Government

Due Process

There are a lot of Democrats running around and bleating about the Constitutional right to due process and illegal immigrants. Where does the right to due process appear in the Constitution? The Fifth Amendment:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an illegal immigrant who was deported to El Salvador and is being held there in prison. A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release, an order affirmed by the Supreme Court, and to provide evidence of the actions it has taken to get him back.

Here is the problem with that- the Supreme Court doesn’t have the authority or the jurisdiction to order that. He is a foreign citizen who is in prison in his home country. The US government in general, and the US Supreme Court in particular, doesn’t have the authority to order the Salvadoran government to do a thing.

It doesn’t matter whether or not he is a gang member, an illegal, or a criminal in the US. The Supreme court cannot order the executive to invade another country, it just isn’t within the SCOTUS’ enumerated powers. The rest of the argument is moot.

Still, I will list the reasons why he wasn’t entitled to due process during deportation. Refer to the Fifth Amendment.

  • He isn’t being held by the US to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime,
  • He isn’t subject in jeopardy of life or limb twice for the same offense,
  • nor is he being compelled to be a witness against himself,
  • nor did the US government deprive him of life, liberty, or property, all they did was return him to his home country.

According to court filings, Kilmar Abrego Garcia was born in July 1995 in the neighborhood of Los Nogales in El Salvador, where he helped his family run a business making pupusas, a local cuisine.

He crossed the border illegally near McAllen, Texas, in March 2012 when he was 16 years old. From the border, Abrego Garcia made his way to Maryland to live with his brother. The Trump administration sent him back to his home country. No due process was required, because the Fifth Amendment doesn’t say he is entitled to it.

By Divemedic, ago

Law Goes Too Far

A bill in the Florida legislature is going too far, and I think that I know why. The proposed law says that a property owner that is being photographed by a drone in an area of his property where he has an expectation of privacy may use reasonable force to prevent that spying. The law is being sold as a boon for the privacy of a homeowner being photographed in their backyard pool:

If I’m at a park and I’m playing baseball with my kids, and somebody takes up a drone just to show what’s going on in the park, do I really have an expectation of privacy? But if my daughters are sunbathing in the pool behind my house, I have an expectation of privacy.

Picture that a drone has been flying over your house. You believe that it is taking pictures of your family as they sunbathe in your backyard. You know that this looks just like the drone owned by your neighbor, so you go to his house. Sure enough, he is standing on the porch, flying his drone. You happen to know that the law also says this:

2. A person who has a reasonable expectation of privacy on his or her privately owned real property may use reasonable force to prohibit a drone from conducting surveillance in violation of this paragraph, if such drone is operating under 500 feet over such property.

To stop him, you wind up and punch him square in his stupid face. That was reasonable force, right? The problem here is that there is no way for you to know if he is conducting what the law says is surveillance or if he was simply flying by your house on the way to another location.

In your case, it turns out that he wasn’t taking pictures of your house, he was taking pictures of your other neighbor’s house because that neighbor wanted to sell his house and was looking for some drone shots for the listing’s Zillow page.

This is going to create a mess. The law is vague and isn’t really intended to protect homeowners. The law requires that the person using force know the intent of the person operating the drone. Let me explain:

A person, a state agency, or a political subdivision as defined in s. 11.45 may not use a drone equipped with an imaging device to record an image of privately owned real property or of the owner, tenant, occupant, invitee, or licensee of such property with the intent to conduct surveillance on the individual or property captured in the image in violation of such person’s reasonable expectation of privacy without his or her written consent. -emphasis added

So why is this law being proposed? The real reason for this law has absolutely nothing to do with homeowners or their families at the pool. No, it has to do with the state’s powerful developers, like the developers of The Villages. That developer is engaged in a legal battle with local journalists who have been filming and selling video of the construction projects in the area. It seems that there is quite a market for this sort of thing, and people have been making money by selling drone footage. That particular developer owns their own newspaper and has been trying to make money by selling their own footage of the area, and is upset that others are trying to horn in on the action. This is purely a big company trying to use the law to create their own monopoly.

