Post Malone, born Austin Richard Post on July 4, 1995, in Syracuse, New York, grew up in Grapevine, Texas, after his family relocated when he was a child. His father, who worked as a concessions manager for the Dallas Cowboys and had a background as a disc jockey, introduced him to a wide array of musical genres, including rock, country, and hip-hop. This early exposure profoundly influenced Post’s eclectic musical style. During his high school years, Post began experimenting with music, forming a heavy metal band and later moving on to softer rock and hip-hop. At sixteen, he created his The post Complete List Of Post Malone Songs From A to Z appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

James Carville Says Businesses and Law Firms that Work with Trump Remind Him of Hitler’s Collaborators

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Culture Steak and Company  No matter what happens, they can’t stop you from grilling with the family in the Blue Ridge. I can’t stop eating sirloin.  My father tells me that my Great-Uncle Sam loved the cut. He’d buy a generous hunk of the beef every weekend and grill it out back over red-hot coals in the Blue Ridge of old Virginia, the one with Robert E. Lee and all. If only Sam could see me now. Stationed behind the charcoal smoker in the high grass behind the brick house where I was raised, sirloin steak has become my weekly driver.  I like to eat it twice a week if I can find the time to drive 30 minutes to the nearest grocer. Once on the weekend, in the fashion of my great uncle, and then again during the week, fried on stainless steel. It’s always better on the grill. My methodology is simple: I look for the fattest cut I can find at the store and I buy it. I like to mix it in a marinade and let it sit for a few hours in the fridge and bring it out an hour before grilling so it can get up to room temperature. My marinade is simple enough: Worcestershire sauce, A1, salt, pepper, and Dijon mustard to bind it all together. I’ve been listening to Jason Molina a lot lately. The Ohio-born rocker, who drank himself to death at the age of 39, provides the perfect soundtrack for such affairs. The Magnolia Electric Co., his seventh and final studio album, rips harder than a Pall Mall cigarette in the background as I stand over the grill. Spent Saturday with my pops. We’re fixing up the place—building fences, tearing up brick, and constructing a wooden bridge over a gully that cuts across the property. Growing up just a stone’s throw from Patrick Henry’s Scotchtown, I’ve always been connected to the land, but it’s only now, as I approach my 40th birthday, that I’ve developed a true appreciation for the field. My friends keep telling me about their therapists. Out here, the only therapy anyone needs is the sun and the grass and work. Lots of it.  I can’t stop thinking about horse racing. Thoroughbreds and quarterhorses and saddlebreds and such. On the way to the Tractor Supply store, my father recounts the story of Secretariat. I know it by heart, but I still ask him to tell me all the ins and outs. Born in the grasslands of Caroline County, Virginia, Secretariat embodied everything one could want in a champion: relentless drive, a tireless engine, and a truly poetic presence on the dirt track. When Big Red died at the age of 19 he had sired nearly 250 horses, yet none of them could reproduce his greatness. How could they?  Secretariat’s death was attributed to laminitis, a painful and debilitating hoof condition. When Dr. Thomas Swerczek, head pathologist at the University of Kentucky, performed the necropsy, he marveled at what he found. “We just stood there in stunned silence,” Swerczek recalled. “We couldn’t believe it. The heart was perfect. There were no problems with it. It was just this huge engine.” Though Secretariat’s heart was never formally measured, it became legendary for what experts in the equine industry call the “x-factor” — the extraordinary quality that marks champions. The stuff of giants. The stuff that inspires films. (Well, the good ones at least.) They buried Secretariat whole. They don’t do that for horses. But Secretariat wasn’t a horse. He was the myth that fell to earth.  I was driving to the dump with a load of fencing when Molina’s haunting lyrics hit me like a brick. I’ve been listening to Molina for the better part of 20 years now, and never once had his music tracked with such power. “We will be gone, but not forever,” roars Molina on the song “Farewell Transmission”: “The real truth about it is—no one gets it right. The real truth about it is—we’re all supposed to try. There ain’t no end to the sands I’ve been trying to crawl. Through the static and distance.” I could finally hear him. These days, I’m spending a lot of time with my 7-year-old nephew, who was born on Valentine’s Day. We share the zodiac sign of Aquarius. He’s inquisitive and loves to run and jump and play all the sports. Over the weekend, I helped him pronounce the word “quietest.” He got it after a few tries. I’ve travelled far and wide in my life—Europe, Asia, and across the beautiful and disenfranchised corners of our America—but I would give it all up just for a few of those moments when I get to teach my nephew how to pronounce a new word. There’s something about the future that is impossible. It’s coming no matter how much the past commands our gaze. Oh, well. Guess it’ll just have to come. I struggle to let sirloin, or any steak for that matter, rest after grilling. Ten minutes say the greats. You’ve got to let it sit for 10 minutes. I never make it past five, but I’m getting better with my patience, probably because I want this whole thing to slow down. The world, life, and the living. It goes quickly. Far too quickly. I know it’s heretical, but I prefer sirloin to ribeye. I definitely prefer it to a strip. Filet mignon? That’s another conversation. I do love a good filet mignon. But there’s something about the economy of a sirloin. It’s just so dang cheap for the payoff you get if you know what you’re doing with it.  