Only an Episcopal minister or a Connecticut senator will miss them

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The roundup begins: ICE rounds up 308 child molsters, rapists and robbers on first day of the Golden Age

The coast-to-coast dragnet — a multi-agency effort led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — picked up felons in and around Boston, Denver, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Seattle, Washington, DC, and Miami, a senior Trump administration official said.

In Boston, Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin reported that ICE officers arrested at least 8 migrants — including a Haitian gang member with 18 arrests who shouted “f**k Trump, Biden forever!” as he was hauled away.

ICE also nabbed one illegal migrant who wasn’t originally a target, but happened to be with MS-13 gang member when the feds showed up.

A White House official gave The Post details of some of the other migrants taken into ICE custody on Tuesday.

Sex offender Edward Marlon Rauda-Aldnada, 56, of El Salvador, was arrested in Silver Spring, Maryland, just north of Washington, DC.

Jose Barco-Chirino, a Venezuelan national, was taken into custody at Colorado State Prison in Canon City, Colo., where he was serving time after being convicted of attempted murder, extreme indifference and felony menacing with a real or simulated weapon.

ERO busted Miguel Andres-Mateo, 20, from Guatemala, in Cornelia, Georgia, outside Atlanta. Andres-Mateo had previously been convicted for driving under the influence and was previously ordered removed from the US in 2014 by an immigration judge. He, too, will remain in ICE custody pending removal from the country.

In Philadelphia, ICE nabbed Kodir Mazhidov, a 22-year-old Tajik national, who was detained after violating the terms of his release from the immigration agency’s custody. On Dec. 29, Philly cops arrested Mazhidov for crimes including reckless endangering another person, fleeing or attempting to elude an officer and reckless driving.

Authorities in Seattle arrested Mexican national Victorino Gaytan-Hernandez, who was convicted of sexual abuse of a minor. He was in the country illegally and will be held in ICE custody until his deportation.

In Miami, ICE arrested six illegal aliens from Guatemala who were living in Martin County, Fla., who had lengthy rap sheets including battery, child abuse, fraud, resisting arrest, DWI, trespassing and vandalism. They were detained as threats to public safety and for violating the terms of their release.

Much too long to read (or listen to), but I'm posting it just to point out that, to my relief, I'm not the only one who'd never heard of Carrie Underwood before Monday

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(Matching my own ignorance of MS. Underwood’s existence, Grok seems to have never heard of the village people, and can’t draw them — funny)

A Beginner's Guide to Carrie Underwood

….I've seen several of our readers mention that they didn't know much about her before, but they'd like to know more going forward. [That may be overstating it a bit — ED] While I'm sure she doesn't need my help selling albums, I just wanted to take some time to share some of her best music with you and prove even further that there's an extremely talented woman behind all the misleading liberal headlines.  

I assume the Nutmeg Nitwit is positioning himself to run for President, but will the rest of the country's voters prove as clueless as Connecticut's?

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Connecticut’s junior senator is again in the news, and again playing for the cameras, not anything effectual. He’s delaying a Senate vote (that he’ll lose) for, at most, two days, which he acknowledges, so rather than jamming a stick in the wheels of the Trump juggernaut, as he’s pretending, he’s merely placing baseball cards in a bicycle’s wheels:lots of noise, but accomplishing nothing.

Dem who called Trump 'existential threat to democracy' now blocking his nominees

Sen. Chris Murphy said there were 'serious concerns' from some Democrats about Trump's CIA pick John Ratcliffe

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., disrupted Senate Republicans' plans to quickly confirm President Donald Trump's national security nominees on Tuesday night when he objected to bypassing lengthy procedural votes that are routinely skipped. 

"Unfortunately, we were at the point of almost having a consent agreement to have a vote on the confirmation of John Ratcliffe to be the CIA director tomorrow. Not today, not yesterday, when it should have happened, but tomorrow," Senate Republican Conference Chairman Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said on the chamber floor. "But the senator from Connecticut has decided to object at the last minute."

"I don't really understand the objection to Mr. Ratcliffe. He was confirmed by the Senate to be the director of National intelligence. He was fully vetted through the bipartisan process in the Senate Intelligence Committee. We voted him out yesterday on a 14 to 3 vote," Cotton, also the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, continued. 

Murphy's Tuesday night objection to speeding through the routine procedural votes is the first case of Democrats using the strategy Republicans employed while in the Senate minority to gain leverage to negotiate. 