Developers in Florida have been trying to do this for over a decade. Back in 2011, there was a failed attempt to make it a felony to take pictures of a farm. It wasn’t about farms- developers will often claim that their property is a farm because property tax rates on farms are low. The developer will place a cow or two, or perhaps a couple of orange trees, on a property that they have bought in order to develop the land, and they claim it to be a farm so that they can avoid paying taxes on the land until the last minute.

They don’t want people photographing their land because the construction crews are frequently breaking all sorts of laws- most of the construction crews are illegal immigrants, there are frequent environmental and OSHA violations, along with other illegalities, and this is how they get the official protection from the government.

When my own house was under construction, I took pictures of the entire house. I have hundreds of photos of the house as it was being built. I did it to have a record of where each wire, pipe, and stud was located, just in case I needed to do repairs or renovations. The developer found out and had a fit. He told me that I couldn’t take any pictures unless there were no construction workers on site, or he would prosecute. It is a felony in Florida to be on a construction site without permission.

Officials know that they are breaking the law, but can’t ignore it unless there is no evidence staring them in the face.

A few decades ago, children of the large farmers in Florida decided that they didn’t want to be farmers, and realized that you could make a lot more money per acre by growing houses on the land and selling them to gullible retirees than you could by growing oranges or raising cattle on that land. They became developers. The Villages is one of those developers, but there is no shortage of them in this state.

Illegal immigration is the modern day equivalent of slavery. Too many people, Democrat or Republican, are making money from this. That is why so many entrenched politicians hate DJT. They are all, D and R, making millions in the graft and corruption, and can’t have him upsetting their golden goose.

A note on developers:

You can take an 80 acre farm, develop it into a housing neighborhood with about 250 houses. If you get cheap enough labor to build the houses, those homes will sell for more than $25 million in profit. Do you have any idea how long you have to operate an 80 acre farm to sell $25 million in oranges?

Do the math- an orange orchard grosses about $2500 per acre each year. It would take an 80 acre orchard more than a century to bring in that kind of cash.

By Divemedic, ago

Are They All Pedos?

Openly Gay Democrat Washington State Senator Jamie Pedersen:

Kids over 13 have the complete right to make their own decisions about their mental health care. Parents don’t have a right to have notice… If they’re old enough to get pregnant, they’re old enough to make their own decisions about what happens with their bodies. And parents do not have the right to change that or make a different decision or be notified in advance.

So once a 13 year old hits puberty, they should also be able to buy liquor, guns, and have sex with openly gay State Senators, is that what you are saying?

By Divemedic, ago

Let’s Keep Our Money

Harvard is claiming that the Trump administration is attempting to force it to give up its constitutional rights when they tie Federal funding to conditions and accuse the administration of trying to “control teaching and learning at Harvard.” That is false. Where in the Constitution does it say that a college has a Constitutional right to the public treasury? I think that it is obscene that the US government is giving taxpayer dollars to an elite school that despises most of the people who are paying the taxes that make that very funding possible.

Harvard got $820 million last year. The list goes on. Columbia got more than $1.5 billion. All told, the eight colleges of the Ivy League received more than $6 billion in government handouts last year, despite the fact that they collectively are sitting on $185 billion in endowment funds.

The Harvard college has the largest endowment of any school in the world- to the tune of more than $53 billion dollars. They spend most of their money and time supporting leftist causes like David Hogg, who is now the vice chairman of the DNC. That is influence peddling of the highest order. Five of our last eight Presidents attended either Yale or Harvard.

I say that the Ivy league doesn’t need our money, and I think we should keep it.

By Divemedic, ago

Article 88

Colonel Sheyla Baez Ramirez. Ramirez assumed command of the Fort McCoy Garrison in Wisconsin in 2024. Ramirez is a left wing political activist who refuses to display the official photographs of the Secretary of Defense, President, and the Vice President.

There is a growing movement in the US military of Commissioned officers who are refusing to display the photos of the President, Vice President, and SecDef. Many of them are being relieved of command. The left is claiming that the Free Speech rights of these officers is being violated to soothe Trump’s ego.

