Thursday, July 02, 2026

Which Is Why Nobody’s Going To The Great American State Fair Tomorrow

Record heat, and no A/C on the Mall.

🙂‍↔️
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Fear Of Yellow Commies

Moynihan: We already know that people are using it for social welfare services. So why would we want more of that? Why would we want more?

Phillip: You’re saying 1.5 million people of Chinese heritage are coming to utilize our social services?

Moynihan: Do you really want people whose parents are still CCP citizens to come here and vote?

Phillip: That is plenty of people who have parents who have foreign citizenship, who are American citizens and do in fact have the right to vote. They might be from China, they might be from Russia, they might be from England, they might be from anywhere.
People who can afford to come here and stay for three months (airlines won’t let pregnant women fly in the third trimester), are probably doing it so their children can access American universities in 18 years.

Again: this is a situation Congress can remedy. Although given the lack of support of public universities (down dramatically since the ‘70’s when I was in school) by the state, colleges might need the tuition money from rich foreigners. Our more pressing concern is the failure to support the students who can attend major research centers, i.e., public universities, in America. Our short sightedness is destroying that base, while we are told the solution is to let free enterprise build AI data centers for, according to Palantir’s Karp, the battlefield.

Make it make sense.

Meanwhile:
Collins: The forecast is expected to be the hottest July 4th ever recorded. There's a list of what people can't even bring because of the tightened security measures: reusable water bottles, sunscreen, bug spray, camping chairs, coolers, umbrellas. I mean, if you're a family and you're going out to watch fireworks that aren't expected to start until after the president has spoken, it might make it tough to to hang out for hours on end.
ETTD. They can be used as weapons, ya know! Brown people all pack shivs. Trump does present a target rich environment for investigations. They’re gonna be investigating him long after his term is over. Pretty sure you’ll be pretty much alone. Mother Nature pats him gently on his pointed little head and says “Bless your heart.”

We close with a preview of the 2026 GOP midterms campaign:
Yeah, don’t think voters are gonna give a shit how many air conditioners France 🇫🇷 doesn’t have.* Can you use your 401k to buy groceries? Asking for a friend. 

*They’re very serious about this:
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Stephen Miller and “Birth Tourism”

To begin with, we have to acknowledge that “birth tourism” is real. But it’s also minuscule:

Though hard to know for certain, the most expansive albeit contested estimate based on review of U.S. Census Bureau data is that up to 26,000 babies born in the United States annually could be attributed to birth tourism—a tiny fraction of the more than 3.5 million U.S. births yearly. Yet the idea has nonetheless taken center stage in the Trump administration’s campaign against the guarantee of birthright citizenship. An executive order, issued by President Donald Trump on his first day back in office, would limit automatic citizenship to children born to at least one U.S.-citizen or lawful permanent resident parent.
We should pause here to note Trump’s order changes the constitutional requirement from jus soli to jus sanguinus, a citizenship standard only recognized in this country by statute for children born to American parents overseas. It has never been the law of the land, and is clearly not the standard in the 14th amendment, yet three justices would rewrite the first clause of that amendment. Never let me hear again about “activist judges” rewriting the law.

Birth tourism is, as I said, real:
The Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory in the Pacific, has attracted special scrutiny since it allows visa-free entry to nationals of certain countries. Congressional Republicans have specifically raised concerns about Chinese women using the territory to gain U.S. citizenship for their baby. The issue also received attention after authorities in 2015 raided “maternity hotels” in Southern California used by Chinese women. The prevalence of Russian women giving birth in South Florida has also generated headlines.

The federal government has advanced a number of initiatives to address birth tourism. These include criminal prosecutions of people linked to birth tourism schemes and a 2020 regulation rendering inadmissible women with a tourist visa who are found to be traveling primarily to the United States to give birth. In 2024, the government modified a visa-free program for the Northern Mariana Islands amid concerns about birth tourism abuses. And this April, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) launched an initiative to investigate birth tourism networks.

In defending the executive order, the Trump administration has asserted that limiting birthright citizenship to lawfully present and long-term foreign-born residents is the only way to address birth tourism. Critics of the executive order argue these concerns can be effectively addressed by means short of undermining a touchstone constitutional protection with deep roots in U.S. history. Opponents also note that the number of babies who would lack U.S. citizenship at birth would far surpass those born as the result of birth tourism.
Following the Barbara decision there was renewed (racist) concern from the administration (and a revived reference to “communist” China, not coincidentally) about Chinese mothers coming to America, but silence on the Russia connection. I don’t have a problem with limiting “birth tourism.” But that’s not what Trump is trying to do.

