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Good Morning!!
“The eyes of the world are upon you,” Eisenhower speaking to troops before Normandy invasion.
Today is the 80th anniversary of D-Day, and President Biden is in France to mark the occasion. Some reports:
President Biden and key U.S. allies were in Normandy Thursday to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the U.S.-led allied forces’ D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied France. The brazen air and sea invasion would mark the beginning of the end of World War II, leading to the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi German forces in Europe less than a year later.
Mr. Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were together to mark the most significant victory of the Western allies in the war, as well as the largest seaborne invasion in history. Mr. Biden is in France through the weekend for D-Day anniversary commemorations and plans to meet with leaders of key allies during his visit.
“Seventy-three-thousand brave Americans landed at Utah and Omaha beaches in Normandy on June 6, 1944 and the president will greet American veterans and their family members while in France to honor their sacrifice,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in announcing the president’s trip.
Mr. Biden and first lady Jill Biden met WWII veterans one by one ahead of a memorial ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery on Thursday, presenting each one with coins made to commemorate the D-Day anniversary. He chatted and joked with some of the men, asking about their hometowns, thanking them for their service and calling them the greatest generation ever.
The president delivered remarks later Thursday at a commemoration ceremony that was also attended by members of Congress from both parties, including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi.
The Independent: D-Day – latest: Biden warns world ‘will not surrender to bullies’ as he commemorates 80th anniversary.
President Joe Biden has vowed to not “surrender to the bullies” as he praised D-Day veterans for their bravery at a commemorative event.
The US President addressed the crowd in Ver-sur-Mer, France, on the 80th anniversary of the landings as he promised the 50 countries standing with Ukraine “will not walk away”.
“Make no mistake the autocrats of the world are watching closely to see what happens in Ukraine. To see if we let this illegal aggression go unchecked,” he said.
“To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators is simply unthinkable.”
He added: “History tells us freedom is not free. You want to know the price of freedom come here to Normandy to look.”
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden greet a World War II veteran during ceremonies to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy. AP
Yahoo News: D-Day latest: Biden brands Putin ‘tyrant and bully’ in Normandy speech.
US President Joe Biden referred to Vladimir Putin as a ‘tyrant’ and a ‘bully’ in his D-Day commemoration speech, after hailing the ‘resolute’ Second World War troops who fought in Normandy 80 years ago today.
President Biden was among the speakers at an international gathering in northern France to commemorate the June 1944 conflict. Biden recognised the bravery of troops who stormed the beaches in Normandy, before going on to speak about the Ukraine war and how ‘the struggle between dictatorship and freedom is unending’.
Earlier, French President Emmanuel Macron had given France’s highest award, the Legion d’Honneur, to a number of US veterans, while the Danish prime minister said it is our generation’s “responsibility” to stand up to Vladimir Putin.
The New York Times’ Roger Cohen has a special report on D-Day with photos by Laetitia Vancon: D-Day at 80: Veterans of the pivotal battle of World War II are disappearing. Europe, facing new conflict, recalls what their comrades died for.
They were ordinary. The young men from afar who clambered ashore on June 6, 1944, into a hail of Nazi gunfire from the Normandy bluffs did not think of themselves as heroes.
No, said Gen. Darryl A. Williams, the commanding general of United States Army Europe and Africa, the allied soldiers “in this great battle were ordinary,” youths who “rose to this challenge with courage and a tremendous will to win, for freedom.”
In front of the general, during a ceremony this week at Deauville on the Normandy coast, were 48 American survivors of that day, the youngest of them 98, most of them 100 years old or more. The veterans sat in wheelchairs. They saluted, briskly enough. Eight decades have gone by, many of them passed in silence because memories of the war were too terrible to relate.
When the 90th anniversary of D-Day comes around in 2034, there may be no more vets. Living memory of the beaches of their sacrifice will be no more.
“Dark clouds of war in Europe are forming,” General Williams said, as he alluded to allied determination to defend Ukraine against Russian attack. This 80th anniversary of the landings is a celebration, but a somber one. Europe is troubled and apprehensive, extremism eating at its liberal democracies.
For more than 27 months now, there has been a war on the continent that has taken hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian and Russian lives. Russia was not invited to the commemoration even though the role of the Soviet Red Army in the defeat of Hitler was critical. A decade ago, President Vladimir V. Putin attended. Now he speaks of nuclear war. It is a time of fissuring and uncertainty.
Remembering the fight against Hitler in WWII is so important today, when a criminal and conman has apparently hypnotizes a large portion of the U.S. population. We can’t allow him to end our democracy and turn Europe over to Putin.
Back in the USA, Senate Republicans showed their true colors yesterday in a vote to protect the right to contraception.
CNN: Senate GOP blocks bill to guarantee access to contraception.
Senate Republicans voted Wednesday to block a bill put forward by Democrats that would guarantee access to contraception nationwide, as Democrats seek to highlight the issue in the run up to November’s elections.
The bill – the Right to Contraception Act – would enshrine into federal law a right for individuals to buy and use contraceptives, as well as for health care providers to provide them. It would apply to birth control pills, the plan B pill, condoms and other forms of contraception.
The legislation failed to advance in a procedural vote by a tally of 51 to 39. Most Republicans dismissed the effort as a political messaging vote that is unnecessary and overly broad.
GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins crossed over to vote with Democrats in favor of advancing the bill. Schumer switched his vote to a no at the last minute in a procedural move that will allow Democrats to bring the bill back up in the future if they want.
“This is a show vote. It’s not serious,” GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said. “Plus, it’s a huge overreach. It doesn’t make any exceptions for conscience. … It’s a phony vote because contraception, to my knowledge, is not illegal. It’s not unavailable.”
The vote is part of a larger push by Senate Democrats to draw attention to how the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has affected all aspects of reproductive health – not just abortion – as the election draws closer. Democrats are highlighting the issue this month, which marks the two-year anniversary of the high court’s ruling.
“In the coming weeks, Senate Democrats will put reproductive freedoms front and center before this chamber, so that the American people can see for themselves who will stand up to defend their fundamental liberties,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said ahead of the vote.
Democratic senators have also introduced a legislative package to establish a nationwide right to in-vitro fertilization, which is expected to come up for a vote as soon as next week.
The Daily Beast: Biden Campaign Names and Shames Republicans Who Voted to Block Contraception Bill.
The Biden campaign posted a video on Wednesday night showing the faces of the 39 senators who voted against the legislation. (Seven Republican senators were not present for the vote.)
“These are the Trump-aligned Republicans who just blocked a bill to protect a woman’s right to contraception,” the campaign tweeted on X….
Ahead of the vote, Schumer said that Senate Democrats would “put reproductive freedoms front and center before this chamber, so that the American people can see for themselves who will stand up to defend their fundamental liberties,” according to the Associated Press.
Polling has consistently shown that there is broad bipartisan support among American voters for contraception, with 92 percent of respondents telling Gallup in 2022 that birth control was “morally acceptable.”
Republicans argued that legislation to enshrine the right to contraception is unnecessary, as it remains freely accessible and available across the country….
But Schumer said in a post-vote speech that “we are kidding ourselves if we think the hard-right is satisfied with overturning Roe,” warning that birth control could be next as reproductive rights continue to be threatened.
“So, make one thing clear: today was not a ‘show vote’ – this was a show-us-who-you-are vote,” he said. “And Senate Republicans showed the American people exactly who they are.”
Recall that after the Dobbs decision, Clarence Thomas stated his desire to overturn the decisions that made contraception, same sex marriage, and sex between same sex partners basic rights–all based on the right to privacy.
Speaking of the right wing SCOTUS justices, last night a former clerk of Samuel Alito appeared on Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC show.
HuffPost: Former Alito Law Clerk ‘Aghast’ After Seeing Jan. 6 Flag Outside His Home, Calls For Recusal.
A former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said Wednesday she was shocked after learning two flags affiliated with rioters during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection were flown outside his homes, saying she believed he should recuse himself from several cases before the court.
Susan Sullivan, who worked as a clerk while Alito was a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, spoke to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell amid the controversy surrounding the flags.
“I was aghast when I saw those photographs because I’ve never known Justice Alito to be anything other than an honorable man, to be a man of integrity,” Sullivan, now a professor at Temple University, told O’Donnell. “It is irrelevant if Mrs. Alito flew it or not. The fact is that flag was there.”
“This is not an insignificant symbol,” she went on. “Irrespective of why it is there, who put it there, it shouldn’t have been there. The problem is that flag is incendiary and it cannot do anything other than raise a reasonable inference of bias.”
Alito has rejected the calls for him to recuse from January 6 related cases.
“I am confident that a reasonable person who is not motivated by political or ideological considerations or a desire to affect the outcome of Supreme Court cases would conclude that the events … do not meet the applicable standard for recusal,” he wrote in a letter to lawmakers last month. “I am therefore required to reject your request.”
Sullivan rejected that claim in the Wednesday interview and an earlier opinion piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer, saying recusal was warranted especially because of the decision before the court.
“[It is] the symbol of these people who attacked the capitol. They support Trump unconditionally,” she said. “So if you have cases before the court that directly relates not just to the former president but to criminal cases that involve that election process…”
“The stakes have never been higher and recusal is, to me, it just defies logic that one would not recuse themselves from a case like this,” Sullivan added. “The stakes are too high.”
Why isn’t Senator Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee doing anything to rein in Alito?
Noah Berlansky at Public Notice: Dick Durbin needs to step up and do his damn job.
The Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday held a lengthy oversight hearing to badger Attorney General Merrick Garland and push the GOP’s false narrative about President Biden weaponizing the DOJ against Donald Trump.
Even though the hearing was conducted in obvious bad faith, it was in some ways successful, at least in the limited sense that Republicans grabbed a lot of headlines and forced Garland to spend a day on the defensive. Virtually every major news outlet it extensive coverage, ranging from the New York Times to MSNBC to Newsmax….
Congressional oversight hearings give Congress a chance to focus the national conversation on what members want to talk about. It gives them a chance to pressure executive branch officials to adopt congressional priorities, or to explain and potentially embarrass themselves.
In contrast, Democrats in the Senate have been bizarrely reluctant to use hearings to advance their agenda. Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has refused to hold hearings to investigate egregious evidence of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas receiving gifts from far right billionaires, or to demand answers from Alito about his apparent embrace of the insurrection. Instead, he’s posting weak statements on social media meekly calling for right-wing members of the Court to do a better job policing themselves.
Republicans like Jim Jordan are ignorant about a lot of things. But they understand that the gavel is power, and they are not afraid to use it. Senate Democrats need to get over their qualms and, in this instance, behave more like their rivals across the aisle….
Hearings drive narratives. But they can do more than that. Congress has real power to pressure government officials, and hearings are a way to demonstrate and exercise that power.
Read more at Public Notice.
More odds and ends:
The Daily Beast: Hunter Biden Prosecutors Might’ve Already Lost the Jury.
The Hunter Biden trial starting in Wilmington, Delaware, is a poster-child case for potential jury nullification.
Biden, the only surviving son of President Joe Biden, is being tried for possessing a firearm while being a user of illegal drugs or drug addict and for lying about the same on a purchase form when he bought a gun. On the surface, the prosecution—a culmination of more than a half-decade of investigation by Special Counsel David Weiss—would appear to have a slam dunk case because there is no real dispute he bought the gun, or that he had a drug addiction around the time he bought the gun.
The strict definition of jury nullification is when a jury has determined that a defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt—but either rejects the evidence or refuses to apply the law because the jury “wants to send a message about some social issue that is larger than the case itself, or because the result dictated by law is contrary to the jury’s sense of justice, morality, or fairness.”
Mr. and Mrs. Hunter Biden
Let’s be clear. Juries are not supposed to do that. They are supposed to convict if the evidence proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and acquit if it doesn’t.
But while the definition of nullification conjures up images of a jury making a social justice-inspired speech in refusing to convict, the reality is quite different because the jury does not need to make such a blatant statement. Rather, the sense that jurors may have of unfairness can be evidenced in an acquittal—despite strong evidence of guilt. (There’s also, of course, the possibility of a hung jury.)
What that means is skilled defense counsel can bring out the factors of unfairness without having to specifically ask a jury to ignore evidence or the law, while skilled prosecutors need to guard against the kind of evidence and testimony that may lead to nullification.
Thus far, the trial is revealing an outmatched prosecution, which has already blundered into a couple of minefields. Defense counsel Abbe Lowell is a seasoned high-profile defense counsel who has defended Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner and got former presidential candidate John Edwards acquitted on campaign finance charges (brought by then-DOJ lawyer Jack Smith).
In the opening by the Biden defense team, Lowell focused on the requirement that the false statements on the gun ownership form had to be “knowing”—a term that Lowell claimed the prosecution tried to avoid in its opening. The utility of this defense is that it works synergistically with the effects of Biden’s admitted drug addiction affecting his decision-making abilities, as well as necessitating a deep dive into the details of his addiction and the specific timeline of when he was using crack cocaine and his efforts to get clean.
The defense appears to be setting up a defense theory that, on the specific date Biden bought the gun, he genuinely believed he was not an addict because he had just finished an 11-day rehabilitation program.
More at the link.
Alan Feuer at The New York Times: Judge Reshuffles Hearings in Trump Documents Case.
The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case abruptly changed the proceeding’s schedule on Wednesday, reshuffling the timing for hearings on an array of important legal issues.
The move by the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, was unlikely to have much impact on the overall trajectory of the case, but it reflected the substantial number of unresolved legal motions she is juggling. Last month, Judge Cannon scrapped the case’s trial date, saying she could not yet pick a new one because of what she described at the time as “the myriad and interconnected” questions she had still not managed to consider.
Judge Cannon kept in place a hearing she had set for June 21 to discuss a motion by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that Jack Smith, the special counsel named to oversee the prosecutions of Mr. Trump, was illegally appointed to his job.
Similar motions have been rejected in cases involving other special counsels, including Robert S. Mueller III, who investigated connections between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, and David C. Weiss, who has brought two criminal cases against Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son.
The most important change Judge Cannon made to the schedule in a brief order was arguably the cancellation of a three-day hearing that had been set to take place starting June 24 in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla.
The hearing was originally meant to consider whether Mr. Trump’s lawyers should be permitted access to communications between prosecutors working for Mr. Smith and officials at the National Archives and several national security agencies.
Giddy up
The lawyers want those communications to bolster their claims that Mr. Smith worked hand in glove with the Biden administration and members of the so-called deep state to bring the documents case against Mr. Trump.
Prosecutors had objected to holding the proceeding at all, telling Judge Cannon in March that no similar hearings had ever been held in the Southern District of Florida, where she sits. In her order on Wednesday, she said she would place the hearing back on her calendar at some point in the future.
Instead of that hearing, Judge Cannon said there would now be a shorter one, on June 24 and 25, to consider different topics, including any lingering discussion about Mr. Smith’s appointment.
Judge Cannon also told the defense and the prosecution to be ready to debate Mr. Trump’s motion to exclude from the case any evidence — including more than 100 classified documents — that the F.B.I. discovered in August 2022 when agents searched Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.
The two sides will argue as well over Mr. Trump’s attempt to suppress the private audio notes that prosecutors obtained from one of his lawyers through a process that pierced the normal protections of attorney-client privilege. The notes by the lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, were central to the government’s allegations that Mr. Trump had obstructed the government’s repeated efforts to reclaim the classified materials he took to Mar-a-Lago.
Finally, the parties are expected to discuss Mr. Smith’s request to Judge Cannon to alter Mr. Trump’s conditions of release by barring him from making public statements that could endanger F.B.I. agents working on the case.
Aileen Cannon is an expert at causing unnecessary delays without triggering an appeal to the 11th Circuit. If she rules that Jack Smith was illegally appointed, that would be cause for immediate appeal, so she will probably find some way to just waste more time.
Jose Pagliery at The Daily Beast: Trial Lawyer Lost 8 Lbs Skipping Trump’s McDonald’s Courthouse Lunches.
Donald Trump’s lead lawyer says the former president’s seven-week criminal trial in New York took a physical toll—but he still managed to lose weight by skipping Trump’s notoriously unhealthy meals.
Todd Blanche appeared on a podcast, For The Defense, hosted by the attorney David Oscar Markus.
“Was it McDonald’s for lunch every single day, or did you get something else?” Markus asked.
“Oh, no-no-no,” Blanche said. “Well, first of all, I didn’t have lunch one day. I ate in the morning and at night.”
Delivery of McDonalds order for Trump’s courthouse lunch
“Look, President Trump’s team takes care of everybody. Like, everybody gets food. You know, there’s a lot of food. It’s not always McDonald’s. There’s a lot of… variety. There’s pizza, and there’s other non-healthy alternatives to McDonald’s.”
Blanche smiled, turning away from the camera and raising his eyebrows.
“Look, I loved it, because, you know, you come in from lunch, and as you know when you’re on trial, you’re trying to figure out what the heck you’re gonna stuff in your belly with the hour that you have. And we would walk in, and there would just be this, just, plethora of just food everywhere,” he said, gesturing with his hands.
The public got a peek last Thursday, when Donald Trump Jr. posted a TikTok video from what legal teams sometimes call the “war room,” where defendants strategize during breaks. The clip showed Trump Sr. sitting before a half-finished 20-ounce Diet Coca-Cola, an opened bag of Lay’s potato chips, a box of Milk Duds, a Milky Way bar, a theater-sized box of Whoppers malted milk balls, and what appeared to be four Hostess SnoBalls….
Trump’s go-to McDonald’s meal—two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish, and a chocolate shake—was first described by close ally Corey R. Lewandowski in a 2017 book, Let Trump Be Trump.
How is it possible that Trump hasn’t had a heart attack by now?
That’s all I have for you today. I hope you’re enjoying your Thursday.
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/06/06/thursday-reads-267/
#AlitoLawClerkSusanSullivan #ClarenceThomas #DDay80thAnniversary #DickDurbin #HunterBidenTrial #JudgeAileenCannon #JusticeSamuelAlito #Normandy #rightToContraception #SenateVoteOnBirthControl #ToddBlanche #TrumpCourthouseLunches
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Good Morning!!
“The eyes of the world are upon you,” Eisenhower speaking to troops before Normandy invasion.
Today is the 80th anniversary of D-Day, and President Biden is in France to mark the occasion. Some reports:
President Biden and key U.S. allies were in Normandy Thursday to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the U.S.-led allied forces’ D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied France. The brazen air and sea invasion would mark the beginning of the end of World War II, leading to the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi German forces in Europe less than a year later.
Mr. Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were together to mark the most significant victory of the Western allies in the war, as well as the largest seaborne invasion in history. Mr. Biden is in France through the weekend for D-Day anniversary commemorations and plans to meet with leaders of key allies during his visit.
“Seventy-three-thousand brave Americans landed at Utah and Omaha beaches in Normandy on June 6, 1944 and the president will greet American veterans and their family members while in France to honor their sacrifice,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in announcing the president’s trip.
Mr. Biden and first lady Jill Biden met WWII veterans one by one ahead of a memorial ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery on Thursday, presenting each one with coins made to commemorate the D-Day anniversary. He chatted and joked with some of the men, asking about their hometowns, thanking them for their service and calling them the greatest generation ever.
The president delivered remarks later Thursday at a commemoration ceremony that was also attended by members of Congress from both parties, including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi.
The Independent: D-Day – latest: Biden warns world ‘will not surrender to bullies’ as he commemorates 80th anniversary.
President Joe Biden has vowed to not “surrender to the bullies” as he praised D-Day veterans for their bravery at a commemorative event.
The US President addressed the crowd in Ver-sur-Mer, France, on the 80th anniversary of the landings as he promised the 50 countries standing with Ukraine “will not walk away”.
“Make no mistake the autocrats of the world are watching closely to see what happens in Ukraine. To see if we let this illegal aggression go unchecked,” he said.
“To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators is simply unthinkable.”
He added: “History tells us freedom is not free. You want to know the price of freedom come here to Normandy to look.”
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden greet a World War II veteran during ceremonies to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy. AP
Yahoo News: D-Day latest: Biden brands Putin ‘tyrant and bully’ in Normandy speech.
US President Joe Biden referred to Vladimir Putin as a ‘tyrant’ and a ‘bully’ in his D-Day commemoration speech, after hailing the ‘resolute’ Second World War troops who fought in Normandy 80 years ago today.
President Biden was among the speakers at an international gathering in northern France to commemorate the June 1944 conflict. Biden recognised the bravery of troops who stormed the beaches in Normandy, before going on to speak about the Ukraine war and how ‘the struggle between dictatorship and freedom is unending’.
Earlier, French President Emmanuel Macron had given France’s highest award, the Legion d’Honneur, to a number of US veterans, while the Danish prime minister said it is our generation’s “responsibility” to stand up to Vladimir Putin.
The New York Times’ Roger Cohen has a special report on D-Day with photos by Laetitia Vancon: D-Day at 80: Veterans of the pivotal battle of World War II are disappearing. Europe, facing new conflict, recalls what their comrades died for.
They were ordinary. The young men from afar who clambered ashore on June 6, 1944, into a hail of Nazi gunfire from the Normandy bluffs did not think of themselves as heroes.
No, said Gen. Darryl A. Williams, the commanding general of United States Army Europe and Africa, the allied soldiers “in this great battle were ordinary,” youths who “rose to this challenge with courage and a tremendous will to win, for freedom.”
In front of the general, during a ceremony this week at Deauville on the Normandy coast, were 48 American survivors of that day, the youngest of them 98, most of them 100 years old or more. The veterans sat in wheelchairs. They saluted, briskly enough. Eight decades have gone by, many of them passed in silence because memories of the war were too terrible to relate.
When the 90th anniversary of D-Day comes around in 2034, there may be no more vets. Living memory of the beaches of their sacrifice will be no more.
“Dark clouds of war in Europe are forming,” General Williams said, as he alluded to allied determination to defend Ukraine against Russian attack. This 80th anniversary of the landings is a celebration, but a somber one. Europe is troubled and apprehensive, extremism eating at its liberal democracies.
For more than 27 months now, there has been a war on the continent that has taken hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian and Russian lives. Russia was not invited to the commemoration even though the role of the Soviet Red Army in the defeat of Hitler was critical. A decade ago, President Vladimir V. Putin attended. Now he speaks of nuclear war. It is a time of fissuring and uncertainty.
Remembering the fight against Hitler in WWII is so important today, when a criminal and conman has apparently hypnotizes a large portion of the U.S. population. We can’t allow him to end our democracy and turn Europe over to Putin.
Back in the USA, Senate Republicans showed their true colors yesterday in a vote to protect the right to contraception.
CNN: Senate GOP blocks bill to guarantee access to contraception.
Senate Republicans voted Wednesday to block a bill put forward by Democrats that would guarantee access to contraception nationwide, as Democrats seek to highlight the issue in the run up to November’s elections.
The bill – the Right to Contraception Act – would enshrine into federal law a right for individuals to buy and use contraceptives, as well as for health care providers to provide them. It would apply to birth control pills, the plan B pill, condoms and other forms of contraception.
The legislation failed to advance in a procedural vote by a tally of 51 to 39. Most Republicans dismissed the effort as a political messaging vote that is unnecessary and overly broad.
GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins crossed over to vote with Democrats in favor of advancing the bill. Schumer switched his vote to a no at the last minute in a procedural move that will allow Democrats to bring the bill back up in the future if they want.
“This is a show vote. It’s not serious,” GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said. “Plus, it’s a huge overreach. It doesn’t make any exceptions for conscience. … It’s a phony vote because contraception, to my knowledge, is not illegal. It’s not unavailable.”
The vote is part of a larger push by Senate Democrats to draw attention to how the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has affected all aspects of reproductive health – not just abortion – as the election draws closer. Democrats are highlighting the issue this month, which marks the two-year anniversary of the high court’s ruling.
“In the coming weeks, Senate Democrats will put reproductive freedoms front and center before this chamber, so that the American people can see for themselves who will stand up to defend their fundamental liberties,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said ahead of the vote.
Democratic senators have also introduced a legislative package to establish a nationwide right to in-vitro fertilization, which is expected to come up for a vote as soon as next week.
The Daily Beast: Biden Campaign Names and Shames Republicans Who Voted to Block Contraception Bill.
The Biden campaign posted a video on Wednesday night showing the faces of the 39 senators who voted against the legislation. (Seven Republican senators were not present for the vote.)
“These are the Trump-aligned Republicans who just blocked a bill to protect a woman’s right to contraception,” the campaign tweeted on X….
Ahead of the vote, Schumer said that Senate Democrats would “put reproductive freedoms front and center before this chamber, so that the American people can see for themselves who will stand up to defend their fundamental liberties,” according to the Associated Press.
Polling has consistently shown that there is broad bipartisan support among American voters for contraception, with 92 percent of respondents telling Gallup in 2022 that birth control was “morally acceptable.”
Republicans argued that legislation to enshrine the right to contraception is unnecessary, as it remains freely accessible and available across the country….
But Schumer said in a post-vote speech that “we are kidding ourselves if we think the hard-right is satisfied with overturning Roe,” warning that birth control could be next as reproductive rights continue to be threatened.
“So, make one thing clear: today was not a ‘show vote’ – this was a show-us-who-you-are vote,” he said. “And Senate Republicans showed the American people exactly who they are.”
Recall that after the Dobbs decision, Clarence Thomas stated his desire to overturn the decisions that made contraception, same sex marriage, and sex between same sex partners basic rights–all based on the right to privacy.
Speaking of the right wing SCOTUS justices, last night a former clerk of Samuel Alito appeared on Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC show.
HuffPost: Former Alito Law Clerk ‘Aghast’ After Seeing Jan. 6 Flag Outside His Home, Calls For Recusal.
A former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said Wednesday she was shocked after learning two flags affiliated with rioters during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection were flown outside his homes, saying she believed he should recuse himself from several cases before the court.
Susan Sullivan, who worked as a clerk while Alito was a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, spoke to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell amid the controversy surrounding the flags.
“I was aghast when I saw those photographs because I’ve never known Justice Alito to be anything other than an honorable man, to be a man of integrity,” Sullivan, now a professor at Temple University, told O’Donnell. “It is irrelevant if Mrs. Alito flew it or not. The fact is that flag was there.”
“This is not an insignificant symbol,” she went on. “Irrespective of why it is there, who put it there, it shouldn’t have been there. The problem is that flag is incendiary and it cannot do anything other than raise a reasonable inference of bias.”
Alito has rejected the calls for him to recuse from January 6 related cases.
“I am confident that a reasonable person who is not motivated by political or ideological considerations or a desire to affect the outcome of Supreme Court cases would conclude that the events … do not meet the applicable standard for recusal,” he wrote in a letter to lawmakers last month. “I am therefore required to reject your request.”
Sullivan rejected that claim in the Wednesday interview and an earlier opinion piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer, saying recusal was warranted especially because of the decision before the court.
“[It is] the symbol of these people who attacked the capitol. They support Trump unconditionally,” she said. “So if you have cases before the court that directly relates not just to the former president but to criminal cases that involve that election process…”
“The stakes have never been higher and recusal is, to me, it just defies logic that one would not recuse themselves from a case like this,” Sullivan added. “The stakes are too high.”
Why isn’t Senator Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee doing anything to rein in Alito?
Noah Berlansky at Public Notice: Dick Durbin needs to step up and do his damn job.
The Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday held a lengthy oversight hearing to badger Attorney General Merrick Garland and push the GOP’s false narrative about President Biden weaponizing the DOJ against Donald Trump.
Even though the hearing was conducted in obvious bad faith, it was in some ways successful, at least in the limited sense that Republicans grabbed a lot of headlines and forced Garland to spend a day on the defensive. Virtually every major news outlet it extensive coverage, ranging from the New York Times to MSNBC to Newsmax….
Congressional oversight hearings give Congress a chance to focus the national conversation on what members want to talk about. It gives them a chance to pressure executive branch officials to adopt congressional priorities, or to explain and potentially embarrass themselves.
In contrast, Democrats in the Senate have been bizarrely reluctant to use hearings to advance their agenda. Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has refused to hold hearings to investigate egregious evidence of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas receiving gifts from far right billionaires, or to demand answers from Alito about his apparent embrace of the insurrection. Instead, he’s posting weak statements on social media meekly calling for right-wing members of the Court to do a better job policing themselves.
Republicans like Jim Jordan are ignorant about a lot of things. But they understand that the gavel is power, and they are not afraid to use it. Senate Democrats need to get over their qualms and, in this instance, behave more like their rivals across the aisle….
Hearings drive narratives. But they can do more than that. Congress has real power to pressure government officials, and hearings are a way to demonstrate and exercise that power.
Read more at Public Notice.
More odds and ends:
The Daily Beast: Hunter Biden Prosecutors Might’ve Already Lost the Jury.
The Hunter Biden trial starting in Wilmington, Delaware, is a poster-child case for potential jury nullification.
Biden, the only surviving son of President Joe Biden, is being tried for possessing a firearm while being a user of illegal drugs or drug addict and for lying about the same on a purchase form when he bought a gun. On the surface, the prosecution—a culmination of more than a half-decade of investigation by Special Counsel David Weiss—would appear to have a slam dunk case because there is no real dispute he bought the gun, or that he had a drug addiction around the time he bought the gun.
The strict definition of jury nullification is when a jury has determined that a defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt—but either rejects the evidence or refuses to apply the law because the jury “wants to send a message about some social issue that is larger than the case itself, or because the result dictated by law is contrary to the jury’s sense of justice, morality, or fairness.”
Mr. and Mrs. Hunter Biden
Let’s be clear. Juries are not supposed to do that. They are supposed to convict if the evidence proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and acquit if it doesn’t.
But while the definition of nullification conjures up images of a jury making a social justice-inspired speech in refusing to convict, the reality is quite different because the jury does not need to make such a blatant statement. Rather, the sense that jurors may have of unfairness can be evidenced in an acquittal—despite strong evidence of guilt. (There’s also, of course, the possibility of a hung jury.)
What that means is skilled defense counsel can bring out the factors of unfairness without having to specifically ask a jury to ignore evidence or the law, while skilled prosecutors need to guard against the kind of evidence and testimony that may lead to nullification.
Thus far, the trial is revealing an outmatched prosecution, which has already blundered into a couple of minefields. Defense counsel Abbe Lowell is a seasoned high-profile defense counsel who has defended Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner and got former presidential candidate John Edwards acquitted on campaign finance charges (brought by then-DOJ lawyer Jack Smith).
In the opening by the Biden defense team, Lowell focused on the requirement that the false statements on the gun ownership form had to be “knowing”—a term that Lowell claimed the prosecution tried to avoid in its opening. The utility of this defense is that it works synergistically with the effects of Biden’s admitted drug addiction affecting his decision-making abilities, as well as necessitating a deep dive into the details of his addiction and the specific timeline of when he was using crack cocaine and his efforts to get clean.
The defense appears to be setting up a defense theory that, on the specific date Biden bought the gun, he genuinely believed he was not an addict because he had just finished an 11-day rehabilitation program.
More at the link.
Alan Feuer at The New York Times: Judge Reshuffles Hearings in Trump Documents Case.
The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case abruptly changed the proceeding’s schedule on Wednesday, reshuffling the timing for hearings on an array of important legal issues.
The move by the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, was unlikely to have much impact on the overall trajectory of the case, but it reflected the substantial number of unresolved legal motions she is juggling. Last month, Judge Cannon scrapped the case’s trial date, saying she could not yet pick a new one because of what she described at the time as “the myriad and interconnected” questions she had still not managed to consider.
Judge Cannon kept in place a hearing she had set for June 21 to discuss a motion by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that Jack Smith, the special counsel named to oversee the prosecutions of Mr. Trump, was illegally appointed to his job.
Similar motions have been rejected in cases involving other special counsels, including Robert S. Mueller III, who investigated connections between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, and David C. Weiss, who has brought two criminal cases against Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son.
The most important change Judge Cannon made to the schedule in a brief order was arguably the cancellation of a three-day hearing that had been set to take place starting June 24 in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla.
The hearing was originally meant to consider whether Mr. Trump’s lawyers should be permitted access to communications between prosecutors working for Mr. Smith and officials at the National Archives and several national security agencies.
Giddy up
The lawyers want those communications to bolster their claims that Mr. Smith worked hand in glove with the Biden administration and members of the so-called deep state to bring the documents case against Mr. Trump.
Prosecutors had objected to holding the proceeding at all, telling Judge Cannon in March that no similar hearings had ever been held in the Southern District of Florida, where she sits. In her order on Wednesday, she said she would place the hearing back on her calendar at some point in the future.
Instead of that hearing, Judge Cannon said there would now be a shorter one, on June 24 and 25, to consider different topics, including any lingering discussion about Mr. Smith’s appointment.
Judge Cannon also told the defense and the prosecution to be ready to debate Mr. Trump’s motion to exclude from the case any evidence — including more than 100 classified documents — that the F.B.I. discovered in August 2022 when agents searched Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.
The two sides will argue as well over Mr. Trump’s attempt to suppress the private audio notes that prosecutors obtained from one of his lawyers through a process that pierced the normal protections of attorney-client privilege. The notes by the lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, were central to the government’s allegations that Mr. Trump had obstructed the government’s repeated efforts to reclaim the classified materials he took to Mar-a-Lago.
Finally, the parties are expected to discuss Mr. Smith’s request to Judge Cannon to alter Mr. Trump’s conditions of release by barring him from making public statements that could endanger F.B.I. agents working on the case.
Aileen Cannon is an expert at causing unnecessary delays without triggering an appeal to the 11th Circuit. If she rules that Jack Smith was illegally appointed, that would be cause for immediate appeal, so she will probably find some way to just waste more time.
Jose Pagliery at The Daily Beast: Trial Lawyer Lost 8 Lbs Skipping Trump’s McDonald’s Courthouse Lunches.
Donald Trump’s lead lawyer says the former president’s seven-week criminal trial in New York took a physical toll—but he still managed to lose weight by skipping Trump’s notoriously unhealthy meals.
Todd Blanche appeared on a podcast, For The Defense, hosted by the attorney David Oscar Markus.
“Was it McDonald’s for lunch every single day, or did you get something else?” Markus asked.
“Oh, no-no-no,” Blanche said. “Well, first of all, I didn’t have lunch one day. I ate in the morning and at night.”
Delivery of McDonalds order for Trump’s courthouse lunch
“Look, President Trump’s team takes care of everybody. Like, everybody gets food. You know, there’s a lot of food. It’s not always McDonald’s. There’s a lot of… variety. There’s pizza, and there’s other non-healthy alternatives to McDonald’s.”
Blanche smiled, turning away from the camera and raising his eyebrows.
“Look, I loved it, because, you know, you come in from lunch, and as you know when you’re on trial, you’re trying to figure out what the heck you’re gonna stuff in your belly with the hour that you have. And we would walk in, and there would just be this, just, plethora of just food everywhere,” he said, gesturing with his hands.
The public got a peek last Thursday, when Donald Trump Jr. posted a TikTok video from what legal teams sometimes call the “war room,” where defendants strategize during breaks. The clip showed Trump Sr. sitting before a half-finished 20-ounce Diet Coca-Cola, an opened bag of Lay’s potato chips, a box of Milk Duds, a Milky Way bar, a theater-sized box of Whoppers malted milk balls, and what appeared to be four Hostess SnoBalls….
Trump’s go-to McDonald’s meal—two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish, and a chocolate shake—was first described by close ally Corey R. Lewandowski in a 2017 book, Let Trump Be Trump.
How is it possible that Trump hasn’t had a heart attack by now?
That’s all I have for you today. I hope you’re enjoying your Thursday.
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/06/06/thursday-reads-267/
#AlitoLawClerkSusanSullivan #ClarenceThomas #DDay80thAnniversary #DickDurbin #HunterBidenTrial #JudgeAileenCannon #JusticeSamuelAlito #Normandy #rightToContraception #SenateVoteOnBirthControl #ToddBlanche #TrumpCourthouseLunches
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Mostly Monday Reads: Presidents Day in a Lost Country
“The latest cabinet meetings aren’t televised for a reason. Fear not, our de facto leader is in control as the ethnic cleansing of the country formerly known as the United States roars ahead unabated. The must-see TV drama not being broadcast is Whose Turn Is It to Change the Old Guy’s Diaper?” John Buss, @repeat 1968
Good Day Sky Dancers!
As we stare down the 250th anniversary of the day our country started its journey from monarchy to democracy, we have to take a look at where we’ve landed today and utter some word of disappointment. The headlines today are filled with references to autocracy, and it’s not difficult to see how the MAGA/Trump overreach is playing out.
Politico sums up the current situation like this. “Trump’s second year: Whiplash. Even proposals that don’t ultimately move forward have consequences.” I’d just like a few more adjectives like weird, cruel, and inexplicably unnecessary.
President Donald Trump’s first year back in office was defined by sweeping upheaval that was largely plotted out during his four-year Florida exile. But the president has somehow intensified the volatility in year two with a succession of whiplash-inducing policy swings, several of which have almost immediately withered in the face of Republican opposition and public outcry.
The administration this week finally withdrew the thousands of federal law enforcement officers from Minneapolis, after violent and at times deadly clashes with protesters turned the tide of public opinion against the president’s immigration crackdown.
It came after Trump threatened to decertify Canadian aircraft, a move deemed “unjustified and dangerous” by a Washington-based aerospace trade union that the president soon dropped. Trump said in early January that he’d cap credit card rates at 10 percent, a move that would have upended the banking industry, only to change his mind and ask Congress for legislation.
Also last month, Trump’s administration paused millions in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funding for state public health infrastructure — only to reverse course roughly 24 hours later.
“The whiplash has real implications,” said Chrissie Juliano, executive director of the Big Cities Health Coalition, a forum of the leaders of metropolitan health departments. “It’s incredibly disruptive, even if you can get back to continuing the work, you know, two days later.”
The unpredictability of a presidency that prioritizes posting over process and often leaves friends and foes alike guessing whether pronouncements should be taken seriously, literally, or both, remains a feature, not a bug of Trump’s approach to governance. In many matters, especially negotiations with other countries, his mercurial opacity is often an attempt to gain leverage, but his threats seemingly lead just as often to backtracking as blowing things up, be they Iranian missile depots, Venezuelan drug boats or the transatlantic alliance.
The same often holds true for domestic policy. The president has made numerous pronouncements with emphatic declarations on social media, sometimes even suggesting he is governing by fiat in cases where legislation is required. But he has quickly moved on from many of them: a cap on credit card interest rates, 50-year mortgages and, according to a new Financial Times report, possibly even the sweeping tariffs on aluminum and steel that have led to higher costs.
We’re just beginning to explore the depths of depravity that Trump and his buddies will go to just feel powerful and get richer. This is from Robert Reich’s SubStack. “The Squalor of the Epstein Class. Happy Presidents Day!”
Here’s how Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie responded on Sunday, during ABC’s “This Week,” to a question about the Trump regime’s handling of the Epstein files:
“This is about the Epstein class …. They’re billionaires who were friends with these people, and that’s what I’m up against in Washington, D.C. Donald Trump told us that even though he had dinner with these kinds of people, in New York City and West Palm Beach, that he would be transparent. But he’s not. He’s still in with the Epstein class. This is the Epstein administration. And they’re attacking me for trying to get these files released.”
The Epstein Class. Not just the people who cavorted with Jeffrey Epstein or the subset who abused young girls. It’s an interconnected world of hugely rich, prominent, entitled, smug, powerful, self-important (mostly) men. Trump is honorary chairman.
Trump is still sitting on two and a half million files that he and Pam Bondi won’t release. Why? Because they implicate Trump and even more of the Epstein class. The files that have been released so far don’t paint a pretty picture.