They are wrong. Military personnel are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Article 88 has this to say:

Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

This is important, because the US military MUST be subservient to civilian control. Allowing officers to oppose that civilian control carries with it a large risk of military coup. Seldom is it seen for Generals to engage in military coups. Usually, it is colonels who do those sorts of things.

  • olonel Reza Khan’s 1921 coup that brought the Pahlavi dynasty to power in Iran
  • The 1931 coup attempts by the Japanese Army (led by Lieutenant Colonel Kingoro Hashimoto)
  • The 1967 coup by a group of colonels in Greece that established the military junta
  • The 1969 Libyan coup d’état in which Colonel Muammar Gaddafi took power
  • The successful coup in Mali by Colonel Assimi Goita

Generals are inherently political creatures, and they are therefore close to the existing power structure the coup intends to overthrow. They got their position through connections, potentially through patronage, and they themselves enjoy powers of patronage and influence. In this case, many of the officers who oppose Trump are there because Biden put them there through DEI programs. They remain loyal to the left.

An example needs to be made of a couple of these mutinous assholes. Start an Article 31 investigation and court martial a couple of them. Reduce them in rank to the lowest you can get away with, toss them in jail for a year or so, and give them a BCD.

By Divemedic, ago

Wasting Money

19 year old Aleysha Ortiz graduated with honors from Hartford Public High School in 2024. She enrolled at the University of Connecticut, who admits students without requiring SAT scores. She is suing the public school because she can’t cope with the rigors of college. That is odd to me because I found college, with a handful courses being the exception, to be easy. Why is an honor student finding it so difficult?

Because she is illiterate. That’s right- she graduated with honors, but cannot read or write.

I met my wife just after I retired from being a paramedic in 2014. I was driving her nuts because I am a high energy guy, and it was killing me to sit at home every day. She talked me into working as a teacher- meaning that our schedules would line up, and we would have time that we could spend together. I started by teaching two classes a day, then progressed to full time for my second year. I taught high school for six and a half years. During that time, I saw a lot of this. How does this happen?

The Department of Education, that’s how.

Funding is tied to benchmarks. Special Ed students don’t have to meet them. The incentive here is to make as many kids special ed as possible. It needs to be done because not only do special ed kids bring increased funding per student, but missing the testing benchmarks means less money. The law is called Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). It says that it is unfair and discriminatory to treat students with intellectual disabilities (what used to be referred to as retarded) the same as other students. So this law was passed to make things more equitable. (Not equal, which is the same standard, but equitable, meaning that they have the same outcome.)

School funding for special education students says that they have to be permitted to pass, and that their diploma and transcript can’t say a thing about the fact that they were special Ed, or that they were passed without meeting benchmarks. In fact, my school district even had a policy stating that non-English speaking students couldn’t receive anything less than a C.

For all students, not just special Ed, teachers are under a microscope. I was once told that another teacher was obviously better at teaching than I was, because all of her students received A’s in her course. If more than 15% of your students received less than a C, you had to submit a written plan to school administrators on how you were going to get their grades up. If more than 15% of your students get below a C for two years in a row, you are fired. The only incentive there is to pass everyone in order to keep your job.

When I was put in charge of teaching Biology at my school, I was given 6 classes of it. The teacher who had been teaching that schedule before me had been fired. I was told that the school’s goal was to have half of the students pass the standardized test on Biology at the end of the year. They told me that they didn’t expect me to hit that goal the first year, but were hoping I could do it by year three. At the end of that first year, 67% of my students hit the benchmark. My evaluation? Meets expectations (in other words, average). Why was that? Because almost a quarter of my students had below a C. I countered by pointing out that my grades were an accurate reflection of my students’ abilities. That didn’t matter.

The goals are difficult, if not impossible. The only real incentive that students have is grades, and some don’t even have that as an incentive. If you remove any possibility of negative outcomes, many students just won’t do anything. That isn’t on the teacher.

The entire education system in this nation is broken. I know- I was teaching in it for more than 6 years. It isn’t just the teachers. Administrators don’t care about the kids who are discipline problems, so they don’t do anything about it. The parents and the teachers also play a huge role in the suckage that is our school system.