One great irony of this is that Trump’s policy would create an entire class of stateless persons.
The order would lead to an estimated 255,000 babies born in the United States annually without U.S. citizenship to parents who are either unauthorized immigrants or on long-term temporary visas, according to Migration Policy Institute (MPI) calculations. Accounting for other demographic trends, MPI estimates ending birthright citizenship could increase the size of the unauthorized population by up to an additional 2.7 million people by 2045 and 5.4 million by 2075.
Unless the countries of their parents recognize jus sanguinus, those children would not be citizens anywhere. Not that this administration cares; the parents and their children are non-persons in the eyes of Stephen Miller.

How many children are we talking about? The 26,000 number comes from an anti-immigration think tank. The CDC puts the number at 9600, based on birth mothers listing foreign home addresses. Either way, in a nation with 3.5 million births a year, it’s barely a drop in the demographic bucket. 🪣 

Again, this is a subject Congress can address:
Birth tourism, the contemporary phrase, was preceded by the pejorative term “anchor baby,” used since the 1970s to describe the practice by principally Mexican immigrants crossing the border to have a baby who would be a U.S. citizen and could eventually sponsor their extended family to immigrate legally. Without knowing the prevalence of this phenomenon, Congress quietly addressed the issue in the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1976. The 1976 act for the first time applied an age requirement of 21 to sponsor a relative from the Western Hemisphere for a green card, effectively ending the ability of minor children to act as “legal anchors” for relatives. Though birth tourism was not explicitly mentioned in the law, an internal State Department memo acknowledged the phenomenon, claiming that the provision was necessary because “large numbers of natives of Mexico have qualified to immigrate to the United States as parents of minor United States citizen children.”
But the Trump Administration isn’t interested in governance. It is only interested in ruling.

The administration has focused significant attention in its second term on immigration enforcement, including in its public argument to end birthright citizenship. It is therefore intriguing that birth tourism, a heretofore fringe issue in American politics with occasional media splashes, featured so prominently in the legal debate.

When and why that shift happened is unclear. What is evident, however, is that birth tourism is an extremely small phenomenon with no sign of becoming more pronounced. It has raised critical challenges—including visa fraud, tax evasion, business ethics, and access to medical care—that cut across multiple policy lenses including immigration, economics, and national security.

But some of these concerns have already been addressed by executive actions taken by prior administrations, including the 2020 regulation prohibiting use of B-2 visas exclusively for birth tourism, investigations and prosecutions of birth tourism facilitators, and increased screening of pregnant tourists to ensure they can pay for maternity and neonatal care. More recently, advocates seeking to limit the practice have proposed enhancing cooperation with international and national law enforcement agencies to target the businesses facilitating birth tourism. Other policy proposals have included greater scrutiny of pregnant tourists, stricter airline measures restricting how far along in their pregnancy women are able to fly, and increased consequences for those who engage in birth tourism. In addition, calls for increased data collection—to accurately measure the scope and scale of birth tourism—have sounded across the political spectrum.

These measures, if adequately resourced and properly implemented, show that policymakers can respond to the challenge of birth tourism without weakening the Constitution. Birthright citizenship has been regarded as a fundamental American principle of inclusivity and a constitutionally guaranteed protection written 150 years ago to end a troubling legacy of slavery. Undoing this principle to address a small-scale policy issue discounts the many other potential consequences of ending birthright citizenship.
I disagree that the first clause of the 14th was only intended “to end a troubling legacy of slavery.” I would argue it was intended to add an even more enduring legacy in America: racism. After all, when the Supreme Court first ruled on the 14th amendment’s citizenship clause, it was when the Chinese Exclusion Act was still law. It was under the provisions of that Act that Mr. Ark was denied entry back into his home country, making him essentially a stateless person. 

Four Supreme Court justices 133 years later, seem to be fine with that. Time really is a flat circle.⭕️ 
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I Think They’re Losing Their Minds

I’m pretty sure a woman could find room to give birth on the new flying bribery palace a/k/a “Air Force One.” Which is also the reason airlines won’t let pregnant passengers on a plane in the last months of pregnancy. 🤰 

They are coming apart at the seams.
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Wednesday, July 01, 2026

The Games People Play

Because of the replies on Twitter, I thought I’d explain.

I’ve seen people avoid paying a judgment, but never like this.

Trump deposited the amount of the judgment with the court, so he could appeal the verdict. It’s a bond, to be sure the judgment is paid if, as now, appeals are exhausted. Trump is now asking for time to file a motion for rehearing, or more accurately, to get the Supremes to reconsider their denial of appeal (technically, of the writ of certiorari). Which they won’t; IIRC, they sat on this for months (13, I want to say). They’re done.