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., expressed his frustration with the objection on the floor, saying, "OK, so 14 to 3 coming out of the committee. And we've now wasted a whole day where we could have been acting on that nomination."

"And so really, I think the question before the House is, do we want a vote on these folks on Tuesday or vote on them on Friday, Saturday and Sunday? Because that's what we're going to do," he said, threatening weekend votes in the upper chamber. 

It took over twenty years — 1950 to 1971 — to get the "new" Greenwich High School built, so why should anyone have expected a hockey rink to be approved after just 15?

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maybe someone will donate his backyard

RTM reject the 117th plan for a replacement rink, placing the arena back on thin ice.

Nothing new under the sun here, we’re famous for these neighborhood squabbles. The high school was delayed for decades as various factions fought it out: One school, or two; east side of town, west side, or center? Everyone finally grew too tired of the dispute to continue, so they settled on building a single school, on a swamp. We’re still trying to remediate the consequences of that compromise.

My guess is that, with costs continuing to escalate, the town’s finally going to discover that it’d be far cheaper to build a Space X launching facility and go with that.

First we lose our low-cost domestics to Trump's deportations, now he's taking our guacamole!

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no mas! We will ruin your Super Bowl party, yankee

This should be fun

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On Monday Trump took the first step to undo one of the most egregious and harmful parts of Lyndon Johnson’s (failed) War on Poverty that has plagued the nation since 1965. Conservatives have noticed; the left will too, soon.

It’s a big deal.

Ending the affirmative action regime

Scott Johnson, PowerLine:

With the adoption of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, equal treatment without regard to race became the law of the land — for about 30 seconds. As he shepherded the bill through the Senate, then Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey declared on the Senate floor: “I will eat my hat if this leads to racial quotas.”

Humphrey served as vice president at the time President Johnson began the great undoing with Executive Order 11246 in 1965. EO 11246 mandated “affirmative action” in federal contracting. Humphrey rolled with the development of the affirmative action regime through his death in 1978 without keeping his promise.

As I understand, EO 11246 was the first brick in the wall of the vast edifice of racial discrimination that materialized under the rubric of affirmative action, though the term itself originated in earlier years. ….

Like The Monster That Devoured Cleveland in the horror movie that Maynard G. Krebs loved to cite, the affirmative action regime fathered the DEI monster. It is Son of the Monster That Devoured Cleveland.

President Trump has now grasped the nettle and repealed EO 11246 and its progeny. On Monday he promulgated an executive order “ending DEI programs and preferencing.”

The executive order:

Revokes Executive Order 11246 contracting criteria mandating affirmative action

Bars the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs from pushing contractors to balance their workforce based on race, sex, gender identity, sexual preference, or religion.

Directs all departments and agencies to take strong action to end private sector DEI discrimination, including civil compliance investigations.

It mandates the Attorney General and the Secretary of Education issue joint guidance regarding the measures and practices required to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard….

Ed Morrisey has more on this over at HotAir:

Trump Launches War on DEI ... And Affirmative Action?

…. [L]ate yesterday. Christopher Rufo reported that Trump has issued an EO that reverses much of the basis for affirmative action, and then extends the ban on DEI and other discriminatory practices to federal contractors:

This has not received very much specific attention, but it would represent a ground-shaking change for the federal government. How much of affirmative action is grounded in LBJ's EO and how much in statute? If it's entirely grounded in an EO, then a later EO can completely reverse it. I suspect that this program has mainly survived because Congress never had to vote on it, and public pressure kept LBJ's successors from tinkering with it ... until now, when the program has grown deeply unpopular through its continued focus on discrimination via immutable characteristics.

Of course, a successor could reissue LBJ's order in a new EO to restore it, too. However, that would carry the political weight of having to impose discriminatory practices again, which is a much different thing than simply allowing them to continue through political inertia. This time around, DEI and affirmative-action opponents will fight much harder in Congress and the courts to keep this zombie Great Society approach from emerging from the grave, and they will have Supreme Court precedents on their side this time as well. 

The Protection Racket Media will no doubt push back hard on these new policies, as will Democrats, which amounts to the exact same thing. Besides calling Trump a racist (which has worked so well for them), they will find 'victims' of the new policies while using the not-so-subtle argument that minorities can't compete for jobs, which makes them the real racists. Expect a full-court press on both strategies in the days ahead.