The WSJ editorialists look at the clock on the clubhouse wall and say it's Time for ICE to Pause in Minneapolis.
Videos of an event aren’t always definitive, but this is how it looks to us. Pretti attempted, foolishly, to assist a woman who had been pepper-sprayed by agents. Multiple agents then tackled Pretti, and he had a phone in one hand as he lay on the ground. An agent discovered a concealed gun on Pretti, and disarmed him. An agent then shot Pretti, and multiple shots followed.
The Trump Administration spin on this simply isn’t believable. Stephen Miller, the political architect of the mass deportation policy, called Pretti a “domestic terrorist.” He was a nurse without a criminal record.
Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, said the fact that he carried a gun and (she said) two magazines, meant he “arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.”
But he had a license to carry a gun, which was legally concealed, not carried in his hand as some claimed. He was carrying his phone. To hear the ardent gun-rights advocates of the Trump Administration claim he had malicious intentions because he carried a concealed weapon is bizarre.
I've noticed a lot of Noem-like pointing-with-horror to that concealed pistol as if it were proof of Pretti's murderous intent. Sorry, not buying it.
(Headline reference. Yes, I'm way old.)
For more plain-spoken criticism, take it away, Robby Soave: The Trump administration is lying about Alex Pretti and gun rights.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents shot and killed a U.S. citizen in Minneapolis, Minnesota, outside a restaurant on Saturday. The victim, 37-year-old Alex Pretti, was licensed to carry a firearm, and he had one with him. The available footage does not show every detail of what happened, but Pretti was holding a cell phone rather than his gun when the officers initiated contact and began wrestling him to the ground.
Trump administration officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, have already declared the killing completely justified, claiming that Pretti had intended to murder law enforcement agents. There is no evidence of this—none whatsoever—which makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the administration is prepared to brazenly lie about what happened.
Other Republican officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and FBI Director Kash Patel, are taking the position that merely bringing a gun to a protest is a violation of the law or an indication of murderous intent. This is deeply wrong, and it is in conflict with the First and Second Amendments—two fundamental rights that Republicans typically profess to care about.
Would Kamala have been worse? Yeah, probably. But…
Also of note:
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Not even a farthing. Scott Sumner suggests better ways to dispose of your change: Not one penny.
When I was young, I was impressed by big things. In class, I’d space out and stare at a world map, noticing the massive size of Greenland. Little did I know that the Mercator projection greatly exaggerates its size:
As I got older, I studied economics and learned that big cold places are a fiscal drag with little military value, manned space flight is mostly a waste of time and money, and the minerals in asteroids are of little value.
I find that average people often envision the wealth of nations in terms of natural resources. Perhaps that’s because in social studies class, teachers often discussed the natural resource endowments of various countries. They didn’t tell us that there is very little correlation between natural resources and GDP per capita. Resource rich Canada is poorer than many northern European countries that lack rich farmland and extensive mineral deposits.
It turns out (at least according to Scott) that Alaska really was "Seward's Folly".
Confession: I'm still a manned spaceflight lookie-loo, even though Scott's probably right that it's "mostly a waste of time and money". Especially Artemis, which I hope won't be another waste of human life as well.
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Just a reminder that Trump is an unforgivable jerk. Jay Nordlinger looks at his Davos speech: Friends in Need, &c.
By now, you’ve no doubt heard what President Trump said about our NATO allies: “I’ve always said, ‘Will they be there if we ever needed them?’ That’s really the ultimate test. I’m not sure of that.”
Trump went on to say, “We’ve never needed them. We have never really asked anything of them.”
Recently, we had Nick Burns as a guest on Q&A: here. At the time of 9/11, he was the U.S. ambassador to NATO. And he recounted, during the podcast, how our allies invoked Article 5, in our behalf.
(Article 5, as you know, states that an attack on one is an attack on all.)
More from President Trump: “They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan or this or that. And they did. They stayed a little back. Little off the front lines.”
But it’s not true.
Take Denmark, the object of Republicans’ wrath lately. That tiny country had 9,500 troops in Afghanistan. Forty-three of them were killed. After the United States, no member of that coalition suffered more losses per capita than Denmark.
I'm not a Europhile, but Trump's beyond the pale.
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