White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

SCOTUS May Want to Check the Bible on Citizenship and Rights

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President Trump claims that birthright citizenship isn’t that: a birthright. He wants the authority to revoke the citizenship of U.S.-born children of immigrants here illegally and visitors here temporarily.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on birthright citizenship this spring. It will likely hand down a ruling by summer.  Before the justices decide, they may want to cast their eyes over the Acts of the Apostles in the Bible.

They will learn anew how inviolate birthright citizenship was to Paul when he entered Jerusalem. He had to invoke his Roman citizenship to save himself from flogging and torture. On another occasion, Paul used his rights as a citizen to demand a trial.

Here is what befell Paul in Jerusalem in Acts 22: 22-29:

22 The crowd listened to Paul until he said this. Then they raised their voices and shouted, “Rid the earth of him! He’s not fit to live!”

23 As they were shouting and throwing off their cloaks and flinging dust into the air,

24 the commander ordered that Paul be taken into the barracks. He directed that he be flogged and interrogated in order to find out why the people were shouting at him like this.

25 As they stretched him out to flog him, Paul said to the centurion standing there, “Is it legal for you to flog a Roman citizen who hasn’t even been found guilty?”

26 When the centurion heard this, he went to the commander and reported it. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “This man is a Roman citizen.”

27 The commander went to Paul and asked, “Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?”

“Yes, I am,” he answered.

28 Then the commander said, “I had to pay a lot of money for my citizenship.

“But I was born a citizen,” Paul replied.

29 Those who were about to interrogate him withdrew immediately. The commander himself was alarmed when he realized that he had put Paul, a Roman citizen, in chains.

In the 1st century, Roman citizenship could be had by birth, purchased or granted by the emperor. But citizens born to their status had something of an edge over those, like the commander, who had bought their  citizenship.

A Roman citizen enjoyed many rights, which are also contained in the U.S. Constitution but are being ignored by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who are sweeping up people — some have turned out to be citizens and some have been deported in error.

These are the rights of a Roman citizen in the 1st century:

—Immunity from flogging and torture. These could be used to extract confessions, but were forbidden to be used against citizens.

—The right to a fair trial, which included the accused’s right to confront his accusers.

—The right to appeal directly to the emperor.

—Protection from degrading death, particularly crucifixion.

—Protection from illegal imprisonment. A citizen couldn’t be jailed if he hadn’t been convicted.

Trump is seeking a Supreme Court ruling to uphold his executive order (14161), ending universal birthright citizenship. The lower courts have restricted the order, and the president has asked SCOTUS to set that aside.

The 14th Amendment grants birthright citizenship to any child born under the jurisdiction of the United States. But Trump’s executive order, according to the New York City Bar, “purports to limit birthright citizenship by alleging that a child born to undocumented parents is not ‘within the jurisdiction of the United States.’  It thereby posits that birthright citizenship does not extend to any child born in the United States to a mother who is unlawfully present or lawfully present on a temporary basis and a father who is neither a U.S. citizen nor a lawful permanent resident.”

If Trump prevails, the unfortunate children will be unable to get birth certificates, register for school, receive healthcare or any public assistance. They must either seek citizenship from their parents’ country or, more likely, join the growing ranks of the world’s stateless people, punished for life for the crime of being born.

Victims to be exploited down through the decades of their lives.

The United Nations estimates that there are more than 4 million stateless people in the world, but that is a gross undercount, considering the number of refugees across Africa and in Latin America. War and drought are adding to the numbers daily.

If the justices want another biblical example, they may turn to the Old Testament and its several warnings that the sins of the fathers will be visited on the children for generations. As Exodus 20:5 puts it, “visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children to the third and fourth generation.”

Those who support the Trump view may want to think about the iniquity they are promoting. No baby chooses where to be born, ever.

The Rule of Law Is the Foundation of Civilization

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The men you see in masks on your television savagely arresting people may not seem like your affair. But they are your affair and mine, and that of every other American.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates outside of the law. It doesn’t disclose charges, and no one arrested sees a court of law.

ICE agents are also the affair of the whole world, for while they are symbols of local terror, they are also symbols of America’s withdrawal from the one critical underpinning of civilization: the rule of law.

Without it, society isn’t much. No one is secure, even those in charge.

At another time, the victim may be the oppressor. When there is no law, there is only fear. One day, the persecutor behind the mask may find himself persecuted by another man behind another mask.

Once power is wielded indiscriminately, it is free to serve many masters.

During the government of Argentina’s campaign to suppress left-wing political opponents, known as the Dirty War, from 1976 to 1983, a new way of settling personal disputes emerged.