There is a liberal moron in the video above claiming that the problem is with inequality. Bullshit. The list is of reasons for the failure is long-

  • There are kids who never come to school. You can’t make them. More than half of my students were chronically absent (meaning out of school more than 20% of the time). More than 10% of them were absent more than half of the time. In a 180 day school year, I had more than one student who were absent over 100 days.
  • Their parents don’t care, and no one is prosecuted for truancy.
  • There are parents who claim to “home school” but don’t actually bother to teach the kids anything. Yes, it happens. I know a few.
  • Students who do come to school and care, largely are cheating their way through school using apps, Google searches, and other cheats. That is how the girl who is the subject of this post made it- she cheated using apps.

The truth is that not every kid is smart enough for college. Not every kid is suited for school. A school that has a student for less than 1100 hours a year can’t fix 18 years of around the clock bad parenting coupled with the handicap of losing the genetic lottery. All of the programs in the world won’t turn a student with a 75 IQ and no motivation into a scholastically successful person. In this case, the mother of the girl didn’t speak English and didn’t bother to learn- she passed her parental responsibilities on to the school district.

We waste a lot of time and effort on trying educate kids who don’t want to learn, and on students with disabilities that prevent them from ever being more than simple manual laborers. There should be an exam at the end of the year when a student turns 15 (9th grade). Those who excel go to a college prep high school, students who show aptitude for it go to vocational school, students who fail are done and can go get a job. If you or your parents want to stay in school after you have failed the exam, you can pay for it yourself and go to private school. Let’s stop wasting money trying to prove that every child has the same mental aptitude. You don’t need to know calculus to run a cash register or push a broom.

Educating a child is a partnership between the student, parents, teachers, and administrators. If any one of those links fails to do their job, the effort will fail and all of the money spent will have been wasted. Let’s stop spending gobs of money to get the end result where a child receives an honors diploma and still can’t read or write.

By Divemedic, ago

Tickets are Racist

California has decided that “traditional enforcement methods have had a well-documented disparate impact on communities of color, and implicit or explicit racial bias in police traffic stops puts drivers of color at risk” therefore, traffic tickets are racist.

To correct this, tickets will come with fines that are adjusted based upon the driver’s income level. How this passes through the equal protection clause, I don’t know.

By Divemedic, ago

It’s a street in a strange world

Maybe it’s the third world. Two border patrol agents have been caught taking thousands of dollars in bribes to allow people to enter the country through the nation’s busiest port of entry without showing documents. Both men were paid thousands for each vehicle they waved through.

While Almonte was in custody, investigators allegedly seized nearly $70,000 in cash they believe his romantic partner was trying to move to Tijuana. Prosecutors wrote in a court filing that Almonte is potentially facing additional charges for money laundering and obstruction of justice..There have been five US Customs and Border Protection officers assigned to the San Diego area to face similar corruption charges in the last two years.

Keep telling me how we need to defend Federal workforce jobs.

By Divemedic, ago

Pull the Other One

We are constantly told by the left that noncitizens can’t vote, and instances of them doing so are ‘vanishingly rare’. Claiming otherwise gets you a ‘fact check’ where your statement is ‘debunked’.

If that is the case, then why would anyone oppose an executive order that enforces current voting laws by ordering the government to crack down on illegal immigrants who vote? Yet, that is exactly what a lawsuit filed by the DNC is all about. Why file a lawsuit against a law that would prevent people from doing what you already claim they aren’t doing?

By Divemedic, ago

Grift

Emily Brown is a government contractor. For the past 18 years, she has made a living working part time, billing the government $3700 a month. For 2025, she had three contracts lined up that would have totaled $63,000. What does she do for them?

Her contracts have her traveling to Albania and Ghana to “conduct research on the barriers that girls, women, persons with disabilities, and others face in accessing secondary education in Timor Leste and Gambia.” In other words, she was performing bullshit make-work.

We have entire school districts here in the US where not one student demonstrates reading comprehension. Reading comprehension and literacy in the US is at an all time low. There is no need to go to other countries to study that phenomenon.

This entire article is supposed to make us feel sorry for her and angry at Trump for putting a stop to the wasted tax dollars like this. This is what I voted for, to stop this stupid bullshit.

By Divemedic, ago