Tell me again why we're in NATO, especially if, as the NYT tells us, it comprises just us and Canada?

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Victor Davis Hanson: Trump didn’t wreck NATO — he just exposed its anti-US hypocrisy

…. All the US had initially requested was basing support in disarming a common Western enemy that, for nearly half a century, has slaughtered American diplomats and soldiers and tried to kill an American president and secretary of state.

But most NATO members could not even offer tacit help.

Some damned the US effort as either illegal or unnecessary.

The American public watched the British waffle for days over permitting the US to use their Diego Garcia airbase.

The Spanish banned American use of their NATO bases and airspace.

The Italians refused a request from American bombers to land and refuel at a Sicilian NATO base.

Many NATO heads of state rebuked the United States to their domestic audiences while, in typical two-faced fashion, publicly offering empty verbal support for the US campaign.

The NATO response to an Iranian missile aimed at fellow NATO member Turkey was anemic.

Even worse was the pathetic British reaction to another Iranian missile launched at a British base at Akrotiri, Cyprus.

Yet neutering a theocratic Iran is clearly of benefit to Europe.

So is preventing the international waters of the Strait of Hormuz from becoming a tollbooth run by the Iranian regime.

Such passivity stood in sharp contrast to the five-year-long Ukraine War on Europe’ border.

Ukraine is not a NATO member.

Nonetheless, Europeans made urgent requests for the US to honor the spirit of NATO solidarity and help protect Europe’s territorial integrity.

Yet continental Europe is not intrinsically weak.

The combined population of the European Union and European NATO members is around 450 million — more than 100 million greater than that of the United States.

These same European nations enjoy an aggregate annual GDP of more than $22 trillion, 10 times the size of the Russian economy.

European diffidence comes on top of Trump’s perennial effort to harangue NATO members into honoring their commitments to spend 2% of GDP on defense — especially in the case of deadbeat Spain and Canada, which for years have welched on their pledges.

Trump’s rhetoric is not what has undermined NATO.

Instead, he ripped off a happy-face scab and exposed a festering wound of increasingly anti-American hypocrisy beneath.

If you wanted to wreck the alliance, there would be no better way than to follow the duplicitous example of Western Europe’s NATO members.

But at least there’s happy news on another front:

UPDATE: Josh Hammer asks the same thing: “What Exactly is the Purpose of NATO in the Year 2026?”

And South of the Village continues to show signs of life

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333 Sound Beach Avenue, (linked fixed now — thanks) $3.850 million, pending after 8 days. Bidders must have been disappointed to learn that the “dining room window treatments (curtains, to us little people) are excluded”. I suppose I understand the owners’ reluctance to part with these gems of the draper’s art; they match the upholstery on two of the chairs, but this might perhaps have been a convenient time to reconsider that decorating decision.

Pending after 7 days

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8 Willow Lane, south of the Village, $1.925 million. If you want an indication of how few accepted offers include buyer contingencies in the current market, take note of how many listings are moving from new on the market to pending, with no stay on the reported contingent contract list. In “normal” markets, there’s usually about a 30-day period between a listing being reported as under contract and reappearing as pending. Not so now; contingent contracts are the exception, not the rule.

Expand this story to the entire economy: new factories, pipelines, housing projects, and then toss in the equivalent state and municipal regulations

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The drag on our economy is almost too massive to fully comprehend, and it doesn’t help that few in the media ever focus on those costs

Massive DC Sewage Spill Caused by Environmental Review That Dragged on for Years

… {T]his was one of the worst sewage spills in American history and naturally people wanted to know why this happened. Today the Washington Post has a story answering that question. It turns out the damage to the section of the pipeline that failed had been known since 2018. But instead of immediately getting to work, the National Part Service decided it needed to perform an environmental review which dragged on for years and prevented the repairs from being made.

D.C. Water asked the National Park Service for permission to fast-track repairs in 2018, after inspectors found widespread corrosion and detached rebar in one area of the six-foot-wide concrete pipe that runs under federal parkland in Maryland, records show. The utility sought to strengthen a three-quarter-mile section that included the point that later ruptured...

But the National Park Service’s environmental review dragged on for years and was still not complete when the pipe collapsed — a delay that experts said appeared to flout a 2020 federal rule requiring such examinations be done within one year...