The police arrested so many and killed them secretly — between 10,000 and 30,000, and the victims became known as the “disappeared” —  that soon murder became easier. If you didn’t like a rival or even a family member, you “disappeared” them — and that was that. No one would report such disappearances to the police for fear that it was the work of the police.

When I was in Argentina after the Dirty War, I was told about a man who didn’t like his mother-in-law and disappeared her. Lawlessness breeds lawlessness.

Currently, in areas of America where ICE is present, there is a common assumption that if someone suddenly goes missing, it means ICE has detained them, and they are likely being sent to a detention center for deportation.

Mickey Spillane, the American crime writer, once said the only difference between the police and the criminals was that the police were employed by the government. We see that with ICE.

In 1215, at Runnymede, the nobles of England told King John to cut it out. They demanded an end to the arbitrary confiscation of property and his majesty’s habit of handing out sentences without trial.

Habeas corpus (“that you have the body”) dates in English law to before the Magna Carta, but it was codified there. The Napoleonic Code embraces many of the same elements as the Magna Carta, although Napoleon eschewed English common law when he revised French law into the code in 1804.

Now, about half of the world’s legal systems are based on the French code, and half, including 49 U.S. states, are based on English common law. Louisiana has a hybrid of the two.

Nonetheless, it is a tenet of both systems that the individual will face trial and know his or her accusers, that the accused could be tried by his or her peers, and that the accused has rights.

Historically, the British relied heavily on the rule of law. In fact, law and its application became a mainstay of maintaining order in Britain and in the Empire. It was part of the concept of British exceptionalism.

The dignity and openness of trials were an important part of the colonial ethos. In Southern Rhodesia, before the country suffered a civil war and became Zimbabwe, I was a defendant in a minor dispute with a hotel over a bill. Even though I had settled the bill, I was ordered to appear before the native commissioner’s court in the remote area of the country where the hotel was located.

The court was a room with a single table and chair. Everyone else sat on the floor. It was crowded with justice-seekers and defendants, all of them black.

Only the commissioner and I were colonials. I thought the process would be nothing more than a courtesy call, a wink and blink.

Finally, the great man with bushy, unkempt, white hair and a mustache called me to the table. He read the now-moot complaint and dressed me down in terms I have never been dressed down, even by irate readers.

He said I was a disgrace to Britain, to my ancestry, to my family, and to my school. But, he said, I had especially let down the Empire. I was warned that if I ever faced him again for any reason, no matter how minor, I would get strict punishment.

It was really a rough way to treat a teenager, but it was part of the justice of the day that had to be seen as even-handed and blind.

In “Oliver Twist,” Charles Dickens wrote that “the law is an ass.” I think it is a beautiful beast, despite running afoul of it in colonial Africa. We need it back in the U.S. stable.

Memories of PDVSA: The Same Problems, Just Worse Now

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In 1991, the state oil company of Venezuela, Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A., known as PDVSA, invited the international energy press to visit.

I was one of the reporters who flew to Caracas and later to Lake Maracaibo, the center of oil production, and then to a very fancy party on a sandbar in the Caribbean.

They were, as a British journalist said, “putting on the dog.”

At that time, PDVSA executives were proud of the way they had maintained the standards and practices which had been in force before nationalization in 1976. The oil company was, we were assured, a lean, mean machine, producing about 3.5 million barrels per day.

They were keen to claim they had maintained the same esprit under state ownership as they had had when they were privately owned by American companies.

They had kept political interference at arm’s length, executives claimed.

PDVSA’s interest then, as it has always been, was more investment, particularly in its natural gas, known as the Cristobal Colon project.

In President Donald Trump’s takeover of Venezuela’s moribund oil sector, natural gas hasn’t been much mentioned — although there may eventually be more demand for natural gas from Venezuela than for its oil.

We had a meeting with Venezuela’s president, Carlos Andres Perez, who was called CAP. He painted a rosy future for the country and its oil and gas industry.

CAP believed the oil revenues would modernize the country. Particularly, he said that technology was needed to make the heavy oil more accessible and manageable.

And there’s the rub. While everyone is quick to point out that Venezuela’s oil reserves are the largest in the world, all oil isn’t equal.

Venezuela’s oil is difficult to deal with. It doesn’t just bubble out of the ground. Instead, 80% of it is highly viscous, more like tar than a free-flowing liquid. And it has a high sulfur content.

In other words, it is the oil that most oil companies, unless they have special production and refining facilities, want to avoid. It takes special coaxing to extract the oil from the ground and ship it.

Venezuelan oil has a high “lifting cost” which makes it expensive to begin with. At present, that cost is about $23 per barrel compared to about $13 per barrel for Saudi Arabian oil.