My father’s been coughing more than usual. Doctor says he’s fine but I know he’s struggling. He’ll be 70 here soon. He had to take on a job recently to cover the bills. My father has worked his whole life. He built a family. He helped farmers here in Virginia. That was his passion, farmers and their animals and this country. He really tried, in the most honest of ways, but it still ain’t enough. Not in Biden’s America. Not in Trump’s America. Tariffs or not, the money’s all dried up and Social Security only goes so far. I wish he’d quit smoking, but who am I to tell him anything when I’ve got a Marlboro hanging from my lips most days? This past Saturday, my father, my mother, my sister, and my nephew were all at the house. I pulled out a thick sirloin I bought earlier in the week and asked my sister to stick around. We set the dinner table like the old days, when we were a young family on the edge of the big city. I fired up the grill and cranked Molina up—way up.  I like to get my first sear on it. Three minutes on both sides. Something like that. No meat thermometer, no touch test. I just cook the damn thing. Somewhere along the way, I like to dunk it back into the marinade. Who knows if it’s hygienic but boy does it taste good in the end. After about 10 minutes I pull it off. “Has to be done.” Five minutes later, I cut into the chunk of meat. Medium rare; God is good. My nephew bows his head in prayer at the table and we all follow suit. I’ve been lax about church these last few years. I tried to get back into it. Catholic’s guilt and all. Whatever, I’ve got seven rosaries hanging from the mirror in my beat Honda Civic. Out here, in God’s country, ain’t that close enough to Heaven?  My sister tells my nephew about how we used to tease each other at the dinner table. My mother rolls her eyes. My father is focused on his food. What a pleasant moment this is. Our little family, laughing and eating. Couldn’t have done it without sirloin, my favorite steak.  The post Steak and Company  appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics The Legal Services Corporation: Principled and Conservative or Liberal Running Dog? A response to “Mr. Musk, Please Defund the Legal Services Corporation.” Credit: Stock Studio 4477 A recent opinion piece in The American Conservative calls for the defunding of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), relying on mischaracterizations and misinformation to attack an institution that plays a crucial role in our justice system. The article not only misrepresents LSC’s mission, impact and scope, but also disregards the real-world consequences of stripping legal aid from those who need it most. As the country’s largest funder of civil legal aid, LSC provides critical legal representation to low-income Americans—including veterans, families with children and seniors—who are facing life-altering civil legal challenges such as wrongful evictions, domestic violence and consumer fraud. Defunding LSC would not only deny vulnerable individuals access to justice, but would ultimately increase costs for taxpayers. When someone is accused of a crime and does not have the resources to hire an attorney, state and federal governments provide legal representation. This is not the case when people face civil actions such as custody battles, foreclosure or denial of veterans and social security benefits. To qualify for legal aid, people must meet strict income guidelines: a family of four must earn less than $32,150 a year and an individual must earn less than $15,650.   A well-functioning legal system is fundamental to maintaining order and ensuring justice. LSC provides essential funding for legal aid organizations that assist low-income American workers and families in navigating civil legal disputes. Without this assistance, many would be left without legal recourse, exacerbating instability in communities and overburdening the courts with self-represented litigants. Conservative lawmakers and policy experts have long championed the idea that people should be able to resolve disputes efficiently and lawfully. LSC helps ensure that contract disputes, landlord-tenant disagreements, family matters and consumer fraud cases do not spiral into crises that erode trust in the legal system. Without legal aid, small business owners could struggle to navigate complex legal proceedings, survivors of natural disasters wouldn’t be able to file the correct paperwork to rebuild their homes leveled by flooding or tornadoes, and many low-income rural Americans, who often lack private legal representation, would be left