Trump appears 1,433 times in the Epstein files so far. His billionaire backers are also members. Elon Musk appears 1,122 times. Howard Lutnick is there. So is Trump-backer Peter Thiel (2,710 times), and Leslie Wexner (565 times). As is Steven Witkoff, now Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s consigliere (1,855 times).
The Epstein Class isn’t limited to Trump donors. Bill Clinton is a member (1,192 times), as is Larry Summers (5,621 times). So are LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman (3,769 times), Prince Andrew (1,821 times), Bill Gates (6,385 times), and Steve Tisch, co-owner of the New York Giants (429 times).
If not politics, then what connects the members of the Epstein Class? It’s not just riches. Some members are not particularly wealthy, but they’re richly connected. They trade on their prominence, on whom they know and who will return their phone calls.
They exchange inside tips on stocks, on the movements of currencies, on IPOs, on new tax-avoidance mechanisms. On getting into exclusive clubs, reservations at chic restaurants, lush hotels, exotic travel.
Most members of the Epstein Class have seceded into their own small, self-contained world, disconnected from the rest of society. They fly in one other’s private jets. They entertain at one other’s guest houses and villas. Some exchange tips on how to procure certain drugs or kinky sex or valuable works of art. And, of course, how to accumulate more wealth.
Many don’t particularly believe in democracy; Peter Thiel (recall, he appears 2,710 times in the Epstein files) has said he “no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Many are putting their fortunes into electing people who will do their bidding. Hence, they are politically dangerous.
The Epstein Class is the by-product of an economy that emerged over the last two decades, from which this new elite has siphoned off vast amounts of wealth.
It’s an economy that bears almost no resemblance to that of mid-20th-century America. The most valuable companies in this new economy have few workers because they don’t make stuff. They design it. They create ideas. They sell concepts. They move money.
I’ve always argued here and in classes that the biggest economic policies of the Reagan and Bush years were tax cuts that made it more profitable to gamble on financial assets rather than to actually produce goods and services. The changes in tax policies that cut upper brackets, then treated capital gains as a tax slash, and other ridiculous policies mean that money never lands where it can actually do good. It also creates a lot of idle hands and minds.
China is beginning to look more modern, more concerned about actual economic outcomes, and the planet. The U.S. continues to race back to the Gilded Age with hints of the Great Depression years. This is from The Guardian. “The Guardian view on Donald Trump and the climate crisis: the US is in reverse while China ploughs ahead. Editorial. The president’s destructive policies enrich fossil fuel billionaires, while Beijing has bet big on the green transition.”
Devastating wildfires, flooding and winter storms were among the 23 extreme weather and climate-related disasters in the US which cost more than a billion dollars last year – at an estimated total loss of $115bn. The last three years have shattered previous records for such events. Last Wednesday, scientists said that we are closer than ever to the point after which global heating cannot be stopped.
Just one day later, Donald Trump and Lee Zeldin, the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, announced the elimination of the Obama-era endangerment finding which underpins federal climate regulations. Scrapping it is just one part of Mr Trump’s assault on environmental controls and promotion of fossil fuels. But it may be his most consequential. Any fragment of hope may lie in the fact that a president who has called global heating a “hoax” framed this primarily as about deregulation – perhaps because the science is now so widely accepted even in the US.
The administration claimed, without evidence, that Americans would save $1.3tn. Never mind insurance or healthcare costs; a recent report found that US earnings would be 12% higher without the climate crisis. The Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse called the decision “corruption, plain and simple”. In 2024, Mr Trump reportedly urged 20 fossil fuel tycoons to stump up $1bn for his presidential campaign – while vowing to remove controls on the industry.
In the same week as this reckless and destructive US decision, it emerged that China had recorded its 21st month of flat or slightly falling carbon emissions. As Washington tears up environmental regulations, Beijing is extending carbon reporting requirements. China remains the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, though its per capita and cumulative historical emissions are still far behind those of the US. But clean energy drove more than 90% of its investment growth last year.
The Carbon Brief website, which published the emissions analysis, says the numbers suggest that the decline in China’s carbon intensity – emissions per unit of GDP – was below the target set in the last five-year plan, making it hard to meet its commitments under the Paris agreement. The shift in emissions may not prove enduring. There is fear that China’s focus may change; the next five-year plan, due in March, will be key. Some subsidies for renewable power have already been withdrawn. The installation of huge quantities of renewable energy infrastructure has been accompanied by a surge in constructing coal-fired power plants, though the hope is that these are intended primarily as a fallback.
We continue to disregard the actual civilized nations and cavort with the worst of the worst. This is from France24. “Rubio tells Orban ‘your success is our success’ during Hungary visit ahead of elections. During a visit to Budapest Monday, just weeks before Hungary’s parliamentary elections, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban that the nationalist leader’s “success” was a success for the US. An ally of President Donald Trump, who has also maintained ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Orban lags behind the main opposition candidate in opinion polls.” The entire Trump cabinet is feckless, shameless, and incompetent. They are also enabling a backslide in democracy.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio hailed Viktor Orban‘s leadership during a visit to Budapest on Monday, ahead of elections threatening the nationalist prime minister’s hold on power.
Rubio’s visit is the final stage of a whirlwind trip to Europe that also saw him address the Munich Security Conference and visit another right-wing ally, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico.
US President Donald Trump has made no secret of his high regard for Orban, saying in a social media post on Friday that the prime minister had produced “phenomenal” results in Hungary.
But Orban, 62, has a fight on his hands for the April 12 legislative elections in Hungary. Polls suggest his Fidesz party is trailing opposition leader Peter Magyar’s TISZA.
“I can say to you with confidence that President Trump is deeply committed to your success because your success is our success,” Rubio said during a joint press conference with Orban after their meeting.
“The president has an extraordinarily close relationship to the prime minister, he does, and it has had tangible benefits,” he said.
Europe’s nations have read the writing on the wall, according to CNN’s Kasie Hunt. “Trump’s damage is done. Democrats – and Europe – are struggling to define what’s next.”
Many of the Democrats who came to the Munich Security Conference this weekend want to be president. But even if one of them can win the White House in 2028, they may find they can no longer claim the title every American president since the 1940s has borne: leader of the free world.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom went on stage to insist his state is more permanent than President Donald Trump. But he acknowledged in an interview with CNN that the leaders he met with believe the damage to the transatlantic alliance is irrevocable.
Progressive star Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York came to pitch a left-wing populist foreign policy but made headlines for a massive stumble instead.
A number of Democratic senators hoping to burnish their foreign policy credentials ahead of possible presidential bids found themselves in a painfully awkward moment with the Danish prime minister, as some Democrats tried to smooth over pugnacious remarks Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham made at the start of the meeting that suggested Trump has not given up his designs on Greenland – a semiautonomous territory of Denmark.
And most members of the House of Representatives who planned to attend didn’t come at all after Republican Speaker Mike Johnson pulled the plug on the congressional delegation.
European thought leaders were reduced to offering a brief standing ovation to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose speech was far more conciliatory than the one Vice President JD Vance delivered at the same gathering last year. But Rubio had kicked off his trip telling American reporters: “The old world is gone.” He also left the conference to fly onward to Slovakia and Hungary, two countries led by strongmen sympathetic to Trump.
The conference’s opening remarks from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz crystallized Europe’s new reality in what seems to be rapidly becoming a post-American century.
“A divide has opened up between Europe and the United States,” Merz said Friday. “The United States’ claim to leadership has been challenged, and possibly lost.”
It’s more than just words. Merz has said he held “confidential talks” with France on European nuclear deterrence. It’s a stunning admission there’s no longer unconditional trust that the US will do what needs to be done for its transatlantic allies.
“What I’m hearing now is, even if we are able to repair these relationships, it’s going to take generations before they feel comfortable,” said Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, of Arizona, a possible presidential hopeful who traveled to Munich not long after learning the Trump administration had tried and failed to indict him over a video he made telling troops not to obey illegal orders.
If this continues, the momentum and direction of the world’s political entanglements will change. Who knows what this will mean? This Op Ed piece from MS Now by Anthony L. Fisher discusses Trump and his attempts at an Imperial Presidency. “Libertarians warned about the ‘imperial presidency.’ Too few actually warned about Trump. A recent New York Times op-ed showed the blind spot many libertarians still have for President Donald Trump.”
When I saw the headline “Libertarians Tried to Warn You About Trump” atop a New York Times op-ed last Monday, I thought, “Hmmm, that’s not quite how I remember it.” Adorned with the striking image of the Gadsden flag’s “Don’t Tread on Me” snake about to get curb-stomped by an enormous black jackboot, the piece was written by Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor in chief of the libertarian magazine and website Reason — where I worked as a journalist for roughly six years. (I left shortly after President Donald Trump’s first inauguration.)
Sure enough, upon reading the column, I discovered the headline didn’t accurately reflect Mangu-Ward’s argument. She primarily made the case that libertarians have warned for years — under presidents in both major parties — about the dangers of ever-expanding executive authority, what’s been aptly coined the “Imperial Presidency.” Rather than claiming to have specifically warned “about Trump,” the writer boasted that libertarians had long sounded the alarm over the consolidation of such power — power now being used for nefarious purposes by a president who just happens to be Donald Trump. (The Times later that day amended the headline to the less specific but more honest, “Libertarians: We Told You So.”)
I can’t argue with that. To the extent most self-identified professional libertarians warned about Trump, they warned about the awesome powers that could be abused by a generic authoritarian president from either party.
But Trump is not a hypothetical. He always told us who he was. And there are far fewer of us who took (and continue to hold) the comparatively unpopular view among libertarians and other right-of-center fellow travelers that Trump presented as a uniquely authoritarian, vindictive, racist, corrupt and lawless demagogue — of which there isn’t remotely an analog on the other side of the aisle.
The problem is that, even now that Trump has proven us skeptics right on every one of those counts, too many libertarians continue to position themselves safely in a “pox on both your houses” perch — much too nuanced and enlightened to be dragged into partisan rancor. This position is how your movement ends up conflating the tyranny of overbearing, temporary Covid policies in Democratic-run areas as equal to (or worse than) the tyranny of a secret police force acting without due process for everyone when attempting to arrest suspected illegal immigrants, summarily executing Americans in the street and branding them “domestic terrorists” while their bodies are still warm.
All of these thoughts lead to one logical conclusion. The Midterm elections need to depose him and remove the spineless and the true believers, or whatever this is, from Congress.
Just to let you know, we’re having the most unkind Mardi Gras Celebration that even the police have seen. We seem to have been overrun by spontaneous groups of young men that are behaving a lot like the droogies in A Clockwork Orange. I may write about it on Friday; however, I’m busy listening to my friends’ experiences uptown and around the Quarter right now.
Peace, Love, and Understanding to you all!
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging Lists today?
#JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #DemocracyBacksliding #TrumpianWhiplash #USEuropeRelations #VictorOrban -
Mostly Monday Reads: Presidents Day in a Lost Country
“The latest cabinet meetings aren’t televised for a reason. Fear not, our de facto leader is in control as the ethnic cleansing of the country formerly known as the United States roars ahead unabated. The must-see TV drama not being broadcast is Whose Turn Is It to Change the Old Guy’s Diaper?” John Buss, @repeat 1968
Good Day Sky Dancers!
As we stare down the 250th anniversary of the day our country started its journey from monarchy to democracy, we have to take a look at where we’ve landed today and utter some word of disappointment. The headlines today are filled with references to autocracy, and it’s not difficult to see how the MAGA/Trump overreach is playing out.
Politico sums up the current situation like this. “Trump’s second year: Whiplash. Even proposals that don’t ultimately move forward have consequences.” I’d just like a few more adjectives like weird, cruel, and inexplicably unnecessary.
President Donald Trump’s first year back in office was defined by sweeping upheaval that was largely plotted out during his four-year Florida exile. But the president has somehow intensified the volatility in year two with a succession of whiplash-inducing policy swings, several of which have almost immediately withered in the face of Republican opposition and public outcry.
The administration this week finally withdrew the thousands of federal law enforcement officers from Minneapolis, after violent and at times deadly clashes with protesters turned the tide of public opinion against the president’s immigration crackdown.
It came after Trump threatened to decertify Canadian aircraft, a move deemed “unjustified and dangerous” by a Washington-based aerospace trade union that the president soon dropped. Trump said in early January that he’d cap credit card rates at 10 percent, a move that would have upended the banking industry, only to change his mind and ask Congress for legislation.
Also last month, Trump’s administration paused millions in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funding for state public health infrastructure — only to reverse course roughly 24 hours later.
“The whiplash has real implications,” said Chrissie Juliano, executive director of the Big Cities Health Coalition, a forum of the leaders of metropolitan health departments. “It’s incredibly disruptive, even if you can get back to continuing the work, you know, two days later.”
The unpredictability of a presidency that prioritizes posting over process and often leaves friends and foes alike guessing whether pronouncements should be taken seriously, literally, or both, remains a feature, not a bug of Trump’s approach to governance. In many matters, especially negotiations with other countries, his mercurial opacity is often an attempt to gain leverage, but his threats seemingly lead just as often to backtracking as blowing things up, be they Iranian missile depots, Venezuelan drug boats or the transatlantic alliance.
The same often holds true for domestic policy. The president has made numerous pronouncements with emphatic declarations on social media, sometimes even suggesting he is governing by fiat in cases where legislation is required. But he has quickly moved on from many of them: a cap on credit card interest rates, 50-year mortgages and, according to a new Financial Times report, possibly even the sweeping tariffs on aluminum and steel that have led to higher costs.
We’re just beginning to explore the depths of depravity that Trump and his buddies will go to just feel powerful and get richer. This is from Robert Reich’s SubStack. “The Squalor of the Epstein Class. Happy Presidents Day!”
Here’s how Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie responded on Sunday, during ABC’s “This Week,” to a question about the Trump regime’s handling of the Epstein files:
“This is about the Epstein class …. They’re billionaires who were friends with these people, and that’s what I’m up against in Washington, D.C. Donald Trump told us that even though he had dinner with these kinds of people, in New York City and West Palm Beach, that he would be transparent. But he’s not. He’s still in with the Epstein class. This is the Epstein administration. And they’re attacking me for trying to get these files released.”
The Epstein Class. Not just the people who cavorted with Jeffrey Epstein or the subset who abused young girls. It’s an interconnected world of hugely rich, prominent, entitled, smug, powerful, self-important (mostly) men. Trump is honorary chairman.
Trump is still sitting on two and a half million files that he and Pam Bondi won’t release. Why? Because they implicate Trump and even more of the Epstein class. The files that have been released so far don’t paint a pretty picture.
Trump appears 1,433 times in the Epstein files so far. His billionaire backers are also members. Elon Musk appears 1,122 times. Howard Lutnick is there. So is Trump-backer Peter Thiel (2,710 times), and Leslie Wexner (565 times). As is Steven Witkoff, now Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s consigliere (1,855 times).
The Epstein Class isn’t limited to Trump donors. Bill Clinton is a member (1,192 times), as is Larry Summers (5,621 times). So are LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman (3,769 times), Prince Andrew (1,821 times), Bill Gates (6,385 times), and Steve Tisch, co-owner of the New York Giants (429 times).
If not politics, then what connects the members of the Epstein Class? It’s not just riches. Some members are not particularly wealthy, but they’re richly connected. They trade on their prominence, on whom they know and who will return their phone calls.
They exchange inside tips on stocks, on the movements of currencies, on IPOs, on new tax-avoidance mechanisms. On getting into exclusive clubs, reservations at chic restaurants, lush hotels, exotic travel.
Most members of the Epstein Class have seceded into their own small, self-contained world, disconnected from the rest of society. They fly in one other’s private jets. They entertain at one other’s guest houses and villas. Some exchange tips on how to procure certain drugs or kinky sex or valuable works of art. And, of course, how to accumulate more wealth.
Many don’t particularly believe in democracy; Peter Thiel (recall, he appears 2,710 times in the Epstein files) has said he “no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Many are putting their fortunes into electing people who will do their bidding. Hence, they are politically dangerous.
The Epstein Class is the by-product of an economy that emerged over the last two decades, from which this new elite has siphoned off vast amounts of wealth.
It’s an economy that bears almost no resemblance to that of mid-20th-century America. The most valuable companies in this new economy have few workers because they don’t make stuff. They design it. They create ideas. They sell concepts. They move money.
I’ve always argued here and in classes that the biggest economic policies of the Reagan and Bush years were tax cuts that made it more profitable to gamble on financial assets rather than to actually produce goods and services. The changes in tax policies that cut upper brackets, then treated capital gains as a tax slash, and other ridiculous policies mean that money never lands where it can actually do good. It also creates a lot of idle hands and minds.
China is beginning to look more modern, more concerned about actual economic outcomes, and the planet. The U.S. continues to race back to the Gilded Age with hints of the Great Depression years. This is from The Guardian. “The Guardian view on Donald Trump and the climate crisis: the US is in reverse while China ploughs ahead. Editorial. The president’s destructive policies enrich fossil fuel billionaires, while Beijing has bet big on the green transition.”
Devastating wildfires, flooding and winter storms were among the 23 extreme weather and climate-related disasters in the US which cost more than a billion dollars last year – at an estimated total loss of $115bn. The last three years have shattered previous records for such events. Last Wednesday, scientists said that we are closer than ever to the point after which global heating cannot be stopped.
Just one day later, Donald Trump and Lee Zeldin, the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, announced the elimination of the Obama-era endangerment finding which underpins federal climate regulations. Scrapping it is just one part of Mr Trump’s assault on environmental controls and promotion of fossil fuels. But it may be his most consequential. Any fragment of hope may lie in the fact that a president who has called global heating a “hoax” framed this primarily as about deregulation – perhaps because the science is now so widely accepted even in the US.
The administration claimed, without evidence, that Americans would save $1.3tn. Never mind insurance or healthcare costs; a recent report found that US earnings would be 12% higher without the climate crisis. The Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse called the decision “corruption, plain and simple”. In 2024, Mr Trump reportedly urged 20 fossil fuel tycoons to stump up $1bn for his presidential campaign – while vowing to remove controls on the industry.
In the same week as this reckless and destructive US decision, it emerged that China had recorded its 21st month of flat or slightly falling carbon emissions. As Washington tears up environmental regulations, Beijing is extending carbon reporting requirements. China remains the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, though its per capita and cumulative historical emissions are still far behind those of the US. But clean energy drove more than 90% of its investment growth last year.
The Carbon Brief website, which published the emissions analysis, says the numbers suggest that the decline in China’s carbon intensity – emissions per unit of GDP – was below the target set in the last five-year plan, making it hard to meet its commitments under the Paris agreement. The shift in emissions may not prove enduring. There is fear that China’s focus may change; the next five-year plan, due in March, will be key. Some subsidies for renewable power have already been withdrawn. The installation of huge quantities of renewable energy infrastructure has been accompanied by a surge in constructing coal-fired power plants, though the hope is that these are intended primarily as a fallback.
We continue to disregard the actual civilized nations and cavort with the worst of the worst. This is from France24. “Rubio tells Orban ‘your success is our success’ during Hungary visit ahead of elections. During a visit to Budapest Monday, just weeks before Hungary’s parliamentary elections, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban that the nationalist leader’s “success” was a success for the US. An ally of President Donald Trump, who has also maintained ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Orban lags behind the main opposition candidate in opinion polls.” The entire Trump cabinet is feckless, shameless, and incompetent. They are also enabling a backslide in democracy.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio hailed Viktor Orban‘s leadership during a visit to Budapest on Monday, ahead of elections threatening the nationalist prime minister’s hold on power.
Rubio’s visit is the final stage of a whirlwind trip to Europe that also saw him address the Munich Security Conference and visit another right-wing ally, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico.
US President Donald Trump has made no secret of his high regard for Orban, saying in a social media post on Friday that the prime minister had produced “phenomenal” results in Hungary.
But Orban, 62, has a fight on his hands for the April 12 legislative elections in Hungary. Polls suggest his Fidesz party is trailing opposition leader Peter Magyar’s TISZA.
“I can say to you with confidence that President Trump is deeply committed to your success because your success is our success,” Rubio said during a joint press conference with Orban after their meeting.
“The president has an extraordinarily close relationship to the prime minister, he does, and it has had tangible benefits,” he said.
Europe’s nations have read the writing on the wall, according to CNN’s Kasie Hunt. “Trump’s damage is done. Democrats – and Europe – are struggling to define what’s next.”
Many of the Democrats who came to the Munich Security Conference this weekend want to be president. But even if one of them can win the White House in 2028, they may find they can no longer claim the title every American president since the 1940s has borne: leader of the free world.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom went on stage to insist his state is more permanent than President Donald Trump. But he acknowledged in an interview with CNN that the leaders he met with believe the damage to the transatlantic alliance is irrevocable.
Progressive star Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York came to pitch a left-wing populist foreign policy but made headlines for a massive stumble instead.
A number of Democratic senators hoping to burnish their foreign policy credentials ahead of possible presidential bids found themselves in a painfully awkward moment with the Danish prime minister, as some Democrats tried to smooth over pugnacious remarks Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham made at the start of the meeting that suggested Trump has not given up his designs on Greenland – a semiautonomous territory of Denmark.
And most members of the House of Representatives who planned to attend didn’t come at all after Republican Speaker Mike Johnson pulled the plug on the congressional delegation.
European thought leaders were reduced to offering a brief standing ovation to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose speech was far more conciliatory than the one Vice President JD Vance delivered at the same gathering last year. But Rubio had kicked off his trip telling American reporters: “The old world is gone.” He also left the conference to fly onward to Slovakia and Hungary, two countries led by strongmen sympathetic to Trump.
The conference’s opening remarks from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz crystallized Europe’s new reality in what seems to be rapidly becoming a post-American century.
“A divide has opened up between Europe and the United States,” Merz said Friday. “The United States’ claim to leadership has been challenged, and possibly lost.”
It’s more than just words. Merz has said he held “confidential talks” with France on European nuclear deterrence. It’s a stunning admission there’s no longer unconditional trust that the US will do what needs to be done for its transatlantic allies.
“What I’m hearing now is, even if we are able to repair these relationships, it’s going to take generations before they feel comfortable,” said Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, of Arizona, a possible presidential hopeful who traveled to Munich not long after learning the Trump administration had tried and failed to indict him over a video he made telling troops not to obey illegal orders.
If this continues, the momentum and direction of the world’s political entanglements will change. Who knows what this will mean? This Op Ed piece from MS Now by Anthony L. Fisher discusses Trump and his attempts at an Imperial Presidency. “Libertarians warned about the ‘imperial presidency.’ Too few actually warned about Trump. A recent New York Times op-ed showed the blind spot many libertarians still have for President Donald Trump.”
When I saw the headline “Libertarians Tried to Warn You About Trump” atop a New York Times op-ed last Monday, I thought, “Hmmm, that’s not quite how I remember it.” Adorned with the striking image of the Gadsden flag’s “Don’t Tread on Me” snake about to get curb-stomped by an enormous black jackboot, the piece was written by Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor in chief of the libertarian magazine and website Reason — where I worked as a journalist for roughly six years. (I left shortly after President Donald Trump’s first inauguration.)
Sure enough, upon reading the column, I discovered the headline didn’t accurately reflect Mangu-Ward’s argument. She primarily made the case that libertarians have warned for years — under presidents in both major parties — about the dangers of ever-expanding executive authority, what’s been aptly coined the “Imperial Presidency.” Rather than claiming to have specifically warned “about Trump,” the writer boasted that libertarians had long sounded the alarm over the consolidation of such power — power now being used for nefarious purposes by a president who just happens to be Donald Trump. (The Times later that day amended the headline to the less specific but more honest, “Libertarians: We Told You So.”)
I can’t argue with that. To the extent most self-identified professional libertarians warned about Trump, they warned about the awesome powers that could be abused by a generic authoritarian president from either party.
But Trump is not a hypothetical. He always told us who he was. And there are far fewer of us who took (and continue to hold) the comparatively unpopular view among libertarians and other right-of-center fellow travelers that Trump presented as a uniquely authoritarian, vindictive, racist, corrupt and lawless demagogue — of which there isn’t remotely an analog on the other side of the aisle.
The problem is that, even now that Trump has proven us skeptics right on every one of those counts, too many libertarians continue to position themselves safely in a “pox on both your houses” perch — much too nuanced and enlightened to be dragged into partisan rancor. This position is how your movement ends up conflating the tyranny of overbearing, temporary Covid policies in Democratic-run areas as equal to (or worse than) the tyranny of a secret police force acting without due process for everyone when attempting to arrest suspected illegal immigrants, summarily executing Americans in the street and branding them “domestic terrorists” while their bodies are still warm.
All of these thoughts lead to one logical conclusion. The Midterm elections need to depose him and remove the spineless and the true believers, or whatever this is, from Congress.
Just to let you know, we’re having the most unkind Mardi Gras Celebration that even the police have seen. We seem to have been overrun by spontaneous groups of young men that are behaving a lot like the droogies in A Clockwork Orange. I may write about it on Friday; however, I’m busy listening to my friends’ experiences uptown and around the Quarter right now.
Peace, Love, and Understanding to you all!
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging Lists today?
#JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #DemocracyBacksliding #TrumpianWhiplash #USEuropeRelations #VictorOrban -
Mostly Monday Reads: Presidents Day in a Lost Country
“The latest cabinet meetings aren’t televised for a reason. Fear not, our de facto leader is in control as the ethnic cleansing of the country formerly known as the United States roars ahead unabated. The must-see TV drama not being broadcast is Whose Turn Is It to Change the Old Guy’s Diaper?” John Buss, @repeat 1968
Good Day Sky Dancers!
As we stare down the 250th anniversary of the day our country started its journey from monarchy to democracy, we have to take a look at where we’ve landed today and utter some word of disappointment. The headlines today are filled with references to autocracy, and it’s not difficult to see how the MAGA/Trump overreach is playing out.
Politico sums up the current situation like this. “Trump’s second year: Whiplash. Even proposals that don’t ultimately move forward have consequences.” I’d just like a few more adjectives like weird, cruel, and inexplicably unnecessary.
President Donald Trump’s first year back in office was defined by sweeping upheaval that was largely plotted out during his four-year Florida exile. But the president has somehow intensified the volatility in year two with a succession of whiplash-inducing policy swings, several of which have almost immediately withered in the face of Republican opposition and public outcry.
The administration this week finally withdrew the thousands of federal law enforcement officers from Minneapolis, after violent and at times deadly clashes with protesters turned the tide of public opinion against the president’s immigration crackdown.
It came after Trump threatened to decertify Canadian aircraft, a move deemed “unjustified and dangerous” by a Washington-based aerospace trade union that the president soon dropped. Trump said in early January that he’d cap credit card rates at 10 percent, a move that would have upended the banking industry, only to change his mind and ask Congress for legislation.
Also last month, Trump’s administration paused millions in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funding for state public health infrastructure — only to reverse course roughly 24 hours later.
“The whiplash has real implications,” said Chrissie Juliano, executive director of the Big Cities Health Coalition, a forum of the leaders of metropolitan health departments. “It’s incredibly disruptive, even if you can get back to continuing the work, you know, two days later.”
The unpredictability of a presidency that prioritizes posting over process and often leaves friends and foes alike guessing whether pronouncements should be taken seriously, literally, or both, remains a feature, not a bug of Trump’s approach to governance. In many matters, especially negotiations with other countries, his mercurial opacity is often an attempt to gain leverage, but his threats seemingly lead just as often to backtracking as blowing things up, be they Iranian missile depots, Venezuelan drug boats or the transatlantic alliance.
The same often holds true for domestic policy. The president has made numerous pronouncements with emphatic declarations on social media, sometimes even suggesting he is governing by fiat in cases where legislation is required. But he has quickly moved on from many of them: a cap on credit card interest rates, 50-year mortgages and, according to a new Financial Times report, possibly even the sweeping tariffs on aluminum and steel that have led to higher costs.
We’re just beginning to explore the depths of depravity that Trump and his buddies will go to just feel powerful and get richer. This is from Robert Reich’s SubStack. “The Squalor of the Epstein Class. Happy Presidents Day!”
Here’s how Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie responded on Sunday, during ABC’s “This Week,” to a question about the Trump regime’s handling of the Epstein files:
“This is about the Epstein class …. They’re billionaires who were friends with these people, and that’s what I’m up against in Washington, D.C. Donald Trump told us that even though he had dinner with these kinds of people, in New York City and West Palm Beach, that he would be transparent. But he’s not. He’s still in with the Epstein class. This is the Epstein administration. And they’re attacking me for trying to get these files released.”
The Epstein Class. Not just the people who cavorted with Jeffrey Epstein or the subset who abused young girls. It’s an interconnected world of hugely rich, prominent, entitled, smug, powerful, self-important (mostly) men. Trump is honorary chairman.
Trump is still sitting on two and a half million files that he and Pam Bondi won’t release. Why? Because they implicate Trump and even more of the Epstein class. The files that have been released so far don’t paint a pretty picture.
Trump appears 1,433 times in the Epstein files so far. His billionaire backers are also members. Elon Musk appears 1,122 times. Howard Lutnick is there. So is Trump-backer Peter Thiel (2,710 times), and Leslie Wexner (565 times). As is Steven Witkoff, now Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s consigliere (1,855 times).
The Epstein Class isn’t limited to Trump donors. Bill Clinton is a member (1,192 times), as is Larry Summers (5,621 times). So are LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman (3,769 times), Prince Andrew (1,821 times), Bill Gates (6,385 times), and Steve Tisch, co-owner of the New York Giants (429 times).
If not politics, then what connects the members of the Epstein Class? It’s not just riches. Some members are not particularly wealthy, but they’re richly connected. They trade on their prominence, on whom they know and who will return their phone calls.
They exchange inside tips on stocks, on the movements of currencies, on IPOs, on new tax-avoidance mechanisms. On getting into exclusive clubs, reservations at chic restaurants, lush hotels, exotic travel.
Most members of the Epstein Class have seceded into their own small, self-contained world, disconnected from the rest of society. They fly in one other’s private jets. They entertain at one other’s guest houses and villas. Some exchange tips on how to procure certain drugs or kinky sex or valuable works of art. And, of course, how to accumulate more wealth.
Many don’t particularly believe in democracy; Peter Thiel (recall, he appears 2,710 times in the Epstein files) has said he “no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Many are putting their fortunes into electing people who will do their bidding. Hence, they are politically dangerous.
The Epstein Class is the by-product of an economy that emerged over the last two decades, from which this new elite has siphoned off vast amounts of wealth.
It’s an economy that bears almost no resemblance to that of mid-20th-century America. The most valuable companies in this new economy have few workers because they don’t make stuff. They design it. They create ideas. They sell concepts. They move money.
I’ve always argued here and in classes that the biggest economic policies of the Reagan and Bush years were tax cuts that made it more profitable to gamble on financial assets rather than to actually produce goods and services. The changes in tax policies that cut upper brackets, then treated capital gains as a tax slash, and other ridiculous policies mean that money never lands where it can actually do good. It also creates a lot of idle hands and minds.
China is beginning to look more modern, more concerned about actual economic outcomes, and the planet. The U.S. continues to race back to the Gilded Age with hints of the Great Depression years. This is from The Guardian. “The Guardian view on Donald Trump and the climate crisis: the US is in reverse while China ploughs ahead. Editorial. The president’s destructive policies enrich fossil fuel billionaires, while Beijing has bet big on the green transition.”
Devastating wildfires, flooding and winter storms were among the 23 extreme weather and climate-related disasters in the US which cost more than a billion dollars last year – at an estimated total loss of $115bn. The last three years have shattered previous records for such events. Last Wednesday, scientists said that we are closer than ever to the point after which global heating cannot be stopped.
Just one day later, Donald Trump and Lee Zeldin, the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, announced the elimination of the Obama-era endangerment finding which underpins federal climate regulations. Scrapping it is just one part of Mr Trump’s assault on environmental controls and promotion of fossil fuels. But it may be his most consequential. Any fragment of hope may lie in the fact that a president who has called global heating a “hoax” framed this primarily as about deregulation – perhaps because the science is now so widely accepted even in the US.
The administration claimed, without evidence, that Americans would save $1.3tn. Never mind insurance or healthcare costs; a recent report found that US earnings would be 12% higher without the climate crisis. The Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse called the decision “corruption, plain and simple”. In 2024, Mr Trump reportedly urged 20 fossil fuel tycoons to stump up $1bn for his presidential campaign – while vowing to remove controls on the industry.
In the same week as this reckless and destructive US decision, it emerged that China had recorded its 21st month of flat or slightly falling carbon emissions. As Washington tears up environmental regulations, Beijing is extending carbon reporting requirements. China remains the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, though its per capita and cumulative historical emissions are still far behind those of the US. But clean energy drove more than 90% of its investment growth last year.
The Carbon Brief website, which published the emissions analysis, says the numbers suggest that the decline in China’s carbon intensity – emissions per unit of GDP – was below the target set in the last five-year plan, making it hard to meet its commitments under the Paris agreement. The shift in emissions may not prove enduring. There is fear that China’s focus may change; the next five-year plan, due in March, will be key. Some subsidies for renewable power have already been withdrawn. The installation of huge quantities of renewable energy infrastructure has been accompanied by a surge in constructing coal-fired power plants, though the hope is that these are intended primarily as a fallback.
We continue to disregard the actual civilized nations and cavort with the worst of the worst. This is from France24. “Rubio tells Orban ‘your success is our success’ during Hungary visit ahead of elections. During a visit to Budapest Monday, just weeks before Hungary’s parliamentary elections, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban that the nationalist leader’s “success” was a success for the US. An ally of President Donald Trump, who has also maintained ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Orban lags behind the main opposition candidate in opinion polls.” The entire Trump cabinet is feckless, shameless, and incompetent. They are also enabling a backslide in democracy.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio hailed Viktor Orban‘s leadership during a visit to Budapest on Monday, ahead of elections threatening the nationalist prime minister’s hold on power.
Rubio’s visit is the final stage of a whirlwind trip to Europe that also saw him address the Munich Security Conference and visit another right-wing ally, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico.
US President Donald Trump has made no secret of his high regard for Orban, saying in a social media post on Friday that the prime minister had produced “phenomenal” results in Hungary.
But Orban, 62, has a fight on his hands for the April 12 legislative elections in Hungary. Polls suggest his Fidesz party is trailing opposition leader Peter Magyar’s TISZA.
“I can say to you with confidence that President Trump is deeply committed to your success because your success is our success,” Rubio said during a joint press conference with Orban after their meeting.
“The president has an extraordinarily close relationship to the prime minister, he does, and it has had tangible benefits,” he said.
Europe’s nations have read the writing on the wall, according to CNN’s Kasie Hunt. “Trump’s damage is done. Democrats – and Europe – are struggling to define what’s next.”
Many of the Democrats who came to the Munich Security Conference this weekend want to be president. But even if one of them can win the White House in 2028, they may find they can no longer claim the title every American president since the 1940s has borne: leader of the free world.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom went on stage to insist his state is more permanent than President Donald Trump. But he acknowledged in an interview with CNN that the leaders he met with believe the damage to the transatlantic alliance is irrevocable.
Progressive star Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York came to pitch a left-wing populist foreign policy but made headlines for a massive stumble instead.
A number of Democratic senators hoping to burnish their foreign policy credentials ahead of possible presidential bids found themselves in a painfully awkward moment with the Danish prime minister, as some Democrats tried to smooth over pugnacious remarks Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham made at the start of the meeting that suggested Trump has not given up his designs on Greenland – a semiautonomous territory of Denmark.
And most members of the House of Representatives who planned to attend didn’t come at all after Republican Speaker Mike Johnson pulled the plug on the congressional delegation.
European thought leaders were reduced to offering a brief standing ovation to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose speech was far more conciliatory than the one Vice President JD Vance delivered at the same gathering last year. But Rubio had kicked off his trip telling American reporters: “The old world is gone.” He also left the conference to fly onward to Slovakia and Hungary, two countries led by strongmen sympathetic to Trump.
The conference’s opening remarks from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz crystallized Europe’s new reality in what seems to be rapidly becoming a post-American century.
“A divide has opened up between Europe and the United States,” Merz said Friday. “The United States’ claim to leadership has been challenged, and possibly lost.”
It’s more than just words. Merz has said he held “confidential talks” with France on European nuclear deterrence. It’s a stunning admission there’s no longer unconditional trust that the US will do what needs to be done for its transatlantic allies.
“What I’m hearing now is, even if we are able to repair these relationships, it’s going to take generations before they feel comfortable,” said Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, of Arizona, a possible presidential hopeful who traveled to Munich not long after learning the Trump administration had tried and failed to indict him over a video he made telling troops not to obey illegal orders.
If this continues, the momentum and direction of the world’s political entanglements will change. Who knows what this will mean? This Op Ed piece from MS Now by Anthony L. Fisher discusses Trump and his attempts at an Imperial Presidency. “Libertarians warned about the ‘imperial presidency.’ Too few actually warned about Trump. A recent New York Times op-ed showed the blind spot many libertarians still have for President Donald Trump.”
When I saw the headline “Libertarians Tried to Warn You About Trump” atop a New York Times op-ed last Monday, I thought, “Hmmm, that’s not quite how I remember it.” Adorned with the striking image of the Gadsden flag’s “Don’t Tread on Me” snake about to get curb-stomped by an enormous black jackboot, the piece was written by Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor in chief of the libertarian magazine and website Reason — where I worked as a journalist for roughly six years. (I left shortly after President Donald Trump’s first inauguration.)
Sure enough, upon reading the column, I discovered the headline didn’t accurately reflect Mangu-Ward’s argument. She primarily made the case that libertarians have warned for years — under presidents in both major parties — about the dangers of ever-expanding executive authority, what’s been aptly coined the “Imperial Presidency.” Rather than claiming to have specifically warned “about Trump,” the writer boasted that libertarians had long sounded the alarm over the consolidation of such power — power now being used for nefarious purposes by a president who just happens to be Donald Trump. (The Times later that day amended the headline to the less specific but more honest, “Libertarians: We Told You So.”)
I can’t argue with that. To the extent most self-identified professional libertarians warned about Trump, they warned about the awesome powers that could be abused by a generic authoritarian president from either party.
But Trump is not a hypothetical. He always told us who he was. And there are far fewer of us who took (and continue to hold) the comparatively unpopular view among libertarians and other right-of-center fellow travelers that Trump presented as a uniquely authoritarian, vindictive, racist, corrupt and lawless demagogue — of which there isn’t remotely an analog on the other side of the aisle.
The problem is that, even now that Trump has proven us skeptics right on every one of those counts, too many libertarians continue to position themselves safely in a “pox on both your houses” perch — much too nuanced and enlightened to be dragged into partisan rancor. This position is how your movement ends up conflating the tyranny of overbearing, temporary Covid policies in Democratic-run areas as equal to (or worse than) the tyranny of a secret police force acting without due process for everyone when attempting to arrest suspected illegal immigrants, summarily executing Americans in the street and branding them “domestic terrorists” while their bodies are still warm.
All of these thoughts lead to one logical conclusion. The Midterm elections need to depose him and remove the spineless and the true believers, or whatever this is, from Congress.
Just to let you know, we’re having the most unkind Mardi Gras Celebration that even the police have seen. We seem to have been overrun by spontaneous groups of young men that are behaving a lot like the droogies in A Clockwork Orange. I may write about it on Friday; however, I’m busy listening to my friends’ experiences uptown and around the Quarter right now.
Peace, Love, and Understanding to you all!
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging Lists today?
#JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #DemocracyBacksliding #TrumpianWhiplash #USEuropeRelations #VictorOrban -
Mostly Monday Reads: Presidents Day in a Lost Country
“The latest cabinet meetings aren’t televised for a reason. Fear not, our de facto leader is in control as the ethnic cleansing of the country formerly known as the United States roars ahead unabated. The must-see TV drama not being broadcast is Whose Turn Is It to Change the Old Guy’s Diaper?” John Buss, @repeat 1968
Good Day Sky Dancers!
As we stare down the 250th anniversary of the day our country started its journey from monarchy to democracy, we have to take a look at where we’ve landed today and utter some word of disappointment. The headlines today are filled with references to autocracy, and it’s not difficult to see how the MAGA/Trump overreach is playing out.
Politico sums up the current situation like this. “Trump’s second year: Whiplash. Even proposals that don’t ultimately move forward have consequences.” I’d just like a few more adjectives like weird, cruel, and inexplicably unnecessary.
President Donald Trump’s first year back in office was defined by sweeping upheaval that was largely plotted out during his four-year Florida exile. But the president has somehow intensified the volatility in year two with a succession of whiplash-inducing policy swings, several of which have almost immediately withered in the face of Republican opposition and public outcry.
The administration this week finally withdrew the thousands of federal law enforcement officers from Minneapolis, after violent and at times deadly clashes with protesters turned the tide of public opinion against the president’s immigration crackdown.
It came after Trump threatened to decertify Canadian aircraft, a move deemed “unjustified and dangerous” by a Washington-based aerospace trade union that the president soon dropped. Trump said in early January that he’d cap credit card rates at 10 percent, a move that would have upended the banking industry, only to change his mind and ask Congress for legislation.
Also last month, Trump’s administration paused millions in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funding for state public health infrastructure — only to reverse course roughly 24 hours later.
“The whiplash has real implications,” said Chrissie Juliano, executive director of the Big Cities Health Coalition, a forum of the leaders of metropolitan health departments. “It’s incredibly disruptive, even if you can get back to continuing the work, you know, two days later.”
The unpredictability of a presidency that prioritizes posting over process and often leaves friends and foes alike guessing whether pronouncements should be taken seriously, literally, or both, remains a feature, not a bug of Trump’s approach to governance. In many matters, especially negotiations with other countries, his mercurial opacity is often an attempt to gain leverage, but his threats seemingly lead just as often to backtracking as blowing things up, be they Iranian missile depots, Venezuelan drug boats or the transatlantic alliance.
The same often holds true for domestic policy. The president has made numerous pronouncements with emphatic declarations on social media, sometimes even suggesting he is governing by fiat in cases where legislation is required. But he has quickly moved on from many of them: a cap on credit card interest rates, 50-year mortgages and, according to a new Financial Times report, possibly even the sweeping tariffs on aluminum and steel that have led to higher costs.
We’re just beginning to explore the depths of depravity that Trump and his buddies will go to just feel powerful and get richer. This is from Robert Reich’s SubStack. “The Squalor of the Epstein Class. Happy Presidents Day!”
Here’s how Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie responded on Sunday, during ABC’s “This Week,” to a question about the Trump regime’s handling of the Epstein files:
“This is about the Epstein class …. They’re billionaires who were friends with these people, and that’s what I’m up against in Washington, D.C. Donald Trump told us that even though he had dinner with these kinds of people, in New York City and West Palm Beach, that he would be transparent. But he’s not. He’s still in with the Epstein class. This is the Epstein administration. And they’re attacking me for trying to get these files released.”
The Epstein Class. Not just the people who cavorted with Jeffrey Epstein or the subset who abused young girls. It’s an interconnected world of hugely rich, prominent, entitled, smug, powerful, self-important (mostly) men. Trump is honorary chairman.
Trump is still sitting on two and a half million files that he and Pam Bondi won’t release. Why? Because they implicate Trump and even more of the Epstein class. The files that have been released so far don’t paint a pretty picture.
Trump appears 1,433 times in the Epstein files so far. His billionaire backers are also members. Elon Musk appears 1,122 times. Howard Lutnick is there. So is Trump-backer Peter Thiel (2,710 times), and Leslie Wexner (565 times). As is Steven Witkoff, now Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s consigliere (1,855 times).
The Epstein Class isn’t limited to Trump donors. Bill Clinton is a member (1,192 times), as is Larry Summers (5,621 times). So are LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman (3,769 times), Prince Andrew (1,821 times), Bill Gates (6,385 times), and Steve Tisch, co-owner of the New York Giants (429 times).
If not politics, then what connects the members of the Epstein Class? It’s not just riches. Some members are not particularly wealthy, but they’re richly connected. They trade on their prominence, on whom they know and who will return their phone calls.
They exchange inside tips on stocks, on the movements of currencies, on IPOs, on new tax-avoidance mechanisms. On getting into exclusive clubs, reservations at chic restaurants, lush hotels, exotic travel.
Most members of the Epstein Class have seceded into their own small, self-contained world, disconnected from the rest of society. They fly in one other’s private jets. They entertain at one other’s guest houses and villas. Some exchange tips on how to procure certain drugs or kinky sex or valuable works of art. And, of course, how to accumulate more wealth.
Many don’t particularly believe in democracy; Peter Thiel (recall, he appears 2,710 times in the Epstein files) has said he “no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Many are putting their fortunes into electing people who will do their bidding. Hence, they are politically dangerous.
The Epstein Class is the by-product of an economy that emerged over the last two decades, from which this new elite has siphoned off vast amounts of wealth.
It’s an economy that bears almost no resemblance to that of mid-20th-century America. The most valuable companies in this new economy have few workers because they don’t make stuff. They design it. They create ideas. They sell concepts. They move money.
I’ve always argued here and in classes that the biggest economic policies of the Reagan and Bush years were tax cuts that made it more profitable to gamble on financial assets rather than to actually produce goods and services. The changes in tax policies that cut upper brackets, then treated capital gains as a tax slash, and other ridiculous policies mean that money never lands where it can actually do good. It also creates a lot of idle hands and minds.
China is beginning to look more modern, more concerned about actual economic outcomes, and the planet. The U.S. continues to race back to the Gilded Age with hints of the Great Depression years. This is from The Guardian. “The Guardian view on Donald Trump and the climate crisis: the US is in reverse while China ploughs ahead. Editorial. The president’s destructive policies enrich fossil fuel billionaires, while Beijing has bet big on the green transition.”
Devastating wildfires, flooding and winter storms were among the 23 extreme weather and climate-related disasters in the US which cost more than a billion dollars last year – at an estimated total loss of $115bn. The last three years have shattered previous records for such events. Last Wednesday, scientists said that we are closer than ever to the point after which global heating cannot be stopped.
Just one day later, Donald Trump and Lee Zeldin, the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, announced the elimination of the Obama-era endangerment finding which underpins federal climate regulations. Scrapping it is just one part of Mr Trump’s assault on environmental controls and promotion of fossil fuels. But it may be his most consequential. Any fragment of hope may lie in the fact that a president who has called global heating a “hoax” framed this primarily as about deregulation – perhaps because the science is now so widely accepted even in the US.
The administration claimed, without evidence, that Americans would save $1.3tn. Never mind insurance or healthcare costs; a recent report found that US earnings would be 12% higher without the climate crisis. The Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse called the decision “corruption, plain and simple”. In 2024, Mr Trump reportedly urged 20 fossil fuel tycoons to stump up $1bn for his presidential campaign – while vowing to remove controls on the industry.
In the same week as this reckless and destructive US decision, it emerged that China had recorded its 21st month of flat or slightly falling carbon emissions. As Washington tears up environmental regulations, Beijing is extending carbon reporting requirements. China remains the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, though its per capita and cumulative historical emissions are still far behind those of the US. But clean energy drove more than 90% of its investment growth last year.
The Carbon Brief website, which published the emissions analysis, says the numbers suggest that the decline in China’s carbon intensity – emissions per unit of GDP – was below the target set in the last five-year plan, making it hard to meet its commitments under the Paris agreement. The shift in emissions may not prove enduring. There is fear that China’s focus may change; the next five-year plan, due in March, will be key. Some subsidies for renewable power have already been withdrawn. The installation of huge quantities of renewable energy infrastructure has been accompanied by a surge in constructing coal-fired power plants, though the hope is that these are intended primarily as a fallback.
We continue to disregard the actual civilized nations and cavort with the worst of the worst. This is from France24. “Rubio tells Orban ‘your success is our success’ during Hungary visit ahead of elections. During a visit to Budapest Monday, just weeks before Hungary’s parliamentary elections, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban that the nationalist leader’s “success” was a success for the US. An ally of President Donald Trump, who has also maintained ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Orban lags behind the main opposition candidate in opinion polls.” The entire Trump cabinet is feckless, shameless, and incompetent. They are also enabling a backslide in democracy.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio hailed Viktor Orban‘s leadership during a visit to Budapest on Monday, ahead of elections threatening the nationalist prime minister’s hold on power.
Rubio’s visit is the final stage of a whirlwind trip to Europe that also saw him address the Munich Security Conference and visit another right-wing ally, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico.
US President Donald Trump has made no secret of his high regard for Orban, saying in a social media post on Friday that the prime minister had produced “phenomenal” results in Hungary.
But Orban, 62, has a fight on his hands for the April 12 legislative elections in Hungary. Polls suggest his Fidesz party is trailing opposition leader Peter Magyar’s TISZA.
“I can say to you with confidence that President Trump is deeply committed to your success because your success is our success,” Rubio said during a joint press conference with Orban after their meeting.
“The president has an extraordinarily close relationship to the prime minister, he does, and it has had tangible benefits,” he said.
Europe’s nations have read the writing on the wall, according to CNN’s Kasie Hunt. “Trump’s damage is done. Democrats – and Europe – are struggling to define what’s next.”
Many of the Democrats who came to the Munich Security Conference this weekend want to be president. But even if one of them can win the White House in 2028, they may find they can no longer claim the title every American president since the 1940s has borne: leader of the free world.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom went on stage to insist his state is more permanent than President Donald Trump. But he acknowledged in an interview with CNN that the leaders he met with believe the damage to the transatlantic alliance is irrevocable.
Progressive star Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York came to pitch a left-wing populist foreign policy but made headlines for a massive stumble instead.
A number of Democratic senators hoping to burnish their foreign policy credentials ahead of possible presidential bids found themselves in a painfully awkward moment with the Danish prime minister, as some Democrats tried to smooth over pugnacious remarks Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham made at the start of the meeting that suggested Trump has not given up his designs on Greenland – a semiautonomous territory of Denmark.
And most members of the House of Representatives who planned to attend didn’t come at all after Republican Speaker Mike Johnson pulled the plug on the congressional delegation.
European thought leaders were reduced to offering a brief standing ovation to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose speech was far more conciliatory than the one Vice President JD Vance delivered at the same gathering last year. But Rubio had kicked off his trip telling American reporters: “The old world is gone.” He also left the conference to fly onward to Slovakia and Hungary, two countries led by strongmen sympathetic to Trump.
The conference’s opening remarks from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz crystallized Europe’s new reality in what seems to be rapidly becoming a post-American century.
“A divide has opened up between Europe and the United States,” Merz said Friday. “The United States’ claim to leadership has been challenged, and possibly lost.”
It’s more than just words. Merz has said he held “confidential talks” with France on European nuclear deterrence. It’s a stunning admission there’s no longer unconditional trust that the US will do what needs to be done for its transatlantic allies.
“What I’m hearing now is, even if we are able to repair these relationships, it’s going to take generations before they feel comfortable,” said Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, of Arizona, a possible presidential hopeful who traveled to Munich not long after learning the Trump administration had tried and failed to indict him over a video he made telling troops not to obey illegal orders.
If this continues, the momentum and direction of the world’s political entanglements will change. Who knows what this will mean? This Op Ed piece from MS Now by Anthony L. Fisher discusses Trump and his attempts at an Imperial Presidency. “Libertarians warned about the ‘imperial presidency.’ Too few actually warned about Trump. A recent New York Times op-ed showed the blind spot many libertarians still have for President Donald Trump.”
When I saw the headline “Libertarians Tried to Warn You About Trump” atop a New York Times op-ed last Monday, I thought, “Hmmm, that’s not quite how I remember it.” Adorned with the striking image of the Gadsden flag’s “Don’t Tread on Me” snake about to get curb-stomped by an enormous black jackboot, the piece was written by Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor in chief of the libertarian magazine and website Reason — where I worked as a journalist for roughly six years. (I left shortly after President Donald Trump’s first inauguration.)
Sure enough, upon reading the column, I discovered the headline didn’t accurately reflect Mangu-Ward’s argument. She primarily made the case that libertarians have warned for years — under presidents in both major parties — about the dangers of ever-expanding executive authority, what’s been aptly coined the “Imperial Presidency.” Rather than claiming to have specifically warned “about Trump,” the writer boasted that libertarians had long sounded the alarm over the consolidation of such power — power now being used for nefarious purposes by a president who just happens to be Donald Trump. (The Times later that day amended the headline to the less specific but more honest, “Libertarians: We Told You So.”)
I can’t argue with that. To the extent most self-identified professional libertarians warned about Trump, they warned about the awesome powers that could be abused by a generic authoritarian president from either party.
But Trump is not a hypothetical. He always told us who he was. And there are far fewer of us who took (and continue to hold) the comparatively unpopular view among libertarians and other right-of-center fellow travelers that Trump presented as a uniquely authoritarian, vindictive, racist, corrupt and lawless demagogue — of which there isn’t remotely an analog on the other side of the aisle.
The problem is that, even now that Trump has proven us skeptics right on every one of those counts, too many libertarians continue to position themselves safely in a “pox on both your houses” perch — much too nuanced and enlightened to be dragged into partisan rancor. This position is how your movement ends up conflating the tyranny of overbearing, temporary Covid policies in Democratic-run areas as equal to (or worse than) the tyranny of a secret police force acting without due process for everyone when attempting to arrest suspected illegal immigrants, summarily executing Americans in the street and branding them “domestic terrorists” while their bodies are still warm.
All of these thoughts lead to one logical conclusion. The Midterm elections need to depose him and remove the spineless and the true believers, or whatever this is, from Congress.
Just to let you know, we’re having the most unkind Mardi Gras Celebration that even the police have seen. We seem to have been overrun by spontaneous groups of young men that are behaving a lot like the droogies in A Clockwork Orange. I may write about it on Friday; however, I’m busy listening to my friends’ experiences uptown and around the Quarter right now.
Peace, Love, and Understanding to you all!
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging Lists today?
#JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #DemocracyBacksliding #TrumpianWhiplash #USEuropeRelations #VictorOrban -
Laid down woman sleeping, by Felix Valloton
Good Morning!!
I don’t know how much I can post today. I’m exhausted and overwhelmed by the events of the past week or so. How much worse can things get in this country? As Democrats, we are dealing with assaults from the corrupt Supreme Court as well as MAGA Republicans, the media pundit class, and cowardly members of our own party. Biden had a bad debate, yes; but so did Trump. He did nothing but spew lies. He didn’t address one policy issue, because he is too stupid and lazy to even understand policy. But all we hear from the DC pundits is that Biden should step down.
Folks, the way we choose presidents since 1972 is through primaries, and Joe Biden won all the primaries. He holds most of the delegates. His campaign has collected millions in donations that can’t be transferred to another candidate. It’s possible the money could go to Kamala Harris, but the DC/NY pundits don’t want her.
Biden is on the ballot in many states; if another candidate runs in his place, voters would have to write in his/her name. With four months left before the election, there just isn’t time for a new candidate to raise money, hire staff, set up campaign offices around the country, and become known to low information voters. That candidate would also have to deal with the anger and resentment of people who voted for Biden/Harris–especially the African American and women voters who are essential to Democrats winning elections.
Finally, an open convention–which some pundits are calling for–would be an insane shit show that would tear the party apart. Push for this if you really want King Trump in the White House–this time with no guardrails from so-called adults in the room.
If you want more details on why replacing our nominee would be a horrible idea, here is a long Twitter thread by Dana Houle that spells out the challenges that would be faced by a candidate who replaced Biden. WordPress won’t let me post the tweets, but I’ll copy some of them here.
1/ Democrats cannot nominate anyone except Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. It’s impossible. If the Biden candidacy ends, so does the Biden campaign. It’s not transferable. Anyone else other than possibly Kamala Harris would have to start from nothing. That’s can’t be done.
2/It’s possible I’m missing something, but I don’t think so. Here’s why the Democrats can nominate Joe Biden, or possibly Kamala Harris, but nobody else. There’s only one candidate with a 2024 presidential campaign committee registered with the Federal Election Commission.
3/Some of the “stuff” of the Biden campaign can probably be transferred to the DNC (and maybe state parties), but most of it can’t. Another candidate can’t just take over Biden’s campaign. So, think about it. A new nominee would not have a campaign. Like, not a tax ID…
4/Not a bank account, not a website or address. There would be nothing. They would start out largely paralyzed for weeks. First and most obviously, there would be no staff. And there would be no HR process for hiring staff, no payroll process. So a new campaign trying to…
5/…rapidly expand would have to focus on staffing. They could probably hire people from the Biden campaign, but not all would want to work for the new candidate. Among the first people needed would be compliance and legal staff, because a new campaign would be immediately…
6/…challenged on ballot access and all kinds of other stuff. Compliance would be needed to deal with the massive influx of immediate cash and to be sure everything meets FEC rules. But to get cash they’d need banking/accounting as well. So that needs to be set up…
7/And since most of the money would come in online, they’d need to immediately set up a web operation robust enough to handle to load, and secure enough to handle the obvious cyberattacks that would happen. So they’d need contracts for servers, support staff, etc…
8/This new campaign would also be immediately inundated with calls and emails from press, potential volunteers and donors, other campaigns/party orgs, orgs inviting the candidate to events, etc.. So they would immediately need staff for press, scheduling, political, etc
9/Some of these people could probably slide over from the DNC or state parties. But that leaves holes at the DNC and state parties. But let’s say they could immediately staff up. Where does everyone work? Office leases prob can’t be automatically transferred to the…
10/…new campaign, so all of those would need to be renegotiated, and some may not be available to the new campaign. They’d also have to deal with utilities. Then, how does everyone communicate? As we know from 2016, security breeches can be fatal. So it’s not something…
11/…that can be tossed together in a day or so. But let’s say all the staff and infrastructure can be conjured from the ether. What about the data? Some could probably be transferred, but some of the lists would probably need to be purchased at fair market value from…
12/…Biden/Harris 2024. The new campaign would be starting out with no email lists, no volunteer lists, no fundraising lists, etc. They’d also be starting with no contracts with vendors. All those contracts would have to be negotiated
There is much more to this thread. I recommend reading it if you’re thinking Biden should step down or you want to inform other people who think that.
From Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice: The pundit class needs to get a grip.
After President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week, the punditocracy has gone both apeshit and feral.
The New York Times editorial board and seemingly every columnist at the paper called on Biden to withdraw from the race in pieces with headlines like, “President Biden, I’ve seen enough.” So did the Chicago Tribune editorial board and New Yorker editor David Remnick. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, co-host of Biden’s favorite morning show, urged the president to at last consider stepping aside. And Pod Save America’s response to the debate was so apoplectic that it prompted the Biden campaign to take a shot at “self-important Podcasters.”
The Sea, by Frederick Childe Hassam
The feeding frenzy/panic is to some extent understandable and inevitable. Biden wanted the debate early in order to put to rest fears about his age and to end the conversation about whether he would drop off the ticket. Instead, he sounded confused, and his lifelong stutter was more prominent than it ever has been in his decades-long career. Media figures licking their chops about the incendiary conflicts and clicks of a contested convention started to salivate a river. Democrats nervous about Biden’s ability to wage a forceful campaign became outright fearful.
But amidst all the tearing of garments and vultures circling, the fact is that we’re still pretty much where we were pre-debate. There are two questions: Is Biden fit to serve? And, would Democrats benefit by forcing him off the ticket? The answers remain “he is” and “probably not.”
There’s little evidence Biden is actually in mental decline.
The debate about Biden’s debate performance has largely focused on his appearance, suggesting he’s unelectable and finessing the question of whether he’s actually unfit. Some outlets, though, openly asserted that Biden is in cognitive decline, arguing that laypeople watching a debate can instantly assess someone’s mental fitness.
The Chicago Tribune, for example, argued Biden “should announce that he will be a single-term president who now has seen the light when it comes to his own capabilities in the face of the singular demands of being the president of the United States.” They added, “Everyone sees that now.”
But you can’t actually just “see” whether someone is in cognitive decline. Yes, people are often convinced that signs of physical illness or hesitation reflect mental hesitation; that’s why there’s so much prejudice against stutterers. But editorial boards and people with a public platform have a responsibility to inform readers, not just mirror popular prejudices.
What we know about aging, and about Biden, has not changed since the debate. In May, the Washington Post consulted with experts about the aging process and how likely aging is to affect the decision-making abilities of Biden and Republican challenger Donald Trump, who’s no spring chicken himself.
Those experts uniformly “rejected any suggestion that there should be an upper age limit for the presidency.” They also argued that there were many advantages to older candidates, who were likely to have better judgement and more emotional stability. According to Earl Miller, a professor of neuroscience at MIT, “Knowledge and experience count for a lot, and that can more than make up for slight losses of memory as a result of aging.”
Experts also pointed out that articulation problems, mixing up words, or using the wrong word were common problems as people aged, but none of them indicate cognitive decline overall. Stutters can also worsen and improve sporadically over a lifetime, but that doesn’t mean someone is impaired.
Also, again, experts insist that you can’t diagnose cognitive decline by watching TV clips, or even by watching a debate.
Read the rest at Public Notice.
Yesterday, ProPublica released a transcript and video of their unscripted interview with Biden from less than a year ago. The interviewer was John Harwood: We’re Releasing Our Full, Unedited Interview With Joe Biden From September.
Following Biden’s poor debate performance against Donald Trump, we’re releasing the full and unedited 21-minute interview we conducted with President Joe Biden nine days before his interview with Special Counsel Robert K. Hur.
In the wake of President Joe Biden’s poor debate performance, his opponents and most major media organizations have pointed out that he has done few interviews that give the public an opportunity to hear him speak without a script or teleprompters.
Woman in red relaxing on sofa, Goutami Mishra
Impressions from Special Counsel Robert K. Hur about his five hours of interviews with the president on Oct. 8 and 9 drove months of coverage. The prosecutor said Biden had “diminished faculties in advancing age” and called him a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden angrily dismissed these assertions, which Vice President Kamala Harris called “politically motivated.”
House Republicans on Monday sued Attorney General Merrick B. Garland for audio recordings of the interview as the White House asserts executive privilege to deny their release.
ProPublica obtained a rare interview with Biden on Sept. 29, nine days before the Hur interviews began. We released the video, which was assembled from footage shot by five cameras, on Oct. 1. We edited out less than a minute of crosstalk and exchanges with the camera people, as is customary in such interviews.
Today, we are releasing the full, 21-minute interview, unedited as seen from the view of the single camera focused on Biden. We understand that this video captures a moment in time nine months ago and that it will not settle the ongoing arguments about the president’s acuity today. Still, we believe it is worth giving the public another chance to see one of Biden’s infrequent conversations with a reporter.
Conducting the interview was veteran journalist and former CNN White House correspondent John Harwood, who requested it and then worked with ProPublica to film and produce it.
He did not send questions to the White House ahead of time, nor did he get approval for the topics to be discussed during the interview.
Recording began as soon as Biden was miked and sitting in the chair that Friday at 2:50 p.m. Earlier that day, Biden’s press staff had said the president would have only 10 minutes for the interview, instead of the previously agreed upon 20 minutes. We requested that the interview go the full 20 minutes. You can hear during the unedited interview a couple of moments when White House staff interrupted to signal that the interview should come to a close. Biden seemed eager to continue talking.
Read and watch the interview at ProPublica.
What’s truly amazing to me is that the media is focused on getting rid of Biden instead of the recent decision by the corrupt Supreme Court that granted king-like powers to Trump if he is elected. The media is doing to Biden what they did to Hillary Clinton and Al Gore–focusing on minutia and in doing so, supporting a dangerous candidate who will do untold damage to the country. George W. Bush was bad enough; a Trump presidency would mean the end of our democracy. He would pull us out of NATO and ally the U.S. with Russia, China, Hungary, Turkey, and North Korea. He has announced his plan to deport millions of immigrants, who will be put in camps until he can figure out how to get rid of them. Is that what we want? I know I don’t.
Here are a few articles to check out today.
Dahlia Lithwick at Slate: Don’t Be Hysterical, Ladies. Daddy Chief Justice Knows Best.
Last week, finding himself furious at the court’s per curiamdecision to hold off on deciding a big abortion case about the kinds of miscarriage care states may withhold from pregnant women in emergency rooms, Justice Samuel Alito excoriated his colleagues for punting. In his view, as he put it—in an opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch—the court’s “about-face” on taking, then running away from, the EMTALA abortion case was “baffling” because “nothing legally relevant has occurred” since the court granted an emergency stay in January and plonked itself into a dispute before it went through the appeals process. It was an easy case, he sniffed. Many amicus briefs had been filed, he huffed. Why had the court balked at the last minute? Thinking. Thinking. Then: “Apparently,” he hypothesized, “the Court has simply lost the will to decide the easy but emotional and highly politicized question that the case presents.”
That’s right. The majority of the court (and all of its females) found the issue too “emotional” to do the hard work of denying women in acute medical emergencies abortion care.
Fairfield Porter, On the Porch, 1961
Had he given his word choice 10 seconds’ further thought (or even conferred with his wife, who is by all accounts “fond of flags”), Alito might have taken out that “emotional” crack before attacking Amy Coney Barrett’s defection in this matter, in the time between the accidental release of the draft decision and its final publication the next day. He did not.
It’s gross, but not unexpected, that often when the court fractures along gender lines, as it has frequently this term, you will hear a whole lot of the jovial “Calm down, little missy” talk that you might recall from 1950s sitcoms.
Last week, finding himself furious at the court’s per curiamdecision to hold off on deciding a big abortion case about the kinds of miscarriage care states may withhold from pregnant women in emergency rooms, Justice Samuel Alito excoriated his colleagues for punting. In his view, as he put it—in an opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch—the court’s “about-face” on taking, then running away from, the EMTALA abortion case was “baffling” because “nothing legally relevant has occurred” since the court granted an emergency stay in January and plonked itself into a dispute before it went through the appeals process. It was an easy case, he sniffed. Many amicus briefs had been filed, he huffed. Why had the court balked at the last minute? Thinking. Thinking. Then: “Apparently,” he hypothesized, “the Court has simply lost the will to decide the easy but emotional and highly politicized question that the case presents.”minal law.’ ”
“Our dissenting colleagues exude an impressive infallibility,” writes Roberts, like a girls soccer coach. “While their confidence may be inspiring, the Court adheres to time-tested practices instead—deciding what is required to dispose of this case.” Hate the player, change the game.
In brushing past the district court opinion written by Judge Tanya Chutkan and the thorough, 57-page appellate opinion joined by Judges Karen LeCraft Henderson, Florence Pan, and J. Michelle Childs, the chief justice manages to malign their work product too: “Despite the unprecedented nature of this case, and the very significant constitutional questions that it raises, the lower courts rendered their decisions on a highly expedited basis.” Shorter Roberts? Really hard to find good help these days.
On CNN, Donald Trump’s former White House counsel Ty Cobb coughed up the same critique of Sotomayor. “Her dissent was a little hysterical, and it really offered no analysis,” he said. “A lot of screaming, no analysis. And I think that was unfortunate.”
Screaming. Insubstantial. Hysterical. What men call banshees, women call prophecy. And of course if there are any sitting justices on the Roberts court whose entire jurisprudence can be reduced to a soggy skein of hurt feelings and self-pity, they are not females.
We women thought we had made progress, but it’s not looking that way these days. There’s quite a bit more to read at Slate. Lithwick has reached the end of her patience. Here’s what she wrote on Twitter on Monday evening:
As an official representative of the legal commentariat I want to suggest that tonight’s a good news cycle to talk to the fascism and authoritarianism experts. This is their inning now…
Akhil Reed Amar at The Atlantic: Something Has Gone Deeply Wrong at the Supreme Court.
Forget Donald Trump. Forget Joe Biden. Think instead about the Constitution. What does this document, the supreme law of our land, actually say about lawsuits against ex-presidents?
Nothing remotely resembling what Chief Justice John Roberts and five associate justices declared in yesterday’s disappointing Trump v. United States decision. The Court’s curious and convoluted majority opinion turns the Constitution’s text and structure inside out and upside down, saying things that are flatly contradicted by the document’s unambiguous letter and obvious spirit.
Imagine a simple hypothetical designed to highlight the key constitutional clauses that should have been the Court’s starting point: In the year 2050, when Trump and Biden are presumably long gone, David Dealer commits serious drug crimes and then bribes President Jane Jones to pardon him.
Is Jones acting as president, in her official capacity, when she pardons Dealer? Of course. She is pardoning qua president. No one else can issue such a pardon. The Constitution expressly vests this power in the president: “The President … shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States.”
Wind from the Sea, by Andrew Wyeth
But the Constitution also contains express language that a president who takes a bribe can be impeached for bribery and then booted from office: “The President … shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” And once our hypothetical President Jones has been thus removed and is now ex-President Jones, the Constitution’s plain text says that she is subject to ordinary criminal prosecution, just like anyone else: “In cases of Impeachment … the Party convicted shall … be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”
Obviously, in Jones’s impeachment trial in the Senate, all sorts of evidence is admissible to prove not just that she issued the pardon but also why she did this—to prove that she had an unconstitutional motive, to prove that she pardoned Dealer because she was bribed to do so. Just as obviously, in the ensuing criminal case, all of this evidence surely must be allowed to come in.
But the Trump majority opinion, written by Roberts, says otherwise, proclaiming that “courts may not inquire into the President’s motives.” In a later footnote all about bribery, the Roberts opinion says that criminal-trial courts are not allowed to “admit testimony or private records of the President or his advisers probing the official act itself. Allowing that sort of evidence would invite the jury to inspect the President’s motivations for his official actions and to second-guess their propriety.”
But such an inspection is exactly what the Constitution itself plainly calls for. An impeachment court and, later, a criminal court would have to determine whether Jones pardoned Dealer because she thought he was innocent, or because she thought he had already suffered enough, or because he put money in her pocket for the very purpose of procuring the pardon. The smoking gun may well be in Jones’s diary—her “private records”—or in a recorded Oval Office conversation with Jones’s “advisers,” as was the case in the Watergate scandal. Essentially, the Court in Trump v. United States is declaring the Constitution itself unconstitutional. Instead of properly starting with the Constitution’s text and structure, the Court has ended up repealing them.
There’s more at the link, but I’ve given you the gist.
Kelsey Griffin, Erica Orden, and Lara Seligman at Politico: The terrifying SEAL Team 6 scenario lurking in the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.
In her dissent to Monday’s Supreme Court ruling, Justice Sonia Sotomayor painted a grim portrait of a commander-in-chief now “immune, immune, immune” from criminal liability and free to exploit official presidential power against political opponents.
“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival?” she wrote. “Immune.”
As extraordinary as that prospect might sound, constitutional law experts say she’s right: The court’s decision in Trump v. United States really does appear to immunize a hypothetical president who directed the military to commit murder, though a president might be hard-pressed to find someone to carry out such an order
Young woman relaxing, by Francesco Masriera
The crux of the issue, legal scholars said, is that the decision granted total immunity for any actions a president takes using the “core powers” that the Constitution bestows on the office. One such power is the authority to command the military.
“The language of the Supreme Court’s decision seems to suggest that because this is a core function of the president, that there is absolute immunity from criminal prosecution,” said Cheryl Bader, a criminal law professor at Fordham Law School and a former federal prosecutor. “If Trump, as commander in chief, ordered his troops to assassinate somebody or stage a coup, that would seem to fall within the absolute immunity provision of the court’s decision.”
The hypothetical about a president deploying the Navy SEALs to assassinate a political opponent has come up before — including during a lower-court hearing on Trump’s immunity litigation and during the Supreme Court’s own oral arguments in the case. It was raised as an absurdity to illustrate that the most sweeping version of Trump’s immunity theory could not possibly be right. In fact, when Justice Samuel Alito broached the scenario during oral arguments, he drew laughter in the courtroom.
So the fact that Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion on Monday did not attempt to directly carve out such extreme examples immediately raised alarm among some experts. Roberts’ opinion appeared to address the matter only obliquely.
Is it possible that Roberts doesn’t understand that Trump wants to use violence? I have no doubt that is if he is elected, he will order the military to fire live rounds at protesters.
Media Matters: Heritage Foundation president celebrates Supreme Court immunity decision: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution”
KEVIN ROBERTS (HERITAGE FOUNDATION PRESIDENT): In spite of all this nonsense from the left, we are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back. No one in the audience should be despairing.
No one should be discouraged. We ought to be really encouraged by what happened yesterday. And in spite of all of the injustice, which, of course, friends and audience of this show, of our friend Steve know, we are going to prevail.
Number two, to the point of the clips and, of course, your preview of the fact that I am an early American historian and love the Constitution. That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it’s vital for a lot of reasons. But I would go to Federalist No. 70.
If people in the audience are looking for something to read over Independence Day weekend, in addition to rereading the Declaration of Independence, read Hamilton’s No. 70 because there, along with some other essays, in some other essays, he talks about the importance of a vigorous executive.
You know, former congressman, the importance of Congress doing its job, but we also know the importance of the executive being able to do his job. And can you imagine, Dave Brat, any president, put politics off to the side, any president having to second guess, triple guess every decision they’re making in their official capacity, you couldn’t have the republic that you just described.
But number three, let me speak about the radical left. You and I have both been parts of faculties and faculty senates and understand that the left has taken over our institutions. The reason that they are apoplectic right now, the reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning.
And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.
That’s all I have for you today. I’ve included some relaxing paintings to counteract the horror.
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/07/03/wednesday-reads-63/
#HeritageFoundation #JohnHarwood #JohnRoberts #KevinRoberts #ProPublicaInterviewWithBiden #SealTeam6Scenario #SupremeCourt
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Laid down woman sleeping, by Felix Valloton
Good Morning!!
I don’t know how much I can post today. I’m exhausted and overwhelmed by the events of the past week or so. How much worse can things get in this country? As Democrats, we are dealing with assaults from the corrupt Supreme Court as well as MAGA Republicans, the media pundit class, and cowardly members of our own party. Biden had a bad debate, yes; but so did Trump. He did nothing but spew lies. He didn’t address one policy issue, because he is too stupid and lazy to even understand policy. But all we hear from the DC pundits is that Biden should step down.
Folks, the way we choose presidents since 1972 is through primaries, and Joe Biden won all the primaries. He holds most of the delegates. His campaign has collected millions in donations that can’t be transferred to another candidate. It’s possible the money could go to Kamala Harris, but the DC/NY pundits don’t want her.
Biden is on the ballot in many states; if another candidate runs in his place, voters would have to write in his/her name. With four months left before the election, there just isn’t time for a new candidate to raise money, hire staff, set up campaign offices around the country, and become known to low information voters. That candidate would also have to deal with the anger and resentment of people who voted for Biden/Harris–especially the African American and women voters who are essential to Democrats winning elections.
Finally, an open convention–which some pundits are calling for–would be an insane shit show that would tear the party apart. Push for this if you really want King Trump in the White House–this time with no guardrails from so-called adults in the room.
If you want more details on why replacing our nominee would be a horrible idea, here is a long Twitter thread by Dana Houle that spells out the challenges that would be faced by a candidate who replaced Biden. WordPress won’t let me post the tweets, but I’ll copy some of them here.
1/ Democrats cannot nominate anyone except Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. It’s impossible. If the Biden candidacy ends, so does the Biden campaign. It’s not transferable. Anyone else other than possibly Kamala Harris would have to start from nothing. That’s can’t be done.
2/It’s possible I’m missing something, but I don’t think so. Here’s why the Democrats can nominate Joe Biden, or possibly Kamala Harris, but nobody else. There’s only one candidate with a 2024 presidential campaign committee registered with the Federal Election Commission.
3/Some of the “stuff” of the Biden campaign can probably be transferred to the DNC (and maybe state parties), but most of it can’t. Another candidate can’t just take over Biden’s campaign. So, think about it. A new nominee would not have a campaign. Like, not a tax ID…
4/Not a bank account, not a website or address. There would be nothing. They would start out largely paralyzed for weeks. First and most obviously, there would be no staff. And there would be no HR process for hiring staff, no payroll process. So a new campaign trying to…
5/…rapidly expand would have to focus on staffing. They could probably hire people from the Biden campaign, but not all would want to work for the new candidate. Among the first people needed would be compliance and legal staff, because a new campaign would be immediately…
6/…challenged on ballot access and all kinds of other stuff. Compliance would be needed to deal with the massive influx of immediate cash and to be sure everything meets FEC rules. But to get cash they’d need banking/accounting as well. So that needs to be set up…
7/And since most of the money would come in online, they’d need to immediately set up a web operation robust enough to handle to load, and secure enough to handle the obvious cyberattacks that would happen. So they’d need contracts for servers, support staff, etc…
8/This new campaign would also be immediately inundated with calls and emails from press, potential volunteers and donors, other campaigns/party orgs, orgs inviting the candidate to events, etc.. So they would immediately need staff for press, scheduling, political, etc
9/Some of these people could probably slide over from the DNC or state parties. But that leaves holes at the DNC and state parties. But let’s say they could immediately staff up. Where does everyone work? Office leases prob can’t be automatically transferred to the…
10/…new campaign, so all of those would need to be renegotiated, and some may not be available to the new campaign. They’d also have to deal with utilities. Then, how does everyone communicate? As we know from 2016, security breeches can be fatal. So it’s not something…
11/…that can be tossed together in a day or so. But let’s say all the staff and infrastructure can be conjured from the ether. What about the data? Some could probably be transferred, but some of the lists would probably need to be purchased at fair market value from…
12/…Biden/Harris 2024. The new campaign would be starting out with no email lists, no volunteer lists, no fundraising lists, etc. They’d also be starting with no contracts with vendors. All those contracts would have to be negotiated
There is much more to this thread. I recommend reading it if you’re thinking Biden should step down or you want to inform other people who think that.
From Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice: The pundit class needs to get a grip.
After President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week, the punditocracy has gone both apeshit and feral.
The New York Times editorial board and seemingly every columnist at the paper called on Biden to withdraw from the race in pieces with headlines like, “President Biden, I’ve seen enough.” So did the Chicago Tribune editorial board and New Yorker editor David Remnick. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, co-host of Biden’s favorite morning show, urged the president to at last consider stepping aside. And Pod Save America’s response to the debate was so apoplectic that it prompted the Biden campaign to take a shot at “self-important Podcasters.”
The Sea, by Frederick Childe Hassam
The feeding frenzy/panic is to some extent understandable and inevitable. Biden wanted the debate early in order to put to rest fears about his age and to end the conversation about whether he would drop off the ticket. Instead, he sounded confused, and his lifelong stutter was more prominent than it ever has been in his decades-long career. Media figures licking their chops about the incendiary conflicts and clicks of a contested convention started to salivate a river. Democrats nervous about Biden’s ability to wage a forceful campaign became outright fearful.
But amidst all the tearing of garments and vultures circling, the fact is that we’re still pretty much where we were pre-debate. There are two questions: Is Biden fit to serve? And, would Democrats benefit by forcing him off the ticket? The answers remain “he is” and “probably not.”
There’s little evidence Biden is actually in mental decline.
