This is the U.S. Federal Building & Courthouse in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. This building, built in 1960s, is s survivor of the brutal domestic terrorist attack that wrecked the Murrah building that was across from it. A memorial to the victims of that attack is now located there, across from the courthouse.
Even here, however, the Court granted a stay of thirty days on the implementation of its order, which a private litigant would be unlikely to have received, and the government shouldn't have received here. The order should have gone into effect immediately absent the government posting a bond to cover the damages, which would be all the tariffs collected while the matter was on appeal, and all that it has already collected, which should need to be fully refunded.
But a refund won't happen and the implementation of the ruling is delayed by 30 days, so the government can appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which doesn't actually have to take the appeal.
Whether the S.Ct upholds it, or proves to be a pure political arm of the government, is another matter.
There were three dissents in the en banc decision.
September 3, 2025
A Federal Court has ruled Trump's deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles to be illegal.
In an act that's outrageous, former FBI Director James Comey has been indicted by a grand jury on two out of the three charges the government brought before it.
The Trump administration, and hence the Republican Party, has gone over to outright fascism with acts of this type. The test now is whether the Courts can withstand the onslaught.
In addition to Comey, now Letitia James has been indicted. More such indictments are apparently coming.
Trump's efforts to deploy the National Guard into cities is universally failing in the Courts.
Comey is being prosecuted for lying to Congress, which Pam Bondi just did herself.
October 16, 2025
And now John Bolton has been charged with eight counts of unlawful transmission of national defense information and 10 counts of unlawful retention of national defense information by a grand jury.
The Department of Justice has become a department of persecution for Trump. It'll take years to undo the damage that has been done. Moreover, because of the extent of this, it's my prediction that many who are now involved in these Trump efforts will face bar sanctions, and likely some prosecutions, in the future.
October 17, 2025
An Illinois court ordered ICE agents to wear body cameras.
October 25, 2025
Way milder than it could have been, but at least somebody tried to do something:
If the TRO is granted, construction will stop, but I would have asked for the structure to have been returned to the status quo ante.
In 1985, President Ronald Reagan appointed me as a federal judge. I was 38 years old. At the time, I looked forward to serving for the rest of my life. However, I resigned Friday, relinquishing that lifetime appointment and giving up the opportunity for public service that I have loved.
My reason is simple: I no longer can bear to be restrained by what judges can say publicly or do outside the courtroom. President Donald Trump is using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment. This is contrary to everything that I have stood for in my more than 50 years in the Department of Justice and on the bench. The White House’s assault on the rule of law is so deeply disturbing to me that I feel compelled to speak out. Silence, for me, is now intolerable.
Mark L. Wolf, U.S. District Court Judge for the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
This was done by a resolution of Congress, stating:
Resolved, That two Battalions of marines be raised, consisting of one Colonel, two Lieutenant Colonels, two Majors, and other officers as usual in other regiments; and that they consist of an equal number of privates with other battalions; that particular care be taken, that no persons be appointed to office, or enlisted into said Battalions, but such as are good seamen, or so acquainted with maritime affairs as to be able to serve to advantage by sea when required...
These heraldry dates are subject to some challenge. It is true that a Marine corps was founded on this day in 1775, but along with the Navy, it was disbanded in 1783. It was brought back in 1798 due to the need to build up the Navy due to tensions with republican France, the first undeclared war in the nation's history.
There's a collection of lessons here, one being that the founders of the republican feared and detested the idea of a standing military. They regarded a standing military as a threat to democracy, which in fact it is. That's the reason that the nation's entire defense was based on state militias. However, as a second lesson, it proved impossible to do, and as a result both a standing Navy and a standing Army had to be created, although the size of the Army was tiny.
A second lesson in this story is that Presidents have, right from the onset, crept up on war, and then later on outright engaged in it, without the required declaration.
Given the climate of the times, all of this should be absolutely frightening.
So, the Andrew formerly known as Prince has to get his own house due to Epstein, while in the US the House won't reconvene and take up the Epstein list. Turns out the British were right all along, we're not capable of governing ourselves.
Freedom Caucus leader John Bear went on record at a meeting of legislators on how to handle the upcoming populist initiative to reduce property taxes by 50%, after they've just been reduced by 25%, as favoring completely eliminating property taxes in favor of sales taxes.
On the imported geezer reduce my property taxes on the house I bought after I moved here from California initiative, he feels that the effect wouldn't be cumulative (50% of the just reduced 25%), while other legislators do.
May 2, 2025
A press interview of Freedeom Caucus member Bear reveals the WFC wants to treat the Wyoming budget to some DOGEy style actions, particularly in regard to grants and loans.
May 4, 2025
I don't know anything about the woman from Teton County who was his competition, but Miller was another individual who spent a career in the military, and therefore was a lifelong recipient of public funds, and who has now returned as an opponent of the Federal government.
For reasons I won't go into, I've seen some of the book that is featured in this article, and there's no way it should be in the children's section of a library.
A draft bill would allow for nuclear facilities to have armed guards as a type of private police force.