During the energy crisis, which unfolded in the fall of 1973 with the Arab oil embargo, U.S. utilities considered pumping it with a surfactant (a thinner) to Florida and burning it directly in boilers like coal.

As evidence that the oil operation hadn’t been damaged by nationalization, executives proudly told us that PDVSA produced more oil with 12,000 employees than the state oil company of Mexico, PEMEX, produced with 200,000.

In other words, the Venezuelans had been able to resist the temptation to turn the oil company into a kind of social welfare program, employing unneeded droves of people.

Now I read the workforce of PDVSA stands at more than 70,000 and oil production has slipped to about 750,000 barrels a day.

By 1991, the oil shortage which had endured since the Arab oil embargo had eased, and PDVSA was worried about its future and whether its heavy oil could find a wider market.

Particularly, it was worried about the day when it would run out of the lighter crudes and would be left only with its viscous reserves.

Two oil companies have been shipping oil to the United States during the time of revolution and sanctions: Citgo, a PDVSA-owned operator of gas stations in the United States, and Chevron. Both have waivers issued by the United States, although Citgo is under orders to divest and is set to be bought by Elliott Company (owned by Paul Singer, a Trump supporter), which may play a big role going forward in Venezuela as its expertise is in lifting.

About that party on a sandbank. Well, PDVSA wanted to show the press that it could spend money as lavishly as any oil major.

We were flown in a private jet to an island, then transported on speedboats to a sandbank, where a feast worthy of a potentate was set up under tents. The catering staff had been taken off the sandbank, so the effect was that the party had miraculously emerged from the Caribbean Sea.

A Conversation With 2026 on America’s Meaning to the World

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Come on in, 2026. Welcome. I am glad to see you because your predecessor year was not to my liking.

Yes, I know there is always something going on in the world that we wish were not going on. Paul Harvey, the conservative broadcaster, said, “In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.”

Indeed. Wars, uprisings, oppression, cruelty and man’s inhumanity to man are to be found in every year. But last year, the world lost something it may not get back. You see, ’26 — you don’t mind if I shorten your title, do you — we lost America. Not the country but the metaphor.

We were, ’26, despite our tragic mistakes — including slavery and wrongheaded wars — a country of caring people, a country that cared (mostly) for its own people and those who lived elsewhere in the world.

It was the country that sought to help itself and to help the world. It was the sharing country, the country that showed the way, the country that sought to correct wrong, to overthrow evil and to excel at global kindness.

It was the country that led by example in freedom of speech, freedom of movement and in free, democratic government.

When John Donne, the English metaphysical poet, described his lover’s beauty as “my America” in the 1590s, he foreshadowed the emergence of the United States a nation of spiritual beauty.

From World War II on, caring was an American inclination as well as a policy.

We rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan, an act of international largesse without historical parallel. We rushed to help after droughts, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis and wars.

We were everywhere with open hands and hearts. America the bountiful. We had the resources and the great heart to do good, to show our own overflowing decency, even if it got mixed up with ideology. We led the world in caring.

We bound up the wounds of the world, as much as we could, whether they were the result of human folly or nature’s occasional callousness.

We delivered truth through the Voice of America and aid through the U.S. Agency for International Development. Our might was always at hand to help, to save the drowning, to feed the starving and to minister to the victims of pandemic — as with AIDS and Ebola in Africa.

In 2025, that ended. More than a century of decency suspended, suddenly, thoughtlessly.

America the Great Country became America Just Another Striving Country, decency confused with weakness, indifference with strength, friends with oil autocracies.

It wasn’t just the sense of noblesse oblige, which not only distinguished us in the 20th century, but also earlier. In the 19th century, we opened our gates to the starving, the downtrodden and the desperate. They joined the people already living here to build the greatest nation — a democracy — that the world has ever seen. First in science. First in business. First in medicine. First in agriculture. First in decency.

These people brought to America labor and know-how across the board, from weaving technology in the 18th century to engineering in the 19th century to musical theater in the 20th century, along with movie-making and rocket science.

I would submit, ’26, that it is all about American greatness, and last year we slammed the door shut on greatness, abandoned longtime allies and friends. We forsook people who had been compatriots in war, culture and history for the dubious company of the worst of the worst, aggressors, oppressors, liars, everyone soaked in the blood of their innocent victims.

Yes, ’26, America stood tall in the world because it stood for what was right. Its system of law — including the ability to have small wrongs addressed by high courts — was the envy of foreign lands where law was bent to politics, where democracy was an empty phrase for state manipulation of the vote. The Soviet Union claimed democracy; America practiced it.