The debate about Biden’s debate performance has largely focused on his appearance, suggesting he’s unelectable and finessing the question of whether he’s actually unfit. Some outlets, though, openly asserted that Biden is in cognitive decline, arguing that laypeople watching a debate can instantly assess someone’s mental fitness.
The Chicago Tribune, for example, argued Biden “should announce that he will be a single-term president who now has seen the light when it comes to his own capabilities in the face of the singular demands of being the president of the United States.” They added, “Everyone sees that now.”
But you can’t actually just “see” whether someone is in cognitive decline. Yes, people are often convinced that signs of physical illness or hesitation reflect mental hesitation; that’s why there’s so much prejudice against stutterers. But editorial boards and people with a public platform have a responsibility to inform readers, not just mirror popular prejudices.
What we know about aging, and about Biden, has not changed since the debate. In May, the Washington Post consulted with experts about the aging process and how likely aging is to affect the decision-making abilities of Biden and Republican challenger Donald Trump, who’s no spring chicken himself.
Those experts uniformly “rejected any suggestion that there should be an upper age limit for the presidency.” They also argued that there were many advantages to older candidates, who were likely to have better judgement and more emotional stability. According to Earl Miller, a professor of neuroscience at MIT, “Knowledge and experience count for a lot, and that can more than make up for slight losses of memory as a result of aging.”
Experts also pointed out that articulation problems, mixing up words, or using the wrong word were common problems as people aged, but none of them indicate cognitive decline overall. Stutters can also worsen and improve sporadically over a lifetime, but that doesn’t mean someone is impaired.
Also, again, experts insist that you can’t diagnose cognitive decline by watching TV clips, or even by watching a debate.
Read the rest at Public Notice.
Yesterday, ProPublica released a transcript and video of their unscripted interview with Biden from less than a year ago. The interviewer was John Harwood: We’re Releasing Our Full, Unedited Interview With Joe Biden From September.
Following Biden’s poor debate performance against Donald Trump, we’re releasing the full and unedited 21-minute interview we conducted with President Joe Biden nine days before his interview with Special Counsel Robert K. Hur.
In the wake of President Joe Biden’s poor debate performance, his opponents and most major media organizations have pointed out that he has done few interviews that give the public an opportunity to hear him speak without a script or teleprompters.
Woman in red relaxing on sofa, Goutami Mishra
Impressions from Special Counsel Robert K. Hur about his five hours of interviews with the president on Oct. 8 and 9 drove months of coverage. The prosecutor said Biden had “diminished faculties in advancing age” and called him a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden angrily dismissed these assertions, which Vice President Kamala Harris called “politically motivated.”
House Republicans on Monday sued Attorney General Merrick B. Garland for audio recordings of the interview as the White House asserts executive privilege to deny their release.
ProPublica obtained a rare interview with Biden on Sept. 29, nine days before the Hur interviews began. We released the video, which was assembled from footage shot by five cameras, on Oct. 1. We edited out less than a minute of crosstalk and exchanges with the camera people, as is customary in such interviews.
Today, we are releasing the full, 21-minute interview, unedited as seen from the view of the single camera focused on Biden. We understand that this video captures a moment in time nine months ago and that it will not settle the ongoing arguments about the president’s acuity today. Still, we believe it is worth giving the public another chance to see one of Biden’s infrequent conversations with a reporter.
Conducting the interview was veteran journalist and former CNN White House correspondent John Harwood, who requested it and then worked with ProPublica to film and produce it.
He did not send questions to the White House ahead of time, nor did he get approval for the topics to be discussed during the interview.
Recording began as soon as Biden was miked and sitting in the chair that Friday at 2:50 p.m. Earlier that day, Biden’s press staff had said the president would have only 10 minutes for the interview, instead of the previously agreed upon 20 minutes. We requested that the interview go the full 20 minutes. You can hear during the unedited interview a couple of moments when White House staff interrupted to signal that the interview should come to a close. Biden seemed eager to continue talking.
Read and watch the interview at ProPublica.
What’s truly amazing to me is that the media is focused on getting rid of Biden instead of the recent decision by the corrupt Supreme Court that granted king-like powers to Trump if he is elected. The media is doing to Biden what they did to Hillary Clinton and Al Gore–focusing on minutia and in doing so, supporting a dangerous candidate who will do untold damage to the country. George W. Bush was bad enough; a Trump presidency would mean the end of our democracy. He would pull us out of NATO and ally the U.S. with Russia, China, Hungary, Turkey, and North Korea. He has announced his plan to deport millions of immigrants, who will be put in camps until he can figure out how to get rid of them. Is that what we want? I know I don’t.
Here are a few articles to check out today.
Dahlia Lithwick at Slate: Don’t Be Hysterical, Ladies. Daddy Chief Justice Knows Best.
Last week, finding himself furious at the court’s per curiamdecision to hold off on deciding a big abortion case about the kinds of miscarriage care states may withhold from pregnant women in emergency rooms, Justice Samuel Alito excoriated his colleagues for punting. In his view, as he put it—in an opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch—the court’s “about-face” on taking, then running away from, the EMTALA abortion case was “baffling” because “nothing legally relevant has occurred” since the court granted an emergency stay in January and plonked itself into a dispute before it went through the appeals process. It was an easy case, he sniffed. Many amicus briefs had been filed, he huffed. Why had the court balked at the last minute? Thinking. Thinking. Then: “Apparently,” he hypothesized, “the Court has simply lost the will to decide the easy but emotional and highly politicized question that the case presents.”
That’s right. The majority of the court (and all of its females) found the issue too “emotional” to do the hard work of denying women in acute medical emergencies abortion care.
Fairfield Porter, On the Porch, 1961
Had he given his word choice 10 seconds’ further thought (or even conferred with his wife, who is by all accounts “fond of flags”), Alito might have taken out that “emotional” crack before attacking Amy Coney Barrett’s defection in this matter, in the time between the accidental release of the draft decision and its final publication the next day. He did not.
It’s gross, but not unexpected, that often when the court fractures along gender lines, as it has frequently this term, you will hear a whole lot of the jovial “Calm down, little missy” talk that you might recall from 1950s sitcoms.
Last week, finding himself furious at the court’s per curiamdecision to hold off on deciding a big abortion case about the kinds of miscarriage care states may withhold from pregnant women in emergency rooms, Justice Samuel Alito excoriated his colleagues for punting. In his view, as he put it—in an opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch—the court’s “about-face” on taking, then running away from, the EMTALA abortion case was “baffling” because “nothing legally relevant has occurred” since the court granted an emergency stay in January and plonked itself into a dispute before it went through the appeals process. It was an easy case, he sniffed. Many amicus briefs had been filed, he huffed. Why had the court balked at the last minute? Thinking. Thinking. Then: “Apparently,” he hypothesized, “the Court has simply lost the will to decide the easy but emotional and highly politicized question that the case presents.”minal law.’ ”
“Our dissenting colleagues exude an impressive infallibility,” writes Roberts, like a girls soccer coach. “While their confidence may be inspiring, the Court adheres to time-tested practices instead—deciding what is required to dispose of this case.” Hate the player, change the game.
In brushing past the district court opinion written by Judge Tanya Chutkan and the thorough, 57-page appellate opinion joined by Judges Karen LeCraft Henderson, Florence Pan, and J. Michelle Childs, the chief justice manages to malign their work product too: “Despite the unprecedented nature of this case, and the very significant constitutional questions that it raises, the lower courts rendered their decisions on a highly expedited basis.” Shorter Roberts? Really hard to find good help these days.
On CNN, Donald Trump’s former White House counsel Ty Cobb coughed up the same critique of Sotomayor. “Her dissent was a little hysterical, and it really offered no analysis,” he said. “A lot of screaming, no analysis. And I think that was unfortunate.”
Screaming. Insubstantial. Hysterical. What men call banshees, women call prophecy. And of course if there are any sitting justices on the Roberts court whose entire jurisprudence can be reduced to a soggy skein of hurt feelings and self-pity, they are not females.
We women thought we had made progress, but it’s not looking that way these days. There’s quite a bit more to read at Slate. Lithwick has reached the end of her patience. Here’s what she wrote on Twitter on Monday evening:
As an official representative of the legal commentariat I want to suggest that tonight’s a good news cycle to talk to the fascism and authoritarianism experts. This is their inning now…
Akhil Reed Amar at The Atlantic: Something Has Gone Deeply Wrong at the Supreme Court.
Forget Donald Trump. Forget Joe Biden. Think instead about the Constitution. What does this document, the supreme law of our land, actually say about lawsuits against ex-presidents?
Nothing remotely resembling what Chief Justice John Roberts and five associate justices declared in yesterday’s disappointing Trump v. United States decision. The Court’s curious and convoluted majority opinion turns the Constitution’s text and structure inside out and upside down, saying things that are flatly contradicted by the document’s unambiguous letter and obvious spirit.
Imagine a simple hypothetical designed to highlight the key constitutional clauses that should have been the Court’s starting point: In the year 2050, when Trump and Biden are presumably long gone, David Dealer commits serious drug crimes and then bribes President Jane Jones to pardon him.
Is Jones acting as president, in her official capacity, when she pardons Dealer? Of course. She is pardoning qua president. No one else can issue such a pardon. The Constitution expressly vests this power in the president: “The President … shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States.”
Wind from the Sea, by Andrew Wyeth
But the Constitution also contains express language that a president who takes a bribe can be impeached for bribery and then booted from office: “The President … shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” And once our hypothetical President Jones has been thus removed and is now ex-President Jones, the Constitution’s plain text says that she is subject to ordinary criminal prosecution, just like anyone else: “In cases of Impeachment … the Party convicted shall … be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”
Obviously, in Jones’s impeachment trial in the Senate, all sorts of evidence is admissible to prove not just that she issued the pardon but also why she did this—to prove that she had an unconstitutional motive, to prove that she pardoned Dealer because she was bribed to do so. Just as obviously, in the ensuing criminal case, all of this evidence surely must be allowed to come in.
But the Trump majority opinion, written by Roberts, says otherwise, proclaiming that “courts may not inquire into the President’s motives.” In a later footnote all about bribery, the Roberts opinion says that criminal-trial courts are not allowed to “admit testimony or private records of the President or his advisers probing the official act itself. Allowing that sort of evidence would invite the jury to inspect the President’s motivations for his official actions and to second-guess their propriety.”
But such an inspection is exactly what the Constitution itself plainly calls for. An impeachment court and, later, a criminal court would have to determine whether Jones pardoned Dealer because she thought he was innocent, or because she thought he had already suffered enough, or because he put money in her pocket for the very purpose of procuring the pardon. The smoking gun may well be in Jones’s diary—her “private records”—or in a recorded Oval Office conversation with Jones’s “advisers,” as was the case in the Watergate scandal. Essentially, the Court in Trump v. United States is declaring the Constitution itself unconstitutional. Instead of properly starting with the Constitution’s text and structure, the Court has ended up repealing them.
There’s more at the link, but I’ve given you the gist.
Kelsey Griffin, Erica Orden, and Lara Seligman at Politico: The terrifying SEAL Team 6 scenario lurking in the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.
In her dissent to Monday’s Supreme Court ruling, Justice Sonia Sotomayor painted a grim portrait of a commander-in-chief now “immune, immune, immune” from criminal liability and free to exploit official presidential power against political opponents.
“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival?” she wrote. “Immune.”
As extraordinary as that prospect might sound, constitutional law experts say she’s right: The court’s decision in Trump v. United States really does appear to immunize a hypothetical president who directed the military to commit murder, though a president might be hard-pressed to find someone to carry out such an order
Young woman relaxing, by Francesco Masriera
The crux of the issue, legal scholars said, is that the decision granted total immunity for any actions a president takes using the “core powers” that the Constitution bestows on the office. One such power is the authority to command the military.
“The language of the Supreme Court’s decision seems to suggest that because this is a core function of the president, that there is absolute immunity from criminal prosecution,” said Cheryl Bader, a criminal law professor at Fordham Law School and a former federal prosecutor. “If Trump, as commander in chief, ordered his troops to assassinate somebody or stage a coup, that would seem to fall within the absolute immunity provision of the court’s decision.”
The hypothetical about a president deploying the Navy SEALs to assassinate a political opponent has come up before — including during a lower-court hearing on Trump’s immunity litigation and during the Supreme Court’s own oral arguments in the case. It was raised as an absurdity to illustrate that the most sweeping version of Trump’s immunity theory could not possibly be right. In fact, when Justice Samuel Alito broached the scenario during oral arguments, he drew laughter in the courtroom.
So the fact that Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion on Monday did not attempt to directly carve out such extreme examples immediately raised alarm among some experts. Roberts’ opinion appeared to address the matter only obliquely.
Is it possible that Roberts doesn’t understand that Trump wants to use violence? I have no doubt that is if he is elected, he will order the military to fire live rounds at protesters.
Media Matters: Heritage Foundation president celebrates Supreme Court immunity decision: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution”
KEVIN ROBERTS (HERITAGE FOUNDATION PRESIDENT): In spite of all this nonsense from the left, we are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back. No one in the audience should be despairing.
No one should be discouraged. We ought to be really encouraged by what happened yesterday. And in spite of all of the injustice, which, of course, friends and audience of this show, of our friend Steve know, we are going to prevail.
Number two, to the point of the clips and, of course, your preview of the fact that I am an early American historian and love the Constitution. That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it’s vital for a lot of reasons. But I would go to Federalist No. 70.
If people in the audience are looking for something to read over Independence Day weekend, in addition to rereading the Declaration of Independence, read Hamilton’s No. 70 because there, along with some other essays, in some other essays, he talks about the importance of a vigorous executive.
You know, former congressman, the importance of Congress doing its job, but we also know the importance of the executive being able to do his job. And can you imagine, Dave Brat, any president, put politics off to the side, any president having to second guess, triple guess every decision they’re making in their official capacity, you couldn’t have the republic that you just described.
But number three, let me speak about the radical left. You and I have both been parts of faculties and faculty senates and understand that the left has taken over our institutions. The reason that they are apoplectic right now, the reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning.
And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.
That’s all I have for you today. I’ve included some relaxing paintings to counteract the horror.
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/07/03/wednesday-reads-63/
#HeritageFoundation #JohnHarwood #JohnRoberts #KevinRoberts #ProPublicaInterviewWithBiden #SealTeam6Scenario #SupremeCourt
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Tutte le citazioni di “Stranger Things”
Sembra essere diventato il gioco dell’estate: cogliere più citazioni possibili dal nuovo fenomeno televisivo della stagione, l’acclamato e meraviglioso Stranger Things, nuova serie tv targata Netflix, capace di trasportarci, nel giro di otto episodi, nei nostri amatissimi anni 80. Sono davvero innumerevoli le citazioni disseminate tra le varie scene di questa serie tv: abbiamo provato a raccogliere qui tutti i riferimenti che siamo riusciti a trovare (e, mi raccomando, se ne avete altri da aggiungere potete continuare la lista sui commenti). Cominciamo a giocare, in rigoroso ordine alfabetico (e fate attenzione, perché quanto segue è pieno zeppo di spoiler, siete avvisati!).
UPDATE: Le citazioni riguardanti la seconda stagione sono scritte in blu.
UPDATE: Le citazioni riguardanti la terza stagione sono scritte in verde.
UPDATE: Le citazioni riguardanti la quarta stagione sono scritte in giallo.Alien: Senza dubbio, una delle citazioni più palesi. Quando nell’ultima puntata il povero Will viene trovato con una sorta di mostro alieno all’interno della sua bocca, è impossibile non pensare al film di Ridley Scott, per non parlare del modo in cui Hopper si china su un enorme uovo dischiuso, altro riferimento alla saga di Alien. Nella terza stagione il Mind Flyer mostra una sorta di estensione interna che somiglia molto alla creatura del film di Ridley Scott: c’è anche una scena in cui Nancy viene attaccata dal mostro, che è parallela al celebre frame con Sigournay Weaver e lo Xenomorfo.
Alien – La Clonazione: Quando Hopper e Joyce trovano il laboratorio di Demogorgoni in Russia, la scena appare praticamente uguale ad una sequenza di questo film di Jean-Pierre Jeunet del 1997, in cui, pensate un po’, aveva recitato anche la stessa Winona Ryder.
Aliens: Nella seconda stagione troviamo Paul Reiser nei panni del dottor Owens, che ci viene presentato allo stesso modo del suo personaggio nel film del 1986, quando doveva convincere la sopravvissuta Ripley a fidarsi di lui (lo stesso comportamento che ha il dottor Owens nei confronti di Will e Joyce). In un’altra scena Owens osserva attentamente i monitor per seguire i movimenti dei suoi uomini, stessa cosa che succedeva in Aliens (e in entrambe le scene uno degli scienziati/soldati afferma “stay frosty, boys”, più citazione di così…). Inoltre così come in Stranger Things c’è un gatto arancione, Mews, che reagisce male quando Dustin porta in casa Dart, anche nel film di Cameron c’è un gatto dello stesso colore che comincia ad agitarsi nel momento in cui arriva il mostro.
Amanti perduti: Il film di Marcel Carné del 1945 è uno dei film preferiti di Robin, come la ragazza ci dice nel finale della terza stagione.
Amityville Horror: Tutta la backstory di Victor Creel è un palese riferimento al film del 1979 di Stuart Rosenberg, in cui una famiglia si trasferisce in un edificio per poi scoprire che è posseduto da forze maligne.
Apocalypse Now: Nel quarto episodio, un attimo prima che Nancy venga chiamata dalla preside per essere interrogata dalla polizia a proposito della scomparsa di Barb, la professoressa sta leggendo alla classe Cuore di tenebra, il romanzo di Joseph Conrad che ha ispirato il film di Francis Ford Coppola (1979).
l’Appartamento: Nella terza stagione quello di Wilder è uno dei film citati da Robin sul podio dei suoi preferiti.
Bella in rosa: Nel finale della seconda stagione Dustin si acconcia i capelli allo stesso modo di Duckie, nel film del 1986 firmato da Howard Deutch. Inoltre in entrambi i casi la ragazza più popolare della scuola chiede al ragazzo di ballare con lei.
Blow Up: C’è addirittura un omaggio a Michelangelo Antonioni, abbastanza palese nella scena in cui Jonathan e Nancy ingrandiscono il dettaglio della fotografia di Barb per cercare di identificare la presenza alle spalle della ragazza. Impossibile non pensare a David Hammings che ingrandisce il dettaglio della pistola all’interno di una sua fotografia. Anche l’immagine di Jonathan che “ruba” fotografie da dietro un cespuglio non può non rimandare alla stessa immagine del protagonista di Blow Up (1966).
Carrie lo sguardo di Satana: Stephen King è senza dubbio uno dei grandi ispiratori della serie. Così come Carrie, anche Eleven è dotata di poteri paranormali e, come la protagonista del film di Brian De Palma del 1976, anche la giovane Eleven ha un carattere timido e quieto finché non viene provocata… Ragazze letali. Nella quarta stagione inoltre, tutta la sottotrama di Eleven a scuola, dove viene bullizzata dai compagni di classe, fa inevitabilmente pensare al film di De Palma.
la Casa: Il poster del filmone di Sam Raimi (1981) campeggia in bella vista nella stanza di Jonathan. Ma non solo: c’è un’inquadratura alle spalle del dondolo bianco nella veranda di casa di Joyce che è identica a quella del dondolo nella veranda della casa del film di Raimi. Ad ogni modo quel dondolo di legno sulla destra della veranda non può trovarsi lì per caso… Nella seconda stagione il modo in cui i tralci intrappolano Hopper ricorda molto la prima vittima del film di Sam Raimi, bloccata nel bosco da alcuni rami “viventi”.
CHiPs: Jonathan si riferisce ai due agenti del governo che si sono installati in casa Wheeler con i nomi dei due agenti del celebre telefilm anni 70, Ponch e John appunto.
Conan il Barbaro: Nel finale della quarta stagione vediamo Hopper raccogliere da terra uno spadone per affrontare il demogorgone. Quella spada, se si guarda bene, è esattamente la stessa usata da Arnold Schwarzenegger in questo film di John Milius del 1982.
la Cosa: Il poster del film di John Carpenter del 1982 campeggia in bella vista nel seminterrato dove Mike nasconde Eleven, inoltre nel nono episodio, quando Dustin telefona a casa del professor Clarke per chiedergli come si costruisce una vasca di deprivazione sensoriale, il professore sta guardando in tv proprio questo film. Nella seconda stagione il mostro odia il calore e ha bisogno del freddo, proprio come la Cosa del film di Carpenter. Stessa cosa che si ripropone nella terza stagione, con un riferimento ancora più netto nella scena in cui i due giornalisti “posseduti” Tom e Bruce si uniscono in un unico, mostruoso, essere.
Dark Crystal: Il poster del film del 1982 di Frank Oz e Jim Henson è appeso nella cameretta di Mike.
il Dottor Zivago: Nella quarta stagione Robin e Steve discutono a proposito di questo film. Sarà un caso che si tratta di una pellicola ambientata in Russia sotto la neve, come la sottotrama di Hopper?
Dracula di Bram Stoker: Nel film del 1992 di Francis Ford Coppola Winona Ryder interpreta Mina Harker, la quale in una scena balla con Dracula. Nella seconda stagione di ST Joyce balla con Bob, che per Halloween si è vestito proprio come il celebre vampiro.
l’Esorcista: Nella seconda stagione Will viene letteralmente posseduto dal mostro, il Mind Flyer. Il piccolo Byers, legato al letto, viene liberato dalla possessione tramite un’operazione che ricorda da vicino l’esorcismo praticato a Regan nel capolavoro di William Friedkin. Ad ogni modo sono moltissimi i richiami tra la vicenda di Will e L’Esorcista, dalle scene in ospedale ad alcuni momenti con la madre.
E.T. L’Extraterrestre: Il padre di tutte le citazioni. Ci si potrebbe scrivere un articolo a parte, soltanto tenendo conto del rapporto tra il film di Spielberg del 1982 e ST. I riferimenti più evidenti? Senza dubbio il rapporto tra Mike e Eleven è decisamente simile a quello tra Elliott e E.T., e indovinate a cosa gioca Elliott all’inizio del film? Ovviamente a Dungeons & Dragons, proprio come fanno i quattro amici all’inizio della serie. Elliott nasconderà E.T. nell’armadio della sua stanza, come farà Mike con Eleven, e la stessa El, una volta rimasta sola, accenderà il televisore di casa (proprio come fa E.T.). Altra citazione? Mike finge di star male per non andare a scuola e lavorare al suo piano per salvare Will, stesso espediente usato da Elliott per saltare le lezioni e poter conoscere meglio il suo misterioso ospite. Eleven indossa una parrucca bionda, così come E.T. in una piccola scena del film di Spielberg. E ancora, ovviamente, la fuga finale in bicicletta, con E.T. che fa volare le bici sopra il posto di blocco della polizia, molto simile alla corsa in bici dei quattro amici e al furgone che Eleven fa volare, dando il via libera alla loro fuga. Nella seconda stagione Eleven, nella speranza di poter uscire durante la notte di Halloween, indossa un lenzuolo da fantasma, proprio come faceva l’extraterrestre nel film di Spielberg. Inoltre sulla mensola di Dustin troviamo un pupazzetto di E.T.
Explorers: Ragazzini che comunicano tra di loro tramite walkie talkie? Ricorda decisamente i tre giovani protagonisti del bellissimo Explorers (1985) di Joe Dante.
Fenomeni Paranormali Incontrollabili: Film del 1984 di Mark Lester, tratto, neanche a dirlo, da un romanzo di Stephen King. La piccola Charlie, bambina dai poteri paranormali, ha molto in comune con Eleven di ST. A partire dalla cuffia piena di elettrodi che gli agenti del governo le mettono in testa per studiare la sua attività cerebrale e, senza dubbio, viene da qui anche l’idea del sangue dal naso in seguito all’utilizzo dei poteri mentali.
Fluido Mortale: Celebre anche con il nome di Blob, il cult horror del 1958 ispira molto il modo in cui il Mind Flyer si dissolve, scorre sul pavimento, per poi assemblarsi come un unico essere. Inoltre anche il fluido del film non ama il caldo.
la Fortezza Nascosta: Nella terza stagione il film di Kurosawa è citato da Robin come uno dei suoi film preferiti.
Ghostbusters: Uno dei punti di riferimento della seconda stagione. Mike, Lucas, Dustin e Will per Halloween si vestono proprio da acchiappafantasmi, inoltre il celebre tema musicale di Ray Parker Jr. è presente sui titoli di coda della seconda puntata. Tra l’altro i “democani” fanno vagamente pensare ai mostruosi demoni a quattro zampe del film di Ivan Reitman.
il Giorno degli Zombi: Film di Romero del 1985, è la pellicola che i ragazzini di Hawkins vanno a vedere al cinema del centro commerciale durante il primo episodio.
i Goonies: Parliamo di uno dei capisaldi del cinema degli anni 80, nonché uno dei grandi punti di riferimento di ST, dai costumi all’atmosfera: quando un gruppo di ragazzini si lancia in un’avventura pericolosa, senza l’aiuto degli adulti, non si può non pensare al capolavoro di Richard Donner (1985). In particolare il personaggio di Dustin fa pensare molto a Chunk (quando gli viene chiesto di “fare quella cosa con le braccia”, fa pensare in qualche modo alla danza del ventre del più goffo dei Goonies), sia per la simpatia che per la fisionomia. E quando Dustin trova la scorta di budini al cioccolato nella mensa scolastica è impossibile non pensare ai gelati trovati da Chunk nel magazzino del ristorante (dove oltre ai gelati trovava anche un cadavere). Inoltre il bullo dei Goonies si chiama Troy, proprio come il bullo di ST e il personaggio di Barb ricorda moltissimo quello di Stef. Ancora: in entrambi i titoli in questione c’è una sorta di triangolo amoroso adolescenziale con il ricco figlio di papà, la borghese perfettina e il fratello maggiore di uno dei ragazzini. Un caso? Probabilmente no. Nella seconda stagione i Goonies sono addirittura omaggiati con la presenza nel cast di Sean Astin, che interpretava Mickey nel celebre film di Richard Donner. Proprio Astin strizza l’occhio al film del 1985 con la battuta: “Cos’è la X? Il tesoro dei pirati?”. Inoltre la scena in cui Dustin divide il suo snack con Dart porta immediatamente alla mente la sequenza in cui Chunk condivide il suo snack con Sloth. Nell’ultima puntata poi, Steve dice che i ragazzini non possono muoversi di casa perché ha promesso di tenerli al sicuro, stesso ruolo da babysitter che aveva Josh Brolin nel film di Donner.
La Grande Fuga: Yuri si riferisce a Hopper accennando a lui come “The Cooler King”. Riferimento inequivocabile al personaggio di Steve McQueen nel film del 1963 di John Sturges, storia di un americano che tenta la fuga da un campo di prigionia tedesco.
Gremlins: Nella seconda stagione Dustin si prende cura di un animaletto all’apparenza tenero e innocuo. In realtà si rivela essere un mostro. Non vi ricorda qualcosa? Nel film di Joe Dante il tenero Gizmo, anche lui all’apparenza dolce e innocuo, per colpe non sue si ritrova a generare i pericolosissimi mostriciattoli del titolo.
Guerre Stellari: Citatissimo già in E.T., figurarsi se poteva non essere citato anche qui. Le citazioni si sprecano davvero: Mike imita la voce di Yoda dicendo a Eleven “Ready are you? What know you of ready?”, stessa frase usata dal maestro Jedi nei confronti di Luke Skywalker ne L’Impero Colpisce Ancora. In un’altra scena Dustin cerca di convincere Elle a far volare il Millennium Falcon con la forza del pensiero (cosa che la ragazza farà senza grandi difficoltà una volta rimasta sola a casa). E ancora, probabilmente la citazione più bella tratta dalla saga di Lucas, è in quel reiterato “Lando! Lando!” da parte sempre di Dustin, temendo che il capo della polizia Hopper possa tradirli proprio come fa Lando Carlissian nei confronti di Han Solo e compagni, sempre ne L’Impero Colpisce Ancora. Ancora Dustin afferma due volte “I’ve got a bad feeling about this”, stessa espressione usata da Han Solo in ogni Episodio di Star Wars in cui compare. Aggiungerei anche che uno dei protagonisti di ST si chiama Lucas, non credo proprio si tratti di una coincidenza. Nella seconda stagione, alla sesta puntata, Mike cerca di salvare gli scienziati del laboratorio urlando continuamente “è una trappola” (“It’s a trap!”), una delle frasi più celebri di Star Wars. Nella discussa settima puntata Eleven viene “addestrata” all’uso della telecinesi allo stesso modo in cui abbiamo visto Luke in Episodio V. Inoltre, sempre Eleven nella stessa puntata, usa la “Forza” per soffocare il carceriere di sua madre, ricordando in tutto e per tutto Darth Vader. Nella terza stagione vediamo R2D2 tra i giocattoli che si animano nella stanza di Dustin. Nella quarta stagione invece Dustin cita L’Impero Colpisce Ancora, dicendo, mentre sta per lanciare il dado durante la partita a D&D, “never tell me the odds”, come fa Han Solo a C3P0 nel momento in cui decide di fuggire in un campo di asteroidi. Inoltre, sempre nella quarta stagione, viene ancora citata l’iconica frase di Han Solo “I’ve got a bad feeling about this”: stavolta a dirla è Murray.
i Guerrieri della notte: Nel settimo episodio la gang di Pittsburgh, alla quale si aggrega Eleven, viene presentata con una camminata che ricorda i celebri Warriors nel film di Walter Hill. Io onestamente non ho visto tutto questo gran riferimento al film, ma la citazione è stata dichiarata dai registi stessi nello speciale Beyond Stranger Things.
Halloween: John Carpenter è sicuramente uno dei punti di riferimento della serie. La musica, con le sue suggestioni synth, omaggia chiaramente il regista di Halloween. Il cognome di Will, Byers, fa subito pensare al Michael Myers del magnifico horror del 1978, inoltre, in una scena in cui Lucas e Dustin parlano di Elle, poco dopo averla incontrata, i due amici teorizzano che possa essere fuggita da un ospedale psichiatrico, facendo il nome proprio del terrificante Myers. Nella seconda stagione, proprio durante la notte di Halloween, Max spaventa i suoi nuovi amici indossando una maschera di Michael Myers. “L’uomo nero”, altro nome con cui veniva chiamato lo stesso Myers nel film di Carpenter, viene citato anche nella quarta stagione. Tra l’altro nel volume 2 della stessa, Eddie indossa una maschera di Michel Myers.
Happy Days: La prima vittima di Vecna, Chrissy, di cognome fa Cunningham ed è una cheerleader. Il suo personaggio, così come quello del suo ragazzo Jason, ricorda moltissimo i ragazzi degli anni 50 protagonisti del mitico telefilm, dove Cunningham era appunto il cognome della famiglia al centro della storia. Inoltre la somiglianza fisica tra Jason e Ron Howard (Richie Cunningham nel telefilm) non è casuale, anche se caratterialmente sono invece diversissimi.
Hellraiser: Sono molti i riferimenti tra Vecna, il villain della quarta stagione, e Pinhead, il celebre “cattivo” del film di Clive Barker del 1987. Entrambi erano esseri umani diventati mostri dopo essere finiti in una dimensione diversa (il Sottosopra di Stranger Things, nel nostro caso), inoltre c’è molta somiglianza nella voce dei due personaggi.
He-Man e i Dominatori dell’Universo: Quando Eleven accende il televisore si vede una parte della sigla di uno dei cartoni animati più amati degli anni 80, altro riferimento a quella cultura nella quale sono cresciuti i trentenni/quarantenni di oggi. Nella seconda stagione i pupazzetti dei Masters sono sparsi un po’ ovunque, in particolare in una scena divertente in cui Erica, la sorellina di Lucas, gioca con l’action figure di He-Man.
Incontri Ravvicinati del Terzo Tipo: Se E.T. è il padre di tutte le citazioni, il film di Spielberg (ancora lui) del 1977 è senza dubbio la madre. Quando si vede Joyce che monta tutte quelle luci in casa, seguendo il proprio istinto apparentemente folle, come si fa a non pensare a Richard Dreyfuss in vestaglia che sradica piante e radici dal suo giardino per ricostruire in casa l’oggetto della propria visione? E le luci natalizie di casa Byers, come non possono ricordare le luci colorate dell’astronave del film di Spielberg? E ancora, la sorellina di Mike che cammina da sola per casa, seguendo le luci, finendo poi nella stanza di Will, come può non far pensare al bimbo di “Incontri Ravvicinati”, che di notte cammina per casa da solo, seguendo il richiamo dei giocattoli animati e delle luci aliene? Nella seconda stagione il film di Spielberg è citato senza dubbio nella scena in cui Will ha una delle prime visioni del Mind Flyer: il piccolo Byers apre la porta di casa sua e viene investito da una luce calda, accesa: stessa sorte che che capitava al bambino di Incontri Ravvicinati poco prima di essere rapito.
Indiana Jones e il Tempio Maledetto: Altro film di Steven Spielberg citato a più riprese nella seconda stagione. Due scene in particolare omaggiano inequivocabilmente il film del 1984: Hopper, dopo esser stato salvato nel tunnel da Joyce e Bob, viene invitato ad andar via dallo scienziato con il lanciafiamme. Appena si allontana torna però indietro un momento per recuperare da terra il suo cappello marrone: la stessa iconica mossa di Indiana Jones. In un’altra scena Nancy e Jonathan restano a dormire a casa di Bauman: ognuno è nella sua stanza e ripete a voce alta alcune frasi dette in precedenza, cercando di trovare il coraggio per andare nell’altra camera. La stessa identica scena è presente nel film di Spielberg, in un’esilarante scena tra Harrison Ford e Kate Capshaw. Un’altra citazione la troviamo quando Nancy brucia Will con un attizzatoio rovente, esattamente come faceva Shorty con una torcia nel tentativo di risvegliare Indiana Jones. Il Tempio Maledetto è nuovamente omaggiato nell’ultima puntata quando Max si mette alla guida della macchina legandosi una scatola alla scarpa, in modo da poter raggiungere i pedali: stessa ingegnosa soluzione trovata da Shorty nel secondo film di Indiana Jones.
l’Invasione degli Ultracorpi: Uno dei riferimenti maggiori della terza stagione. I Flyed, o l’esercito del Mind Flyer se preferite, sono una sorta di versione alternativa degli abitanti della città, stessa cosa che succedeva nel bellissimo film di Kaufman del 1956. Inoltre nel film di riferimento la protagonista si chiamava Driscoll, come il nome della signora che in questa stagione avverte Nancy a proposito dei ratti in cantina.
It: Stephen King è uno degli autori più omaggiati da ST, basti dare un’occhiata al carattere usato per il titolo, praticamente identico a quello di molti libri dello scrittore statunitense. C’è una scena, durante un flashback all’interno della Castle Byers, in cui Joyce domanda a Will: “Non hai più paura dei pagliacci?”. Nell’ultimo episodio inoltre, il tentativo di Lucas di usare una fionda per colpire il mostro, è chiaramente un riferimento allo scontro tra i giovani protagonisti di It e Pennywise. Nella seconda stagione Nancy e Jonathan rivedono le cicatrici delle ferite che si erano fatti sulla mano nel finale della prima stagione: una scena già presente nel libro di Stephen King, quando i Perdenti, da grandi, ricordano la loro promessa rivedendo le cicatrici sulle mani. In un’altra scena Bob racconta a Will di un suo incubo ricorrente a proposito di un clown terrificante.
Jurassic Park: Poteva mancare la citazione ad un altro classico di Steven Spielberg? Ovviamente no. Nella seconda stagione Steve affronta Dart, salvo poi accorgersi che altri democani stanno arrivando alle sue spalle. I velociraptor del classico del 1993 si comportavano allo stesso modo. Il film viene citato anche nella scena in cui Bob deve muoversi nel laboratorio per riattivare l’elettricità, stando attento alla presenza dei mostri: al posto dei democani c’erano i raptor, ma la scena è la stessa. Nella terza stagione c’è anche un’altra scena molto simile, ovvero quando i ragazzi devono nascondersi dal Mind Flyer, accucciandosi sotto i mobili dei negozi del centro commerciale.
Karate Kid: Nello scontro tra Jonathan e Steve (episodio 6), quando quest’ultimo ne prende di santa ragione, il suo amico Tommy cerca di allontanare il fratello di Will urlandogli “He’s had enough, man! I said he’s had enough!” (“Ne ha avute abbastanza!”), stessa frase detta da uno dei bulli nel film del 1984 di John G. Avildsen, quando Daniel viene gonfiato di botte durante la notte di Halloween, prima di essere salvato dal maestro Miyagi. L’ambientazione della scena di lotta in ST, fa inoltre pensare moltissimo a quella di un altro scontro, quello tra Roddy Piper e Keith David in Essi Vivono di John Carpenter (1988). Nella seconda stagione, durante la festa di Halloween alla quale partecipano Nancy e Steve, alcuni personaggi sono vestiti come i membri del Cobra Kai. Nella terza stagione invece Ralph Macchio è al centro di una conversazione tra Max e Eleven.
Mad Max: Nella seconda stagione la nuova arrivata Maxine si firma MADMAX in sala giochi. Il proprietario inoltre, nella quinta puntata, la chiama “guerriera della strada”, come il titolo del secondo capitolo della saga di George Miller (Interceptor – Il guerriero della strada del 1981).
il Mago di Oz: Il poster di questo cult di Fleming è appeso nella stanzetta di Suzie, l’amica di Dustin.
Magnum P.I.: Il memorabile detective interpretato da Tom Selleck ispira senza alcun dubbio il look di Hopper: il baffo e la camicia sfarzosa sono un chiaro riferimento al telefilm. Inoltre lo stesso Hopper nel primo episodio della terza stagione sta guardando il telefilm in tv.
Mamma ho perso l’aereo: Forse è un riferimento forzato, ma il modo in cui Nancy e Jonathan preparano le trappole per attirare il mostro in casa dei Byers ricorda troppo da vicino la meticolosità con cui il piccolo Kevin disseminava trappole per impedire ai ladri di entrare in casa McAllister, nel film di John Hughes (1990).
Minority Report: Ancora un film di Spielberg, ma molto più recente (2002). Eleven immersa nella vasca di deprivazione sensoriale ricorda moltissimo la Agatha di Minority Report, anch’essa con i capelli rasati, anch’essa dai grandi poteri mentali, anch’essa capace di trasmettere le sue visioni mentre è distesa in una grande vasca.
the Mist: Torniamo a Stephen King, e in questo caso anche al bel film di Frank Daramond del 2007. Nell’episodio 4 di ST un uomo, collegato a un cavo, si introduce nel buco del muro dei laboratori Hawkins che, scopriremo poi, conduce al Sottosopra. Il cavo però, sotto gli occhi di Brenner e degli altri scienziati della Hawkins, verrà tirato indietro e di lui non resterà niente. La stessa scena avviene appunto in The Mist, quando un volontario decide di legarsi a una fune per uscire dal supermercato dove si sono rifugiati i sopravvissuti. Inutile dire che la fune tornerà indietro insanguinata, senza più alcuna traccia dell’uomo.
Mister Mamma: Nella seconda stagione il film del 1983 con Michael Keaton viene noleggiato dai Byers per la notte di Halloween.