A review by The Post of more than 2,600 public utility documents reveals how concerns about the removal of trees and vegetation, along with other environmental impacts, postponed repairs to the Potomac Interceptor. The pipe continued to degrade for more than seven years before it failed on Jan. 19 and released one of the largest spills of untreated wastewater in U.S. history.

This happened because the NPS was concerned about the trees and an endangered bat species.

In September 2021, during President Joe Biden’s first year in office, the utility informed the Park Service that the project would probably require removing not three trees, but about 260. The utility promised to replant hundreds of trees, replacing the diameter of those lost, inch-for-inch.

Park Service officials replied that they had “critical concerns” about the trees, partly because they might serve as a habitat for the endangered northern long-eared bat.

The bat typically lives in caves and mines but can rest in shaggy bark and crevices of trees along the C & O Canal in warmer months.

Ultimately, the Park Service decided it needed to do a major review of the site because the plan involved work at another spot a short distance away thus compounding the environmental impact.

A law passed under the Trump administration required the NPS to finish its review in one year from the date it announced it was necessary, but instead the review just dragged on for years even as continued inspections of the pipeline showed it was deteriorating. In fact, the section which eventually failed was cause for an emergency meeting in December 2024.

On Dec. 12, 2024, D.C. Water officials met with Park Service officials to deliver an urgent request, according to a D.C. Water presentation prepared for the meeting. The utility said it needed approval to begin repairs on the most critical 800 feet that appeared to be in imminent danger of failing.

The Potomac Interceptor “needs immediate repair in which the rapid degradation of the pipe has made it a high priority task to prevent collapse,” read the first item on the meeting agenda.

Crews finally got to work last fall and finished a small section. The plan was to continue the work on the next section of the pipe this summer. Instead, the pipe failed in January. So this disaster was the direct result of an ecological review that took seven years.

John Adams is rolling in his grave

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Under Duress: Colorado Demands Lawyers Promise Not to Aid Feds on Immigration or Be Locked Out of System

If attorneys don't agree to not work with federal immigration authorities, they can't e-file their client's cases. They basically can't work. If they want to serve clients and work their cases, they are basically held hostage. 

(continued from X)

  • I do not practice immigration law.

  • I do not practice criminal law

  • Nothing about my civil practice has anything to do with this

  • And yet because I cannot log into the State's official e-filing system without saluting The Resistance, I now cannot represent my clients, file lawsuits, access cases, file documents in existing cases, etc.

  • If I click "Decline," it kicks me out of the system. I must click "Accept" to access the system and continue representing my civil clients -- again, in cases that have absolutely nothing to do with immigration law or policy. …..

  • I have ethical obligations to my clients to represent them competently. My existing cases have running deadlines that I must attend to. Judges issue orders in my cases that I must follow. If I don't click "Accept" in order to access the State's e-filing system, I will harm my clients, torpedo my practice, and probably commit malpractice.

There’s a lengthy article in the website Samson Historical explaining the history of the case; here are the concluding paragraphs:

John Adams' Defense of Eight British Soldiers Involved In The Boston Massacre

While Adams was glad to serve his town (and later country) in this way of defending the right to a fair trial, he did not take specific pride in the fact that he was the one to do it. In fact, he suggested that any man should have done it due to a sense of duty and that “(j)]udgment of Death against those Soldiers would have been as foul a Stain upon this Country as the Executions of the Quakers or Witches, anciently. As the Evidence was, the Verdict of the Jury was exactly right”.

In sum, the December 1770 trial was an important test in the rule of law. Certainly, the Boston Massacre itself is much more memorable and invoked the patriotic feelings and desire to overthrow British rule that we associate with the American war for independence. However, the December 1770 trial of the British captain and soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre established that America was going to be a nation of laws, of innocence until proven guilty, and of the right to self-defense, no matter how liked or hated the defendant was. Everyone was going to be equal before the law.

After December 1770 and the conclusion of the two trials, Boston was relatively calm until the Tea Act of 1773 that prompted the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773. Adams reflected fondly on his decision to defend the British captain and soldiers:

"It was one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered to my country."

We learned about John Adams in junior high and how he courageously stood up against the mob by taking on the defense of hated defendants and thereby reinforcing the concept that we intended to be a nation of law, not monarchal whim even though, ironically, he was defending the monarch’s soldiers.