So the trial court will deny Trump’s motion. He’ll appeal, and the appellate court will tell him to pound sand. And he’ll appeal that.

Or so Trump probably hopes. Sooner or later, Carroll gets the money, with interest. Trump can’t stop that; I’m not even sure he can postpone it. Once a judgment is final (as this one now is), courts are usually only interested in seeing it collected. They don’t have a lot of sympathy with deadbeat defendants.

So it’s likely the trial court will just release the money and end the game. There’s really no reason not to. Trump may be hoping to postpone the inevitable. I don’t see why the courts should play along.
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Connect The Dots

(Rural voters in Texas are largely Republican voters.)

Because there seems to be a major disconnect. (Although I do think Karp and Vance are connected at some quantum level, because they both go off like lunatics at roughly the same time. Or maybe it’s just a contagion passed from Karp to Thiel to Vance.)
Somethin’s happenin’ here….

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“Trickle Down” Is Still…

.. the horse gets the oats, and you get what trickles down.

Trump’s media company stock is in the toilet, btw. But Trump made his money on the front end, there. His crypto money likewise came from fees paid to purchase it. The coin itself is worth about $1.67. Trump doesn’t care.
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Fundamentally Misinterpreted

Pretty sure this Administration has already told parents: “Your baby can stay, but you have to go.”

Also pretty sure Roberts laid out the history of jus soli citizenship in the Barbara opinion: that it was adopted by the government after independence, and was added to the Constitution to insure the children of slaves born here would indeed be citizens (and that wasn’t limited to children born AFTER the 13th amendment was adopted). Roberts also included the Congressional arguments over the 14th, which included challenges that the language would cover immigrants and “the Chinese.” To which the sponsor said: “Yup.”

Interesting that that legislative history was not reviewed in U.S. v. Ark. Seems they didn’t feel the need to in 1893, even with the Chinese Exclusion Act on the books. This is how we identify progress.
What’re you gonna do about it? “Pack” the Court? Amend the Constitution? Pass a new statute in the last 3 weeks of the pre-election session? The White House thinks the country has fundamentally misinterpreted the intent of the Emoluments Clause.
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Fired Up

 I am going to shamelessly copy this from TC:

DEMOCRATS SHOULD POINT OUT, at every possible turn that now it's the Democratic Socialists who want:

YOU TO OWN YOUR HOME,

YOU TO KEEP YOUR HOME,

YOU TO KEEP YOUR FARM,

YOU TO KEEP YOUR RETIREMENT SAVINGS,

YOU TO KEEP YOUR MONEY,

YOU TO EDUCATE YOUR CHILDREN,

YOU TO KEEP OWNERSHIP OF YOUR BODY,

YOU TO KEEP YOUR HEALTH AS LONG AS POSSIBLE, ETC.

AND IT'S THE REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS WHO ARE TAKING ALL OF THOSE AWAY FROM YOU.

They should say that since that's socialism NOW, that's what voters really want.

That's how scary those Democratic Socialists really are, that they want to do that FOR YOU and it's the Republicans who are DOING THE OPPOSITE TO YOU RIGHT NOW. The very things we were always told was a consequence of socialism, losing your property, turns out to be a consequence of capitalism American 2026 style.
The GOP is united around the message that immigrants want your houses (just by being here they’ve driven up the cost of housing. Somehow.), but “affordability” is a hoax, which is why Trump can’t sign the housing bill, but we must keep pregnant foreigners out of America because…freedom?

Xenophobia is literally all they’ve got. And they think that’s enough to distract from that laundry list of concerns that have been bothering Americans since Covid. 

They lose.
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Trump Is Panicking About Paxton

Can’t imagine why: But why else come to Dallas in September? It’s not like “As goes Texas, so goes the election.”
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“Because Birth Tourists Are Polluting Our Bloodlines”

He means “white people.” This is bringing all of the racists out of the woodwork.

At least it’s easier to identify them, now. What’s the current number? 60% of Americans can’t pay their bills? How many can’t afford housing? And yet immigrants are racing here to pop out babies who are “anchors”? In the country with the least support for children, childcare, and maternity, in the industrialized world?
Yeah; this can’t possibly be about racism.
What crime is that? Non-white women visiting America?
Rep. Randy Fine accuses SCOTUS of "facilitating the invasion of this country," adding that "we're gonna have to reduce immigration of all kinds, because if we say that once you get off the plane and hide for a while and you have a baby, that baby is American, we're not gonna be able to let people come here"
Literally afraid of a nation of immigrants. "Reason for visit?”

“To pollute American bloodlines with Chinese babies. Oh, and US. v Ark, 1893.”
Working hard to resurrect eugenics. 🤔
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