking federal funds to reconstruct Baltimore’s collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge.

Maryland’s congressional delegation, which holds outsize sway on the appropriations process, issued additional demands, too, related to negotiations over future home of the Washington Commanders. The NFL team now plays its home games at Northwest Stadium in Landover, Maryland, a venue widely regarded as one of the worst in the league.

The funding bill is expected to include a provision that transfers the land around RFK Stadium from the federal government to the city of D.C., paving the way for local policymakers turn the land over to the Commanders for a new stadium. Maryland lawmakers have put a hold on the funding bill, the people said, until their state can extract concessions from both the NFL franchise and other appropriators to offset the potential loss to their state.

Lawmakers almost universally expect Congress to ultimately clear those roadblocks: A government shutdown ahead of the holidays — and Donald Trump’s inauguration — would have reverberating consequences in the House leadership races.
Still, Congress will have another rapid government funding deadline next year. Johnson has pledged to process all 12 annual appropriations bills and not take up an omnibus funding package when the stopgap expires in March.

But negotiators from both chambers are still far apart on a top-line spending figure. And both chambers’ schedules are jam-packed with priorities for the start of the next term. The Senate will have to confirm Trump’s Cabinet nominees. The House may attempt to pass a budget resolution to queue up tax and border security legislation, potentially putting a robust appropriations package yet again on the back burner.

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I chuckled

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Bill Seals from our Iowa State site just shot me this message:
"Hearing the plan for Dekkers is to spend one season at IWCC and attempt to land in the UFL or CFL. D1 bounce back or transfer to NAIA school not happening."

Oof.