Private police forces are rare, but not completely unknown. The Wyoming Stock Growers Association at one time was authorized to have them, although that's long ago in the past. While I haven't kept up on it, so I don't know the current status, railroads at one time had them as well.
DOGE has been such a disaster that even Trump is questioning it. This is the last thing Wyoming needs
Deep down, to a large extent, the Freedom Caucus just hates the government.
Meanwhile:
The State's Democratic Party is abasically as dead as a doornail. Those looking for a middle path aren't being offered it by the Democrats, who recently replaced their leadership. The thin, bow tie, wearing newly elected leader provides an apt symbol for a party grossly out of step with the state.
Wyoming lawmakers step toward bill clarifying corner crossing’s legality: Some agricultural industry lobbyists urged a legislative committee to wait and see whether the U.S. Supreme Court takes the case, but others — including law enforcement — testified that they could use precise legal directions.
Gomers in the Wyoming “Freedom” Caucus: If the caucus was a herd, it would be full of gomers, columnist Rod Miller says. Its members make a lot of noise, but can’t get the job done.
And of course 82 year old Jim Magana, who seemingly hasn't managed to grasp that the positions he consistently advocates hurt the reputations of ranchers in general, is at it again:
Magagna should have stepped down from a leadership role with the WSGA a good 30 years ago. He's hurting the livestock industry by seemingly never accepting its no longer the 1960s.
Ayes included Pearson, Cowley Republican Rep. Dalton Banks, Cheyenne Republican Rep. Steve Johnson, Riverton Republican Rep. Pepper Ottman, Douglas Republican Rep. Tomi Strock, Thermopolis Republican Rep. John Winter and Casper Republican Sen. Bob Ide.
Opposing were Buffalo Republican Sen. Barry Crago, Cheyenne Republican Sen. Taft Love, La Barge Republican Rep. Mike Schmid, Baggs Republican Rep. Bob Davis and Laramie Democrat Rep. Karlee Provenza.
Of course, Casper Republican Ide is in favor of it.
Don't vote for the people in the aye column.
And with this hideous idea, we're going to close out this edition and start a new one.
Announcement confirming that Trump wine and cider is now stocked at Coast Guard BX's.
Sigh.
Interestingly, just yesterday I heard a Catholic Answers interview of Dr. Andrew Willard Jones on his book The Church Against the State. The interview had a fascinating discussion on sovereignty and subsidiarity, and included a discussion on systems of organizing society, including oligarchy.
China's civil war was acknowledged now to be a major conflict and two Game Wardens were found dead near Rawlins.
The Chinese Civil War was the topic of a political cartoon as well.
The murdered Game Wardens were Bill Lakanen and Don Simpson who were killed by ardent Nazi sympathizer and German immigrant Johann Malten. The same Game Wardens had arrested Malten for game violations when investigating, interestingly enough, claims that Malten had been involved in espionage and was relaying weather reports on shortwave, something that was illegal during the war when there was a blackout on weather reporting as the information was useful to submarines. Upon visiting Malten's cabin in the Sierra Madres they found he had committed numerous game violations.
On this occasion they were stopping by to see if Malten had continued to ignore the law. They were shot down out of hand when they arrived.
Malten burned his cabin down and it was officially reported that he'd died within it, although the evidence of that is very poor. There were reported sightings of him for years thereafter.
And a selection of 1945 cartoons.
I knew about this story because former Wyoming Game Warden David Bragonier wrote about it in his book about Wyoming Game Wardens, Wild Journey: On the Trail With a Wyoming Game Warden in Yellowstone Country. It's a good book, and I recommend it.
Bragonier discusses this event, although I clearly don't remember everything I read in his account. That's probably not too surprising as I read the book in 1999. What I recall but didn't see in the accounts on the murder you can find here is that the investigation was associated not only with the killer's German nationality and his strong Nazi sympathies, but also with shortwave radio transmissions that could not be pinned down.
There's a bunch of interesting things that could, and if a person had time, should be explored here as the story raises all sorts of undeveloped oddities.
One of them is that Lakanen and Simpson are two out of the three Wyoming Game Wardens who were murdered by immigrants (to the extent I know why the various ones who lost their lives in the line of duty did). I'm not saying that immigrants murder game wardens, but this is an interesting fact. The other one is John Buxton, who was murdered by a youthful Austrian immigrant in 1919. In that instance he had taken a .30-30 Savage rifle from a 17 year old who drew a revolver and killed him. The reasons that Buxton was checking the boys is unclear. Stories frequently claim they were hunting out of season, but that seems incorrect. They were certainly overarmed for rabbits, however, with a .30-30 being way too large for that pursuit. Buxton might have been checking them as their activities seems suspicious, which frankly they do, or because there was a state law at the time that prohibited aliens from carrying firearms.
The killers handgun, we might note, was concealed.
I only note this as its odd. Hunting is common in Germany and Austria, and indeed there's a strong hunting culture there, but it's highly regulated. As a result, poaching is fairly common as well, even though its highly criminal. Indeed, one of the SS's units during World War Two, the Dirlewanger Brigade, was originally made up of convicted poachers, although it moved on to other criminals over time.
Anyhow, I wonder if these people were just hugely out of sink with any culture at all.
