Merry Christmas

About twenty years ago, I found myself on the side of Mt. Whitney in California, making a painting. It was Christmas Eve. The painting was my present to my wife, Kitty, who always encouraged me to ‘make another painting’ in pretty much any situation.

That started a tradition that lasted for a few years, where I made a painting every Christmas Eve, and sometimes New Year’s Eve as well, like the painting of Mt. Whitney at the top of this post. That painting is huge. It is sixty inches wide and forty high. Painted in watercolor, it may as well have been ice, because every stroke froze as it was applied. The water in my water jar developed a thick crust of ice that had to be broken with every stroke to get at the water. Sometimes my brush froze between the water jar and the paper, forcing me to sop up huge amounts of water with each dip, to prevent spontaneous freezing on contact with the frigid air.

Despite the weather-imposed challenges, I thought it looked pretty good until I put it in my van and all that ice started melting. Before my eyes, careful brush strokes with crisp outlines dissolved into blurry puddles. The good news was that it melted slowly and I had a roll of paper towels. I put the heat on high and spent the next twenty minutes mopping up excess water.

The next few hours were spent speeding through the night back to Los Angeles, worried what Kitty might say about the melted painting. The goal was to please her, and that is what made the trips worth the effort. I didn’t like the idea I might have wasted a New Year’s Eve on a dud. However, it was dark by the time I finished, and I didn’t know for sure what the painting looked like.

This is how many Americans are feeling about numerous ongoing issues in government right now. We sense things are moving in the right direction, but the work is happening in conditions we can't observe directly—and we won't know what it truly looks like until it emerges into the light.

SitRep 12/21/2025

Election integrity

I keep hearing that this is moving in the right direction, and then a week or two later see something happen to support the claim. This shows that what I hear is at least connected closely enough to what is actually happening that it can be reasonably relied upon.

The most recent news on this is that the DOJ has sued 22 states for refusing to turn over their voter rolls for examination. The states say this would violate the privacy of their voters, but that didn’t stop them from handing over the exact same data to the non-government ERIC system, or to private individuals who study the rolls, like me. On this basis alone, the refusals look very suspicious.

Separately, Fulton County, Georgia is being sued for election-related malfeasance in 2020. In those proceedings, Fulton County attorney Ann Brumbaugh admitted that about 315,000 votes in 2020 didn’t have a proper chain of custody due to missing signatures on tabulator tapes. This has been reported as an admission that 315,000 votes were illegally certified.

I am told by multiple sources that the administration is well aware of my research, though I haven’t been contacted directly by them. My understanding is that my work, and that of other researchers, are just more pieces of a very complex puzzle the DOJ is putting together. For the best result, they have to do it themselves. That is fine with me as long as they solve the problem.

Prognosis: trending in the right direction. Dozens of lawsuits launched by DOJ, admissions made, no resolutions yet. The DOJ seems to know this has to be resolved before the midterms next year, and are working to achieve that.

The Border

The millions of illegals who spread into our country like a puddle of infected diarrhea during Biden’s term is slowly getting mopped up. The numbers, however, are daunting. Estimates range from 20-30 million persons in our country illegally. If the real number is only half of the lowest bound, 10 million, two and a half million would have to be deported in each of President Trump’s four years in office just to get back to where we were in 2020.

The good news is that after 11 months of the Trump administration, about 2.5 million illegals have been deported or have self-deported so far. The bad news is that the real number of illegals isn’t 10 million, but much higher. This means that deportations have to step up in intensity and quantity. The good news is that Tom Homan has said that is happening, recruitment at the Border Patrol is up, and resources are available for the task.

Meanwhile, I’ve been seeing videos all over Facebook that indicate that our Big Beautiful Wall at the southern border is back in production, going up as fast as can be managed.

And of course, we also have those other beautiful videos, of Venezuelan drug boats being blown to smithereens. Why arrest narcotraffickers when they are effectively military combatants and can be permanently eradicated?

A side effect of dealing with the border is that fewer illegals in the country means fewer names that can be bribed or hijacked for illegal voting.

Justice for those abused by Biden/Obama administration

I fully expected all of the ongoing abuse of innocent Americans imprisoned for political reasons by the Biden Admin to stop on day one of Trump’s second term. That came close to being true with the blanket pardons for all J6 prisoners, but with many notable exceptions.

The most prominent is Tina Peters, a 70 year old Gold Star mom and cancer survivor. She was given a 9 year prison term for, ostensibly, providing unauthorized access to Mesa County election records. More to the point, it seems obvious the actual reason for her incarceration is that she did her best to follow the law by backing up election data before it was illegally destroyed pursuant to an order from the Secretary of State, Jena Griswold.