America soared, for example, with President Jimmy Carter’s principled and persuasive pursuit of human rights and President Ronald Reagan’s extraordinary explanation of its greatness: the “shining city upon a hill.”

It sunk from time to time. Slavery was horrific; Dred Scott, appalling; Prohibition, silly; the Hollywood blacklist, outrageous.

But ’26, decency finally triumphed and America was great, its better instincts superb — and now worth restoring for the nation and for the troubled, brutalized world.

Good luck, ’26. You will bear a standard that the world has looked to. Lift it high again.

 

Postcard from the Queen Mary 2: Holiday Cruise to the Caribbean

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My husband, Llewellyn King, and I chose a Christmas-to-New Year’s cruise on the Queen Mary 2, titled Caribbean Celebration, because there were so many days at sea. We love the feelings of lethargy, languor and disengagement that fill us on those days.

But the sea days — and there were three since we left New York on Dec. 22 — were an irritant to the few children on board who couldn’t wait to get to our first port of call, Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas, the capital of the U.S. Virgin Islands. I think the prospect of visiting Blackbeard’s Castle on the island was beating out the visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads.

There have been no shortage of sugarplums on the QM2, both edible and inedible. For this cruise, the pastry pros in the galley have rolled out some inspired creations.

On Deck 3, as you walk to the Britannia, the main dining room, there is a corridor-long gingerbread village. Look but don’t pinch off a piece of the white icing-covered picket fence, passengers are gently asked.

At lunch in the King’s Court Buffet on Christmas Day, passengers’ eyes popped at the festive dough decorations and ice sculptures, and shirt buttons popped after eating many helpings of the desserts. They piled plates high with thick slices of cakes — including Black Forest and Bûche de Noel.

I stopped an English lady before she tried to cut into a square cake frosted with royal icing. It was part of one of the buffet decorations.

“That is a fake cake,” I said.

“I saw a German cake, a French cake, but no Christmas cake,” she sighed.

I love that traditional British cake, too. It is packed with dried fruit and plied with brandy or rum for weeks, then covered with a layer of marzipan and royal icing.

I sighed for a second, then I spied mountains of colored marshmallows on a nearby table. I hoped there would be piles of Turkish delight for which I have a passion. Sigh, no. In consolation, I snagged a couple of Quality Street toffee pennies.

The galley chefs have accommodated passengers’ varied tastes and dietary restrictions admirably. But in keeping with The Cunard Line’s British heritage, every day they have offered a full English breakfast (fried eggs, back bacon, Cumberland sausages, mushrooms, tomatoes, black pudding and toast — sigh for some, no fried toast. At lunch, there has been a carvery table with two kinds of roasts, a meat or vegetable stew, various curries, battered cod and chips, even Cornish pasties and small beef and mushroom pies. Sigh for my husband, no beef and kidney pies.

On Dec. 26, Boxing Day, Llewellyn and I met the Chef de Cuisine Willy Guilot. He is a Filipino and has worked on the Queen Mary 2 since she entered service in 2004. We complimented him on the quality of the meals. He said the work had been “crazy” in the galley over Christmas, but he high-beamed at our recognition of it.

For Christmas Day dinner in the Britannia, I chose the traditional turkey with chestnut stuffing and Mrs. Beeton’s Christmas Plum Pudding. I think Isabella Beeton, the Victorian journalist and author of “Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management,” which is more commonly known today as “Mrs. Beeton’s Cookbook,” would have ordered it. She might even have licked what was left of the pudding the custard sauce on the plate.

On my way out of the dining room, I passed by a table where the English lady I had met at lunch was sitting. She smiled at me and pointed to her dessert plate on which there was a crumb of pudding and a drop of custard sauce.

Dancing the night away. Photo: Linda Gasparello

Rudolf Nureyev, the ballet superstar, said, “You live as long as you dance.” Judging from the median age on the elegant Queen’s Room dance floor every night at 9, he got that right.

Last night, the QM2 band played swing music and the floor was alive with pairs of agile ancients dancing all the styles, including the Lindy Hop and the Jive. They had all the moves and the clothes, especially the ladies, who wore full, flowing skirts for twirling.

As they walked off the floor, my husband and I thought they would return to their seats and order a belt. But no, they did about-faces when the band leader said, “You may not want to take your seats, because we’re going to play Benny Goodman’s ‘Sing, Sing, Sing.’ ”

We saw a Chinese couple from Toronto, who we have watched dance other nights in the Queen’s Room, and have gotten to know, return to the floor.

At lunch today, the 86-year-old husband told us that he and his wife have taken ballroom dancing for 14 years with a Russian teacher. His wife said, “She is very strict.”