In the earlier murder, it's been noted that the young men had been in run-ins apparently with Italian immigrants in the same location. Austro Hungaria and Italy had been on opposite sides of World War One. Again, I'm not saying that caused the murder, but I do wonder if they conceived of themselves as being very much on the outside of things.
Another interesting thing, although having nothing to do with the focus on this page, is the lingering Nazi sympathies in some quarters amongst German immigrants who chose to continue to live in the country. That carried on, quietly, well after the war, even after the news of the Holocaust became known.
Odd.
If Malten was actually a spy, that may explain the killing in and of itself.
Another thing this story oddly brings up is the extent to which trapping remained economically viable.
Trapping was pretty common in Wyoming up into the 1970s, when there was a fur market price collapse. I had, well still have, traps, although I haven't set them for decades. In the 1970s high school kids like myself supplemented our incomes by trapping or hunting coyotes for their furs. The market was so lucrative at the time that there were people who flew in from out of state and hunted coyotes near Miracle Miles, something we didn't appreciate very much as we didn't have those sorts of resources available to us. The Federal Government was also big into predator control at the time which we also didn't appreciate much for the same reason.
Furs are, fwiw, an actual renewable resource fabric, one of the few.
Fur coats were a big deal for women at this time and would, again, be throughout the 1950s. They were not nearly as much of a luxury item as people like to remember. My mother had a heavy mink coat that she brought down from Montreal that she wore on really cold days. As a kid I loved it when she brought it out, due to the feel of the soft minks.
It was, in spite of Donald Trump and the Sweet Home Alabama crowe dof the GOP may believe, colder then.
I've never looked into it but I suspect that synthetic fabrics had as much to do with the decline in furs as anything else. That started during World War Two and is well evidenced by the Air Force's switch from sheepskin flight altitude flight jackets to synthetic ones. That trend continue into the 1950s and I suspect it just generally caught up with fur coats by the 1980s. Indeed, the association of fur with luxury somewhat increased in that time, with it generally being the case that things are regarded as luxurious not only for their scarcity, but because they really aren't needed.
More on fur clothing some other time.
I guess the final thing I'll note is how dangerous of job being a game warden is. A lot of the crimes you investigate are, by default, armed crimes.
Given that, it's amazing to look back and realize that when I was a kid wardens didn't carry sidearms. They weren't allowed to. I recall when that changed and many did not take up what was then the option to carry them. Now they're required to.
Indeed, I was recently stopped by a warden and frankly he wasn't very nice. That's a new trend as well. I don't like it. But not only was he not nice, he was extremely intimidating carrying a government issued handgun on a government issued gunbelt and wearing a government issued flak jacket.
I've really hated the militarization of the policy and this is all part of it. Everytime I see a policeman anymore, including a game warden, they're dressed like they're going into Hue in 1968. All policemen of every type are civilians. They're simply deputized civilians. They shouldn't look like an occupying army. And if the treat people rudely, and many do, and are standing their armed treating you like you are a detained Vietnamese villager, it's scary.
A little of that comes across, I'd note, in Bragonier's book, in spite of my recommendation of it. It's a good book, but he displayed an element of contempt for the public he served in it.
David Bragonier must be, I'd suspect, gone to his reward by now His biography indicates that he was born in Iowa in 1937 and moved to Wyoming after graduating high school. He became a game warden over twenty years later, in 1958, something that would be extremely difficult to do now due to the education requirements. He briefly worked for the Forest Service before that.
A man becoming a Game Warden at 39, which he did, would be really unusual now. Probably impossible.
I actually have twice tried to plow that field myself, rejecting it once as I just go engaged. I would have been about 30 at the time. It'd be completely impossible for me to become a Game Warden now as I not have a wildlife management degree. I suppose that requiring that specific degree is a good thing, but I do miss the days when a lot of Game Wardens were basically from ranching families. Even when I was that age, many of them fit that category. My cohort was probably about the last one that would meet that description.
I went on, of course, to a successful career in the law, and I was already a lawyer, of course at age 30, and had been for a few years. I took one fork in the road. You aren't supposed to look back. Luke tells us, in a different context, that "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God". I'll confess I've looked back a lot.
Having said all of that, I spoke the same warden (turns out he's very green) as I found a poached elk about two weeks later. I had to guide him in, by phone, to the location. He was very nice on that occasion, and that's how things should be.
Indian Inspector E. C. Watkins issued a report to the Secretary of the Interior which would end up helping to bring about Gen. Terry's campaign of 1876. Indeed, on the same day, Gen. Sheridan issued a confidential letter to Terry informing him that he had met with President Grant, the Secretary of the Interior, and the Secretary of War, and that the Grant had decided that the military should no longer try to keep miners from occupying the Black Hills: "it being his belief that such resistance only increased their desire and complicated the troubles."
Watkins was a lawyer and businessman by profession who has served in the Civil War, where he obtained the rank of Major. He'd been appointed Inspector of Indian Affairs in in 1875 and occupied that position for four years before returning to private life
Philip Sheridan was in command of the Military District of Missouri at the time. Interestingly, he had only been married, at age 44, for a few months, to Irene Rucker, who was 22.