Nightmare – Dal Profondo della Notte: In questa carrellata di citazioni non poteva mancare un altro maestro degli anni 80: Wes Craven. Il modo in cui il mostro deforma il muro di casa Byers cercando di uscire è un omaggio alla sagoma di Freddy Krueger che deforma il muro sopra la sua vittima dormiente nel film di Craven del 1984. Anche il rogo finale del mostro di ST ricorda molto il rogo in cui si dimena Krueger nella prima parte del film. Nightmare è inoltre uno dei riferimenti principali della quarta stagione: così come Krueger, anche Vecna uccide le sue vittime entrando nella loro mente e la morte di Chrissy alla fine del primo episodio ricorda moltissimo il modo in cui viene uccisa Tina nel film di Wes Craven. Inoltre, la presenza di Robert Englund (proprio l’attore che interpretava Freddy Krueger) nei panni di Victor Creel non può essere assolutamente un caso.
Poltergeist: Uno dei riferimenti diegetici più evidenti: Joyce porta a Will i biglietti del cinema per andare a vedere il film di Tobe Hooper (1982). Inoltre il modo in cui la stessa Joyce comunica con Will ricorda moltissimo la comunicazione tra i Freelings e la piccola Carol Anne, anche lei tra l’altro intrappolata in una sorta di altra dimensione.
Pulp Fiction: Riferimento piuttosto bizzarro, trattandosi di un film del 1994 (che di certo non ha bisogno di presentazioni). Quando Eddie dice di essere “pretty god damn far from OK”, come si può non pensare subito a Marcellus Wallace che, dopo essere stato violentato da due maniaci sessuali, afferma “I’m pretty fuckin’ far from OK”. Inoltre Robin, nell’ultimo episodio, afferma “I don’t believe in a higher power or divine intervention, but that was a miracle”, che evoca un concetto simile espresso da Samuel L. Jackson nel film di Tarantino.
Rambo: Nella terza stagione Alexei definisce Hopper un “Rambo grasso”.
il Ribelle: Il cinema, sulla cui insegna campeggia in bella vista l’insulto a Nancy nella penultima puntata, ha in programmazione il film di Michael Chapman (1983) con Tom Cruise.
Risky Business: Nella seconda stagione, durante la festa di Halloween, Nancy si veste come il personaggio di Lana nel film del 1983 firmato da Paul Brickman.
Ritorno al Futuro: Questa è una delle citazioni più difficili da trovare. Nell’ultimo episodio Eleven affronta il mostro all’interno di un’aula scolastica, lanciandolo contro una lavagna per poi distruggerlo (?). Bene, sopra la lavagna c’è un orologio da parete, sapete che ora indica? Le 22.04! Esatto, proprio la stessa identica ora in cui il fulmine si abbatte sull’orologio di Hill Valley nel 1955, permettendo a Doc di far tornare Marty indietro nel futuro! Nella terza stagione uno spezzone del capolavoro di Zemeckis viene proiettato nel cinema del centro commerciale, dove si sono rifugiati Steve, Robin, Dustin ed Erica.
Rocky: Nella seconda stagione, durante la festa di Halloween, c’è un ragazzo vestito con il classico look di Rocky Balboa: tuta grigia e bandana rossa.
Rusty il Selvaggio: Nel quinto episodio, quando Nancy trova la mazza da baseball per affrontare la caccia al mostro, sopraggiunge Steve che le propone di andare al cinema a vedere il film di Francis Ford Coppola (1983), commentando anche che il protogonista (Matt Dillon) gli somiglia.
Scanners: Di persone uccise con la forza del pensiero ne abbiamo? Decisamente sì. Il modo in cui Eleven si sbarazza degli agenti governativi non può non far pensare al magnifico Michael Ironside nel film di David Cronenberg (1981).
Schegge di Follia: In una scena del quinto episodio, nel mezzo di due inquadrature su Joyce, c’è Nancy che cerca una mazza da baseball e la macchina da presa si sofferma su un set di mazze da croquet. Niente di strano, se non fossero state usate in moltissime scene di questo film del 1989 di Michael Lehmann, che vede come protagonista proprio Winona Ryder.
Scream: Saranno moltissimi i film in cui un ragazzo entra di notte nella camera di una ragazza passando dalla finestra, ma nella scena in cui Steve entra nella stanza di Nancy ci sono moltissime similitudini con il film di Wes Craven (1996). Oltre all’entrata clandestina dalla finestra e il bacio sul letto, c’è un riferimento piuttosto evidente: sia lo Steve di ST che il Billy di Scream prendono un orsacchiotto di peluche dal letto della loro rispettiva ragazza e lo fanno parlare. Probabilmente non è un caso.
Scuola di Mostri: Uno dei film per ragazzi più sottovalutati degli anni 80. Una sorta di Goonies in cui un gruppo di ragazzini esperti di mostri sono gli unici in grado di affrontare l’arrivo di Dracula, l’Uomo Lupo, la Mummia, Frankenstein e il Mostro delle Paludi. Ogni film con pre-adolescenti uniti in una missione pericolosa appartiene all’immaginario degli anni 80 e, anche se questo film di Fred Dekker (1987) non ha riferimenti diretti con ST, il mood è sempre quello.
Shining: Ancora Stephen King, inevitabilmente. Forse è un riferimento casuale, ma ogni volta che c’è un’ascia in una scena in interni, è impossibile non pensare a Jack Torrance e al capolavoro di Stanley Kubrick (1980).
il Signore degli Anelli: Anche se non è una pellicola appartenente all’immaginario collettivo degli anni 80, quella di Peter Jackson (e l’opera di Tolkien in generale) viene citata a più riprese. Il luogo in cui Will sparisce è chiamato Bosco Atro, una delle foreste più celebri della Terra di Mezzo, e il rapporto tra i ragazzi ricorda molto quello tra gli hobbit di Tolkien: il senso del sacrificio, l’amicizia fraterna. In particolar modo c’è la scena del risveglio di Will nel letto d’ospedale che è assolutamente identica alla scena in cui Frodo si risveglia nel letto alla fine de Il Ritorno del Re: da un lato ci sono Mike, Dustin e Lucas a saltellare e raccontare le proprie gesta, dall’altro ci sono Sam, Pipino e Merry. Nella quarta stagione Dustin propone di andare a cercare la porta sul Sottosopra e Eddie capisce che gli sta chiedendo di “andare a Mordor” perché “la Contea sta bruciando”.
il Silenzio degli Innocenti: Alzi la mano chi non ci ha pensato immediatamente: la scena in cui Nancy e Robin vanno a parlare con Victor nel manicomio criminale ricorda troppo la sequenza del primo incontro tra Clarice Starling e Hannibal Lecter nel capolavoro di Jonathan Demme del 1991.
Sixteen Candles: Quando la “squadra” si reca alla Warzone per procurarsi le armi necessarie per combattere contro Vecna, Robin vede la ragazza che le piace, Vickie, che si bacia con il suo ragazzo. Il look di Vickie è terribilmente simile a quello di Molly Ringwald in questo film del 1984 diretto da John Hughes.
Stand By Me: Ancora Stephen King. Il film di Rob Reiner (1986) è un altro grande punto di riferimento per ST. Quattro ragazzini in un bosco, alla ricerca di qualcosa/qualcuno. L’omaggio più grande è senza dubbio la camminata che i quattro fanno lungo i binari del treno, senza dubbio un riferimento ad una delle scene più celebri del film di Reiner. Inoltre il quarto capitolo di ST si intitola The Body, stesso nome del racconto di King dal quale è stato tratto appunto Stand By Me.
Stati di Allucinazione: Nel film di Ken Russell (1980), William Hurt conduce degli esperimenti su se stesso restando in sospensione dentro una vasca di deprivazione sensoriale. Impossibile non pensare agli esperimenti condotti su Eleven dal professor Brenner.
St. Elmo’s Fire: Nel film di Joel Schumacher del 1985 c’è un personaggio di nome Billy che ha un look praticamente identico a quello del fratello di Max (che si chiama anch’esso Billy).
la Storia infinita: Non poteva esserci omaggio più bello al capolavoro di Wolfgang Petersen. Dustin ha bisogno di un’informazione via radio da Suzie, lei però pretende che lui canti con lei Neverending Story, la mitica canzone di Limahl che noi bambini degli anni 80 abbiamo tutti cantato a squarciagola. Il problema è che sono tutti in ascolto via radio: la performance di Dustin è comunque impeccabile.
lo Squalo: L’alone di Steven Spielberg è praticamente ovunque in questa serie. Il suo squalo del 1975 è presente sotto forma di poster nella stanza di Will, ma le citazioni non finiscono qui: il mostro di ST è attratto dal sangue, e non può essere un caso quella scena in cui Barb, seduta sul bordo della piscina, fa cadere alcune gocce di sangue in acqua. Subito dopo farà una brutta fine… Lo squalo, come animale, è presente inoltre anche in un libro sui predatori citato da Nancy a Jonathan.
Superman III: Nel finale Joyce, per riuscire a girare entrambe le chiavi contemporaneamente, usa la sua cintura come protesi per raggiungere una delle due chiavi. La scena è una citazione di una sequenza analoga nel film di Richard Lester.
Terminator: Il film di James Cameron è in programmazione al cinema di Hawkins e inoltre Eleven vede il trailer del film in televisione. Nella terza stagione il riferimento è molto più forte: il personaggio di Grigori, il russo implacabile, è chiaramente plasmato su quello del film di Cameron (e lo stesso sindaco, quando Hopper gli domanda il nome del russo, risponde ironicamente che si chiama “Arnold Schwarzenegger”).
Terminator 2: Nel concitato finale della quarta stagione, Nancy, armata con un fucile a canne mozze, spara contro Vecna. Come si fa a non pensare a Sarah Connor che spara contro il suo nemico in questo iconico film del 1991 firmato da James Cameron?
Twin Peaks: La serie culto di David Lynch è citata nel finale di stagione di ST, quando Will, davanti allo specchio del bagno, si ritrova per un momento di nuovo nel Sottosopra, e sputa i germi di un nuovo male nel lavandino. Nel finale di Twin Peaks (1990) c’è invece Cooper che guarda nello specchio del bagno, vedendo riflesso Bob (così come Will, sembra che il male si stia impossessando di lui). Inoltre, la scena della prima puntata in cui Joyce va a svegliare Will, scoprendo che non ha dormito a casa, è molto simile ad una scena nel pilota di Twin Peaks, ovvero quando Sarah Palmer va a svegliare Laura (scoprendo anche in questo caso che non c’è).
Under The Skin: Uno dei riferimenti più recenti e senza dubbio inaspettati. Così come Eleven quando entra nella vasca di deprivazione sensoriale in ST, anche Scarlett Johansson nel film di Jonathan Glazer (2013) si muove in un’altra dimensione liquida e totalmente buia.
Venerdì 13: Nella seconda stagione, un ragazzino vestito da Jason spaventa Will durante la notte di Halloween.
Wargames: Adolescenti che contrastano una minaccia russa? Ma ovviamente è un riferimento al film del 1983 di John Badham con Matthew Broderick! Come se non bastasse quando Will, Mike e Jonathan chiamano un numero misterioso scoprendo che si tratta di un computer urlano “Wargames!“, per far capire a tutti cosa sta succedendo. Inoltre si può distinguere un accenno della colonna sonora del film quando Mike dice ai suoi compagni che bisogna chiedere l’intervento di Suzie.
Zombi: Il capolavoro di Romero si svolgeva quasi interamente all’interno di un centro commerciale, ambientazione centrale anche nella terza stagione di ST. Anche nella serie c’è un’automobile in bella mostra nella hall del centro commerciale, inoltre Robin e gli altri scivolano servendosi dello spazio tra le due scale mobili, come faceva uno dei personaggi nel film di Romero.
[Se l’articolo ti è piaciuto, offrimi un caffè o magari una colazione,
una piccola mancia per aiutarmi a sostenere il sito!]#articolo #citazioni #colonnaSonora #confronto #film #foto #immagini #netflix #personaggi #primaStagione #quartaStagione #recensione #riferimenti #secondaStagione #serieTv #spiegazione #strangerThings #terzaStagione #tutteLeCitazioni #tuttiIFilmCitati
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It's worth noting the court's reasoning here. In overturning the prior dismissal of the case, they challenged Judge Carney's comparison of the neo-nazi defendants with antifascist arrestees on three grounds:
1. The nazis were serial perpetrators who went to multiple rallies and assaulted people, whereas the antifascists who had been arrested at a rally weren't and didn't.
2. The nazis "behaved like leaders of an organized crime group" insofar as they "coordinated combat training sessions; created materials to recruit others; and planned cross-country travel to commit their acts."
3. Prosecutors simply had a much stronger case against the nazis, given their prior assault convictions and the fact that they bragged about it online, handing prosecutors useful evidence.
I'd like to think that the second point might establish a precedent applicable to basically the entire Active Club network and possibly others, but the reality is that it's at least as likely to be applied to groups like JBGC or any activists who do actual self-defense classes together.
The third one really should be an object lesson to all of us. As the lawyers say: Shut The Fuck Up. Don't talk about what you did or didn't do and sure as hell don't brag about it. It's just not worth it.
Anyways, an interesting turn. And Judge Carney has just recently (semi-?)retired, so maybe Rundo will finally go to trial. (From what I hear, Boman has left that whole scene and expressed regret about it all. I have no insight into whether or not this is true or, if so, whether or not he's sincere. In either case, regret isn't, unto itself, a literal or metaphorical Get Out of Jail Free card. Still, an ex-nazi is better than an active nazi, and I'd rather he make a sincere effort and get the support he needs in getting out of that scene. We'll see...)
===
From the article:For the second time, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday reinstated an indictment against a pair of Southern California white supremacists, overruling a federal judge who said the men were singled out for selective prosecution.
The appellate panel rejected the conclusion of Senior U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney, a George W. Bush appointee, who said federal prosecutors went after the two members of the white-supremacist Rise Above Movement while ignoring similar violence by members of far-left groups. The pair was accused of chasing down and violently attacking counter protesters at Make America Great Again rallies.
By looking broadly at the collective conduct of groups like antifa and weighing it against the individual conduct of the two defendants, Robert Rundo and Robert Boman, Carney was comparing apples to oranges, the Ninth Circuit panel said.
#Rundo #RiseAboveMovement #NeoNazis #Antifa #NinthCircuit #ActiveClub
-
It's worth noting the court's reasoning here. In overturning the prior dismissal of the case, they challenged Judge Carney's comparison of the neo-nazi defendants with antifascist arrestees on three grounds:
1. The nazis were serial perpetrators who went to multiple rallies and assaulted people, whereas the antifascists who had been arrested at a rally weren't and didn't.
2. The nazis "behaved like leaders of an organized crime group" insofar as they "coordinated combat training sessions; created materials to recruit others; and planned cross-country travel to commit their acts."
3. Prosecutors simply had a much stronger case against the nazis, given their prior assault convictions and the fact that they bragged about it online, handing prosecutors useful evidence.
I'd like to think that the second point might establish a precedent applicable to basically the entire Active Club network and possibly others, but the reality is that it's at least as likely to be applied to groups like JBGC or any activists who do actual self-defense classes together.
The third one really should be an object lesson to all of us. As the lawyers say: Shut The Fuck Up. Don't talk about what you did or didn't do and sure as hell don't brag about it. It's just not worth it.
Anyways, an interesting turn. And Judge Carney has just recently (semi-?)retired, so maybe Rundo will finally go to trial. (From what I hear, Boman has left that whole scene and expressed regret about it all. I have no insight into whether or not this is true or, if so, whether or not he's sincere. In either case, regret isn't, unto itself, a literal or metaphorical Get Out of Jail Free card. Still, an ex-nazi is better than an active nazi, and I'd rather he make a sincere effort and get the support he needs in getting out of that scene. We'll see...)
===
From the article:For the second time, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday reinstated an indictment against a pair of Southern California white supremacists, overruling a federal judge who said the men were singled out for selective prosecution.
The appellate panel rejected the conclusion of Senior U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney, a George W. Bush appointee, who said federal prosecutors went after the two members of the white-supremacist Rise Above Movement while ignoring similar violence by members of far-left groups. The pair was accused of chasing down and violently attacking counter protesters at Make America Great Again rallies.
By looking broadly at the collective conduct of groups like antifa and weighing it against the individual conduct of the two defendants, Robert Rundo and Robert Boman, Carney was comparing apples to oranges, the Ninth Circuit panel said.
#Rundo #RiseAboveMovement #NeoNazis #Antifa #NinthCircuit #ActiveClub
-
It's worth noting the court's reasoning here. In overturning the prior dismissal of the case, they challenged Judge Carney's comparison of the neo-nazi defendants with antifascist arrestees on three grounds:
1. The nazis were serial perpetrators who went to multiple rallies and assaulted people, whereas the antifascists who had been arrested at a rally weren't and didn't.
2. The nazis "behaved like leaders of an organized crime group" insofar as they "coordinated combat training sessions; created materials to recruit others; and planned cross-country travel to commit their acts."
3. Prosecutors simply had a much stronger case against the nazis, given their prior assault convictions and the fact that they bragged about it online, handing prosecutors useful evidence.
I'd like to think that the second point might establish a precedent applicable to basically the entire Active Club network and possibly others, but the reality is that it's at least as likely to be applied to groups like JBGC or any activists who do actual self-defense classes together.
The third one really should be an object lesson to all of us. As the lawyers say: Shut The Fuck Up. Don't talk about what you did or didn't do and sure as hell don't brag about it. It's just not worth it.
Anyways, an interesting turn. And Judge Carney has just recently (semi-?)retired, so maybe Rundo will finally go to trial. (From what I hear, Boman has left that whole scene and expressed regret about it all. I have no insight into whether or not this is true or, if so, whether or not he's sincere. In either case, regret isn't, unto itself, a literal or metaphorical Get Out of Jail Free card. Still, an ex-nazi is better than an active nazi, and I'd rather he make a sincere effort and get the support he needs in getting out of that scene. We'll see...)
===
From the article:For the second time, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday reinstated an indictment against a pair of Southern California white supremacists, overruling a federal judge who said the men were singled out for selective prosecution.
The appellate panel rejected the conclusion of Senior U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney, a George W. Bush appointee, who said federal prosecutors went after the two members of the white-supremacist Rise Above Movement while ignoring similar violence by members of far-left groups. The pair was accused of chasing down and violently attacking counter protesters at Make America Great Again rallies.
By looking broadly at the collective conduct of groups like antifa and weighing it against the individual conduct of the two defendants, Robert Rundo and Robert Boman, Carney was comparing apples to oranges, the Ninth Circuit panel said.
#Rundo #RiseAboveMovement #NeoNazis #Antifa #NinthCircuit #ActiveClub
-
It's worth noting the court's reasoning here. In overturning the prior dismissal of the case, they challenged Judge Carney's comparison of the neo-nazi defendants with antifascist arrestees on three grounds:
1. The nazis were serial perpetrators who went to multiple rallies and assaulted people, whereas the antifascists who had been arrested at a rally weren't and didn't.
2. The nazis "behaved like leaders of an organized crime group" insofar as they "coordinated combat training sessions; created materials to recruit others; and planned cross-country travel to commit their acts."
3. Prosecutors simply had a much stronger case against the nazis, given their prior assault convictions and the fact that they bragged about it online, handing prosecutors useful evidence.
I'd like to think that the second point might establish a precedent applicable to basically the entire Active Club network and possibly others, but the reality is that it's at least as likely to be applied to groups like JBGC or any activists who do actual self-defense classes together.
The third one really should be an object lesson to all of us. As the lawyers say: Shut The Fuck Up. Don't talk about what you did or didn't do and sure as hell don't brag about it. It's just not worth it.
Anyways, an interesting turn. And Judge Carney has just recently (semi-?)retired, so maybe Rundo will finally go to trial. (From what I hear, Boman has left that whole scene and expressed regret about it all. I have no insight into whether or not this is true or, if so, whether or not he's sincere. In either case, regret isn't, unto itself, a literal or metaphorical Get Out of Jail Free card. Still, an ex-nazi is better than an active nazi, and I'd rather he make a sincere effort and get the support he needs in getting out of that scene. We'll see...)
===
From the article:For the second time, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday reinstated an indictment against a pair of Southern California white supremacists, overruling a federal judge who said the men were singled out for selective prosecution.
The appellate panel rejected the conclusion of Senior U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney, a George W. Bush appointee, who said federal prosecutors went after the two members of the white-supremacist Rise Above Movement while ignoring similar violence by members of far-left groups. The pair was accused of chasing down and violently attacking counter protesters at Make America Great Again rallies.
By looking broadly at the collective conduct of groups like antifa and weighing it against the individual conduct of the two defendants, Robert Rundo and Robert Boman, Carney was comparing apples to oranges, the Ninth Circuit panel said.
#Rundo #RiseAboveMovement #NeoNazis #Antifa #NinthCircuit #ActiveClub
-
Mostly Monday Reads: Oops! He did it again!
“King of kings..” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The Trump Kakistocracy continues to upset the operations of every agency in the country. Unfortunately, some of the most necessary and strategic posts have been filled with village idiots. After the revelation of the first SignalGate, you would think there would be more quick changes to protect the conversations at the top of the Pentagon and the Department of Defense. Party Boy, sexual predator, and all-around dumb guy, Pete Hegseth, has done it again. No need for spies when the head of the nation’s military broadcasts stuff on commercial software that everyone’s hacked. There is total chaos at the Pentagon. This headline from Politico says it all. “White House backs Hegseth, Leavitt says ‘entire Pentagon’ is resisting him. Hegseth “is doing phenomenal leading the Pentagon,” Leavitt said during a Monday “Fox & Friends” appearance.”
“President Donald Trump “stands strongly behind Pete Hegseth,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday morning, defending the scandal-plagued Defense secretary against escalating criticism from Democrats and former senior officials.
Hegseth “is doing phenomenal leading the Pentagon,” Leavitt said in a “Fox & Friends” appearance. “This is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you and working against the monumental change you are trying to implement.”
Her comments came a day after The New York Times reported that Hegseth shared sensitive information about military operations in Yemen in a private chat on the Signal app that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer — the second reported instance of the secretary sharing operational plans in an unclassified chat. The revelations have reignited the so-called Signalgate scandal and deepened scrutiny over Hegseth’s judgment and leadership.
Former top Pentagon spokesperson John Ullyot, who stepped down last week, also bashed the Pentagon leader for allegedly plunging the department into dysfunction in a POLITICO Magazine opinion piece published Sunday night.
Ullyot — once a vocal supporter of the Defense secretary — accused Hegseth’s team of spreading unverified claims about three top officials who were fired last week, falsely accusing them of leaking sensitive information to media outlets.
“President Donald Trump has a strong record of holding his top officials to account,’” Ullyot wrote. “Given that, it’s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer.”
Hegseth brushed off the allegations Monday and blamed it on backlash for his efforts to reshape the Pentagon.
I love this headline from Rolling Stone. “Turns Out It Wasn’t Such a Great Idea to Put Pete Hegseth in Charge of the Military. The former Fox News host’s tenure at the top of the Pentagon has been riddled with scandal and broader institutional turmoil.” The article was filed by Ryan Bort and Asawin Suebsaeng
Pete Hegseth barely received enough votes to win confirmation as Donald Trump’s defense secretary. Three Republicans even bucked their own party’s president to oppose him. One of them, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), cited “accusations of financial mismanagement and problems with the workplace culture he fostered.” Another, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), said Hegseth had “failed to demonstrate” that he could manage “nearly 3 million military and civilian personnel, an annual budget of nearly $1 trillion.”
It hasn’t taken long for Hegseth to prove them — along with every Senate Democrat and the countless others who warned about him taking over the Pentagon — right.
The New York Times reported on Sunday that Hegseth shared attack plans in a second unsecured Signal group chat, following the revelation last month that he shared the plans to attack Houthi militants in Yemen in a Signal chat group that included a journalist. The second chat included Hegseth’s wife, brother, and personal lawyer, underscoring the former Fox News host’s recklessness with highly sensitive information.
The news came after a tumultuous week in the Pentagon that saw Hegseth fire three senior officials — ostensibly because of an internal investigation into leaking, although the officials seemed confused about what happened. “We still have not been told what exactly we were investigated for, if there is still an active investigation, or if there was even a real investigation of ‘leaks’ to begin with,” they wrote in a joint statement Friday night, adding that, although the experience was “unconscionable,” they will continue to support Trump’s plans for the Pentagon.
John Ullyot, who resigned as a spokesperson for the Pentagon last week, put a button on the turmoil in an op-ed for Politico on Sunday. “It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon,” the piece began. “From leaks of sensitive operational plans to mass firings, the dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president — who deserves better from his senior leadership.”
Ullyot went on to bash the week’s firings, calling the purge “strange and baffling”; detail Hegeth’s “horrible crisis-communications” following the initial Signal scandal; and predict that “many in the secretary’s own inner circle will applaud quietly” if Trump decides to hold him accountable. Ullyot also predicted that the drama isn’t going to let up anytime soon: “There are very likely more shoes to drop in short order, with even bigger bombshell stories coming this week, key Pentagon reporters have been telling sources privately.”
We’ve already received notice in Louisiana about the number of student VISAS yanked by the #FARTUS party. If it happens here, it’s undoubtedly happening all over the country. Jennifer Rubin has this advice on her Substack, The Contrarian. “Stop Waiting for a Formal Declaration of ‘Crisis’. It is here. We are living through it. No shit cupcake.
Are we in a “constitutional crisis”?
You have likely heard that question innumerable times over the past three months, followed by a discussion as to whether our president has actually, explicitly, openly violated a court order (make that a Supreme Court order). When a question is so pervasive, it is safe to assume that yes, we are already there.
When does the combo of authoritarian bullying, revenge seeking, stooge-nominating, retaliatory prosecuting, contemptuous litigating, and lawless usurpation of congressional power become a “crisis”? The word is defined by Merriam-Webster as “an unstable or crucial time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending…especiallyone with the distinct possibility of a highly undesirable outcome.” Frankly, we have been in that “crisis” since the first day of the Trump presidency.
When a Republican Congress allows the president to seize the power of the purse and does nothing, when the secretary of defense commits the worst breach of national security protocols in memory (and evidently doesn’t learn his lesson), or when Republicans refuse to reclaim the power to lay tariffs—despite a recession-inducing presidential trade war—the question is not if we are in a constitutional crisis, but just how bad it is.
For Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Rumeysa Ozturk, Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and scores of others who are legally present in the United States have been snatched up, incarcerated (or are facing incarceration) in a foreign gulag, and are deprived of their right to contest their confinement and visa revocation, the “constitutional crisis” is well underway.
When the Supreme Court convenes “literally in the middle of the night” to stop the government from spiriting away Venezuelans in apparent contradiction of their instruction to give every individual a meaningful opportunity to oppose their deportation, the “constitutional crisis” has arrived.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) knows a constitutional crisis. When asked explicitly whether we were in one on Meet the Press, he affirmed, “Yes, we are.” He had to fly down to El Salvador to see for himself Abrego Garcia’s condition, and upon his return, called out the president and his flacks for abject lies, even revealing the clumsy attempt to stage a scene suggesting he and Kilmar were tossing down margaritas on a tropical holiday.
When such steps are required to confirm whether or not a lawful American resident is alive, we know this is not only the least trustworthy White House in modern history, but one seemingly eager to foment a constitutional crisis. “They wanted to create this appearance that life was just lovely for Kilmar, which of course is a big, fat lie,” Van Hollen said. Calling out the White House’s baseless allegations that Abrego Garcia is a gang member and terrorist, Van Hollen declared, “…In other words, put up in court or shut up.”
If you are interested in tracking foreign students who have lost their VISAS, you may look at this from Inside Higher Education. “What We’ve Learned So Far From Tracking Student Visa Data. More than 1,500 students from nearly 250 colleges have had their visas revoked, but who they are—and why they’ve been targeted—is still largely unknown.” Two international students from UNO, where I teach, have had theirs removed.
On April 7, amid reports that the federal government was detaining international students and revoking their visas, Inside Higher Ed began collecting and cross-checking data in an effort to track exactly how many students were affected—and at which institutions. Our goal was to understand the scope of the federal government’s involvement in the visa process and what it means for international students and the colleges and universities they attend.
Over the past two weeks, more than 1,500 students—representing several hundred colleges and universities, as well as state systems—have had a sudden or unexpected change in their Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) listing, or their F-1 or J-1 visa status.
Luke Garrett, writing for NPR, has this headline today. “House Democrats land in El Salvador, demand Abrego Garcia’s return.” They need to start showing up in ICE detention centers, like the one down here, before more folks get shipped off despite all the court decisions.
Four House Democrats were scheduled to land in El Salvador Monday to demand the release and return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen who lived in Maryland and was deported by the administration to a prison in El Salvador due to what the Trump administration an “administrative error.”
The group — Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., and Rep. Maxine Dexter, D-Ore. — said in a statement they hope “to pressure” the White House “to abide by a Supreme Court order.”
“While Donald Trump continues to defy the Supreme Court, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is being held illegally in El Salvador after being wrongfully deported,” Rep. Garcia said. “That is why we’re here — to remind the American people that kidnapping immigrants and deporting them without due process is not how we do things in America.”
The Trump administration has refused to bring back Abrego Garcia despite a Supreme Court order to “facilitate” his return — and is receiving bipartisan criticism for it. The Salvadoran citizen entered the country illegally; an immigration judge said he should not be deported to El Salvador because Abrego Garcia was able to prove he was likely to suffer persecution in his home country. The Trump administration says it deported him because he was a member of MS-13; his lawyers deny that Abrego Garcia belongs to the gang.
The White House has said it can’t force the Salvadoran government to release one of its citizens, while El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele called the idea of Abrego Garcia’s release “preposterous.”
On Thursday, a federal court denied the Trump administration’s appeal of the court’s return-order.
Last week, Reps. Garcia and Frost requested congressional travel funds and security for the trip to El Salvador. Rep. James Comer, the Kentucky Republican who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, rejected the request. Rep. Mark Green, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, said Thursday he’d also deny any such request.
The group’s visit to El Salvador is not a taxpayer funded CODEL trip.
At least members of the Democratic Party are beginning to do something. Will it be enough? Some of the worst news came when an Executive Order leaked that basically removed all the Eisenhower reforms of the Diplomatic Corps and turned them all back into Ugly Americans. The Substack PastPresentFuture, written by Dan Gardner, will give you some background on the changes made during Eisenhower’s presidency.
If one is of a certain vintage, the phrase “ugly American” has a vivid meaning.
Picture the worst stereotype of an American abroad. Loud, abrasive, arrogant. Incurious about local culture and politics because Americans have nothing to learn from foreigners. Incapable of delivering even a few words in another language and certain they can always make themselves understood by speaking English at a higher volume. Smugly confident that the United States is the most advanced of civilizations, in every way that matters, and all the rest of the world silently dreams of being American, or least meeting one of God’s chosen.
That’s an “ugly American.”
Curiously, though, that’s not what the phrase meant when it was coined. In fact, what it originally described was the opposite of all that.
The history of “ugly American” is worth reviewing because in that one phrase we can see how American foreign aid — and foreign policy more generally — is changing in the second Trump administration. There is even a direct connection between “ugly American” and today’s headlines, notably the hostile takeover of USAID by Elon Musk and his band of young zealots.
This isn’t a happy story, I’m afraid. But it is an important one.
You may read about the story at the link. Here’s the information on the linked EO from The Daily Beast. “Diplomats Are Freaking Out About Trump’s Leaked Executive Order. One official said monkeys with a typewriter could have come up with a more logical plan for the State Department.”
American diplomats spent the weekend panicking about a possible plan to radically reshape the State Department in President Donald Trump’s image.
A 16-page document that appears to be a draft for an executive order has been circulating among diplomatic staff since last week. It calls for the elimination of dozens of positions and departments, slashing diplomatic operations in Canada, and closing “non-essential” embassies and consulates in sub-Saharan Africa.
It would also overhaul the traditionally non-partisan foreign service exam to test applicants on whether they share Trump’s MAGA foreign policy views, according to Bloomberg.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio called a New York Times report on the draft document “fake news‚” though he didn’t offer any details about which part was wrong.
Diplomats, however, worried the document was real, especially in light of the administration asking Congress to cut the State Department’s budget almost in half this year, to $28.4 billion, Politico reported.
“There’s a lot that could be reformed, but you could give infinite monkeys infinite typewriters, and they would come up with something better than that,” one diplomat told Politico.
Many of the document’s items violate the laws that govern the State Department’s operations, while other parts contradict the Trump administration’s communications to Congress about its plans for the department, according to Politico.
Other parts are internally inconsistent. For example, the Fulbright Program would be recast as “solely for master’s-level study in national security-related disciplines” with priority given to programs offering intense instruction in critical languages, including Russian and Mandarin Chinese.
At the same time, the entire African Affairs bureau would be replaced by a single special envoy reporting directly to the National Security Council. Experts say pulling out of Africa would leave a void that Russia and China are both eager to exploit.
Already, Kremlin-backed groups are handing out boxes of tuberculosis and HIV medication on the continent after the Trump administration froze U.S. aid funding, The Washington Post reported. Chinese officials have given interviews and taken out advertisements branding the country as a reliable partner.
The purported State Department draft order would also lead to a major disruption in services for Americans living and traveling in the affected countries, including those who lose their passports or need to register births abroad.
“Something tells me that Steven Miller is one of the monkeys with a typewriter. So, this is about all I’m up for today. I’ll leave some suggested reads below.
I imagine you’ve all heard that Pope Francis has exited the Earthly Door. I’m just sorry that one of the last faces he saw was that of J Dank. But maybe he wanted to give him a test after the Cardinal gave him a lecture on why deporting innocent people is not very Catholic of him.
- Tom Sykes / The Daily Beast: Pope Francis’ Last Act Was to Give JD Vance a Lesson About Migrants — CHRISTIAN VALUES — The pontiff, who died Monday, spoke up in opposition to MAGA policies and suggested in a final statement that they stirred up “contempt.” — Pope Francis, who died at 88 on Monday …
This headline has raised my torch and pitchfork.
Caroline Kitchener / New York Times: Baby Bonuses, Fertility Planning: Trump Aides Assess Ideas to Boost Birthrate … “We need to channel the MAHA spirit and really dive deep into infertility,” said Emma Waters, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again campaign.Rebecca Kiger for The New York Times
- Svante Myrick / The Hill: At the first whiff of power, these Republicans betrayed the rule of law
You may check for more at Memeorandum.
Have as nice a week as possible!
What’s on your reading and blogging list?
#FARTUSPlansForDiplomats #JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #FARTUS #FreeAlbregoGarcia #kakistocracy #PeteHegsethWeirdoSexualAssaulter #RIPPopeFrancis #uglyAmerican
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Mostly Monday Reads: Oops! He did it again!
“King of kings..” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The Trump Kakistocracy continues to upset the operations of every agency in the country. Unfortunately, some of the most necessary and strategic posts have been filled with village idiots. After the revelation of the first SignalGate, you would think there would be more quick changes to protect the conversations at the top of the Pentagon and the Department of Defense. Party Boy, sexual predator, and all-around dumb guy, Pete Hegseth, has done it again. No need for spies when the head of the nation’s military broadcasts stuff on commercial software that everyone’s hacked. There is total chaos at the Pentagon. This headline from Politico says it all. “White House backs Hegseth, Leavitt says ‘entire Pentagon’ is resisting him. Hegseth “is doing phenomenal leading the Pentagon,” Leavitt said during a Monday “Fox & Friends” appearance.”
“President Donald Trump “stands strongly behind Pete Hegseth,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday morning, defending the scandal-plagued Defense secretary against escalating criticism from Democrats and former senior officials.
Hegseth “is doing phenomenal leading the Pentagon,” Leavitt said in a “Fox & Friends” appearance. “This is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you and working against the monumental change you are trying to implement.”
Her comments came a day after The New York Times reported that Hegseth shared sensitive information about military operations in Yemen in a private chat on the Signal app that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer — the second reported instance of the secretary sharing operational plans in an unclassified chat. The revelations have reignited the so-called Signalgate scandal and deepened scrutiny over Hegseth’s judgment and leadership.
Former top Pentagon spokesperson John Ullyot, who stepped down last week, also bashed the Pentagon leader for allegedly plunging the department into dysfunction in a POLITICO Magazine opinion piece published Sunday night.
Ullyot — once a vocal supporter of the Defense secretary — accused Hegseth’s team of spreading unverified claims about three top officials who were fired last week, falsely accusing them of leaking sensitive information to media outlets.
“President Donald Trump has a strong record of holding his top officials to account,’” Ullyot wrote. “Given that, it’s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer.”
Hegseth brushed off the allegations Monday and blamed it on backlash for his efforts to reshape the Pentagon.
I love this headline from Rolling Stone. “Turns Out It Wasn’t Such a Great Idea to Put Pete Hegseth in Charge of the Military. The former Fox News host’s tenure at the top of the Pentagon has been riddled with scandal and broader institutional turmoil.” The article was filed by Ryan Bort and Asawin Suebsaeng
Pete Hegseth barely received enough votes to win confirmation as Donald Trump’s defense secretary. Three Republicans even bucked their own party’s president to oppose him. One of them, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), cited “accusations of financial mismanagement and problems with the workplace culture he fostered.” Another, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), said Hegseth had “failed to demonstrate” that he could manage “nearly 3 million military and civilian personnel, an annual budget of nearly $1 trillion.”
It hasn’t taken long for Hegseth to prove them — along with every Senate Democrat and the countless others who warned about him taking over the Pentagon — right.
The New York Times reported on Sunday that Hegseth shared attack plans in a second unsecured Signal group chat, following the revelation last month that he shared the plans to attack Houthi militants in Yemen in a Signal chat group that included a journalist. The second chat included Hegseth’s wife, brother, and personal lawyer, underscoring the former Fox News host’s recklessness with highly sensitive information.
The news came after a tumultuous week in the Pentagon that saw Hegseth fire three senior officials — ostensibly because of an internal investigation into leaking, although the officials seemed confused about what happened. “We still have not been told what exactly we were investigated for, if there is still an active investigation, or if there was even a real investigation of ‘leaks’ to begin with,” they wrote in a joint statement Friday night, adding that, although the experience was “unconscionable,” they will continue to support Trump’s plans for the Pentagon.
John Ullyot, who resigned as a spokesperson for the Pentagon last week, put a button on the turmoil in an op-ed for Politico on Sunday. “It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon,” the piece began. “From leaks of sensitive operational plans to mass firings, the dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president — who deserves better from his senior leadership.”
Ullyot went on to bash the week’s firings, calling the purge “strange and baffling”; detail Hegeth’s “horrible crisis-communications” following the initial Signal scandal; and predict that “many in the secretary’s own inner circle will applaud quietly” if Trump decides to hold him accountable. Ullyot also predicted that the drama isn’t going to let up anytime soon: “There are very likely more shoes to drop in short order, with even bigger bombshell stories coming this week, key Pentagon reporters have been telling sources privately.”
We’ve already received notice in Louisiana about the number of student VISAS yanked by the #FARTUS party. If it happens here, it’s undoubtedly happening all over the country. Jennifer Rubin has this advice on her Substack, The Contrarian. “Stop Waiting for a Formal Declaration of ‘Crisis’. It is here. We are living through it. No shit cupcake.
Are we in a “constitutional crisis”?
You have likely heard that question innumerable times over the past three months, followed by a discussion as to whether our president has actually, explicitly, openly violated a court order (make that a Supreme Court order). When a question is so pervasive, it is safe to assume that yes, we are already there.
When does the combo of authoritarian bullying, revenge seeking, stooge-nominating, retaliatory prosecuting, contemptuous litigating, and lawless usurpation of congressional power become a “crisis”? The word is defined by Merriam-Webster as “an unstable or crucial time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending…especiallyone with the distinct possibility of a highly undesirable outcome.” Frankly, we have been in that “crisis” since the first day of the Trump presidency.