Six months ago, they both had a fall, but they were determined to dance aboard the QM2 this Christmas and New Year’s. So they danced gently for rehabilitation, but were told not to waltz.

I saw them waltzing one night and assured them, “What happens on the Queen’s Room dance floor, stays on it.”

He said, “My grandmother said, ‘When you are 60 you live in terms of years. When you are 70, in months. And when you are 80, in days.”

I added,“When you are 100, in minutes.” They laughed a little.

They said they want to dance their 80s away — and next Christmas and New Year’s on the same cruise.

Quite unlike cruises we have taken on other lines, the many Chinese couples, young and old, on the QM2 are on the dance floor not at the gaming tables. Every night, they are in heaven, whether dancing cheek to cheek or in the mood to jitterbug.

New Year’s Resolutions Are Bad — Slough Off Instead

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A remarkable autobiography by Anthony Inglis, the English conductor and musicologist, is titled, “Sit Down, Stop Waving Your Arms About!” Quite so.

This admonition occurred while Inglis was conducting a musical. Someone sitting in the front row tapped him on the shoulder and told him to sit down and stop waving his arms about.

My admonition to you for the new year is to sit down and stop stressing yourself.

We are plagued with the idea of stress, and yet we start the new year with resolutions. We order a raft of these stress-making endeavors.

Want a stress-free new year? Stop your New Year’s resolutions right now.

Do you need to tell yourself that you will stay on your diet? No. You won’t anyway.

Do you need to set a goal of going to the gym five times a week? No. You won’t get to Planet Fitness more than once or twice, in the whole year.

So, your desk looks like a dump, leave it alone. You will promise yourself that for the first time ever you will get organized in 2026. You won’t. So why get stressed about it?

You have promised yourself that this year you are going to improve your mind and read 20 great books. You won’t. Best case, you will flip through a James Patterson thriller or a Danielle Steel romance. Maybe the detective novel you purchased at an airport will make it to your nightstand, alongside the classic you plan to read when you get around to it. That is never, so get rid of that reproving volume. Give it to charity. You will shed stress and feel good at the same time by doing that.

Sloth clothed as virtue is so, so stress-relieving.

Put aside the stress of resolutions in the new year and relax into a year of self-indulgence.

If a work colleague comes over to you and starts talking about productivity, cross your arms, sit down and, if your system allows, break wind.

Approach work as a card-carrying slough-off. In the Soviet Union, which was supposed to be the “workers’ paradise,” workers used to say, “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” Good on them.

If striving is pointless, stop striving. Give it a rest.

I suggest there is a terrible national lack of malaise. At every turn, we are urged to learn more, work harder and innovate, innovate, innovate. You don’t need innovation to have a second helping, open a beer or take the day off.

You may need to be a little innovative, explaining why you aren’t at work. But that isn’t so hard: Claim a mental health day. Particularly if you are well and fit enough to enjoy it at the beach, at a movie theater or snuggled down into your bed.

If people are telling you to “lean in” and “try harder or the Chinese will get ahead,” go to dinner at a Chinese restaurant and wonder at the number of dishes which can be prepared almost instantly — none of which you would cook. Then conclude that the Chinese have already won and stop stressing.

Think back to when we stressed mightily about the Japanese and the Germans beating us at everything. Then enjoy a suffusing, warm gladness when you realize that all that leaning in and trying harder hasn’t helped them beat us. Maybe we should have a national academy for failing upward.

Lloyd Kelly, a fine artist and a friend, teaches Tai Chi in Louisville, Kentucky, particularly in one of the city’s hospitals. He advises his students — some of whom are in wheelchairs — to stay within their comfort level, “to give just 70%.”

There is something beautiful about that admonishment at a time when people are stressed out and society is mindlessly urging you to struggle, to achieve, to conquer.

Here, then, is a resolution you can keep: I am only going to give a 70% effort. That way, perchance, you will have a great new year by default.

How Fear Came to America in 2025

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Of all the things that happened in 2025 — a year dominated by the presidency of Donald Trump — not the least is that fear came to America.

It’s reminiscent of the fear that African Americans knew in the days of the lynch mob, or that Jews have felt from time to time, or that Hollywood felt during the blacklist of the 1940s and 1950s, or the fear that people of Japanese descent from the West Coast, who were mostly U.S. citizens, felt when they were rounded up and interred following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

For some, it is a low-grade fear of reprisals, financial ruin and humiliation. And for some, it is a fear of ruin by litigation. But for others, it is fear of faceless arrest, the jail cell and plastic handcuffs.