All today’s students know about our revolution is that it was fomented by a bunch of now-dead, irrelevant old white men who staged a war to preserve slavery. The products of this “education” are now in law firms and our courts and our political structure, where they force the firing of senior partners at their firms who dared to defend persecuted Trump administration members in his first term and, in state legislatures and our courts, impose prohibitions like this, one all while preaching that “we’re a nation of laws”.

Depending on how and whether it follows through, and expands its coverage to Democrats, this could be fun

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the hokey pokey is what it’s all about!

TMZ Is Coming for Congress — and Washington Is Nervous

Stephen Green

TMZ is one of those celebrity gossip and listicle sites that I suspect readers around here probably scroll right past, [true in my case; never seen it, don’t even know what its letters stand for – ed] even though it's almost as old as the original blogosphere that eventually helped launch PJ Media. I suspect that's about to change. Bigly.

>>>>

Social media serves up the celebrity dish so much faster. In its heyday, readers could count on TMZ's army of photographers and tipsters to deliver the goods, but the business model topped out.

Well, what's there to do with that army of tipsters and photogs? 

TMZ told them to aim for new targets: America's usually well-insulated political class.

And let me tell you, so far the results are glorious. On second thought, don't let me tell you — I'll show you.

As best I can tell, TMZ's new business model exposed itself (heh) on Monday with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) enjoying a little DHS shutdown time with his bubble wand at Disney World.

>>>>

Is any of this Graham stuff newsworthy? Honestly, I'm torn on that one. But at 5.8 million X views (and counting), Graham and his bubble wand certainly piqued people's interest.

Most of TMZ's X feed is still the usual celeb stuff, but Laura Miers noticed that "Their politician posts get like 10,000x more engagement than their celebrity posts."

This next item, I'm not at all confused about whether it's newsworthy.

>>>>

I'd like to see a lot more like that. And if TMZ is serious about expanding its reach, they need to make their new effort truly nonpartisan. Not sure I'll let my hopes get up too high on that count, however. If TMZ wants to be just another hyperpartisan outlet, they'll likely get lost in the left-wing shuffle.

Still, Politico's Riley Rogerson posted that "The Hill is bracing for TMZ," and one congressional staffer told her they're already having conversations in D.C. about "how to engage and prepare for your boss’s TMZ moment." Another staffer told Rogerson they're actually “super stoked” by TMZ, but that other congresscritters could be in for a “rude awakening.”

Maybe you find a gossip site like TMZ getting into this kind of thing a bit distasteful, and my initial reaction was just that. 

But if the mainstream media — which long ago traded in its credibility for ideology and access — won't do the "legit" legwork needed to expose Congress's petty corruptions and hypocrisies, then maybe, in the immortal words of Melvin Udall, this is as good as it gets.

Not that there's ever been any doubt that the Democrat party is run solely for the benefit of its union voters and “leaders” at the expense of the chumps, but here's another example

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every day is christmas for the cool kids

Hochul in talks to make fat pork union deal that could lower retirement age for teachers to 55 — at staggering cost to taxpayers

The proposal would also lower employees’ contribution rate from 4.5% to 3.5%, according to details shared with The Post from a source familiar with the situation.

The lower-retirement-age portion of the plan would cost an estimated $835.9 million, sources said.

The lowering of employees’ paycheck contributions to the pension fund would run $593 million, they said.

The additional costs would be handed down to school districts and local governments, including New York City, which could be left with $328 million in additional costs.

Coming next week

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167 Zaccheus Mead Lane, $10.895 million. It’s a house that’s had trouble meeting its owners’ hopes before; purchased for $5.8 million in 1997, those purchasers sunk some major money into extensive renovations and put it back on the market in 2016 at $10.5 million. After a long, fruitless wait, they sold it to these owners for $5.835 million in 2018, thereby returning to almost exactly where they’d come in 21 years before. Bummer.

No improvements noted on this current listing, but we’re in a different market than the 2008-2020 era, so they’ll probably do better.

(Update) I wrote about this house several times during its long travail on the listing rolls back then, most recently in 2017. A snippet:

167 Zaccheus Mead Lane, originally $10.5 million, has taken another price cut, this time a  $900,000 slash, and is now down to $8.750. I know that this house was profiled before, both here  and in Greenwich Time, but damned if I can find either. In any event, a 1908 house, completely redone, but with an unfortunate addition of some kind of "tea house" that resembles nothing so much as a poorly designed junior high school from the 1960s. 

Tough sell.