When a Republican Congress allows the president to seize the power of the purse and does nothing, when the secretary of defense commits the worst breach of national security protocols in memory (and evidently doesn’t learn his lesson), or when Republicans refuse to reclaim the power to lay tariffs—despite a recession-inducing presidential trade war—the question is not if we are in a constitutional crisis, but just how bad it is.
For Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Rumeysa Ozturk, Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and scores of others who are legally present in the United States have been snatched up, incarcerated (or are facing incarceration) in a foreign gulag, and are deprived of their right to contest their confinement and visa revocation, the “constitutional crisis” is well underway.
When the Supreme Court convenes “literally in the middle of the night” to stop the government from spiriting away Venezuelans in apparent contradiction of their instruction to give every individual a meaningful opportunity to oppose their deportation, the “constitutional crisis” has arrived.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) knows a constitutional crisis. When asked explicitly whether we were in one on Meet the Press, he affirmed, “Yes, we are.” He had to fly down to El Salvador to see for himself Abrego Garcia’s condition, and upon his return, called out the president and his flacks for abject lies, even revealing the clumsy attempt to stage a scene suggesting he and Kilmar were tossing down margaritas on a tropical holiday.
When such steps are required to confirm whether or not a lawful American resident is alive, we know this is not only the least trustworthy White House in modern history, but one seemingly eager to foment a constitutional crisis. “They wanted to create this appearance that life was just lovely for Kilmar, which of course is a big, fat lie,” Van Hollen said. Calling out the White House’s baseless allegations that Abrego Garcia is a gang member and terrorist, Van Hollen declared, “…In other words, put up in court or shut up.”
If you are interested in tracking foreign students who have lost their VISAS, you may look at this from Inside Higher Education. “What We’ve Learned So Far From Tracking Student Visa Data. More than 1,500 students from nearly 250 colleges have had their visas revoked, but who they are—and why they’ve been targeted—is still largely unknown.” Two international students from UNO, where I teach, have had theirs removed.
On April 7, amid reports that the federal government was detaining international students and revoking their visas, Inside Higher Ed began collecting and cross-checking data in an effort to track exactly how many students were affected—and at which institutions. Our goal was to understand the scope of the federal government’s involvement in the visa process and what it means for international students and the colleges and universities they attend.
Over the past two weeks, more than 1,500 students—representing several hundred colleges and universities, as well as state systems—have had a sudden or unexpected change in their Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) listing, or their F-1 or J-1 visa status.
Luke Garrett, writing for NPR, has this headline today. “House Democrats land in El Salvador, demand Abrego Garcia’s return.” They need to start showing up in ICE detention centers, like the one down here, before more folks get shipped off despite all the court decisions.
Four House Democrats were scheduled to land in El Salvador Monday to demand the release and return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen who lived in Maryland and was deported by the administration to a prison in El Salvador due to what the Trump administration an “administrative error.”
The group — Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., and Rep. Maxine Dexter, D-Ore. — said in a statement they hope “to pressure” the White House “to abide by a Supreme Court order.”
“While Donald Trump continues to defy the Supreme Court, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is being held illegally in El Salvador after being wrongfully deported,” Rep. Garcia said. “That is why we’re here — to remind the American people that kidnapping immigrants and deporting them without due process is not how we do things in America.”
The Trump administration has refused to bring back Abrego Garcia despite a Supreme Court order to “facilitate” his return — and is receiving bipartisan criticism for it. The Salvadoran citizen entered the country illegally; an immigration judge said he should not be deported to El Salvador because Abrego Garcia was able to prove he was likely to suffer persecution in his home country. The Trump administration says it deported him because he was a member of MS-13; his lawyers deny that Abrego Garcia belongs to the gang.
The White House has said it can’t force the Salvadoran government to release one of its citizens, while El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele called the idea of Abrego Garcia’s release “preposterous.”
On Thursday, a federal court denied the Trump administration’s appeal of the court’s return-order.
Last week, Reps. Garcia and Frost requested congressional travel funds and security for the trip to El Salvador. Rep. James Comer, the Kentucky Republican who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, rejected the request. Rep. Mark Green, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, said Thursday he’d also deny any such request.
The group’s visit to El Salvador is not a taxpayer funded CODEL trip.
At least members of the Democratic Party are beginning to do something. Will it be enough? Some of the worst news came when an Executive Order leaked that basically removed all the Eisenhower reforms of the Diplomatic Corps and turned them all back into Ugly Americans. The Substack PastPresentFuture, written by Dan Gardner, will give you some background on the changes made during Eisenhower’s presidency.
If one is of a certain vintage, the phrase “ugly American” has a vivid meaning.
Picture the worst stereotype of an American abroad. Loud, abrasive, arrogant. Incurious about local culture and politics because Americans have nothing to learn from foreigners. Incapable of delivering even a few words in another language and certain they can always make themselves understood by speaking English at a higher volume. Smugly confident that the United States is the most advanced of civilizations, in every way that matters, and all the rest of the world silently dreams of being American, or least meeting one of God’s chosen.
That’s an “ugly American.”
Curiously, though, that’s not what the phrase meant when it was coined. In fact, what it originally described was the opposite of all that.
The history of “ugly American” is worth reviewing because in that one phrase we can see how American foreign aid — and foreign policy more generally — is changing in the second Trump administration. There is even a direct connection between “ugly American” and today’s headlines, notably the hostile takeover of USAID by Elon Musk and his band of young zealots.
This isn’t a happy story, I’m afraid. But it is an important one.
You may read about the story at the link. Here’s the information on the linked EO from The Daily Beast. “Diplomats Are Freaking Out About Trump’s Leaked Executive Order. One official said monkeys with a typewriter could have come up with a more logical plan for the State Department.”
American diplomats spent the weekend panicking about a possible plan to radically reshape the State Department in President Donald Trump’s image.
A 16-page document that appears to be a draft for an executive order has been circulating among diplomatic staff since last week. It calls for the elimination of dozens of positions and departments, slashing diplomatic operations in Canada, and closing “non-essential” embassies and consulates in sub-Saharan Africa.
It would also overhaul the traditionally non-partisan foreign service exam to test applicants on whether they share Trump’s MAGA foreign policy views, according to Bloomberg.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio called a New York Times report on the draft document “fake news‚” though he didn’t offer any details about which part was wrong.
Diplomats, however, worried the document was real, especially in light of the administration asking Congress to cut the State Department’s budget almost in half this year, to $28.4 billion, Politico reported.
“There’s a lot that could be reformed, but you could give infinite monkeys infinite typewriters, and they would come up with something better than that,” one diplomat told Politico.
Many of the document’s items violate the laws that govern the State Department’s operations, while other parts contradict the Trump administration’s communications to Congress about its plans for the department, according to Politico.
Other parts are internally inconsistent. For example, the Fulbright Program would be recast as “solely for master’s-level study in national security-related disciplines” with priority given to programs offering intense instruction in critical languages, including Russian and Mandarin Chinese.
At the same time, the entire African Affairs bureau would be replaced by a single special envoy reporting directly to the National Security Council. Experts say pulling out of Africa would leave a void that Russia and China are both eager to exploit.
Already, Kremlin-backed groups are handing out boxes of tuberculosis and HIV medication on the continent after the Trump administration froze U.S. aid funding, The Washington Post reported. Chinese officials have given interviews and taken out advertisements branding the country as a reliable partner.
The purported State Department draft order would also lead to a major disruption in services for Americans living and traveling in the affected countries, including those who lose their passports or need to register births abroad.
“Something tells me that Steven Miller is one of the monkeys with a typewriter. So, this is about all I’m up for today. I’ll leave some suggested reads below.
I imagine you’ve all heard that Pope Francis has exited the Earthly Door. I’m just sorry that one of the last faces he saw was that of J Dank. But maybe he wanted to give him a test after the Cardinal gave him a lecture on why deporting innocent people is not very Catholic of him.
- Tom Sykes / The Daily Beast: Pope Francis’ Last Act Was to Give JD Vance a Lesson About Migrants — CHRISTIAN VALUES — The pontiff, who died Monday, spoke up in opposition to MAGA policies and suggested in a final statement that they stirred up “contempt.” — Pope Francis, who died at 88 on Monday …
This headline has raised my torch and pitchfork.
Caroline Kitchener / New York Times: Baby Bonuses, Fertility Planning: Trump Aides Assess Ideas to Boost Birthrate … “We need to channel the MAHA spirit and really dive deep into infertility,” said Emma Waters, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again campaign.Rebecca Kiger for The New York Times
- Svante Myrick / The Hill: At the first whiff of power, these Republicans betrayed the rule of law
You may check for more at Memeorandum.
Have as nice a week as possible!
What’s on your reading and blogging list?
#FARTUSPlansForDiplomats #JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #FARTUS #FreeAlbregoGarcia #kakistocracy #PeteHegsethWeirdoSexualAssaulter #RIPPopeFrancis #uglyAmerican
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Finally Friday Reads: First, they came for …
First, they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me“Spoken like a true felon.” John (repeat1968) Buss @johnbuss.bsky.social
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The snow is beginning to melt here in chilly New Orleans. The last bit I have to tackle is on the kitchen stairs. It’s been a trying week from many standpoints. I’m not sure when I first read the poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller, which is reprinted at this link at the Holocaust Memorial. I imagine it was sometime in my early teens, but that’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is the headlines today that are horrifying and familiar to anyone familiar with the movies, the documentaries, and the stories from relatives of Germany before and during World War 2. No wonder the MAGAs are trying to ban The Diary of a Yong Girl by Anne Frank. Children and families are being snatched by ICE now.
So far, I have heard two over-the-top stories about the zealotry with which ICE, and soon, the military and other Federal Law Agencies are going after people. I read yesterday about Indigenous people getting scooped up in raids as well. We knew this would happen. This is from Newsweek. “US Citizens Are Being Told To Carry Birth Certificates Amid ICE Raids.”
United States citizens, including Native Americans, are being warned to carry ID with them after reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers questioning and detaining people this week.
One such warning came from the Navajo Nation President, Buu Nygren, in Arizona, following reports that some residents had been approached by officials.
Newsweek reached out to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE for comment via email Friday morning.
With President Donald Trump’s plan to ramp up deportations of illegal immigrants, ICE and DHS will likely come under increased scrutiny in the coming weeks and months as they seek to show force when it comes to immigration enforcement. Any overstepping could result in legal action against the agencies.
Nygren’s post on Facebook Wednesday came a day before ICE carried out a raid in Newark, New Jersey, in which a U.S. veteran was reportedly detained by officials, along with some American citizens.
According to the tribal leader in Arizona, there had been “several concerns and unconfirmed reports” that immigration officials had detained Diné people in urban areas.
“My office is looking into this matter and will provide updates as they come,” he said in the post. “I am working actively with our state leaders and law enforcement to protect our Diné people.”
The speculation of who FARTUS and his gang of White Christian Nationalists will come after first is obvious and just as he promised. I’ll start with them coming for “leftist” professors first. This is from the New York Times. It’s Michelle Goldberg’s offering on her Op-Ed Column. “Trump’s Plan to Crush the Academic Left.”
Creeley, at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, predicts that many state legislatures, local officials and university trustees are going to enlist, either out of enthusiasm or expediency, in the crusade to bring the academic left to heel. “I think you’ll see professors investigated and terminated. I think you’re going to see students punished, and I think you’re going to see a pre-emptive action on those fronts,” he said.
Just look at what’s happened at Harvard this week. On Tuesday it announced that, as part of a lawsuit settlement, it would adopt a definition of antisemitism that includes some harsh criticisms of Israel and Zionism, such as holding Israel to a “double standard” and likening its policies to Nazism. Though Harvard claims that it still adheres to the First Amendment, under this definition a student or professor who accuses Israel of genocidal action in Gaza — as the Israeli American Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov has — might be subject to disciplinary action.
In a further act of capitulation, the Harvard Medical School canceled a lecture and panel on wartime health care that was to feature patients from Gaza because of objections that it was one-sided, The Harvard Crimson reported.
“I think that Harvard likely read the room, so to speak, from a political perspective, and decided to cut their losses,” said Creeley. In this period of capitulation, it probably won’t be the last school to fall in line.
Sara Dorn has written this for Forbes Magazine. “Deportations Have Started, White House Says: Everything To Know About Trump’s Plan. The “largest deportation operation” in U.S. history is underway as hundreds of “illegal immigrant criminals” were arrested Thursday and flown out of the U.S., the White House said, as the federal government, U.S. cities, and Mexico brace for a string of executive orders targeting illegal immigration to take effect.”
- The White House said deportation flights began Friday, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement made 538 arrests and lodged 373 detainees on Thursday, in addition to hundreds of “illegal immigrant criminals” who were flown out of the U.S. on military aircraft.
- ICE made 308 arrests Tuesday, Trump’s first full day in office, Border Czar Tom Homan told Fox News, similar to figures under the Biden administration, which made 282 daily arrests on average in September, the last month for which data is available.
- The administration says removals will pick up quickly, though: ICE and Border Patrol agents have been ordered to deport people who cross the border without authorization immediately and conduct “expedited removals” for people found within the interior of the United States, CBS reports, while major raids are expected in various cities.
- Trump on Monday signed a string of executive orders targeting immigration: The military was ordered to the border, migrants can no longer make advance appointments with border officials and they must wait in Mexico while their asylum cases play out.
- Trump also suspended the parole program for migrants from four countries and is attempting to restrict birthright citizenship for children of undocumented and non-permanent immigrants, though a judge on Thursday blocked the policy while legal challenges to the order work their way through the courts.
- While Trump has said the deportations would begin “very quickly,” the operations will likely require Congress to approve additional funding, as ICE already faces a budget shortfall to maintain existing deportation levels in the current spending plan that expires on March 14, according to NBC.
- There are also logistical hurdles like a limited number of beds to hold people in pre-deportation and planes to use for deportation flights, though Trump ordered the military to assist with aircraft and detention space—and removals are only possible if countries are willing to accept deportees, posing a challenge, especially for people from U.S. adversaries like Venezuela.
“To be fair… there were a lot of flies on the stage.” John (repeat1968) Buss
@johnbuss.bsky.socialIn The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait writes, “There Is No Resistance. The response to the January 6 pardons shows that the president faces no effective constraints from within his party.” Very few will stand up to him.
To see how far the lines of normal have moved since President Donald Trump freed the January 6ers, briefly return to the closing days of the 2024 presidential campaign. At the time, a hot issue was whether Trump harbored fascist tendencies, as some of his former aides alleged. The very notion struck most conservatives, including some who have criticized him from time to time, as ludicrous. “Trump says crude and unworthy things and behaved abysmally after the 2020 election,” National Review’s editor-in-chief, Rich Lowry, conceded, “but the idea that he bears any meaningful resemblance to these cracked movements is a stupid smear.”
Looking to dismiss the case, Lowry then reached for the wildest example of fascist behavior he could think of: “Obviously, Trump isn’t deploying a paramilitary wing of the GOP to clash with his enemies on the streets.”
I think the one thing we can say about the days since he took the reins is that he’s definitely a fascist, and what he is doing is fascist. The lies and propaganda are over the top. I am tired of being gaslighted about Elon Musk’s Seig Heil. If you haven’t seen the films of NAZI German and the Seig Heil that starts from the heart, you know what it is. Holding your hand up in a wave is totally different.
While the Anti-Defamation League condemned the Seig Heil, Bebe Netanyahu defended him. This is from The Economic Times. “Israeli PM Netanyahu defends Elon Musk: ‘Falsely smeared’ over Nazi salute row.”
On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk against accusations of making a Nazi salute. Netanyahu took to X (formerly Twitter) to express his support for Musk, stating, “Elon Musk is being falsely smeared. Elon is a great friend of Israel. He visited Israel after the October 7 massacre in which Hamas terrorists committed the worst atrocity against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.” He added, “He has since repeatedly and forcefully supported Israel’s right to defend itself against genocidal terrorists and regimes who seek to annihilate the one and only Jewish state. I thank him for this.”
The controversy began on January 20, during the inauguration of US President Donald Trump. Musk made a gesture that many social media users likened to the “sieg heil” used by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Musk responded to the allegations by calling them baseless and stating that the gesture was taken out of context. “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired,” Musk posted on X.
Meanwhile, “War crimes court issues warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister.” However, this is most important today. This article can be found at AXIOS with its analysis by Andrew Solender. Can we all start realizing the clear and present danger now?
A House Republican on Thursday introduced a proposed change to the Constitution that would allow President Trump to seek a third term in office.
Why it matters: The amendment has virtually no chance of becoming ratified but it is a marker of the depths of fealty the new president enjoys within the House GOP.
- Republican House members have rushed to introduce bills that would codify Trump’s vision for expanding the U.S. borders by acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal, for instance.
- The measure is an extreme long-shot: It would need a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress and be ratified by 38 states to be added to the Constitution.
Driving the news: Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) said Thursday he is introducing a two-page joint resolution to amend the 22nd Amendment, which sets the current two-term limit for presidents.
- Ogles’ amendment would allow any president to serve a third term if their first two terms were non-consecutive.
- The text of the amendment would still prohibit a third term if the first two were consecutive — prohibiting former Presidents Bush, Obama and Clinton from running again — or a third full term for anyone who has served more than two years of someone else’s term.
What they’re saying: “It is imperative that we provide President Trump with every resource necessary to correct the disastrous course set by the Biden administration,” Ogles said in a statement.
- “He is dedicated to restoring the republic and saving our country, and we, as legislators and as states, must do everything in our power to support him.”
- Ogles is a member of the Trump-aligned House Freedom Caucus who introduced legislation to allow him to negotiate a purchase of Greenland.
The world must think the entire country has gone nuts to let these freaks back into office. This is from King’s College London. “What Trump’s second presidential term could mean for the world. With Donald Trump now sworn in as the 47th US President, academics from King’s have been sharing insights into the implications of his presidency for the USA and the rest of the world.”
Donald Trump’s latest term as US President is set to transform American politics, according to Dr Georgios Samaras, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the International School for Government.
He said Trump’s influential circle, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and the drive to safeguard free speech has placed Facebook, Instagram, and X in near-complete control of cultural narratives. He said some of these involve “hateful rhetoric, authoritarian themes and misinformation which is increasingly going unchecked.”
…
Professor Andrew Blick appeared on LBC with Andrew Marr, who suggested Trump is behaving like “an old-fashioned European monarch”.
In response, Professor Blick said the US constitution was designed with in-built checks and balances, such as a separate election of the President to Congress, two chambers in the Congress and the Supreme Court. However he said the problem with this was that Trump, or those close to him, seemed to have a hold of all these things.
Comparing the US to the UK, he said there are weaker protections within Britain’s constitutional system which means if someone has strong majority in the House of Commons there are less limitations on what they can do.
He added that the UK has already “seen the Musk effect before the Trump presidency even started” with the owner of X shaping the agenda of British politics, such as the government announcing reviews following a series of posts by Musk. “Without his intervention would that have happened?” he asked.
Professor Blick suggested Keir Starmer and his team will be worried about upsetting Trump and what the consequences might be, although he said the obvious differences between the two political leaders could prove to be Starmer’s “superpower”.
The people of the UK are clearly not amused. I still remember, as a kid watching Hitler Documentaries at school, how the German people fell for this nonsense. Now I know that being stupid, lazy, racist, and wanting to blame everyone else is an easy out. It just takes one nutter with that snake oil to make these kinds of people fall in line. And as the poem implies, it takes the rest of us to be complacent. It also takes legacy media and a corporate culture that values revenues and power over the people they sell stuff to.
Just watch out for yourselves! I can’t see this being reversed very quickly. The only thing the courts have slowed down is the obvious attack on the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. However, we also know that the Supreme Court has been corrupted. This is from CNN, as reported by Joan Biskupic, CNN’s Chief Supreme Court Analyst. “How the modern Supreme Court might view the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship.” Many court decisions are explored in this article, and I suggest you review them. It includes Dred Scott and Wong Kim Ark. These quotes from Justice Roberts from his confirmation hearings scare me. Will we actually revisit Dred Scott?
Chief Justice Roberts received no questions about the Wong Kim Ark case during his 2005 Senate confirmation hearings. But Dred Scott was raised, and Roberts responded by calling it, “perhaps the most egregious examples of judicial activism in our history … in which the Court went far beyond what was necessary to decide the case.”
“And really, I think historians would say that the Supreme Court tried to put itself in the position of resolving the dispute about the extension of slavery, and resolving it in a particular way that it thought was best for the Nation,” he added. “And we saw what disastrous consequences flowed from that.”
Since then, Roberts has also alluded to Dred Scott in terms of his own legacy.
“You wonder if you’re going to be John Marshall or you’re going to be Roger Taney,” he said in 2010, contrasting the great 19th century chief justice with the chief justice who wrote Dred Scott.
“The answer is, of course, you are certainly not going to be John Marshall,” Roberts said. “But you want to avoid the danger of being Roger Taney.”
We are so fucked.
The final thing that scares the shit out of me is what the pardons of jailed domestic terrorists that threatened abortion clinics will do to further radicalize the movement again. This is from the BBC. “Trump pardons anti-abortion activists ahead of rally.” It’s reported by Robert Greenall.
US President Donald Trump has pardoned 23 anti-abortion activists, including some convicted of blockading a reproductive health clinic and intimidating staff and patients.
The pardons were part of a round of executive orders signed by Trump on Thursday, one of several in the first week of his presidency.
Trump described the convictions as “ridiculous”, but abortion rights campaigners said the move was evidence of his opposition to abortion access.
The orders came a day before anti-abortion protesters were due to come to Washington DC for the annual March for Life, which the president is due to address by videolink.
He’s the only US President who has attended the rally in person.
So, today’s big thing will be the Pete Hegseth Vote in the Senate. This is from The Guardian. “Senate to vote on Pete Hegseth confirmation for secretary of defense. Former Fox News host accused of sexual assault, financial mismanagement and excessive alcohol use appears to have enough Republican votes.”
The Senate will vote on Friday night on the nomination of Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s controversial pick for US secretary of defense, but mounting concerns over Hegseth’s personal history and inexperience have raised doubts about his chances of confirmation.
Hegseth, a former Fox News host and army veteran, cleared a key procedural hurdle on Thursday, after 51 Republican senators voted to advance his nomination toward a final vote. But two Senate Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, joined their Democratic colleagues in voting against advancing Hegseth’s nomination because of their skepticism about his qualifications.
“After thorough evaluation, I must conclude that I cannot in good conscience support his nomination for secretary of defense,” Murkowski said in a statement on Thursday. “I commend Pete Hegseth’s service to our nation, including leading troops in combat and advocating for our veterans. However, these accomplishments do not alleviate my significant concerns regarding his nomination.”
Hegseth can only afford to lose the votes of three Senate Republicans, assuming every Democratic senator opposes his nomination, so it appears he is still on track for confirmation. Two Republican senators who had been viewed as potential no votes, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, both supported advancing Hegseth’s nomination on Thursday.
In a floor speech delivered on Friday, the Senate majority leader, Republican John Thune, praised Hegseth’s qualifications and predicted he would steer the Pentagon in a new, forward-thinking direction.
“A veteran of the army national guard who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr Hegseth will bring a warrior’s perspective to the role of defense secretary and will provide much-needed fresh air at the Pentagon,” Thune said.
And yet, Hegseth continues to be dogged by questions about allegations of sexual assault, excessive alcohol use and financial mismanagement of two non-profits that he led. On Thursday, news broke that Hegseth paid $50,000 in a settlement to a woman who accused him of sexual assault in 2017.
Did I mention we are so fucked? Vive la résistance
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
#CrushingTheAcademicLeft #FARTUS #First #JohnRepeat1968BussJohnbussBskySocial #kakistocracy #massDeportations #OpenCarryBirthCertificate #pardonsOfJailedDomesticTerrorists #PeteHegsethWeirdoSexualAssaulter #theyCameFor #ViveLaRésistance
-
Finally Friday Reads: First, they came for …
First, they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me“Spoken like a true felon.” John (repeat1968) Buss @johnbuss.bsky.social
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The snow is beginning to melt here in chilly New Orleans. The last bit I have to tackle is on the kitchen stairs. It’s been a trying week from many standpoints. I’m not sure when I first read the poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller, which is reprinted at this link at the Holocaust Memorial. I imagine it was sometime in my early teens, but that’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is the headlines today that are horrifying and familiar to anyone familiar with the movies, the documentaries, and the stories from relatives of Germany before and during World War 2. No wonder the MAGAs are trying to ban The Diary of a Yong Girl by Anne Frank. Children and families are being snatched by ICE now.
So far, I have heard two over-the-top stories about the zealotry with which ICE, and soon, the military and other Federal Law Agencies are going after people. I read yesterday about Indigenous people getting scooped up in raids as well. We knew this would happen. This is from Newsweek. “US Citizens Are Being Told To Carry Birth Certificates Amid ICE Raids.”
United States citizens, including Native Americans, are being warned to carry ID with them after reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers questioning and detaining people this week.
One such warning came from the Navajo Nation President, Buu Nygren, in Arizona, following reports that some residents had been approached by officials.
Newsweek reached out to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE for comment via email Friday morning.
With President Donald Trump’s plan to ramp up deportations of illegal immigrants, ICE and DHS will likely come under increased scrutiny in the coming weeks and months as they seek to show force when it comes to immigration enforcement. Any overstepping could result in legal action against the agencies.
Nygren’s post on Facebook Wednesday came a day before ICE carried out a raid in Newark, New Jersey, in which a U.S. veteran was reportedly detained by officials, along with some American citizens.
According to the tribal leader in Arizona, there had been “several concerns and unconfirmed reports” that immigration officials had detained Diné people in urban areas.
“My office is looking into this matter and will provide updates as they come,” he said in the post. “I am working actively with our state leaders and law enforcement to protect our Diné people.”
The speculation of who FARTUS and his gang of White Christian Nationalists will come after first is obvious and just as he promised. I’ll start with them coming for “leftist” professors first. This is from the New York Times. It’s Michelle Goldberg’s offering on her Op-Ed Column. “Trump’s Plan to Crush the Academic Left.”
Creeley, at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, predicts that many state legislatures, local officials and university trustees are going to enlist, either out of enthusiasm or expediency, in the crusade to bring the academic left to heel. “I think you’ll see professors investigated and terminated. I think you’re going to see students punished, and I think you’re going to see a pre-emptive action on those fronts,” he said.
Just look at what’s happened at Harvard this week. On Tuesday it announced that, as part of a lawsuit settlement, it would adopt a definition of antisemitism that includes some harsh criticisms of Israel and Zionism, such as holding Israel to a “double standard” and likening its policies to Nazism. Though Harvard claims that it still adheres to the First Amendment, under this definition a student or professor who accuses Israel of genocidal action in Gaza — as the Israeli American Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov has — might be subject to disciplinary action.
In a further act of capitulation, the Harvard Medical School canceled a lecture and panel on wartime health care that was to feature patients from Gaza because of objections that it was one-sided, The Harvard Crimson reported.
“I think that Harvard likely read the room, so to speak, from a political perspective, and decided to cut their losses,” said Creeley. In this period of capitulation, it probably won’t be the last school to fall in line.
Sara Dorn has written this for Forbes Magazine. “Deportations Have Started, White House Says: Everything To Know About Trump’s Plan. The “largest deportation operation” in U.S. history is underway as hundreds of “illegal immigrant criminals” were arrested Thursday and flown out of the U.S., the White House said, as the federal government, U.S. cities, and Mexico brace for a string of executive orders targeting illegal immigration to take effect.”
- The White House said deportation flights began Friday, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement made 538 arrests and lodged 373 detainees on Thursday, in addition to hundreds of “illegal immigrant criminals” who were flown out of the U.S. on military aircraft.
- ICE made 308 arrests Tuesday, Trump’s first full day in office, Border Czar Tom Homan told Fox News, similar to figures under the Biden administration, which made 282 daily arrests on average in September, the last month for which data is available.
- The administration says removals will pick up quickly, though: ICE and Border Patrol agents have been ordered to deport people who cross the border without authorization immediately and conduct “expedited removals” for people found within the interior of the United States, CBS reports, while major raids are expected in various cities.
- Trump on Monday signed a string of executive orders targeting immigration: The military was ordered to the border, migrants can no longer make advance appointments with border officials and they must wait in Mexico while their asylum cases play out.
- Trump also suspended the parole program for migrants from four countries and is attempting to restrict birthright citizenship for children of undocumented and non-permanent immigrants, though a judge on Thursday blocked the policy while legal challenges to the order work their way through the courts.
- While Trump has said the deportations would begin “very quickly,” the operations will likely require Congress to approve additional funding, as ICE already faces a budget shortfall to maintain existing deportation levels in the current spending plan that expires on March 14, according to NBC.
- There are also logistical hurdles like a limited number of beds to hold people in pre-deportation and planes to use for deportation flights, though Trump ordered the military to assist with aircraft and detention space—and removals are only possible if countries are willing to accept deportees, posing a challenge, especially for people from U.S. adversaries like Venezuela.
“To be fair… there were a lot of flies on the stage.” John (repeat1968) Buss
@johnbuss.bsky.socialIn The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait writes, “There Is No Resistance. The response to the January 6 pardons shows that the president faces no effective constraints from within his party.” Very few will stand up to him.
To see how far the lines of normal have moved since President Donald Trump freed the January 6ers, briefly return to the closing days of the 2024 presidential campaign. At the time, a hot issue was whether Trump harbored fascist tendencies, as some of his former aides alleged. The very notion struck most conservatives, including some who have criticized him from time to time, as ludicrous. “Trump says crude and unworthy things and behaved abysmally after the 2020 election,” National Review’s editor-in-chief, Rich Lowry, conceded, “but the idea that he bears any meaningful resemblance to these cracked movements is a stupid smear.”
Looking to dismiss the case, Lowry then reached for the wildest example of fascist behavior he could think of: “Obviously, Trump isn’t deploying a paramilitary wing of the GOP to clash with his enemies on the streets.”
I think the one thing we can say about the days since he took the reins is that he’s definitely a fascist, and what he is doing is fascist. The lies and propaganda are over the top. I am tired of being gaslighted about Elon Musk’s Seig Heil. If you haven’t seen the films of NAZI German and the Seig Heil that starts from the heart, you know what it is. Holding your hand up in a wave is totally different.
While the Anti-Defamation League condemned the Seig Heil, Bebe Netanyahu defended him. This is from The Economic Times. “Israeli PM Netanyahu defends Elon Musk: ‘Falsely smeared’ over Nazi salute row.”
On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk against accusations of making a Nazi salute. Netanyahu took to X (formerly Twitter) to express his support for Musk, stating, “Elon Musk is being falsely smeared. Elon is a great friend of Israel. He visited Israel after the October 7 massacre in which Hamas terrorists committed the worst atrocity against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.” He added, “He has since repeatedly and forcefully supported Israel’s right to defend itself against genocidal terrorists and regimes who seek to annihilate the one and only Jewish state. I thank him for this.”
The controversy began on January 20, during the inauguration of US President Donald Trump. Musk made a gesture that many social media users likened to the “sieg heil” used by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Musk responded to the allegations by calling them baseless and stating that the gesture was taken out of context. “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired,” Musk posted on X.
Meanwhile, “War crimes court issues warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister.” However, this is most important today. This article can be found at AXIOS with its analysis by Andrew Solender. Can we all start realizing the clear and present danger now?
A House Republican on Thursday introduced a proposed change to the Constitution that would allow President Trump to seek a third term in office.
Why it matters: The amendment has virtually no chance of becoming ratified but it is a marker of the depths of fealty the new president enjoys within the House GOP.
- Republican House members have rushed to introduce bills that would codify Trump’s vision for expanding the U.S. borders by acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal, for instance.
- The measure is an extreme long-shot: It would need a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress and be ratified by 38 states to be added to the Constitution.
Driving the news: Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) said Thursday he is introducing a two-page joint resolution to amend the 22nd Amendment, which sets the current two-term limit for presidents.
- Ogles’ amendment would allow any president to serve a third term if their first two terms were non-consecutive.
- The text of the amendment would still prohibit a third term if the first two were consecutive — prohibiting former Presidents Bush, Obama and Clinton from running again — or a third full term for anyone who has served more than two years of someone else’s term.
What they’re saying: “It is imperative that we provide President Trump with every resource necessary to correct the disastrous course set by the Biden administration,” Ogles said in a statement.
- “He is dedicated to restoring the republic and saving our country, and we, as legislators and as states, must do everything in our power to support him.”
- Ogles is a member of the Trump-aligned House Freedom Caucus who introduced legislation to allow him to negotiate a purchase of Greenland.
The world must think the entire country has gone nuts to let these freaks back into office. This is from King’s College London. “What Trump’s second presidential term could mean for the world. With Donald Trump now sworn in as the 47th US President, academics from King’s have been sharing insights into the implications of his presidency for the USA and the rest of the world.”
Donald Trump’s latest term as US President is set to transform American politics, according to Dr Georgios Samaras, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the International School for Government.
He said Trump’s influential circle, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and the drive to safeguard free speech has placed Facebook, Instagram, and X in near-complete control of cultural narratives. He said some of these involve “hateful rhetoric, authoritarian themes and misinformation which is increasingly going unchecked.”
…
Professor Andrew Blick appeared on LBC with Andrew Marr, who suggested Trump is behaving like “an old-fashioned European monarch”.
In response, Professor Blick said the US constitution was designed with in-built checks and balances, such as a separate election of the President to Congress, two chambers in the Congress and the Supreme Court. However he said the problem with this was that Trump, or those close to him, seemed to have a hold of all these things.
Comparing the US to the UK, he said there are weaker protections within Britain’s constitutional system which means if someone has strong majority in the House of Commons there are less limitations on what they can do.
He added that the UK has already “seen the Musk effect before the Trump presidency even started” with the owner of X shaping the agenda of British politics, such as the government announcing reviews following a series of posts by Musk. “Without his intervention would that have happened?” he asked.
Professor Blick suggested Keir Starmer and his team will be worried about upsetting Trump and what the consequences might be, although he said the obvious differences between the two political leaders could prove to be Starmer’s “superpower”.
The people of the UK are clearly not amused. I still remember, as a kid watching Hitler Documentaries at school, how the German people fell for this nonsense. Now I know that being stupid, lazy, racist, and wanting to blame everyone else is an easy out. It just takes one nutter with that snake oil to make these kinds of people fall in line. And as the poem implies, it takes the rest of us to be complacent. It also takes legacy media and a corporate culture that values revenues and power over the people they sell stuff to.
Just watch out for yourselves! I can’t see this being reversed very quickly. The only thing the courts have slowed down is the obvious attack on the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. However, we also know that the Supreme Court has been corrupted. This is from CNN, as reported by Joan Biskupic, CNN’s Chief Supreme Court Analyst. “How the modern Supreme Court might view the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship.” Many court decisions are explored in this article, and I suggest you review them. It includes Dred Scott and Wong Kim Ark. These quotes from Justice Roberts from his confirmation hearings scare me. Will we actually revisit Dred Scott?
Chief Justice Roberts received no questions about the Wong Kim Ark case during his 2005 Senate confirmation hearings. But Dred Scott was raised, and Roberts responded by calling it, “perhaps the most egregious examples of judicial activism in our history … in which the Court went far beyond what was necessary to decide the case.”
“And really, I think historians would say that the Supreme Court tried to put itself in the position of resolving the dispute about the extension of slavery, and resolving it in a particular way that it thought was best for the Nation,” he added. “And we saw what disastrous consequences flowed from that.”
Since then, Roberts has also alluded to Dred Scott in terms of his own legacy.
“You wonder if you’re going to be John Marshall or you’re going to be Roger Taney,” he said in 2010, contrasting the great 19th century chief justice with the chief justice who wrote Dred Scott.
“The answer is, of course, you are certainly not going to be John Marshall,” Roberts said. “But you want to avoid the danger of being Roger Taney.”
We are so fucked.
The final thing that scares the shit out of me is what the pardons of jailed domestic terrorists that threatened abortion clinics will do to further radicalize the movement again. This is from the BBC. “Trump pardons anti-abortion activists ahead of rally.” It’s reported by Robert Greenall.
US President Donald Trump has pardoned 23 anti-abortion activists, including some convicted of blockading a reproductive health clinic and intimidating staff and patients.
The pardons were part of a round of executive orders signed by Trump on Thursday, one of several in the first week of his presidency.
Trump described the convictions as “ridiculous”, but abortion rights campaigners said the move was evidence of his opposition to abortion access.
The orders came a day before anti-abortion protesters were due to come to Washington DC for the annual March for Life, which the president is due to address by videolink.
He’s the only US President who has attended the rally in person.
So, today’s big thing will be the Pete Hegseth Vote in the Senate. This is from The Guardian. “Senate to vote on Pete Hegseth confirmation for secretary of defense. Former Fox News host accused of sexual assault, financial mismanagement and excessive alcohol use appears to have enough Republican votes.”
The Senate will vote on Friday night on the nomination of Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s controversial pick for US secretary of defense, but mounting concerns over Hegseth’s personal history and inexperience have raised doubts about his chances of confirmation.
Hegseth, a former Fox News host and army veteran, cleared a key procedural hurdle on Thursday, after 51 Republican senators voted to advance his nomination toward a final vote. But two Senate Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, joined their Democratic colleagues in voting against advancing Hegseth’s nomination because of their skepticism about his qualifications.
“After thorough evaluation, I must conclude that I cannot in good conscience support his nomination for secretary of defense,” Murkowski said in a statement on Thursday. “I commend Pete Hegseth’s service to our nation, including leading troops in combat and advocating for our veterans. However, these accomplishments do not alleviate my significant concerns regarding his nomination.”
Hegseth can only afford to lose the votes of three Senate Republicans, assuming every Democratic senator opposes his nomination, so it appears he is still on track for confirmation. Two Republican senators who had been viewed as potential no votes, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, both supported advancing Hegseth’s nomination on Thursday.
In a floor speech delivered on Friday, the Senate majority leader, Republican John Thune, praised Hegseth’s qualifications and predicted he would steer the Pentagon in a new, forward-thinking direction.
“A veteran of the army national guard who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr Hegseth will bring a warrior’s perspective to the role of defense secretary and will provide much-needed fresh air at the Pentagon,” Thune said.
And yet, Hegseth continues to be dogged by questions about allegations of sexual assault, excessive alcohol use and financial mismanagement of two non-profits that he led. On Thursday, news broke that Hegseth paid $50,000 in a settlement to a woman who accused him of sexual assault in 2017.
Did I mention we are so fucked? Vive la résistance
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
#CrushingTheAcademicLeft #FARTUS #First #JohnRepeat1968BussJohnbussBskySocial #kakistocracy #massDeportations #OpenCarryBirthCertificate #pardonsOfJailedDomesticTerrorists #PeteHegsethWeirdoSexualAssaulter #theyCameFor #ViveLaRésistance
-
Finally Friday Reads: First, they came for …
First, they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me“Spoken like a true felon.” John (repeat1968) Buss @johnbuss.bsky.social
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The snow is beginning to melt here in chilly New Orleans. The last bit I have to tackle is on the kitchen stairs. It’s been a trying week from many standpoints. I’m not sure when I first read the poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller, which is reprinted at this link at the Holocaust Memorial. I imagine it was sometime in my early teens, but that’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is the headlines today that are horrifying and familiar to anyone familiar with the movies, the documentaries, and the stories from relatives of Germany before and during World War 2. No wonder the MAGAs are trying to ban The Diary of a Yong Girl by Anne Frank. Children and families are being snatched by ICE now.