All of this has made us a nation in fear and removed our faith in our laws, our Constitution, and our plain decency.

This is a new kind of fear which is acute in places, such as immigrant communities, but more universal than in the past.

It isn’t the fear of a foreign power or an alien ideology or a disease, but a fear generated domestically — generated by our own government. Fear in our workplaces, our schools, our movie studios, our newsrooms and our universities.

For the first time, this year we saw troops on the streets of cities when there was no civil unrest — as there was, for example, during the riots of 1968 which followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

We saw troops deployed in cities where they weren’t wanted, opposed by the local government and local people. But those cities got the troops courtesy of a claim by the president that troops can manage law enforcement better than the local police. Or was there some more sinister purpose?

For the first time, we saw arrests without charge or evidence, carried out by masked ICE agents, of people simply suspected of being here illegally.

Often the suspicion is no more than the color of the arrestee’s skin, their dress and their demeanor. No crime needs to be proved by this army of the state, dressed to intimidate. To the ICE men and women, appearance is tantamount to conviction.

Nightly on television we watched agents drag away men, women and children without due process; they would be held and deported without charge, trial or having any avenue of appeal. Justice denied, nonoperational. Often deportees go to countries that are alien or different from their homelands.

Fear has come home.

Immigrants are frightened even if they are citizens. If you have olive-toned skin, you can be dragged and held incommunicado. No appeal, no trial, no court appearance, no access to help. Habeas corpus suspended.

Pinch yourself and ask: Is this the America we cherish for its freedom, its justice and its generosity of spirit?

The fear isn’t confined to those who might be swept up in the mindless cruelty of ICE but extends throughout society. People with stature fear that if they speak out, if they do what at other times they might have seen as their civic duty, they will endanger themselves and their families. All the government has to do is to start an investigation or threaten one and the damage is done, the first level of punishment is delivered.

Investigations can target anything from how you filled out a mortgage application to whether you wrote something which may be viewed as objectionable, and the punishment begins.

Fear stalks the schools where teachers and professors can be punished for what they say or teach, and where the institutions of higher learning are subject to political scrutiny. Politics has become the law, capricious and savage.

There is fear in business where so many companies rely on government loan guarantees or tax credits for their growth. There is fear that if they say anything that can be construed as disloyal, they will be punished.

Political opponents fear that their mortgage applications may be deemed to be irregular and they are to be censured or prosecuted. Political prosecution is now a government tool.

Others just fear that Trump will ridicule them in public with his schoolyard denigrations, particularly members of Congress. They fear they will be reprimanded and marked for defeat in the polls.

There is an awful completeness about the Trump rampage: his systematic ignoring of norms, shredding of the rights of the individual, destroying families and bringing about untold misery.

A question for all America: How is the spreading of fear — sometimes an acute fear and sometimes low-grade fear — throughout society beneficial and to whom?

We, the people, deserve to know.

MET Group Advocates for Europe-Wide Energy Bank

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When Benjamin Lakatos speaks, energy people listen in Europe and increasingly farther afield.

Recently Lakatos, chairman and Group CEO of MET Group, has been speaking out strongly in favor of a European energy bank to correct some of the chaos which often convulses European energy markets and leads to general instability.

As laid out by Lakatos, in an interview with Mlex, an energy news service which is part of LexisNexis, the energy bank could be modeled on a central bank.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there has been a lot of chaos with prices and supplies yo-yoing, often reflecting geopolitical uncertainty and state actions.

Some of the normal market protections, like long-term contracts, haven’t been effective, largely because vendors and buyers have found the market so unstable that they have been reluctant to enter into binding, long-term commitments.

MET Group, which is based in Zug, Switzerland, points out that the idea of a European energy bank is far from universal acceptance, but there have been adjacent ideas. One idea is that the energy bank could grow out of the European Central Bank, be an offspring enterprise.

The idea of a European energy bank has also been advancing in think tanks and in policy workshops.

“The ‘energy bank’ would have tools analogous to central banks: liquidity injections, ‘circuit breakers’ in trading, easing margin calls, guarantees, and counter party support,” Lakatos told Mlex.

Lakatos, just 49 years old, is the dynamic leader of MET Group, an integrated European energy conglomerate, which has grown from a gas trading company in 2007 to its current status as a heavyweight active in 21 countries, 33 national energy markets and 44 trading hubs.

Originally, MET Group was a subsidiary of MOL, a Hungarian energy company. It became an independent company in a management buyout in 2018.

The headquarters were moved to Zug because Lakatos, who headed the buyout and is MET Group’s largest stockholder, felt it was a better base for raising capital, from a tax point of view and quite possibly, but he didn’t say so, from a political one.