without any legal assistance at all. Rather than promoting progressive legal activism, as the misguided article states, LSC and its grantees are bound by strict statutory limitations (imposed by Congress) on the types of cases it can support. LSC grantees cannot engage in class-action lawsuits, lobbying, or political advocacy, and those restrictions apply to funding from any source. In other words, if a grantee accepts so much as $1 from LSC, it must abide by the same conditions that Congress imposed; it cannot raise money from other sources and engage in any prohibited activities. Moreover, extensive, multi-layered oversight mechanisms, including an independent Office of the Inspector General, review and ensure that both LSC and its grantees operate within the scope of these limitations. The idea that civil legal aid is a vehicle for partisan activism is a mischaracterization that ignores the broad restrictions set by Congress. LSC’s primary function is ensuring that individuals have basic legal representation in civil matters. It is this mission that has forged significant bipartisan support for LSC from Congress, from state supreme court justices, from state attorneys general, from corporate general counsels and from law firms in every state. In fact, many Republican leaders have supported LSC precisely because they recognize its importance in upholding the principles of limited government and self-reliance, not to mention the valuable, sometimes life-saving services that LSC grantees provide to constituents in their districts. When people have access to legal aid, they are better able to resolve disputes efficiently, without requiring costly interventions from the state. Defunding LSC would have far-reaching consequences, not just for low-income individuals but for the broader community. Studies consistently have shown that every dollar invested in legal aid generates economic benefits by reducing reliance on social safety nets, ensuring people have stable employment and wages, and preventing costly litigation. When individuals cannot access justice, they often turn to emergency government services, increasing public spending in other areas like shelters, crisis centers and emergency rooms. Additionally, eliminating LSC would create a surge of unrepresented litigants in courts nationwide, slowing down judicial proceedings and increasing costs for all parties involved. Judges across the country, including conservative jurists, have repeatedly emphasized the importance of legal aid in ensuring court efficiency and fair outcomes. Finally, eliminating funding for civil legal aid removes a critical support function for pro bono services provided by lawyers and law firms. LSC grantees promote and support these services by training private attorneys in areas of the law they otherwise are not used to practicing, by offering co-counseling support and by providing critical administrative and case support. Encouraging and supporting volunteer lawyer programs is an essential function of legal aid programs. Rather than eliminating LSC, a more constructive approach would be to ensure its funding is used effectively and transparently. Lawmakers should focus, as they have in the past, on strengthening accountability measures while maintaining this critical safety net that aligns with the principles of fairness, efficiency and limited government intervention. When lawmakers and policymakers look beyond ideological divides, they recognize the practical benefits of maintaining LSC: the senior widow in Florida who needed help after a contractor scammed her out of her life’s savings; the mother who needed protection for herself and her young child when her husband tried to strangle her; the veteran who was wrongfully denied assistance and almost lost his home. Civil legal aid is not, or at least should not be, a partisan issue but a safeguard of justice for all Americans. And the work of LSC and its grantees to uphold the integrity of our legal system depends on ensuring that all citizens, regardless of income, have access to basic legal representation. Nathan Hecht & John Malcolm Former Chief Justice, Texas Supreme Court LSC Board Member The author replies: Not surprisingly, many lawyers, judges, and state bar associations are thrilled to have hundreds of millions of LSC federal dollars flowing into their profession, just as so many journalists fight to keep Washington handouts going to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And as with so many NPR and PBS media people, the values of most legal services lawyers are not in the American mainstream, but are skewed to the “social justice” far left.   In their piece, Chief Justice Hecht and Mr. Malcolm stress LSC’s support for better individual justice: they point to work in actual legal cases (e.g., landlord-tenant lawsuits) and training for private attorneys. Hecht and Malcolm’s policy position is actually the same as Hillary Clinton’s when she was defending LSC in the 1980s against President Ronald Reagan’s effort to abolish it. Clinton always hid the radical agenda, publicly maintaining that LSC’s work was about promoting justice for individual indigents and for ensuring a more efficient legal system.   