There were a few others, like J6 prisoners who were held in prison despite their pardons on flimsy excuses. For the most part, these have been resolved and the unlawfully prosecuted prisoners have been released.

That was step one, and it isn’t complete. Tina Peters, for instance, is still in jail. Step two is to prosecute the people responsible for these thousands of politically-motivated prosecutions. That doesn’t seem to have started yet. This issue can’t ever be considered fully resolved until the malefactors have been put in jail. Preferably, after a big tar and feather party.

Crimes against Trump and co.

This is similar to the last section but deserves separate treatment. President Trump was relentlessly hounded in the interregnum between terms, and criminally targeted in the five years before that. The Russia Hoax alone represents enough examples of seditious conspiracy to throw almost everyone involved into jail for the rest of their lives.

After the Russia Hoax, there were innumerable other plots, some of which may never be uncovered: the stolen 2020 election, the Covid/vaccine hoax, the many lawfare hoaxes, two attempts on President Trump’s life amid laughably inept Secret Service ‘protection’, prosecutions of Trump’s lawyers, and on and on.

None of these should be forgotten. The people involved should not get wrist-slap treatment. They should be punished so severely that their grandchildren’s grandchildren can still feel the scorching shame of their ancestor’s cowardly and despicable acts.

Action on these has started, but hasn’t gotten far. At least, it doesn’t seem like it yet. The cases against James Comey and Letitia James, neither of which dealt with their greatest offenses, have both been tossed out of court for the time being. Both are on appeal but neither are particularly serious. Going after James for mortgage fraud after she used her power as NY Attorney General to unlawfully prosecute Trump and to secure what amounted to the theft of about $500,000,000 in the form of an unwarranted penalty, is a far more severe crime. The same is true of Comey. Prosecuting him for lying to Congress when he could just as easily be prosecuted for sedition is mild treatment.

After 11 months, I am starting to have serious doubts regarding Attorney General Pam Bondi’s commitment to this task, or her ability to get the job done. Maybe she’s doing an excellent job behind the scenes but is hiding it well. We’ll see.

The Autopen

President Trump officially declared that anything signed with Joe Biden’s name using the Autopen is null and void. That is an excellent first step. Next comes the litigation as Democrats scramble to reverse this for every document in question.

Charlie Kirk

Tyler Robinson is in jail and may be executed, as he should be. But that isn’t what matters the most. Charlie Kirk is gone, a martyr to his faith. Compared to that, Robinson is irrelevant. His ‘statement’ to support LGBTQ-themed causes was drowned into silence by the reaction to Kirk’s assassination.

The shock of that day has not faded. If anything, it has clarified something that was already building beneath the surface. The moment when the bullet struck Charlie was a real Turning Point. Americans who had until then been oblivious, suddenly realized they’d made their bed in a nest of snakes.

Like the failed assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, which led to the Trump/Musk alliance, Trump’s victory, and DOGE, Charlie Kirk’s memory seems on track to causing a massive religious revival in America. I can’t think of a better way to remember a man who lived his life striving to always honor God.

Government Corruption

The Trump administration has taken great strides in dismantling DEI policies throughout government and increasingly in the private sector. We will not have a transvestite-themed Christmas at the White House, unlike the previous four bizarre years, replete with attempts to outdo Sodom and Gomorrah.

Canceling USAid, the Department of Education, and many other useless or dangerous government agencies, eliminated much of the support structure relied upon by Deep State members. Without those, it is increasingly difficult for them to defend against the scrutiny they managed to evade until recently.

The Gulf of America, The Trump and JFK Center of the Performing Arts, the sombrero videos, the autopen portrait in the hall of presidents, not to mention the new plaques, and everything else like them, are wonderful for raising the spirit of Americans who suffered through the Biden and Obama years. In retrospect, Trump’s first term looks more like a continuation of Obama and globalist control rather than a real “Trump” term. He did some great things back then, but it is now obvious there was so much interference from seditionists that they blocked many of his efforts to improve America. His second term is very different.

Back to LA

After getting back to Studio City, I hauled my watercolor upstairs to be evaluated by Kitty. She loved it. A tear appeared in her eye, ‘It’s beautiful’.

It wasn’t perfect, but it got the job done. That is what mattered the most.

President Trump is facing unprecedented numbers of difficult problems to solve. They are all getting attention simultaneously, to differing levels of success, but all of it is trending in the right direction. It would be too much to expect everything to be reversed on the first day, much like expecting my frozen paint strokes to remain frozen in a warmer environment.

Like my painting that New Year’s Eve, it's a messy situation—strokes that looked crisp are dissolving, the final image not yet clear. But the work is underway, and I'm glad that Donald J. Trump is the man holding the brush. Some things only reveal their true form after the ice melts.