MET Group is a purchaser of U.S. liquified natural gas for distribution in Europe. From its base in natural gas, MET Group is heavily involved in renewables, wind and solar, and storage. It has endorsed the concept of energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables and has become a leader in solar, wind and storage.

The company embraces forward-thinking and is 90 percent employee-owned with the remaining 10 percent held by Singapore’s Keppel Infrastructure.

In January 2026, Lakatos will move from Group CEO to his new role as executive chairman with emphasis on future strategies.

Lakatos seems to have no illusions about the size of the undertaking in persuading European institutions to sign onto the creation of an energy bank or the potential lethargy of government and established entities.

Lakatos’s concept of an energy bank is remarkably far- reaching and has no exact precedent anywhere. However, there are echoes of when Henry Kissinger created the International Energy Agency in 1974.

At that time, it was believed the IEA would act, in part, as an oil bank and that it would take an active role in opposing OPEC and monopolists controlling oil, after the Arab oil embargo in the fall of 1973. As time wore on, the mission of the IEA changed and it became more of a noticeboard agency than an executive one.

The story of the buffeting volatility of the European energy markets is told in MET Group’s own revenues.

Last year, it reported consolidated revenue of $17.9 billion. But in 2022, the year of the great shortages, its revenues were a staggering $40.5 billion. Its 2023 revenues were also high at $24.5 billion.

Interestingly, the call for an energy bank comes at a time when thought leaders are seeking to enhance the idea of European identity.

At a fall meeting of the Jean Monnet Association in France, at which I was present, there was a detailed examination of how those living in the 27-member European Union could feel a greater sense of common European identity. More clearly defined, Europe-wide institutions would help, the association’s members thought.

How Europe Stole Christmas and Promoted Snow

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The Grinch didn’t steal Christmas. Europe did. Filched it, packed it up and moved it north, where it snows.

In this wholesale looting of the world’s greatest holiday, the U.S., Canada and some other non-European northern habitats were also complicit.

I grew up in the Southern Hemisphere in faraway Zimbabwe — then called Southern Rhodesia, a British colony — and we had to bear Northern hegemony at Christmas. We had to bear it the rest of the year as well, but this is about Christmas and that symbol of the North: snow.

In subequatorial Africa, snow was a distant European asset. We had learned to associate it with Christmas, and we would celebrate the holiday by singing the carol about the good Bohemian King Wenceslas, looking out “on the feast of Stephen, when the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even.”

Cotton wool was our snow substitute. When we decorated for Christmas, we couldn’t have it lying about “deep and crisp and even.” We just put cotton wool puffs on Christmas trees (another symbol of European expansionism), picture rails and window frames.

The shops used glitter and cotton wool in Christmas window scenes that were out of Victorian-period Europe, not the Holy Land.

Only nativity scenes in churches were exempt from the scourge of cotton wool. Well, mostly. As kids we were confused by the snow mania, and sometimes we tried to embellish the straw in manger scenes with cotton wool.

My mother, who never visited anywhere north of the equator, was a campaigner, in her way, against the theft of Christmas. She would lecture people on what the temperature was at Christmas in Bethlehem. She said it was very hot.

There was no way she could have known what the actual temperature was in Bethlehem, but she didn’t let that inhibit her argument against the Northern appropriation of something that was rooted in the Levant.

In fact, Christmas is the beginning of the coolest time of year in Jerusalem and Bethlehem; the temperature hovers around 40 F. It isn’t a winter wonderland in the way that Christmas is portrayed in Europe and America.

And all that hoopla about sales and shopping till you drop came from those delightful Christmas markets, which you see all over continental Europe at this time of year.

You can blame the Germans for Christmas trees and the Scandinavians for reindeer, but it seems to me that the Brits, my people, have done a rather good job of Christmas appropriation.

Put aside that they have tried to grab the entire concept of the people of Israel. Yes, the British Israelite movement postulates the British are descendants of the 10 lost tribes of Israel.

This is an attempted act of cultural appropriation on a massive scale, and it hasn’t succeeded, but it still has its adherents.

The great English poet William Blake has been more successful. His poem “Jerusalem,” which he wrote in 1804, was put to music by Hubert Parry in 1916 to aid the World War I effort and has become a second British national anthem. People prefer it to “God Save the King” — and it has a better tune.

Blake wrote:

“I will not cease from Mental Fight/ Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:/Till we have built Jerusalem,/ In England’s green & pleasant Land.”

Well, that is a very ambitious attempt to steal a legend, and it makes cotton wool seem rather timid in the struggle to own Christmas.