So far, I have heard two over-the-top stories about the zealotry with which ICE, and soon, the military and other Federal Law Agencies are going after people. I read yesterday about Indigenous people getting scooped up in raids as well. We knew this would happen. This is from Newsweek. “US Citizens Are Being Told To Carry Birth Certificates Amid ICE Raids.”
United States citizens, including Native Americans, are being warned to carry ID with them after reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers questioning and detaining people this week.
One such warning came from the Navajo Nation President, Buu Nygren, in Arizona, following reports that some residents had been approached by officials.
Newsweek reached out to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE for comment via email Friday morning.
With President Donald Trump’s plan to ramp up deportations of illegal immigrants, ICE and DHS will likely come under increased scrutiny in the coming weeks and months as they seek to show force when it comes to immigration enforcement. Any overstepping could result in legal action against the agencies.
Nygren’s post on Facebook Wednesday came a day before ICE carried out a raid in Newark, New Jersey, in which a U.S. veteran was reportedly detained by officials, along with some American citizens.
According to the tribal leader in Arizona, there had been “several concerns and unconfirmed reports” that immigration officials had detained Diné people in urban areas.
“My office is looking into this matter and will provide updates as they come,” he said in the post. “I am working actively with our state leaders and law enforcement to protect our Diné people.”
The speculation of who FARTUS and his gang of White Christian Nationalists will come after first is obvious and just as he promised. I’ll start with them coming for “leftist” professors first. This is from the New York Times. It’s Michelle Goldberg’s offering on her Op-Ed Column. “Trump’s Plan to Crush the Academic Left.”
Creeley, at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, predicts that many state legislatures, local officials and university trustees are going to enlist, either out of enthusiasm or expediency, in the crusade to bring the academic left to heel. “I think you’ll see professors investigated and terminated. I think you’re going to see students punished, and I think you’re going to see a pre-emptive action on those fronts,” he said.
Just look at what’s happened at Harvard this week. On Tuesday it announced that, as part of a lawsuit settlement, it would adopt a definition of antisemitism that includes some harsh criticisms of Israel and Zionism, such as holding Israel to a “double standard” and likening its policies to Nazism. Though Harvard claims that it still adheres to the First Amendment, under this definition a student or professor who accuses Israel of genocidal action in Gaza — as the Israeli American Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov has — might be subject to disciplinary action.
In a further act of capitulation, the Harvard Medical School canceled a lecture and panel on wartime health care that was to feature patients from Gaza because of objections that it was one-sided, The Harvard Crimson reported.
“I think that Harvard likely read the room, so to speak, from a political perspective, and decided to cut their losses,” said Creeley. In this period of capitulation, it probably won’t be the last school to fall in line.
Sara Dorn has written this for Forbes Magazine. “Deportations Have Started, White House Says: Everything To Know About Trump’s Plan. The “largest deportation operation” in U.S. history is underway as hundreds of “illegal immigrant criminals” were arrested Thursday and flown out of the U.S., the White House said, as the federal government, U.S. cities, and Mexico brace for a string of executive orders targeting illegal immigration to take effect.”
- The White House said deportation flights began Friday, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement made 538 arrests and lodged 373 detainees on Thursday, in addition to hundreds of “illegal immigrant criminals” who were flown out of the U.S. on military aircraft.
- ICE made 308 arrests Tuesday, Trump’s first full day in office, Border Czar Tom Homan told Fox News, similar to figures under the Biden administration, which made 282 daily arrests on average in September, the last month for which data is available.
- The administration says removals will pick up quickly, though: ICE and Border Patrol agents have been ordered to deport people who cross the border without authorization immediately and conduct “expedited removals” for people found within the interior of the United States, CBS reports, while major raids are expected in various cities.
- Trump on Monday signed a string of executive orders targeting immigration: The military was ordered to the border, migrants can no longer make advance appointments with border officials and they must wait in Mexico while their asylum cases play out.
- Trump also suspended the parole program for migrants from four countries and is attempting to restrict birthright citizenship for children of undocumented and non-permanent immigrants, though a judge on Thursday blocked the policy while legal challenges to the order work their way through the courts.
- While Trump has said the deportations would begin “very quickly,” the operations will likely require Congress to approve additional funding, as ICE already faces a budget shortfall to maintain existing deportation levels in the current spending plan that expires on March 14, according to NBC.
- There are also logistical hurdles like a limited number of beds to hold people in pre-deportation and planes to use for deportation flights, though Trump ordered the military to assist with aircraft and detention space—and removals are only possible if countries are willing to accept deportees, posing a challenge, especially for people from U.S. adversaries like Venezuela.
“To be fair… there were a lot of flies on the stage.” John (repeat1968) Buss
@johnbuss.bsky.socialIn The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait writes, “There Is No Resistance. The response to the January 6 pardons shows that the president faces no effective constraints from within his party.” Very few will stand up to him.
To see how far the lines of normal have moved since President Donald Trump freed the January 6ers, briefly return to the closing days of the 2024 presidential campaign. At the time, a hot issue was whether Trump harbored fascist tendencies, as some of his former aides alleged. The very notion struck most conservatives, including some who have criticized him from time to time, as ludicrous. “Trump says crude and unworthy things and behaved abysmally after the 2020 election,” National Review’s editor-in-chief, Rich Lowry, conceded, “but the idea that he bears any meaningful resemblance to these cracked movements is a stupid smear.”
Looking to dismiss the case, Lowry then reached for the wildest example of fascist behavior he could think of: “Obviously, Trump isn’t deploying a paramilitary wing of the GOP to clash with his enemies on the streets.”
I think the one thing we can say about the days since he took the reins is that he’s definitely a fascist, and what he is doing is fascist. The lies and propaganda are over the top. I am tired of being gaslighted about Elon Musk’s Seig Heil. If you haven’t seen the films of NAZI German and the Seig Heil that starts from the heart, you know what it is. Holding your hand up in a wave is totally different.
While the Anti-Defamation League condemned the Seig Heil, Bebe Netanyahu defended him. This is from The Economic Times. “Israeli PM Netanyahu defends Elon Musk: ‘Falsely smeared’ over Nazi salute row.”
On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk against accusations of making a Nazi salute. Netanyahu took to X (formerly Twitter) to express his support for Musk, stating, “Elon Musk is being falsely smeared. Elon is a great friend of Israel. He visited Israel after the October 7 massacre in which Hamas terrorists committed the worst atrocity against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.” He added, “He has since repeatedly and forcefully supported Israel’s right to defend itself against genocidal terrorists and regimes who seek to annihilate the one and only Jewish state. I thank him for this.”
The controversy began on January 20, during the inauguration of US President Donald Trump. Musk made a gesture that many social media users likened to the “sieg heil” used by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Musk responded to the allegations by calling them baseless and stating that the gesture was taken out of context. “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired,” Musk posted on X.
Meanwhile, “War crimes court issues warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister.” However, this is most important today. This article can be found at AXIOS with its analysis by Andrew Solender. Can we all start realizing the clear and present danger now?
A House Republican on Thursday introduced a proposed change to the Constitution that would allow President Trump to seek a third term in office.
Why it matters: The amendment has virtually no chance of becoming ratified but it is a marker of the depths of fealty the new president enjoys within the House GOP.
- Republican House members have rushed to introduce bills that would codify Trump’s vision for expanding the U.S. borders by acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal, for instance.
- The measure is an extreme long-shot: It would need a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress and be ratified by 38 states to be added to the Constitution.
Driving the news: Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) said Thursday he is introducing a two-page joint resolution to amend the 22nd Amendment, which sets the current two-term limit for presidents.
- Ogles’ amendment would allow any president to serve a third term if their first two terms were non-consecutive.
- The text of the amendment would still prohibit a third term if the first two were consecutive — prohibiting former Presidents Bush, Obama and Clinton from running again — or a third full term for anyone who has served more than two years of someone else’s term.
What they’re saying: “It is imperative that we provide President Trump with every resource necessary to correct the disastrous course set by the Biden administration,” Ogles said in a statement.
- “He is dedicated to restoring the republic and saving our country, and we, as legislators and as states, must do everything in our power to support him.”
- Ogles is a member of the Trump-aligned House Freedom Caucus who introduced legislation to allow him to negotiate a purchase of Greenland.
The world must think the entire country has gone nuts to let these freaks back into office. This is from King’s College London. “What Trump’s second presidential term could mean for the world. With Donald Trump now sworn in as the 47th US President, academics from King’s have been sharing insights into the implications of his presidency for the USA and the rest of the world.”
Donald Trump’s latest term as US President is set to transform American politics, according to Dr Georgios Samaras, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the International School for Government.
He said Trump’s influential circle, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and the drive to safeguard free speech has placed Facebook, Instagram, and X in near-complete control of cultural narratives. He said some of these involve “hateful rhetoric, authoritarian themes and misinformation which is increasingly going unchecked.”
…
Professor Andrew Blick appeared on LBC with Andrew Marr, who suggested Trump is behaving like “an old-fashioned European monarch”.
In response, Professor Blick said the US constitution was designed with in-built checks and balances, such as a separate election of the President to Congress, two chambers in the Congress and the Supreme Court. However he said the problem with this was that Trump, or those close to him, seemed to have a hold of all these things.
Comparing the US to the UK, he said there are weaker protections within Britain’s constitutional system which means if someone has strong majority in the House of Commons there are less limitations on what they can do.
He added that the UK has already “seen the Musk effect before the Trump presidency even started” with the owner of X shaping the agenda of British politics, such as the government announcing reviews following a series of posts by Musk. “Without his intervention would that have happened?” he asked.
Professor Blick suggested Keir Starmer and his team will be worried about upsetting Trump and what the consequences might be, although he said the obvious differences between the two political leaders could prove to be Starmer’s “superpower”.
The people of the UK are clearly not amused. I still remember, as a kid watching Hitler Documentaries at school, how the German people fell for this nonsense. Now I know that being stupid, lazy, racist, and wanting to blame everyone else is an easy out. It just takes one nutter with that snake oil to make these kinds of people fall in line. And as the poem implies, it takes the rest of us to be complacent. It also takes legacy media and a corporate culture that values revenues and power over the people they sell stuff to.
Just watch out for yourselves! I can’t see this being reversed very quickly. The only thing the courts have slowed down is the obvious attack on the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. However, we also know that the Supreme Court has been corrupted. This is from CNN, as reported by Joan Biskupic, CNN’s Chief Supreme Court Analyst. “How the modern Supreme Court might view the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship.” Many court decisions are explored in this article, and I suggest you review them. It includes Dred Scott and Wong Kim Ark. These quotes from Justice Roberts from his confirmation hearings scare me. Will we actually revisit Dred Scott?
Chief Justice Roberts received no questions about the Wong Kim Ark case during his 2005 Senate confirmation hearings. But Dred Scott was raised, and Roberts responded by calling it, “perhaps the most egregious examples of judicial activism in our history … in which the Court went far beyond what was necessary to decide the case.”
“And really, I think historians would say that the Supreme Court tried to put itself in the position of resolving the dispute about the extension of slavery, and resolving it in a particular way that it thought was best for the Nation,” he added. “And we saw what disastrous consequences flowed from that.”
Since then, Roberts has also alluded to Dred Scott in terms of his own legacy.
“You wonder if you’re going to be John Marshall or you’re going to be Roger Taney,” he said in 2010, contrasting the great 19th century chief justice with the chief justice who wrote Dred Scott.
“The answer is, of course, you are certainly not going to be John Marshall,” Roberts said. “But you want to avoid the danger of being Roger Taney.”
We are so fucked.
The final thing that scares the shit out of me is what the pardons of jailed domestic terrorists that threatened abortion clinics will do to further radicalize the movement again. This is from the BBC. “Trump pardons anti-abortion activists ahead of rally.” It’s reported by Robert Greenall.
US President Donald Trump has pardoned 23 anti-abortion activists, including some convicted of blockading a reproductive health clinic and intimidating staff and patients.
The pardons were part of a round of executive orders signed by Trump on Thursday, one of several in the first week of his presidency.
Trump described the convictions as “ridiculous”, but abortion rights campaigners said the move was evidence of his opposition to abortion access.
The orders came a day before anti-abortion protesters were due to come to Washington DC for the annual March for Life, which the president is due to address by videolink.
He’s the only US President who has attended the rally in person.
So, today’s big thing will be the Pete Hegseth Vote in the Senate. This is from The Guardian. “Senate to vote on Pete Hegseth confirmation for secretary of defense. Former Fox News host accused of sexual assault, financial mismanagement and excessive alcohol use appears to have enough Republican votes.”
The Senate will vote on Friday night on the nomination of Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s controversial pick for US secretary of defense, but mounting concerns over Hegseth’s personal history and inexperience have raised doubts about his chances of confirmation.
Hegseth, a former Fox News host and army veteran, cleared a key procedural hurdle on Thursday, after 51 Republican senators voted to advance his nomination toward a final vote. But two Senate Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, joined their Democratic colleagues in voting against advancing Hegseth’s nomination because of their skepticism about his qualifications.
“After thorough evaluation, I must conclude that I cannot in good conscience support his nomination for secretary of defense,” Murkowski said in a statement on Thursday. “I commend Pete Hegseth’s service to our nation, including leading troops in combat and advocating for our veterans. However, these accomplishments do not alleviate my significant concerns regarding his nomination.”
Hegseth can only afford to lose the votes of three Senate Republicans, assuming every Democratic senator opposes his nomination, so it appears he is still on track for confirmation. Two Republican senators who had been viewed as potential no votes, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, both supported advancing Hegseth’s nomination on Thursday.
In a floor speech delivered on Friday, the Senate majority leader, Republican John Thune, praised Hegseth’s qualifications and predicted he would steer the Pentagon in a new, forward-thinking direction.
“A veteran of the army national guard who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr Hegseth will bring a warrior’s perspective to the role of defense secretary and will provide much-needed fresh air at the Pentagon,” Thune said.
And yet, Hegseth continues to be dogged by questions about allegations of sexual assault, excessive alcohol use and financial mismanagement of two non-profits that he led. On Thursday, news broke that Hegseth paid $50,000 in a settlement to a woman who accused him of sexual assault in 2017.
Did I mention we are so fucked? Vive la résistance
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
#CrushingTheAcademicLeft #FARTUS #First #JohnRepeat1968BussJohnbussBskySocial #kakistocracy #massDeportations #OpenCarryBirthCertificate #pardonsOfJailedDomesticTerrorists #PeteHegsethWeirdoSexualAssaulter #theyCameFor #ViveLaRésistance
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Finally Friday Reads: First, they came for …
First, they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me“Spoken like a true felon.” John (repeat1968) Buss @johnbuss.bsky.social
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The snow is beginning to melt here in chilly New Orleans. The last bit I have to tackle is on the kitchen stairs. It’s been a trying week from many standpoints. I’m not sure when I first read the poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller, which is reprinted at this link at the Holocaust Memorial. I imagine it was sometime in my early teens, but that’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is the headlines today that are horrifying and familiar to anyone familiar with the movies, the documentaries, and the stories from relatives of Germany before and during World War 2. No wonder the MAGAs are trying to ban The Diary of a Yong Girl by Anne Frank. Children and families are being snatched by ICE now.
So far, I have heard two over-the-top stories about the zealotry with which ICE, and soon, the military and other Federal Law Agencies are going after people. I read yesterday about Indigenous people getting scooped up in raids as well. We knew this would happen. This is from Newsweek. “US Citizens Are Being Told To Carry Birth Certificates Amid ICE Raids.”
United States citizens, including Native Americans, are being warned to carry ID with them after reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers questioning and detaining people this week.
One such warning came from the Navajo Nation President, Buu Nygren, in Arizona, following reports that some residents had been approached by officials.
Newsweek reached out to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE for comment via email Friday morning.
With President Donald Trump’s plan to ramp up deportations of illegal immigrants, ICE and DHS will likely come under increased scrutiny in the coming weeks and months as they seek to show force when it comes to immigration enforcement. Any overstepping could result in legal action against the agencies.
Nygren’s post on Facebook Wednesday came a day before ICE carried out a raid in Newark, New Jersey, in which a U.S. veteran was reportedly detained by officials, along with some American citizens.
According to the tribal leader in Arizona, there had been “several concerns and unconfirmed reports” that immigration officials had detained Diné people in urban areas.
“My office is looking into this matter and will provide updates as they come,” he said in the post. “I am working actively with our state leaders and law enforcement to protect our Diné people.”
The speculation of who FARTUS and his gang of White Christian Nationalists will come after first is obvious and just as he promised. I’ll start with them coming for “leftist” professors first. This is from the New York Times. It’s Michelle Goldberg’s offering on her Op-Ed Column. “Trump’s Plan to Crush the Academic Left.”
Creeley, at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, predicts that many state legislatures, local officials and university trustees are going to enlist, either out of enthusiasm or expediency, in the crusade to bring the academic left to heel. “I think you’ll see professors investigated and terminated. I think you’re going to see students punished, and I think you’re going to see a pre-emptive action on those fronts,” he said.
Just look at what’s happened at Harvard this week. On Tuesday it announced that, as part of a lawsuit settlement, it would adopt a definition of antisemitism that includes some harsh criticisms of Israel and Zionism, such as holding Israel to a “double standard” and likening its policies to Nazism. Though Harvard claims that it still adheres to the First Amendment, under this definition a student or professor who accuses Israel of genocidal action in Gaza — as the Israeli American Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov has — might be subject to disciplinary action.
In a further act of capitulation, the Harvard Medical School canceled a lecture and panel on wartime health care that was to feature patients from Gaza because of objections that it was one-sided, The Harvard Crimson reported.
“I think that Harvard likely read the room, so to speak, from a political perspective, and decided to cut their losses,” said Creeley. In this period of capitulation, it probably won’t be the last school to fall in line.
Sara Dorn has written this for Forbes Magazine. “Deportations Have Started, White House Says: Everything To Know About Trump’s Plan. The “largest deportation operation” in U.S. history is underway as hundreds of “illegal immigrant criminals” were arrested Thursday and flown out of the U.S., the White House said, as the federal government, U.S. cities, and Mexico brace for a string of executive orders targeting illegal immigration to take effect.”
- The White House said deportation flights began Friday, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement made 538 arrests and lodged 373 detainees on Thursday, in addition to hundreds of “illegal immigrant criminals” who were flown out of the U.S. on military aircraft.
- ICE made 308 arrests Tuesday, Trump’s first full day in office, Border Czar Tom Homan told Fox News, similar to figures under the Biden administration, which made 282 daily arrests on average in September, the last month for which data is available.
- The administration says removals will pick up quickly, though: ICE and Border Patrol agents have been ordered to deport people who cross the border without authorization immediately and conduct “expedited removals” for people found within the interior of the United States, CBS reports, while major raids are expected in various cities.
- Trump on Monday signed a string of executive orders targeting immigration: The military was ordered to the border, migrants can no longer make advance appointments with border officials and they must wait in Mexico while their asylum cases play out.
- Trump also suspended the parole program for migrants from four countries and is attempting to restrict birthright citizenship for children of undocumented and non-permanent immigrants, though a judge on Thursday blocked the policy while legal challenges to the order work their way through the courts.
- While Trump has said the deportations would begin “very quickly,” the operations will likely require Congress to approve additional funding, as ICE already faces a budget shortfall to maintain existing deportation levels in the current spending plan that expires on March 14, according to NBC.
- There are also logistical hurdles like a limited number of beds to hold people in pre-deportation and planes to use for deportation flights, though Trump ordered the military to assist with aircraft and detention space—and removals are only possible if countries are willing to accept deportees, posing a challenge, especially for people from U.S. adversaries like Venezuela.
“To be fair… there were a lot of flies on the stage.” John (repeat1968) Buss
@johnbuss.bsky.socialIn The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait writes, “There Is No Resistance. The response to the January 6 pardons shows that the president faces no effective constraints from within his party.” Very few will stand up to him.
To see how far the lines of normal have moved since President Donald Trump freed the January 6ers, briefly return to the closing days of the 2024 presidential campaign. At the time, a hot issue was whether Trump harbored fascist tendencies, as some of his former aides alleged. The very notion struck most conservatives, including some who have criticized him from time to time, as ludicrous. “Trump says crude and unworthy things and behaved abysmally after the 2020 election,” National Review’s editor-in-chief, Rich Lowry, conceded, “but the idea that he bears any meaningful resemblance to these cracked movements is a stupid smear.”
Looking to dismiss the case, Lowry then reached for the wildest example of fascist behavior he could think of: “Obviously, Trump isn’t deploying a paramilitary wing of the GOP to clash with his enemies on the streets.”
I think the one thing we can say about the days since he took the reins is that he’s definitely a fascist, and what he is doing is fascist. The lies and propaganda are over the top. I am tired of being gaslighted about Elon Musk’s Seig Heil. If you haven’t seen the films of NAZI German and the Seig Heil that starts from the heart, you know what it is. Holding your hand up in a wave is totally different.
While the Anti-Defamation League condemned the Seig Heil, Bebe Netanyahu defended him. This is from The Economic Times. “Israeli PM Netanyahu defends Elon Musk: ‘Falsely smeared’ over Nazi salute row.”
On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk against accusations of making a Nazi salute. Netanyahu took to X (formerly Twitter) to express his support for Musk, stating, “Elon Musk is being falsely smeared. Elon is a great friend of Israel. He visited Israel after the October 7 massacre in which Hamas terrorists committed the worst atrocity against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.” He added, “He has since repeatedly and forcefully supported Israel’s right to defend itself against genocidal terrorists and regimes who seek to annihilate the one and only Jewish state. I thank him for this.”
The controversy began on January 20, during the inauguration of US President Donald Trump. Musk made a gesture that many social media users likened to the “sieg heil” used by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Musk responded to the allegations by calling them baseless and stating that the gesture was taken out of context. “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired,” Musk posted on X.
Meanwhile, “War crimes court issues warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister.” However, this is most important today. This article can be found at AXIOS with its analysis by Andrew Solender. Can we all start realizing the clear and present danger now?
A House Republican on Thursday introduced a proposed change to the Constitution that would allow President Trump to seek a third term in office.
Why it matters: The amendment has virtually no chance of becoming ratified but it is a marker of the depths of fealty the new president enjoys within the House GOP.
- Republican House members have rushed to introduce bills that would codify Trump’s vision for expanding the U.S. borders by acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal, for instance.
- The measure is an extreme long-shot: It would need a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress and be ratified by 38 states to be added to the Constitution.
Driving the news: Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) said Thursday he is introducing a two-page joint resolution to amend the 22nd Amendment, which sets the current two-term limit for presidents.
- Ogles’ amendment would allow any president to serve a third term if their first two terms were non-consecutive.
- The text of the amendment would still prohibit a third term if the first two were consecutive — prohibiting former Presidents Bush, Obama and Clinton from running again — or a third full term for anyone who has served more than two years of someone else’s term.
What they’re saying: “It is imperative that we provide President Trump with every resource necessary to correct the disastrous course set by the Biden administration,” Ogles said in a statement.
- “He is dedicated to restoring the republic and saving our country, and we, as legislators and as states, must do everything in our power to support him.”
- Ogles is a member of the Trump-aligned House Freedom Caucus who introduced legislation to allow him to negotiate a purchase of Greenland.
The world must think the entire country has gone nuts to let these freaks back into office. This is from King’s College London. “What Trump’s second presidential term could mean for the world. With Donald Trump now sworn in as the 47th US President, academics from King’s have been sharing insights into the implications of his presidency for the USA and the rest of the world.”
Donald Trump’s latest term as US President is set to transform American politics, according to Dr Georgios Samaras, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the International School for Government.
He said Trump’s influential circle, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and the drive to safeguard free speech has placed Facebook, Instagram, and X in near-complete control of cultural narratives. He said some of these involve “hateful rhetoric, authoritarian themes and misinformation which is increasingly going unchecked.”
…
Professor Andrew Blick appeared on LBC with Andrew Marr, who suggested Trump is behaving like “an old-fashioned European monarch”.
In response, Professor Blick said the US constitution was designed with in-built checks and balances, such as a separate election of the President to Congress, two chambers in the Congress and the Supreme Court. However he said the problem with this was that Trump, or those close to him, seemed to have a hold of all these things.
Comparing the US to the UK, he said there are weaker protections within Britain’s constitutional system which means if someone has strong majority in the House of Commons there are less limitations on what they can do.
He added that the UK has already “seen the Musk effect before the Trump presidency even started” with the owner of X shaping the agenda of British politics, such as the government announcing reviews following a series of posts by Musk. “Without his intervention would that have happened?” he asked.
Professor Blick suggested Keir Starmer and his team will be worried about upsetting Trump and what the consequences might be, although he said the obvious differences between the two political leaders could prove to be Starmer’s “superpower”.
The people of the UK are clearly not amused. I still remember, as a kid watching Hitler Documentaries at school, how the German people fell for this nonsense. Now I know that being stupid, lazy, racist, and wanting to blame everyone else is an easy out. It just takes one nutter with that snake oil to make these kinds of people fall in line. And as the poem implies, it takes the rest of us to be complacent. It also takes legacy media and a corporate culture that values revenues and power over the people they sell stuff to.
Just watch out for yourselves! I can’t see this being reversed very quickly. The only thing the courts have slowed down is the obvious attack on the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. However, we also know that the Supreme Court has been corrupted. This is from CNN, as reported by Joan Biskupic, CNN’s Chief Supreme Court Analyst. “How the modern Supreme Court might view the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship.” Many court decisions are explored in this article, and I suggest you review them. It includes Dred Scott and Wong Kim Ark. These quotes from Justice Roberts from his confirmation hearings scare me. Will we actually revisit Dred Scott?
Chief Justice Roberts received no questions about the Wong Kim Ark case during his 2005 Senate confirmation hearings. But Dred Scott was raised, and Roberts responded by calling it, “perhaps the most egregious examples of judicial activism in our history … in which the Court went far beyond what was necessary to decide the case.”
“And really, I think historians would say that the Supreme Court tried to put itself in the position of resolving the dispute about the extension of slavery, and resolving it in a particular way that it thought was best for the Nation,” he added. “And we saw what disastrous consequences flowed from that.”
Since then, Roberts has also alluded to Dred Scott in terms of his own legacy.
“You wonder if you’re going to be John Marshall or you’re going to be Roger Taney,” he said in 2010, contrasting the great 19th century chief justice with the chief justice who wrote Dred Scott.
“The answer is, of course, you are certainly not going to be John Marshall,” Roberts said. “But you want to avoid the danger of being Roger Taney.”
We are so fucked.
The final thing that scares the shit out of me is what the pardons of jailed domestic terrorists that threatened abortion clinics will do to further radicalize the movement again. This is from the BBC. “Trump pardons anti-abortion activists ahead of rally.” It’s reported by Robert Greenall.
US President Donald Trump has pardoned 23 anti-abortion activists, including some convicted of blockading a reproductive health clinic and intimidating staff and patients.
The pardons were part of a round of executive orders signed by Trump on Thursday, one of several in the first week of his presidency.
Trump described the convictions as “ridiculous”, but abortion rights campaigners said the move was evidence of his opposition to abortion access.
The orders came a day before anti-abortion protesters were due to come to Washington DC for the annual March for Life, which the president is due to address by videolink.
He’s the only US President who has attended the rally in person.
So, today’s big thing will be the Pete Hegseth Vote in the Senate. This is from The Guardian. “Senate to vote on Pete Hegseth confirmation for secretary of defense. Former Fox News host accused of sexual assault, financial mismanagement and excessive alcohol use appears to have enough Republican votes.”
The Senate will vote on Friday night on the nomination of Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s controversial pick for US secretary of defense, but mounting concerns over Hegseth’s personal history and inexperience have raised doubts about his chances of confirmation.
Hegseth, a former Fox News host and army veteran, cleared a key procedural hurdle on Thursday, after 51 Republican senators voted to advance his nomination toward a final vote. But two Senate Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, joined their Democratic colleagues in voting against advancing Hegseth’s nomination because of their skepticism about his qualifications.
“After thorough evaluation, I must conclude that I cannot in good conscience support his nomination for secretary of defense,” Murkowski said in a statement on Thursday. “I commend Pete Hegseth’s service to our nation, including leading troops in combat and advocating for our veterans. However, these accomplishments do not alleviate my significant concerns regarding his nomination.”
Hegseth can only afford to lose the votes of three Senate Republicans, assuming every Democratic senator opposes his nomination, so it appears he is still on track for confirmation. Two Republican senators who had been viewed as potential no votes, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, both supported advancing Hegseth’s nomination on Thursday.
In a floor speech delivered on Friday, the Senate majority leader, Republican John Thune, praised Hegseth’s qualifications and predicted he would steer the Pentagon in a new, forward-thinking direction.
“A veteran of the army national guard who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr Hegseth will bring a warrior’s perspective to the role of defense secretary and will provide much-needed fresh air at the Pentagon,” Thune said.
And yet, Hegseth continues to be dogged by questions about allegations of sexual assault, excessive alcohol use and financial mismanagement of two non-profits that he led. On Thursday, news broke that Hegseth paid $50,000 in a settlement to a woman who accused him of sexual assault in 2017.
Did I mention we are so fucked? Vive la résistance
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
#CrushingTheAcademicLeft #FARTUS #First #JohnRepeat1968BussJohnbussBskySocial #kakistocracy #massDeportations #OpenCarryBirthCertificate #pardonsOfJailedDomesticTerrorists #PeteHegsethWeirdoSexualAssaulter #theyCameFor #ViveLaRésistance
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Finally Friday Reads: We have a Kakistocracy* coming. Let’s not keep it!
“Make America Garbage Again,” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
After sleeping through last week, I have finally decided that PTSD has kicked in, and I’m in survival mode. At least I woke up to find the word that best describes what we’re watching unfold. From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
kak·is·toc·ra·cy ˌkakə̇ˈstäkrəsē
plural kakistocracies
:government by the worst people
Greek kakistos (superlative of kakos bad) + English -cracy
The Cambridge Dictionary is more blunt. It evidently was coined sometime in the 17th century. Now we know how far we’re going to fall back.
A government that is ruled by the least suitable, able, or experienced people in a state or country: Who rules in a kakistocracy? We are living in a new era of kakistocracy.
Fewer examples:
- Kakistocracies are governments ruled by the stupid and ignorant.
- What we have here is the world’s only kakistocracy.
- The total lack of integrity of the administration is proof that we now live in a kakistocracy.
This is what we will have after January 20,2025, which is, ironically enough, not only the inauguration of the first felon to ever hold office but also the holiday celebrating Martin Luther King. Somewhere, the Greek Muses have entered the realm of Greek Tragedy. All we need is a chorus.
I turned to some TV news last night to watch the faces of the political class chatter about the proposed cabinet members with the look of teenagers stuck in a summer camp horror film. Yes, this all does feel like a very bad movie or dream that you want to be over when you awaken. However, it is more like the idea of the tyranny of the masses that Alexis de Tocqueville dreamed of while writing his book Democracy in America. He was very afraid of the unwashed masses, and now we know why.
The greatest danger Tocqueville saw was that public opinion would become an all-powerful force, and that the majority could tyrannize unpopular minorities and marginal individuals. In Volume 1, Part 2, Chapter 7, “Of the Omnipotence of the Majority in the United States and Its Effects,” he lays out his argument with a variety of well-chosen constitutional, historical, and sociological examples.
I love that last part because it comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a history class curriculum prepared for teachers on the topic. Quick, go read it or get your copy of the book before both are banned and defunded. It’s an independent agency, like the Fed, and we’ll see how long into the kakistocracy that remains to be true for both. I imagine I would never get grants to be funded as I did in 1982 to bring Kate Millet and Betty Friedan to Omaha and funds to expand our Women’s Festival to include black women presenters. That was even during the Reagan years. He must have been damned woke or completely asleep, drooling on the Resolute desk to miss that opportunity.
“Matt is the man selected to hide all the criming, appropriate.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Okay, so let me really depress you now with some headlines. This is from Public Notice‘s Lisa Needham. “Trump moves to burn down the rule of law. His cabinet nominations are obscene and augur dark days to come.” And you thought I was being a bummer!
When the sordid history of the second Trump administration is written, should we all survive that long, it will be difficult to sort out which of his early cabinet picks were the most atrocious. And while handing over control of the military to a weekend Fox News host or putting an anti-vax creep in charge of America’s top public health agency are really bad, it will be hard to sink lower than Matt Gaetz being nominated as the nation’s top law enforcement official.
Let’s pretend, for just a moment, that Gaetz isn’t just being given this job because he’s a lib-triggering Trump crony and evaluate him on the merits. Gaetz’s legal experience, such as it is, seems to consist of a stint at a small firm in Florida, Anchors Garden, where he worked after graduating from law school in 2007. The firm currently has only nine attorneys, and Gaetz devotes precisely one line to the experience in his self-servingly weird House bio, saying, “Prior to serving in Congress, Matt worked as an attorney in Northwest Florida with the Keefe, Anchors & Gordon law firm, where he advocated for a more open and transparent government.”
Advocating for a more open and transparent government sounds pretty important, right? But while the firm does have a government affairs and public records practice, when Mother Jones did a deep dive into Gaetz’s experience there, what they turned up instead was that he working on things like debt collection and representing a homeowners’ association over a dispute about a beach volleyball net. It isn’t even entirely clear when Gaetz stopped working at the firm. His House bio skips ahead to his 2010 election to the Florida House, and his legal work is never mentioned again.
This is not the biography of someone you would hire to be an assistant district attorney in a mid-size American city, much less the head of the entire Department of Justice.
Compare Gaetz to Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general pick during his previous term. Sure, Sessions was so racist that he couldn’t get confirmed as a judge. But he also spent 12 years as the US Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama and two years as the Alabama attorney general before being elected to four consecutive Senate terms. During his time in the Senate, he served on the Senate Judiciary Committee, becoming its ranking member in 2009. Sessions was a repulsive and retrograde choice for AG, but he wasn’t a demonstrably unqualified one.
That’s a sunny note to start your weekend on. Wait, there’s more! If you want to see real pearl-clutching, you must go to WAPO or NYT. But they’re a little too late for me. Here’s something from The Bulwark. I’ve suddenly gone all in for the alt-press like I did in 1970 when I started writing for Omaha’s underground Newspaper, The Aardvark, to write terrible things about Richard Nixon. “Gaetz Begins Lobbying Lawmakers, Hoping He Hasn’t Burned All the Bridges/ The congressman and his team are trying to convince Senators to overlook a potentially damning ethics report and his history of political histrionics.” This analysis is coauthored by Mark Caputo and Joe Perticone.
Though Trump has made a slew of controversial picks (the latest being Thursday’s nomination of anti-vaccine activist Robert Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services), Gaetz stands out as a singularly polarizing figure because of the investigations into his conduct, the accusations against him, and his strained personal relationship with fellow Republican members of Congress he has torched, including allies of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, whose ouster he masterminded.
“We have 53 senators and we might not have 50 votes to confirm right now. It’s really up in the air,” said a member of Trump’s team briefed on its preliminary vote-counting. “Gaetz can be a real asshole. But he can be a great guy. The senators need to see the great guy and kind of hear the asshole apologize and tell them why all this stuff about sex crimes isn’t true.”
The push to confirm Gaetz is the latest test of his ability to survive crises that would have ruined any other politician. It also will provide an early indication of Trump’s ability to bend the Senate to his will. The president-elect has quickly moved to force votes on high-profile nominees that no other person in his position would have dared put forward. And as a fallback, he is pressuring incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune into giving him the right to bypass the Senate to make temporary appointments.
Doing so would get Trump’s cabinet in place. But it could come at a political cost if it perceived that the president is jamming through highly-controversial nominees. On Thursday, ABC reported that the woman at the center of the sex-crimes case had told House investigators that Gaetz had paid to have sex with her in 2017 when she was a minor. Gaetz was also allegedly implicated in paying other women for sex, which he has denied, and in illicit drug use.
The succession of nominations and reporting left Republican senators in an uncomfortable spot. Some, including those on the Senate Judiciary Committee—which would first vote on Gaetz’s nomination—said they wanted to see the House ethics report into Gaetz.
A quick look at several of the appointments finds quite a few rapists and serial adulterers. Trump obviously wants mini-mes. The BBC has this list up to date and is waiting for more. “Who has joined Trump’s team so far?” Some of the appointees are not getting sanguine coverage.’
This article is specific to Gaetz and was written by North American Correspondent Anthony Zurcher. “Trump picking Gaetz to head justice sends shockwaves – and a strong message.”
Donald Trump’s nomination of congressman Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general has arrived like a thunderclap in Washington.
Of all the president-elect’s picks for his administration so far, this is easily the most controversial – and sends a clear message that Trump intends to shake up the establishment when he returns to power.
The shockwaves were still being felt on Thursday morning as focus shifted to a looming fight in the Senate over his nomination.
Trump is assembling his team before he begins his term on 20 January, and his choice of defence secretary, Fox News host Pete Hegseth, and intelligence chief, former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, have also raised eyebrows.
But it is Gaetz making most headlines. The Florida firebrand is perhaps best known for spearheading the effort to unseat then-Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy last year. But he has a history of being a flamethrower in the staid halls of Congress.
In 2018, he brought a right-wing Holocaust denier to the State of the Union, and later tried to expel two fathers who lost children in a mass shooting from a hearing after they objected to a claim he made about gun control.
His bombastic approach means he has no shortage of enemies, including within his own party. And so Trump’s choice of Gaetz for this crucial role is a signal to those Republicans, too – his second administration will be staffed by loyalists who he trusts to enact his agenda, conventional political opinion be damned.
Gasps were heard during a meeting of Republican lawmakers when the nomination for America’s top US prosecutor was announced, Axios reported, citing sources in the room.
Republican congressman Mike Simpson of Idaho reportedly responded with an expletive.
“I don’t think it’s a serious nomination for the attorney general,” Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said. “This one was not on my bingo card.”
Gaetz is playing Rocky and is already running up and down the Capitol stairs trying to find the few people that like him. But even the New York Post is taking on the RFK appointment to HHS. I know, I can’t believe I’m doing this. It’s even it’s Editorial Board. “Putting RFK Jr. in charge of health breaks the first rule of medicine.”
The overriding rule of medicine is: First, do no harm.
We’re certain installing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head Health and Human Services breaks this rule.
Maybe he’s sworn to focus narrowly on areas where he clearly can help — inspiring Americans to embrace healthier diets and more exercise, etc.
I wonder where eating roadkill and fish laded with mercury comes into that equation?
But wait! There are reasons to question every one of his appointments. This is from The Guardian. “Trump defense secretary nominee involved in 2017 sexual assault investigation, no charges filed – report.”
Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who Donald Trump nominated to be defense secretary, was involved in a sexual assault investigation in California seven years ago, but no charges were filed against him, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
The incident happened in 2017 at a hotel and golf course in the city of Monterey, but there were few details of how Hegseth was involved, or what happened. Here’s more, from the Chronicle:
In a brief statement late Thursday, the city manager’s office in Monterey confirmed the sexual assault investigation, but provided few details.
The city said the incident was reported to have happened between almost midnight on Oct. 7, 2017, and 7 a.m. the next morning at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa on Del Monte Golf Course, less than a mile from Monterey Bay and across Highway 1 from the Naval Postgraduate School.
“The Monterey Police Department investigated an alleged sexual assault at 1 Old Golf Course Road,” the city said. It said the victim’s name was confidential and that the alleged assault was reported on Oct. 12, 2017. The city said no weapons were involved, but that there was a report of “contusions to right thigh.”
The city declined to release the police report, saying it was exempt from public disclosure, and said it would not make any further remarks on the probe.
