āļø TERMINATOR ā Saturday, May 2, 2026 ā C&C NEWS š¦
Good morning, C&C, itās Saturday! Time for your Weekend Edition roundup, which includes: text tips; Iran War news ā Trump dodges War Resolution trap and declares the āhostilities are terminatedā; heāll be back; Times breaks a brand new Epstein conspiracy theory that media somehow avoided for the last seven years; more fallout from the Epstein files sneaks quietly through the media cycle; Trump signs executive order for branded IRA accounts for working-age Americans; DOJ opens another front against former FBI Director Comey, who must be feeling like itās one damned thing after another these days; Janet Mills drops out of Maine senatorial race to make way for Democrat fascist; Dems deploy remasculization strategy; more. I recovered from an anger management breakdown this week, after I received more political text messages in a single morning than words in an above-average C&C roundup. So in frustration, I finally searched high and low for a solution. (I googled it.) Until this week, Iād been investing increasing amounts of rage-inducing time each day into āstoppingā and deleting them, one by one, like an obsessive-compulsive maniac. Anyway, having located an answer, and having tested it all week, Iām now sharing the solution with everyone else who, like me, may have missed the memo. (This is iPhone only. Iāve never touched an Android phone.) Go into Settings. In the Search box, enter āMessages.ā When you find and tap it, scroll down to āUnknown Senders.ā Set āScreen Unknown Sendersā to on. Then make sure āFilter Spamā is on. It works great. The only downside is that from time to time, youāll need to glance in your āUnknown Sendersā folder to make sure nothing real got swept in there, like a question from the DoorDash driver whoās trying to deliver your extra spicy Taco Bell chalupas. Finally, some spam texts may still slip through. Thereās a nuclear option for those. The App Store offers a selection of apps that aggressively police your text inbox. Iām currently trying āSifter,ā which, although it seems aimed at computer science majors, only costs a couple of bucks and adds aggressive filtering and blocking. You can see in my Messages settings, above, that the āText Filterā is set to āSifter.ā Thatās why. You might not even need Sifter or apps like it. Turning on Screen Unknown Senders may be enough to get the job done. Please share additional tips in the comments. We need to work together to prevent this high-tech epidemic from spreading. 15 days to flatten the text tsunami curve. ššš Yesterday, in a letter to congressional leaders that can only be described as a masterclass in creative legal writing, President Trump informed Congress that the Iran war has been, and I quote, āterminated.ā CBS News reported, āTrump tells Congress āhostilitiesā with Iran have āterminatedā as conflict hits 60-day deadline.ā Well, how terminated depends on the meaning of that word, āterminated.ā Maybe more like, mostly terminatedā like a mostly peaceful protest. The letter arrived with the split-second precision of a lawyer filing at 11:59 PM right before the deadline. (I might be familiar with the maneuver.) Under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, the President has exactly 60 days to continue military operations before Congress weighs in. That countdown reached zero yesterday, on May 1st. So Trump did what every president since Richard Nixon has done when the timer runs outā he sent the American language into battle. āThe hostilities that began on February 28, 2026 have terminated,ā Trump wrote in a letter to Republican leaders in the House and Senate. This will surprise the 50,000 American troops currently maintaining a naval blockade of Iranās ports, who might be forgiven for thinking that surrounding a country with warships is, at minimum, hostility-adjacent. Defense Secretary Hegseth helpfully clarified we could resume bombing āat the push of a button,ā which I guess youād call un-terminating hostilities or something. (Either way, it is either a War Powers Resolution button-hole or the button on Skynetās user interface, depending on who you ask.) Under the War Powers Resolution āa statute passed by Congressā a president can start military action without āprior authorization,ā but he must notify Congress within 48 hours, and then he must āterminate hostilitiesā within 60 days unless Congress grants an extension. Today would have been 61 days from the start of the war. A week ago, the New York Times was practically crowing about the War Powers Resolution, euphorically hoping it would cut Trump off at the knees: Sorry, Times. āAs the situation develops,ā Trumpās letter concluded, āI will continue to update the Congress on noteworthy changes.ā In other words: Iāll be back. Since it originally passed, Congress has successfully used the War Powers Resolution to end a military campaign exactly zero times. Not even once in nearly 53 years. This makes the Resolutionās 60-day ādeadlineā essentially a polite suggestion with no enforcement teeth and practically invites lawyerly wordplay. Obama did it with Libya (he argued āoperationsā didnāt constitute āhostilitiesā). Clinton did it with Kosovo (he argued congressional funding was implicit authorization). Clinton also did it with Somalia (not āsustainedā). Biden claimed we werenāt engaged in āhostilitiesā against Russia at all (Ukraine was). Many SCOTUS-watchers note an unrelated but relevant 1983 Supreme Court decision captioned INS v. Chadha, which disapproved of Congress taking any action without legislative process and āpresentmentāā which means getting the presidential John Hancock. So itās likely that, to stop a presidentās war, Congress would need a signature from the same president it was trying to stop. Indeed, in 2019, Trump vetoed a Yemen resolution, and Congress lacked the votes to override him. Thus, the War Powers Resolution appears to be the legislative equivalent of a strongly-worded letter, like a notice from the HOA explaining that your 12-by-18 American flag exceeds the 6-by-9 maximum in subsection 4.7(b), and please remit the $10 fine within 30 days. The President has repeatedly told reporters he thinks the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutionalā a sentiment shared by many constitutional scholars. His letter never mentioned the Resolution directly one way or the other; the only reason we know the two were connected was the timing and the use of the words āhostilitiesā and āterminated,ā which track the statute. But the letter did mention āmy constitutional authority to conduct United States foreign relations and as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive.ā Thatās a direct slap at the Resolutionās main constitutional weakness, which is that the Constitution puts the President in charge of both military and foreign policy, meaning Congress canāt start setting war deadlines and making military rules. Since hostilities have now officially been āterminated,ā if we resume them, does that mean the 60-day clock starts over? Nobody knows. The War Powers Resolution has never been tested in the Supreme Court, and given the Resolutionās constitutional problems, I doubt Congress will ever push it there. š„š„š„ Like Dr. Frankenstein throwing the switch and sending lightning surging through the Monsterās veins, the New York Times electrifyingly resurrected the stale Epstein suicide conspiracy this week, in a story headlined, āJeffrey Epsteinās Possible Suicide Note Hidden From Public View.ā If you thought you already knew all the weird, inexplicable facts about Epsteinās death, just wait. You aināt seen nothing yet. The Times story is typically useless. Worried, perhaps, about legal liability, it tiptoed around some of the most astonishing revelations since we learned the cameras were turned off and the guards were sleeping. First of all, the story reported that three weeks before he was killed, Epstein was found unconscious in his cell with āa strip of cloth around his neck.ā When he came to, Epstein told jailers that his ceā¦
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