I wish you, yes, a white Christmas. I like the white stuff — snow, not cotton wool.

Anatomy of a Utility: How CPS Energy Is Getting Ahead of Challenges Facing U.S. Utilities

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CPS Energy, which serves San Antonio and surrounding areas, as one observer said, “has gotten out in front of its problems.”

So much so that the utility, the nation’s largest gas and electric municipal power company, with nearly 400,000 gas customers and over 970,000 electric customers, has become something of a model for other utilities. Not problem-free but buoyant, and with low rates.

CPS Energy, like many utilities across the country, has been dealing with the rapid growth in demand, both from residential customers and from increased industrial activity around the San Antonio region, to say nothing of the long line of data centers and other commercial and industrial businesses queued up for power.

According to Elaina Ball, chief strategy officer, CPS Energy has been able to keep ahead of demand by buying gas-fired generating facilities as part of their community-led and board- approved generation plan, aligned with their Vision 2027 strategy.

This strategy has provided opportunities for the utility to avoid the stress of building new plants with attendant supply chain problems, and the cost of new infrastructure.

Ball told me their latest purchase was 34 gas turbines at four sites in the Houston area. These were bought from a private equity company, but are well-sited for incorporation into CPS Energy. Mostly, they are quick start-peaking units, she said.

A collateral gain from this purchase has been that the units can burn hydrogen in a mixture, as two of the turbine facilities are located near a hydrogen supply pipeline in the Houston area.

The nearly $1.4 billion purchase was debt-financed. Cory Kuchinsky, chief financial officer and treasurer, said he was very satisfied with the financing arrangement, and that it had been oversubscribed.

“We’re pleased with the purchases because they’re all fairly young units,” Ball said of the Houston area units. A year earlier, CPS Energy was able to do another favorable, big deal when it bought 1,710 megawatts of gas-fired turbines from Talen Energy for $785 million.

CPS Energy is a diversified utility and ranks first in solar and second in wind power in Texas. It was an early supporter of nuclear power and owns 40 percent of the South Texas Project, a two-unit nuclear power plant southwest of Houston. They also announced plans to purchase an additional 2-percent stake, which is expected to close in the near future.

CPS Energy is closely watching the development of small modular reactors and is also open to being a partner in large nuclear plants, Ball said.

It has a long coal history and is contemplating retiring one of its units, Spruce 1, and keeping Spruce 2, which is only 15 years old. Ball said of the older unit, “It is ready for an AARP card and a move to the Caribbean.” The utility has plans to convert Spruce 2 to natural gas.

When I asked Rudy D. Garza, CPS Energy president and CEO, about the Trump administration’s antipathy to renewables and its desire to keep every coal plant burning coal, he said he needed “every electron from any place I can get it and without discrimination.”

Garza said, “There are a lot of things I can’t control that impact my business. An administration coming in and arbitrarily telling us they don’t like renewables …. that makes it harder for me to do my job.”

The utility is proud of its investments in wind, solar and batteries, and it plans to add to all three.

“We excel in a lot of areas. We’re one of the most reliable utilities in the state of Texas,” Garza said.

He added, “CPS Energy has the lowest electric rates in Texas and that, together with the effects of being city-owned, keeps us in good shape with our customers.”

Senior executives like Garza, Ball and Kuchinsky are proud of the culture of the utility.

“Everyone I hire has to be grounded in how electricity is generated and transmitted …. whether you are an attorney, or an accountant, or a call center rep, you have to understand the utility business, and you have to learn the utility business,” Garza said.

As for management, Garza believes he can’t run CPS Energy in a top-down way. His philosophy: If you can’t keep the lights on today, there is no use in worrying about what you are going to do in five years.

Garza, an engineer with political and lobbying experience, oversees day-to-day operations and long-term strategy, and partakes in the social obligations, like the United Way, which CEOs are called on to do in the community.

CPS Energy is sticking with its plans to continue to add solar, wind and storage to its mix. Its current record peak generation is 5,860 megawatts and demand is growing at 2% to 4% annually over the medium term.

Here is how CPS Energy’s generation mix breaks down approximately: Gas, 57 percent; Coal, 12 percent; Nuclear, 9 percent; Renewables, 20 percent; and other purchased power (not generation specific) make up the rest.

Kuchinsky adds, “We have thousands of megawatts of large load wanting to connect with us.” He said these were industrial customers as well as data centers.

San Antonio is a magnet for visitors who want to enjoy its colonial-era architecture, visit the Alamo, sit and dine along its River Walk, and listen to Tejano music.

But it is also a magnet for power-hungry, high-tech companies which are flooding into the area it serves, a common theme across the state.