Hecht and Malcolm assert that, today, Congress has finally succeeded in restricting LSC’s radical mission. Let us for a moment grant that they are correct (which they are not); is it not strange that they see no irony in urging conservatives to accept and embrace Lyndon Johnson’s original Great Society vision of federal funding for private lawsuits? As constitutionalists, conservatives flatly reject the notion that Congress, under any circumstances, should be injecting each year hundreds of millions of dollars into the private practice of law.   Moreover, Hecht and Malcom are whistling by the graveyard if they sincerely believe that Congress has succeeded in stopping LSC from indirectly subsidizing an ecosystem of far-left legal activism. The situation may not be so bad as it was under Clinton, but LSC grantees are still ideologically engaged on a range of partisan issues such as systemic racism, DEI, LGBT, homelessness, and immigration. They inevitably support more welfare rights, nanny-state intervention, and government rule by judicial fiat.  The curious observer can find a cornucopia of leftwing priorities by visiting the LSC website of grantees and drilling down on their activities. For example, the grantee Northwest Justice Project (NJB) in Washington state is today still a rallying point for radical “Black Lives Matter” values packaged into the group’s “Race, Justice, and Equity Initiative.” As the NJP board of directors proclaimed in 2020, and continues to endorse:  We must also acknowledge the consequences of racism in dramatically increasing the tragic toll of the pandemic on the Black community. And we condemn the vicious responses we have seen across the country to demands for basic justice. NJP stands with the protesters who have asserted their constitutional right to assemble and express their outrage at systemic racism and demand change to our institutions and society. This outrage is not an outlier but typical of the legal services community. The same NJP initiative publicly condemns the White House’s attempt to limit birthright citizenship, applauding the state of Washington’s lawsuit to block the president’s executive order. While Hecht and Malcolm will stress that current LSC restrictions prevent NJP from formally joining that legal action, how confident are they that NJP lawyers are not informally consulting with the state attorney general?    LSC grantees are fully in step with the radical DEI mission and are, for example, collecting client data on “unknown” and “another gender” identities. Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid was typical when it posted on Facebook that “the Supreme Court’s ruling on LGBTQ+ rights in the workplace was a breath of fresh air,” calling on its followers to join with it to discuss “what has changed for LGBTQ+ workers and how we can protect ourselves in the workplace.” Activist lawyers undertaking such “educational work” easily drift into de facto advocacy.   Meanwhile, California Rural Legal Assistance continues to sue state entities, such as the Bakersfield City School District, for not spending enough public money on education. A generation ago, Governor Reagan wondered, as should President Trump today, what business the federal government has in financing private lawsuits against state and local entities. If a majority of Californians seek to change public policy on education, let them win at the ballot box, not in the courthouse in league with an activist judge.  It is the same with America’s out-of-control homelessness policies, which have been pushed to extremes, ruining much of our country’s urban life. Homelessness is another public policy passion in the legal aid world and judicial activism is the approach that most LSC grantees support. One leading LSC attorney explained:  Over time, I really learned the brokenness of the systems that our clients interact with, and so I really evolved to have much more of a social justice lens than a charity lens to this work. I started to understand that homelessness really isn’t just about an individual’s struggles, it’s rooted in systemic issues like inequality, like lack of affordable housing, like inadequate social services. And so now I really see these broader structural problems as essential to create meaningful and lasting change. Another legal services priority is farmworker rights, by which they mean migrant rights, a backdoor into the policy world of accommodating illegal immigration. Hecht and Malcolm would point out, rightly, that LSC grantees are restricted in providing legal services to illegal immigrants. But there are loopholes and penumbras in the rules. As the LSC-supported Michigan Immigrant Rights Center explains: “We provide full intakes and legal advice to everyone detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Michigan and consider their cases for full representation if they fit into a place-based or case-based priority.” Without DOGE auditing the financial ledgers, it is hard to document old-fashioned waste, fraud, and abuse, but such malfeasance has been found before (in 2010) as millions pass through the LSC network of some 130 grantees and sub-grantees. Yes, self-interested state bar associations and the American Bar Association will lobby that LSC money is needed for lawyer training, courtroom efficiencies, etc.; that is because they are hooked on the taxpayer subsidy. Cut off the federal money and force all these groups to raise funds from private donors. Start by sending a DOGE team into LSC headquarters. The post The Legal Services Corporation: Principled and Conservative or Liberal Running Dog? