I see more and more people coming out to protest the failures of this regime, which are legion. That’s a good thing. MAGA may be happy, but Americans are pissed off! Increasingly, they’re showing up at protests to say so. Americans are ready to fight. We know who we want to fight and we know why we want to fight them. Our problem? We lack a central point to rally around.

Bernie Sanders and now AOC are starting to have an effect. People are coming out in droves to see them and hear them. The speeches are inspiring, too. But I’m not sure Bernie and AOC are successfully going to be the bright star people follow. While their speeches ARE good, they boil down to a litany of complaints and charges. No actions. They MAY help people vent fury but they’re not DOING anything to protect the Constitution.

At one of the rallies, I heard a woman in the crowd shout, “What are you going to DO about it?” To my ear, it was a challenge, not a taunt. It had an unspoken subtext: “Yeah, the speeches are nice and even inspiring, but they’re JUST speeches. We need action and you’re in Congress. What ACTIONS are you taking?” (Yes, the subtext was longer than the text…)

Bernie heard her. He looked over at her. Then he turned back to his speech and kept on a-talkin’. I’m a Bernie fan. I’m an AOC fan. They can describe a problem clearly and with passion. They can throw out vague affirmations. “Oh, we’re not going to let them do that!” Great. Now let’s hear the plan to stop them. “We’re going to give speeches!” Less great.

I do have to add, Bernie and AOC are bringing out thousands of people to these rallies. If nothing else, that will demonstrate for everybody how many of us are furious and ready to fight. It creates a sense of solidarity. It’s inspiring to the push-back. But it STILL needs to speak to specific actions or, I fear, the movement will fizzle, eventually.

We’ve seen people focus their fury on Swasitcar dealerships. I suspect that’s because it’s a visible, focal point. We can ALL find a Swasticar dealership and we can ALL stand outside. Even better, we can SEE results as sales drop and the stock crashes. It’s tangible action with tangible results. Right now, it’s the best Americans have got, attacking the dealerships. As a side benefit, it’s making people FEEL better as they take some kind of action. For a moment, they feel less paralyzed by events of the day.

Counting on individual action is better than nothing but it’s also next to nothing. The various splinter groups around the country are a step up but they lack focus. What we NEED is a George Washington – a trusted, central figure people can rally around. It should matter less which individual grievance one comes out to protest and more that we all agree the destruction our nation at the hands of greedy, evil “people” is unacceptable. In protecting the Constitution as an umbrella issue, you’re ALSO protecting your own, individual cause…

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This is weird. 47 spent a few days, there, ripping on Joe Biden for using autopen to sign some or all of the pardons he issued before leaving office. 47 insisted this was a BAD thing. He acknowledged that he uses autopen but only for “unimportant” things. The “unimportant” thing he cited was return letters to fans who have written him.

THEN, he made a big deal about signing the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. He invoked this particular war powers act, he said, in order to accomplish something he could easily have accomplished, legally, using other, already-on-the-books laws. Then he promised he was going to deport a bunch of Venezuelan gang members using the Act. Again, if his charges against the gang members were true, he didn’t NEED the Alien Enemies Act. But that’s what he did.

Now obviously, legal types pushed back against his invocation of the war time act and a judge agreed it had been misapplied. The judge issued a restraining order telling the administration NOT to deport the targeted group until the courts could hear the case. The regime ignored the order and sent the planes anyway.

The judge got angry and ordered the regime back to court to explain why they ignored his order. I feel like The First Felon and his crew expected to ride out the storm based on the idea that people would have to defend Venezuelan gang members. Who wants to do that? (Note: it SHOULD be every American, since the problem with what he did wasn’t the victims so much as the violation of the law.)

But… oh, rats! It turns out some of the “Venezuelan gang members,” um, weren’t. Right, they weren’t gang members. Right, some of them weren’t Venezuelan. The thing they seem to have in common is they were a) brown and, b) had a tattoo. I’m no lawyer, but I’m not familiar with any law that makes it illegal to be brown and have tattoos. Neither, I suspect, is the judge. This, as you can imagine, is going to seriously undermine any claims of “just taking out the garbage.”

So NOW 47 – you remember, he’s the guy who never uses autopen for “important” things – is out and about telling people that HE never signed the Executive Order invoking the Alien Enemies Act. He says he doesn’t KNOW when the EO was signed because he left that to other people. That sounds like autopen on an important document, to me, AND it’s a confession that maybe he didn’t know it was being signed at all, right? One of his loyal minions did that TO him, right?

Now, obviously, it’s just Donny being Donny and avoiding responsibility for anything he “strongly” does that “bigly” comes back to bite him in the ass – which happens to this guy a lot. He’s taking the position that, since he can’t know when the order was signed, he can’t be held in contempt for ignoring the judges order. I’ll bet that’s not right, though.

I HAVE noticed this: now that he’s relying on autopen as his alibi, he has shut his mouth about Biden using autopen and how “wrong” that was. At least for the moment. Fear not, that lie will be back. He really wants to take revenge against anybody who participated in prosecuting him over all of those crimes he (allegedly) committed. But for right now, he needs it to be okay for some unknown, low-level flunky to use autopen to sign his name to important papers without him knowing who or when.

He spoke with reporters and told them, “Number one, I don’t know when it was signed ’cause I didn’t sign it. Other people handled it. But Marco Rubio’s done a great job, and he wanted them out, and we go along with that.” That looks like throwing Rubio under the bus, but that’s a different piece.

MAGA will buy it, of course. Hell, they’ll buy practically anything – especially the cheap crap he has made in China and overcharges for, here. (“Wow, only $11,000 dollars for a $300 dollar guitar? What a deal!”) What I’m hoping even MAGA can’t accept is the White House explanation for the sudden (and, likely, temporary) change of stance. The White House position, and I’m not making this up, was that The Felon “was obviously referring to the original Alien Enemies Act that was signed back in 1798.” That’s what White House communications director Steven Cheung said in a statement.

While 47 was actively trying to distance himself from the EO invoking the Alien Enemies Act, the White House was insisting that he was referring to the original signing of the original act? In 1798? He didn’t know WHEN that was signed or by whom? How about 1798 and John Adams? And we can be confident it WAS Adams. Autopen hadn’t been invented yet.

While the trumpster was pulling his “I know nothing. I see nothing!” shtick, the White House was swearing up and down and inside out that, “The recent Executive Order was personally signed by President Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act that designated Tren de Aragua as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in order to apprehend and deport these heinous criminals.”

So there you go. He didn’t do what he did, he doesn’t know anything about all those things he’s an expert on, and he knows nothing about what his underlings are doing because he has his fingers so decidedly on the pulse of his regime, um, from the golf course. Clear as mud…