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs ‘Liberation Day’—For Mexico The Mexican president smells economic opportunity. While most of the world was left shocked and dismayed by President Donald Trump’s tariff roll-out on “Liberation Day” earlier this week, at least one foreign government was quietly celebrating. “This is great for the country,” Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum said the next day. Mexico and Canada, as part of the USMCA free trade agreement, avoided the imposition of any additional tariffs during Trump’s announcement Wednesday, while the average tariff rate on U.S. imports is set to skyrocket to 29 percent from just two percent previously. While Mexico does still face a 25 percent on steel and automotive exports to the U.S., the country is not subject to any tariffs whatsoever on exports compliant with the USMCA. With immediate access to the massive import American market—the largest in the world—a relatively inexpensive labor force, and uniquely favorable terms of trade, Sheinbaum sees Mexico as well placed to be the largest beneficiary of the new American tariff regime. “Today, Mexico has a preferential treaty,” Sheinbaum’s economy minister Marcelo Ebrard said Thursday, pointing gleefully to a map illustrating the effects of Trump’s liberation day speech, showing the entire world painted red except Mexico and Canada. “The U.S. has 14 free trade agreements, but the only one to which tariffs were not applied is the USMCA; all the rest received tariffs,” Ebrard noted. “The strategy laid out by President Sheinbaum has been that Mexico needs to achieve a preferential treaty, that is, that we have better conditions to compete… such that Mexican exports are more competitive than any other country. And this plan laid out by President Sheinbaum is working.” Sheinbaum and her supporters see this as the fruit of the president’s efforts to build a good working relationship with Trump. “This is because of the good relationship we have built between the government of Mexico and that of the United States,” Sheinbaum told reporters. “This has permitted Mexico to avoid having further tariffs imposed.” Sheinbaum pointed to her careful handling of Trump’s earlier tariff threats as reasons for Mexico’s exclusion from the new tariff schedule. “If you recall, after my last call with President Trump I said that if it was the case that he imposed reciprocal tariffs there would not be tariffs [on Mexico], because as Mexico does not put tariffs on the U.S., the U.S. will not put tariffs on Mexico.” Despite some pressure, Mexico declined to implement retaliatory tariffs after Trump put in place a 25 percent tariff on Mexican steel, aluminum, automotives, and automotive parts. Sheinbaum has also been very cooperative with the United States on matters of immigration and drug trafficking, sending 10,000 troops to police the border, seizing large amounts of fentanyl bound for the U.S., and extraditing 29 cartel leaders already imprisoned in Mexico to face justice in the U.S. Now Sheinbaum’s skillful political maneuvering looks to be paying off. Mexico is the United States’ second largest import market after China, and with the imposition of major tariffs on China and many of the U.S.’s other largest trade partners, stands to benefit massively from the new economic order. Sheinbaum’s Plan Mexico called for reducing imports from China and increasing foreign investment into export-oriented industries, and, if no significant changes in the White House’s tariff plans are announced, Mexico will probably become one of the most promising places in the world for industrial investment, particularly for countries looking to relocate their supply chains out of China. And Sheinbaum isn’t done yet. Ebrard is headed to Washington next week to work on negotiations that could reduce tariffs on Mexican-assembled automobiles by accounting for U.S. manufactured parts. The president even hopes she can get Trump to lower his tariffs on Mexican steel and aluminum. The world is still grappling with the new economic order being hashed out at Washington—a return to protectionist measures not seen in the U.S. since the 19th century. Economists are unhappy, American stock markets are dropping, and foreign economic ministers are trying to scrape together deals that might grant them more favorable trade terms with the U.S. But south of the border, things are looking bright for Mexico. The post ‘Liberation Day’—For Mexico appeared first on The American Conservative.

Sure, it might have been a coincidence. Still, just a few short hours after CNN posted an article criticizing US military operations against the Iranian-backed Houthi Rebels in Yemen, President Trump…

I can’t stop eating sirloin.  My father tells me that my Great-Uncle Sam loved the cut. He’d buy a generous hunk of the beef every weekend and grill it out back over red-hot coals in the Blue…

A recent opinion piece in The American Conservative calls for the defunding of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), relying on mischaracterizations and misinformation to attack an institution that plays…