The Monterey County District Attorney’s Office did not reply to a request for comment late Thursday, but an online database indicated no criminal charges had been filed against Hegseth in that county.
Vanity Fair reports that news of the allegation sent Trump’s transition team scrambling over the past few days:
Donald Trump’s transition team scrambled Thursday after Trump’s incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles was presented with an allegation that former Fox & Friends cohost Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to be Defense Secretary, had engaged in sexual misconduct. According to two sources, Wiles was briefed Wednesday night about an allegation that Hegseth had acted inappropriately with a woman. One of the sources said the alleged incident took place in Monterey, California in 2017.
According to the transition source, the allegation is serious enough that Wiles and Trump’s lawyers spoke to Hegseth about it on Thursday. A source with knowledge of the meeting said that Hegseth said the allegation stemmed from a consensual encounter and characterized the episode as he-said, she-said.
On Thursday evening, Hegseth’s lawyer Timothy Parlatore said: “This allegation was already investigated by the Monterey police department and they found no evidence for it.”
Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung said: “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his Administration. Mr. Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed. We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again.”
That guy puts the sleaze in sleazy. Plus, he was investigated for war crimes and would be in charge of dealing with war criminals. This is from Time Magazine. “Pete Hegseth’s Role in Trump’s Controversial Pardons of Men Accused of War Crimes.”
President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement that he would nominate Fox News host Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense in his second term has already stirred controversy.
Hegseth, a military veteran, staunch defender of Trump’s “America First” agenda, and an outspoken critic of what he calls the military’s “woke” culture, has built a career around challenging the military establishment. He held an influential role in advocating for Trump to intervene on behalf of service members in three cases involving war crime accusations in 2019—cases that divided the military and ignited fierce debates over the limits of executive power and military accountability.
Now, if he is confirmed as the next Secretary of Defense, Hegseth will oversee 1.3 million active-duty service members and manage military strategy at a time of global instability, raising questions about how his past approach towards accused war criminals will impact his military leadership and discipline.
During Trump’s first term in office, Hegseth lobbied for the pardons of Army Lieutenant Clint Lorance and Army Major Mathew Golsteyn, and pushed to support Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, each of whom were facing charges or convictions related to alleged war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hegseth’s advocacy on behalf of the three service members appeared to pay off: in Nov. 2019, Trump granted pardons to Lorance and Golsteyn, and reversed a demotion of Gallagher, citing Hegseth and Fox News when he tweeted about his decision to review one of the cases.
Hegseth’s vocal defense of these men as victims of overzealous prosecution raised eyebrows in the military community, where such interventions by civilians are seen by some as a threat to the integrity of the justice system. “These are men who went into the most dangerous places on earth with a job to defend us and made tough calls on a moment’s notice,” Hegseth said on Fox & Friends in May 2019. “They’re not war criminals, they’re warriors.”
Lorance had been convicted by a military court in 2013 for the murder of two Afghan men during a military operation in 2012 in which he ordered his soldiers to open fire on a group of unarmed Afghan civilians he suspected of being insurgents. Lorance served six years of a 19-year sentence before Trump, after lobbying from Hegseth and others, granted him a pardon in Nov. 2019, arguing that he was unfairly targeted by military prosecutors and that his actions were justified in a combat environment where split-second decisions were often necessary for survival.
This is from Military.com. ‘He’s Going to Have to Explain It’: Surprise Defense Secretary Pick’s History Takes Center Stage.”
He has repeatedly called to ban women from serving in combat roles in the military.
He advocated extensively to gain pardons for troops accused and convicted of war crimes.
And he was one of a dozen troops turned away from serving on the National Guard mission to defend the Capitol, allegedly over tattoos that are popular with neo-Nazi and far-right groups.
Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s surprise pick to be the next defense secretary, has an extensive history of combat in the culture wars that have been brewing over the military for the past decade.
Prior to Trump’s announcement Tuesday evening that he was nominating Hegseth, the National Guard veteran was most known as a co-host on the weekend edition of “Fox and Friends,” one of Trump’s favorite TV shows. But in choosing Hegseth, Trump landed on a defense secretary nominee with a record of public statements that line up with the promises Trump made on the campaign trail to root out alleged “wokeness” within the military.
Senators from both parties tasked with considering his nomination responded Wednesday by saying that they have a lot of questions about Hegseth’s history and those past statements, but broadly insisted they were reserving judgment.
“I’m going to have to visit with him about those remarks,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, the Senate’s first female combat veteran who was rumored to be in the running for Trump’s defense secretary, told reporters Wednesday when asked about Hegseth’s opposition to women in combat.
“Even a staff member of mine, she is an infantry officer. She’s back in Iowa now. She is a tumble. So he’s going to have to explain it,” Ernst added, though she did not answer when Military.com asked whether she would vote against Hegseth over the issue.
So, this is basically a band of misfits and less than mediocre wipipo. But I’ll just let Muse tell it like it is. Yes, there are a lot of f-bombs in the lyrics!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
#Repeat1968 #JohnBuss #MattGaetzWeirdo #PeteHegsethWeirdoSexualAssaulter #RFKJrWeirdo #TrumpSCabinetPicksBandOfMisfits #WeAreFuckingFucked
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Finally Friday Reads: We have a Kakistocracy* coming. Let’s not keep it!
“Make America Garbage Again,” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
After sleeping through last week, I have finally decided that PTSD has kicked in, and I’m in survival mode. At least I woke up to find the word that best describes what we’re watching unfold. From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
kak·is·toc·ra·cy ˌkakə̇ˈstäkrəsē
plural kakistocracies
:government by the worst people
Greek kakistos (superlative of kakos bad) + English -cracy
The Cambridge Dictionary is more blunt. It evidently was coined sometime in the 17th century. Now we know how far we’re going to fall back.
A government that is ruled by the least suitable, able, or experienced people in a state or country: Who rules in a kakistocracy? We are living in a new era of kakistocracy.
Fewer examples:
- Kakistocracies are governments ruled by the stupid and ignorant.
- What we have here is the world’s only kakistocracy.
- The total lack of integrity of the administration is proof that we now live in a kakistocracy.
This is what we will have after January 20,2025, which is, ironically enough, not only the inauguration of the first felon to ever hold office but also the holiday celebrating Martin Luther King. Somewhere, the Greek Muses have entered the realm of Greek Tragedy. All we need is a chorus.
I turned to some TV news last night to watch the faces of the political class chatter about the proposed cabinet members with the look of teenagers stuck in a summer camp horror film. Yes, this all does feel like a very bad movie or dream that you want to be over when you awaken. However, it is more like the idea of the tyranny of the masses that Alexis de Tocqueville dreamed of while writing his book Democracy in America. He was very afraid of the unwashed masses, and now we know why.
The greatest danger Tocqueville saw was that public opinion would become an all-powerful force, and that the majority could tyrannize unpopular minorities and marginal individuals. In Volume 1, Part 2, Chapter 7, “Of the Omnipotence of the Majority in the United States and Its Effects,” he lays out his argument with a variety of well-chosen constitutional, historical, and sociological examples.
I love that last part because it comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a history class curriculum prepared for teachers on the topic. Quick, go read it or get your copy of the book before both are banned and defunded. It’s an independent agency, like the Fed, and we’ll see how long into the kakistocracy that remains to be true for both. I imagine I would never get grants to be funded as I did in 1982 to bring Kate Millet and Betty Friedan to Omaha and funds to expand our Women’s Festival to include black women presenters. That was even during the Reagan years. He must have been damned woke or completely asleep, drooling on the Resolute desk to miss that opportunity.
“Matt is the man selected to hide all the criming, appropriate.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Okay, so let me really depress you now with some headlines. This is from Public Notice‘s Lisa Needham. “Trump moves to burn down the rule of law. His cabinet nominations are obscene and augur dark days to come.” And you thought I was being a bummer!
When the sordid history of the second Trump administration is written, should we all survive that long, it will be difficult to sort out which of his early cabinet picks were the most atrocious. And while handing over control of the military to a weekend Fox News host or putting an anti-vax creep in charge of America’s top public health agency are really bad, it will be hard to sink lower than Matt Gaetz being nominated as the nation’s top law enforcement official.
Let’s pretend, for just a moment, that Gaetz isn’t just being given this job because he’s a lib-triggering Trump crony and evaluate him on the merits. Gaetz’s legal experience, such as it is, seems to consist of a stint at a small firm in Florida, Anchors Garden, where he worked after graduating from law school in 2007. The firm currently has only nine attorneys, and Gaetz devotes precisely one line to the experience in his self-servingly weird House bio, saying, “Prior to serving in Congress, Matt worked as an attorney in Northwest Florida with the Keefe, Anchors & Gordon law firm, where he advocated for a more open and transparent government.”
Advocating for a more open and transparent government sounds pretty important, right? But while the firm does have a government affairs and public records practice, when Mother Jones did a deep dive into Gaetz’s experience there, what they turned up instead was that he working on things like debt collection and representing a homeowners’ association over a dispute about a beach volleyball net. It isn’t even entirely clear when Gaetz stopped working at the firm. His House bio skips ahead to his 2010 election to the Florida House, and his legal work is never mentioned again.
This is not the biography of someone you would hire to be an assistant district attorney in a mid-size American city, much less the head of the entire Department of Justice.
Compare Gaetz to Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general pick during his previous term. Sure, Sessions was so racist that he couldn’t get confirmed as a judge. But he also spent 12 years as the US Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama and two years as the Alabama attorney general before being elected to four consecutive Senate terms. During his time in the Senate, he served on the Senate Judiciary Committee, becoming its ranking member in 2009. Sessions was a repulsive and retrograde choice for AG, but he wasn’t a demonstrably unqualified one.
That’s a sunny note to start your weekend on. Wait, there’s more! If you want to see real pearl-clutching, you must go to WAPO or NYT. But they’re a little too late for me. Here’s something from The Bulwark. I’ve suddenly gone all in for the alt-press like I did in 1970 when I started writing for Omaha’s underground Newspaper, The Aardvark, to write terrible things about Richard Nixon. “Gaetz Begins Lobbying Lawmakers, Hoping He Hasn’t Burned All the Bridges/ The congressman and his team are trying to convince Senators to overlook a potentially damning ethics report and his history of political histrionics.” This analysis is coauthored by Mark Caputo and Joe Perticone.
Though Trump has made a slew of controversial picks (the latest being Thursday’s nomination of anti-vaccine activist Robert Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services), Gaetz stands out as a singularly polarizing figure because of the investigations into his conduct, the accusations against him, and his strained personal relationship with fellow Republican members of Congress he has torched, including allies of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, whose ouster he masterminded.
“We have 53 senators and we might not have 50 votes to confirm right now. It’s really up in the air,” said a member of Trump’s team briefed on its preliminary vote-counting. “Gaetz can be a real asshole. But he can be a great guy. The senators need to see the great guy and kind of hear the asshole apologize and tell them why all this stuff about sex crimes isn’t true.”
The push to confirm Gaetz is the latest test of his ability to survive crises that would have ruined any other politician. It also will provide an early indication of Trump’s ability to bend the Senate to his will. The president-elect has quickly moved to force votes on high-profile nominees that no other person in his position would have dared put forward. And as a fallback, he is pressuring incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune into giving him the right to bypass the Senate to make temporary appointments.
Doing so would get Trump’s cabinet in place. But it could come at a political cost if it perceived that the president is jamming through highly-controversial nominees. On Thursday, ABC reported that the woman at the center of the sex-crimes case had told House investigators that Gaetz had paid to have sex with her in 2017 when she was a minor. Gaetz was also allegedly implicated in paying other women for sex, which he has denied, and in illicit drug use.
The succession of nominations and reporting left Republican senators in an uncomfortable spot. Some, including those on the Senate Judiciary Committee—which would first vote on Gaetz’s nomination—said they wanted to see the House ethics report into Gaetz.
A quick look at several of the appointments finds quite a few rapists and serial adulterers. Trump obviously wants mini-mes. The BBC has this list up to date and is waiting for more. “Who has joined Trump’s team so far?” Some of the appointees are not getting sanguine coverage.’
This article is specific to Gaetz and was written by North American Correspondent Anthony Zurcher. “Trump picking Gaetz to head justice sends shockwaves – and a strong message.”
Donald Trump’s nomination of congressman Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general has arrived like a thunderclap in Washington.
Of all the president-elect’s picks for his administration so far, this is easily the most controversial – and sends a clear message that Trump intends to shake up the establishment when he returns to power.
The shockwaves were still being felt on Thursday morning as focus shifted to a looming fight in the Senate over his nomination.
Trump is assembling his team before he begins his term on 20 January, and his choice of defence secretary, Fox News host Pete Hegseth, and intelligence chief, former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, have also raised eyebrows.
But it is Gaetz making most headlines. The Florida firebrand is perhaps best known for spearheading the effort to unseat then-Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy last year. But he has a history of being a flamethrower in the staid halls of Congress.
In 2018, he brought a right-wing Holocaust denier to the State of the Union, and later tried to expel two fathers who lost children in a mass shooting from a hearing after they objected to a claim he made about gun control.
His bombastic approach means he has no shortage of enemies, including within his own party. And so Trump’s choice of Gaetz for this crucial role is a signal to those Republicans, too – his second administration will be staffed by loyalists who he trusts to enact his agenda, conventional political opinion be damned.
Gasps were heard during a meeting of Republican lawmakers when the nomination for America’s top US prosecutor was announced, Axios reported, citing sources in the room.
Republican congressman Mike Simpson of Idaho reportedly responded with an expletive.
“I don’t think it’s a serious nomination for the attorney general,” Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said. “This one was not on my bingo card.”
Gaetz is playing Rocky and is already running up and down the Capitol stairs trying to find the few people that like him. But even the New York Post is taking on the RFK appointment to HHS. I know, I can’t believe I’m doing this. It’s even it’s Editorial Board. “Putting RFK Jr. in charge of health breaks the first rule of medicine.”
The overriding rule of medicine is: First, do no harm.
We’re certain installing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head Health and Human Services breaks this rule.
Maybe he’s sworn to focus narrowly on areas where he clearly can help — inspiring Americans to embrace healthier diets and more exercise, etc.
I wonder where eating roadkill and fish laded with mercury comes into that equation?
But wait! There are reasons to question every one of his appointments. This is from The Guardian. “Trump defense secretary nominee involved in 2017 sexual assault investigation, no charges filed – report.”
Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who Donald Trump nominated to be defense secretary, was involved in a sexual assault investigation in California seven years ago, but no charges were filed against him, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
The incident happened in 2017 at a hotel and golf course in the city of Monterey, but there were few details of how Hegseth was involved, or what happened. Here’s more, from the Chronicle:
In a brief statement late Thursday, the city manager’s office in Monterey confirmed the sexual assault investigation, but provided few details.
The city said the incident was reported to have happened between almost midnight on Oct. 7, 2017, and 7 a.m. the next morning at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa on Del Monte Golf Course, less than a mile from Monterey Bay and across Highway 1 from the Naval Postgraduate School.
“The Monterey Police Department investigated an alleged sexual assault at 1 Old Golf Course Road,” the city said. It said the victim’s name was confidential and that the alleged assault was reported on Oct. 12, 2017. The city said no weapons were involved, but that there was a report of “contusions to right thigh.”
The city declined to release the police report, saying it was exempt from public disclosure, and said it would not make any further remarks on the probe.
The Monterey County District Attorney’s Office did not reply to a request for comment late Thursday, but an online database indicated no criminal charges had been filed against Hegseth in that county.
Vanity Fair reports that news of the allegation sent Trump’s transition team scrambling over the past few days:
Donald Trump’s transition team scrambled Thursday after Trump’s incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles was presented with an allegation that former Fox & Friends cohost Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to be Defense Secretary, had engaged in sexual misconduct. According to two sources, Wiles was briefed Wednesday night about an allegation that Hegseth had acted inappropriately with a woman. One of the sources said the alleged incident took place in Monterey, California in 2017.
According to the transition source, the allegation is serious enough that Wiles and Trump’s lawyers spoke to Hegseth about it on Thursday. A source with knowledge of the meeting said that Hegseth said the allegation stemmed from a consensual encounter and characterized the episode as he-said, she-said.
On Thursday evening, Hegseth’s lawyer Timothy Parlatore said: “This allegation was already investigated by the Monterey police department and they found no evidence for it.”
Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung said: “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his Administration. Mr. Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed. We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again.”
That guy puts the sleaze in sleazy. Plus, he was investigated for war crimes and would be in charge of dealing with war criminals. This is from Time Magazine. “Pete Hegseth’s Role in Trump’s Controversial Pardons of Men Accused of War Crimes.”
President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement that he would nominate Fox News host Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense in his second term has already stirred controversy.
Hegseth, a military veteran, staunch defender of Trump’s “America First” agenda, and an outspoken critic of what he calls the military’s “woke” culture, has built a career around challenging the military establishment. He held an influential role in advocating for Trump to intervene on behalf of service members in three cases involving war crime accusations in 2019—cases that divided the military and ignited fierce debates over the limits of executive power and military accountability.
Now, if he is confirmed as the next Secretary of Defense, Hegseth will oversee 1.3 million active-duty service members and manage military strategy at a time of global instability, raising questions about how his past approach towards accused war criminals will impact his military leadership and discipline.
During Trump’s first term in office, Hegseth lobbied for the pardons of Army Lieutenant Clint Lorance and Army Major Mathew Golsteyn, and pushed to support Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, each of whom were facing charges or convictions related to alleged war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hegseth’s advocacy on behalf of the three service members appeared to pay off: in Nov. 2019, Trump granted pardons to Lorance and Golsteyn, and reversed a demotion of Gallagher, citing Hegseth and Fox News when he tweeted about his decision to review one of the cases.
Hegseth’s vocal defense of these men as victims of overzealous prosecution raised eyebrows in the military community, where such interventions by civilians are seen by some as a threat to the integrity of the justice system. “These are men who went into the most dangerous places on earth with a job to defend us and made tough calls on a moment’s notice,” Hegseth said on Fox & Friends in May 2019. “They’re not war criminals, they’re warriors.”
Lorance had been convicted by a military court in 2013 for the murder of two Afghan men during a military operation in 2012 in which he ordered his soldiers to open fire on a group of unarmed Afghan civilians he suspected of being insurgents. Lorance served six years of a 19-year sentence before Trump, after lobbying from Hegseth and others, granted him a pardon in Nov. 2019, arguing that he was unfairly targeted by military prosecutors and that his actions were justified in a combat environment where split-second decisions were often necessary for survival.
This is from Military.com. ‘He’s Going to Have to Explain It’: Surprise Defense Secretary Pick’s History Takes Center Stage.”
He has repeatedly called to ban women from serving in combat roles in the military.
He advocated extensively to gain pardons for troops accused and convicted of war crimes.
And he was one of a dozen troops turned away from serving on the National Guard mission to defend the Capitol, allegedly over tattoos that are popular with neo-Nazi and far-right groups.
Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s surprise pick to be the next defense secretary, has an extensive history of combat in the culture wars that have been brewing over the military for the past decade.
Prior to Trump’s announcement Tuesday evening that he was nominating Hegseth, the National Guard veteran was most known as a co-host on the weekend edition of “Fox and Friends,” one of Trump’s favorite TV shows. But in choosing Hegseth, Trump landed on a defense secretary nominee with a record of public statements that line up with the promises Trump made on the campaign trail to root out alleged “wokeness” within the military.
Senators from both parties tasked with considering his nomination responded Wednesday by saying that they have a lot of questions about Hegseth’s history and those past statements, but broadly insisted they were reserving judgment.
“I’m going to have to visit with him about those remarks,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, the Senate’s first female combat veteran who was rumored to be in the running for Trump’s defense secretary, told reporters Wednesday when asked about Hegseth’s opposition to women in combat.
“Even a staff member of mine, she is an infantry officer. She’s back in Iowa now. She is a tumble. So he’s going to have to explain it,” Ernst added, though she did not answer when Military.com asked whether she would vote against Hegseth over the issue.
So, this is basically a band of misfits and less than mediocre wipipo. But I’ll just let Muse tell it like it is. Yes, there are a lot of f-bombs in the lyrics!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
#Repeat1968 #JohnBuss #MattGaetzWeirdo #PeteHegsethWeirdoSexualAssaulter #RFKJrWeirdo #TrumpSCabinetPicksBandOfMisfits #WeAreFuckingFucked
-
Finally Friday Reads: We have a Kakistocracy* coming. Let’s not keep it!
“Make America Garbage Again,” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
After sleeping through last week, I have finally decided that PTSD has kicked in, and I’m in survival mode. At least I woke up to find the word that best describes what we’re watching unfold. From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
kak·is·toc·ra·cy ˌkakə̇ˈstäkrəsē
plural kakistocracies
:government by the worst people
Greek kakistos (superlative of kakos bad) + English -cracy
The Cambridge Dictionary is more blunt. It evidently was coined sometime in the 17th century. Now we know how far we’re going to fall back.
A government that is ruled by the least suitable, able, or experienced people in a state or country: Who rules in a kakistocracy? We are living in a new era of kakistocracy.
Fewer examples:
- Kakistocracies are governments ruled by the stupid and ignorant.
- What we have here is the world’s only kakistocracy.
- The total lack of integrity of the administration is proof that we now live in a kakistocracy.
This is what we will have after January 20,2025, which is, ironically enough, not only the inauguration of the first felon to ever hold office but also the holiday celebrating Martin Luther King. Somewhere, the Greek Muses have entered the realm of Greek Tragedy. All we need is a chorus.
I turned to some TV news last night to watch the faces of the political class chatter about the proposed cabinet members with the look of teenagers stuck in a summer camp horror film. Yes, this all does feel like a very bad movie or dream that you want to be over when you awaken. However, it is more like the idea of the tyranny of the masses that Alexis de Tocqueville dreamed of while writing his book Democracy in America. He was very afraid of the unwashed masses, and now we know why.
The greatest danger Tocqueville saw was that public opinion would become an all-powerful force, and that the majority could tyrannize unpopular minorities and marginal individuals. In Volume 1, Part 2, Chapter 7, “Of the Omnipotence of the Majority in the United States and Its Effects,” he lays out his argument with a variety of well-chosen constitutional, historical, and sociological examples.
I love that last part because it comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a history class curriculum prepared for teachers on the topic. Quick, go read it or get your copy of the book before both are banned and defunded. It’s an independent agency, like the Fed, and we’ll see how long into the kakistocracy that remains to be true for both. I imagine I would never get grants to be funded as I did in 1982 to bring Kate Millet and Betty Friedan to Omaha and funds to expand our Women’s Festival to include black women presenters. That was even during the Reagan years. He must have been damned woke or completely asleep, drooling on the Resolute desk to miss that opportunity.
“Matt is the man selected to hide all the criming, appropriate.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Okay, so let me really depress you now with some headlines. This is from Public Notice‘s Lisa Needham. “Trump moves to burn down the rule of law. His cabinet nominations are obscene and augur dark days to come.” And you thought I was being a bummer!
When the sordid history of the second Trump administration is written, should we all survive that long, it will be difficult to sort out which of his early cabinet picks were the most atrocious. And while handing over control of the military to a weekend Fox News host or putting an anti-vax creep in charge of America’s top public health agency are really bad, it will be hard to sink lower than Matt Gaetz being nominated as the nation’s top law enforcement official.
Let’s pretend, for just a moment, that Gaetz isn’t just being given this job because he’s a lib-triggering Trump crony and evaluate him on the merits. Gaetz’s legal experience, such as it is, seems to consist of a stint at a small firm in Florida, Anchors Garden, where he worked after graduating from law school in 2007. The firm currently has only nine attorneys, and Gaetz devotes precisely one line to the experience in his self-servingly weird House bio, saying, “Prior to serving in Congress, Matt worked as an attorney in Northwest Florida with the Keefe, Anchors & Gordon law firm, where he advocated for a more open and transparent government.”
Advocating for a more open and transparent government sounds pretty important, right? But while the firm does have a government affairs and public records practice, when Mother Jones did a deep dive into Gaetz’s experience there, what they turned up instead was that he working on things like debt collection and representing a homeowners’ association over a dispute about a beach volleyball net. It isn’t even entirely clear when Gaetz stopped working at the firm. His House bio skips ahead to his 2010 election to the Florida House, and his legal work is never mentioned again.
This is not the biography of someone you would hire to be an assistant district attorney in a mid-size American city, much less the head of the entire Department of Justice.
Compare Gaetz to Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general pick during his previous term. Sure, Sessions was so racist that he couldn’t get confirmed as a judge. But he also spent 12 years as the US Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama and two years as the Alabama attorney general before being elected to four consecutive Senate terms. During his time in the Senate, he served on the Senate Judiciary Committee, becoming its ranking member in 2009. Sessions was a repulsive and retrograde choice for AG, but he wasn’t a demonstrably unqualified one.
That’s a sunny note to start your weekend on. Wait, there’s more! If you want to see real pearl-clutching, you must go to WAPO or NYT. But they’re a little too late for me. Here’s something from The Bulwark. I’ve suddenly gone all in for the alt-press like I did in 1970 when I started writing for Omaha’s underground Newspaper, The Aardvark, to write terrible things about Richard Nixon. “Gaetz Begins Lobbying Lawmakers, Hoping He Hasn’t Burned All the Bridges/ The congressman and his team are trying to convince Senators to overlook a potentially damning ethics report and his history of political histrionics.” This analysis is coauthored by Mark Caputo and Joe Perticone.
Though Trump has made a slew of controversial picks (the latest being Thursday’s nomination of anti-vaccine activist Robert Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services), Gaetz stands out as a singularly polarizing figure because of the investigations into his conduct, the accusations against him, and his strained personal relationship with fellow Republican members of Congress he has torched, including allies of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, whose ouster he masterminded.
“We have 53 senators and we might not have 50 votes to confirm right now. It’s really up in the air,” said a member of Trump’s team briefed on its preliminary vote-counting. “Gaetz can be a real asshole. But he can be a great guy. The senators need to see the great guy and kind of hear the asshole apologize and tell them why all this stuff about sex crimes isn’t true.”
The push to confirm Gaetz is the latest test of his ability to survive crises that would have ruined any other politician. It also will provide an early indication of Trump’s ability to bend the Senate to his will. The president-elect has quickly moved to force votes on high-profile nominees that no other person in his position would have dared put forward. And as a fallback, he is pressuring incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune into giving him the right to bypass the Senate to make temporary appointments.
Doing so would get Trump’s cabinet in place. But it could come at a political cost if it perceived that the president is jamming through highly-controversial nominees. On Thursday, ABC reported that the woman at the center of the sex-crimes case had told House investigators that Gaetz had paid to have sex with her in 2017 when she was a minor. Gaetz was also allegedly implicated in paying other women for sex, which he has denied, and in illicit drug use.
The succession of nominations and reporting left Republican senators in an uncomfortable spot. Some, including those on the Senate Judiciary Committee—which would first vote on Gaetz’s nomination—said they wanted to see the House ethics report into Gaetz.
A quick look at several of the appointments finds quite a few rapists and serial adulterers. Trump obviously wants mini-mes. The BBC has this list up to date and is waiting for more. “Who has joined Trump’s team so far?” Some of the appointees are not getting sanguine coverage.’
This article is specific to Gaetz and was written by North American Correspondent Anthony Zurcher. “Trump picking Gaetz to head justice sends shockwaves – and a strong message.”
Donald Trump’s nomination of congressman Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general has arrived like a thunderclap in Washington.
Of all the president-elect’s picks for his administration so far, this is easily the most controversial – and sends a clear message that Trump intends to shake up the establishment when he returns to power.
The shockwaves were still being felt on Thursday morning as focus shifted to a looming fight in the Senate over his nomination.
Trump is assembling his team before he begins his term on 20 January, and his choice of defence secretary, Fox News host Pete Hegseth, and intelligence chief, former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, have also raised eyebrows.
But it is Gaetz making most headlines. The Florida firebrand is perhaps best known for spearheading the effort to unseat then-Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy last year. But he has a history of being a flamethrower in the staid halls of Congress.
In 2018, he brought a right-wing Holocaust denier to the State of the Union, and later tried to expel two fathers who lost children in a mass shooting from a hearing after they objected to a claim he made about gun control.
His bombastic approach means he has no shortage of enemies, including within his own party. And so Trump’s choice of Gaetz for this crucial role is a signal to those Republicans, too – his second administration will be staffed by loyalists who he trusts to enact his agenda, conventional political opinion be damned.
Gasps were heard during a meeting of Republican lawmakers when the nomination for America’s top US prosecutor was announced, Axios reported, citing sources in the room.
Republican congressman Mike Simpson of Idaho reportedly responded with an expletive.
“I don’t think it’s a serious nomination for the attorney general,” Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said. “This one was not on my bingo card.”
Gaetz is playing Rocky and is already running up and down the Capitol stairs trying to find the few people that like him. But even the New York Post is taking on the RFK appointment to HHS. I know, I can’t believe I’m doing this. It’s even it’s Editorial Board. “Putting RFK Jr. in charge of health breaks the first rule of medicine.”
The overriding rule of medicine is: First, do no harm.
We’re certain installing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head Health and Human Services breaks this rule.
Maybe he’s sworn to focus narrowly on areas where he clearly can help — inspiring Americans to embrace healthier diets and more exercise, etc.
I wonder where eating roadkill and fish laded with mercury comes into that equation?
But wait! There are reasons to question every one of his appointments. This is from The Guardian. “Trump defense secretary nominee involved in 2017 sexual assault investigation, no charges filed – report.”
Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who Donald Trump nominated to be defense secretary, was involved in a sexual assault investigation in California seven years ago, but no charges were filed against him, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
The incident happened in 2017 at a hotel and golf course in the city of Monterey, but there were few details of how Hegseth was involved, or what happened. Here’s more, from the Chronicle:
In a brief statement late Thursday, the city manager’s office in Monterey confirmed the sexual assault investigation, but provided few details.
The city said the incident was reported to have happened between almost midnight on Oct. 7, 2017, and 7 a.m. the next morning at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa on Del Monte Golf Course, less than a mile from Monterey Bay and across Highway 1 from the Naval Postgraduate School.
“The Monterey Police Department investigated an alleged sexual assault at 1 Old Golf Course Road,” the city said. It said the victim’s name was confidential and that the alleged assault was reported on Oct. 12, 2017. The city said no weapons were involved, but that there was a report of “contusions to right thigh.”
The city declined to release the police report, saying it was exempt from public disclosure, and said it would not make any further remarks on the probe.
The Monterey County District Attorney’s Office did not reply to a request for comment late Thursday, but an online database indicated no criminal charges had been filed against Hegseth in that county.
Vanity Fair reports that news of the allegation sent Trump’s transition team scrambling over the past few days:
Donald Trump’s transition team scrambled Thursday after Trump’s incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles was presented with an allegation that former Fox & Friends cohost Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to be Defense Secretary, had engaged in sexual misconduct. According to two sources, Wiles was briefed Wednesday night about an allegation that Hegseth had acted inappropriately with a woman. One of the sources said the alleged incident took place in Monterey, California in 2017.
According to the transition source, the allegation is serious enough that Wiles and Trump’s lawyers spoke to Hegseth about it on Thursday. A source with knowledge of the meeting said that Hegseth said the allegation stemmed from a consensual encounter and characterized the episode as he-said, she-said.
On Thursday evening, Hegseth’s lawyer Timothy Parlatore said: “This allegation was already investigated by the Monterey police department and they found no evidence for it.”
Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung said: “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his Administration. Mr. Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed. We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again.”
That guy puts the sleaze in sleazy. Plus, he was investigated for war crimes and would be in charge of dealing with war criminals. This is from Time Magazine. “Pete Hegseth’s Role in Trump’s Controversial Pardons of Men Accused of War Crimes.”
President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement that he would nominate Fox News host Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense in his second term has already stirred controversy.
Hegseth, a military veteran, staunch defender of Trump’s “America First” agenda, and an outspoken critic of what he calls the military’s “woke” culture, has built a career around challenging the military establishment. He held an influential role in advocating for Trump to intervene on behalf of service members in three cases involving war crime accusations in 2019—cases that divided the military and ignited fierce debates over the limits of executive power and military accountability.
Now, if he is confirmed as the next Secretary of Defense, Hegseth will oversee 1.3 million active-duty service members and manage military strategy at a time of global instability, raising questions about how his past approach towards accused war criminals will impact his military leadership and discipline.
During Trump’s first term in office, Hegseth lobbied for the pardons of Army Lieutenant Clint Lorance and Army Major Mathew Golsteyn, and pushed to support Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, each of whom were facing charges or convictions related to alleged war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hegseth’s advocacy on behalf of the three service members appeared to pay off: in Nov. 2019, Trump granted pardons to Lorance and Golsteyn, and reversed a demotion of Gallagher, citing Hegseth and Fox News when he tweeted about his decision to review one of the cases.
Hegseth’s vocal defense of these men as victims of overzealous prosecution raised eyebrows in the military community, where such interventions by civilians are seen by some as a threat to the integrity of the justice system. “These are men who went into the most dangerous places on earth with a job to defend us and made tough calls on a moment’s notice,” Hegseth said on Fox & Friends in May 2019. “They’re not war criminals, they’re warriors.”
Lorance had been convicted by a military court in 2013 for the murder of two Afghan men during a military operation in 2012 in which he ordered his soldiers to open fire on a group of unarmed Afghan civilians he suspected of being insurgents. Lorance served six years of a 19-year sentence before Trump, after lobbying from Hegseth and others, granted him a pardon in Nov. 2019, arguing that he was unfairly targeted by military prosecutors and that his actions were justified in a combat environment where split-second decisions were often necessary for survival.
This is from Military.com. ‘He’s Going to Have to Explain It’: Surprise Defense Secretary Pick’s History Takes Center Stage.”
He has repeatedly called to ban women from serving in combat roles in the military.
He advocated extensively to gain pardons for troops accused and convicted of war crimes.
And he was one of a dozen troops turned away from serving on the National Guard mission to defend the Capitol, allegedly over tattoos that are popular with neo-Nazi and far-right groups.
Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s surprise pick to be the next defense secretary, has an extensive history of combat in the culture wars that have been brewing over the military for the past decade.
Prior to Trump’s announcement Tuesday evening that he was nominating Hegseth, the National Guard veteran was most known as a co-host on the weekend edition of “Fox and Friends,” one of Trump’s favorite TV shows. But in choosing Hegseth, Trump landed on a defense secretary nominee with a record of public statements that line up with the promises Trump made on the campaign trail to root out alleged “wokeness” within the military.
Senators from both parties tasked with considering his nomination responded Wednesday by saying that they have a lot of questions about Hegseth’s history and those past statements, but broadly insisted they were reserving judgment.
“I’m going to have to visit with him about those remarks,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, the Senate’s first female combat veteran who was rumored to be in the running for Trump’s defense secretary, told reporters Wednesday when asked about Hegseth’s opposition to women in combat.
“Even a staff member of mine, she is an infantry officer. She’s back in Iowa now. She is a tumble. So he’s going to have to explain it,” Ernst added, though she did not answer when Military.com asked whether she would vote against Hegseth over the issue.
So, this is basically a band of misfits and less than mediocre wipipo. But I’ll just let Muse tell it like it is. Yes, there are a lot of f-bombs in the lyrics!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
#Repeat1968 #JohnBuss #MattGaetzWeirdo #PeteHegsethWeirdoSexualAssaulter #RFKJrWeirdo #TrumpSCabinetPicksBandOfMisfits #WeAreFuckingFucked
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Wednesday Reads
Good Afternoon!!
I’ve been surveying the day’s top news stories and my head is spinning. I don’t know what to focus on or where to begin, and there’s no way I can cover everything. There is too much happening, so I’ve just chosen the stories that interested me the most.
Trump’s fascist crackdown on Washington DC
The New York Times: National Guard Troops in Washington Stick to Tourist Areas.
The 800 National Guard troops sent into Washington last week will soon be augmented by hundreds more, as several states with Republican governors commit to supporting President Trump’s crackdown in the city.
But Army officials appear to be trying to keep the troops on the sidelines of the mission, despite the tough-on-crime image that Mr. Trump has sought to project.
The troops have joined an array of federal agents who appeared on city streets after Mr. Trump declared last week that the federal government was assuming law enforcement responsibility in the capital, which he has falsely claimed is essentially lawless.
The first wave of troops sent to the city all came from the D.C. National Guard, which the president can call out directly. National Guard troops from Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina and West Virginia will soon also be deployed, according to the governors of those states. National Guard officials said that there were 869 troops in Washington as of Monday night; the Republican-led states so far have pledged 1,000 more.
The Republican governors said they were providing the additional troops at the request of the Trump administration. Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio said that Army Secretary Dan Driscoll had asked for the extra troops. “When the secretary of the Army asks for backup support to our troops that are already deployed, yes, we will back up our troops,” Mr. DeWine told the Columbus Dispatch.
The number is still expected to grow. But the role of the additional troops appears vague, and the answers to even basic questions, including whether they will be armed, have shifted.
What is the purpose of this militarization of a city beyond Trump’s effort to distract from the Epstein story and his overall fascist dictatorship project?
“There is no justification for any deployment of Guard forces in D.C., let alone the deployment of hundreds of Guard forces from multiple states, which smacks of a military occupation of the district,” said Elizabeth Goitein, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school.
“Local crime is a matter to be handled by local law enforcement,” she added.
Members of the National Guard stand near D.C.’s Union Station, within view of the U.S. Capitol.
The places where the troops have been deployed so far tell part of the story. Most have been seen near the National Mall, large monuments and other tourist-heavy areas.
Army officials said that more would be sent to 10 metro stations, most of which are also near tourist and entertainment sites. They include the Foggy Bottom, Smithsonian, Eastern Market and Waterfront stations.
Near the Washington Monument over the weekend, troops posed for photos with tourists. The National Guard presence, with desert sand-colored vehicles parked near the capital’s most visited tourists spots, is now showing up regularly on social media feeds in posts by visitors to Washington.
The rules of engagement for the troops, at the moment, remain limited to supporting, but not providing, law enforcement. That means that troops are not making arrests, though Army officials acknowledged that could change if Mr. Trump decides that he wants an even more forceful presence.
CNN: National Guard troops from GOP-led states begin arriving in DC as part of Trump’s crime crackdown.
West Virginia National Guard troops have begun to arrive in Washington, DC, to assist with President Donald Trump’s crime crackdown in the nation’s capital, a defense official told CNN on Tuesday.
The troops could begin assisting the DC National Guard operationally as soon as Wednesday after they have completed their in-processing, the defense official added.
Their arrival comes after the Republican governors of six states — West Virginia, South Carolina, Ohio, Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee — announced they will send guard members to Washington, DC.
The deployment of other states’ troops marks an escalation of Trump’s efforts to amass forces in the capital. The president previously announced that he was deploying DC National Guard troops to the city, surging federal agents into the streets, and federalizing DC’s police force. The president has repeatedly complained about rising crime in DC, but overall crime numbers are lower this year than in 2024.
Servicemembers from the West Virginia and South Carolina National Guards receive an orientation brief upon their arrival at the Washington, D.C. Armory, Aug. 19, 2025
The defense official said Tuesday that while there are roughly 2,400 personnel in the DC National Guard, assistance from other states was needed because of how many troops are either undergoing training elsewhere or are on leave.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said Monday he approved about 135 National Guard troops to DC, while Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves announced he would deploy approximately 200 members.
Tennessee will send roughly 160 guard members to the city this week following a request from the Trump administration, Gov. Bill Lee’s press secretary said in a Tuesday statement to CNN.
Over the weekend, West Virginia’s governor said his state was sending 300 to 400 National Guard troops to the nation’s capital. South Carolina authorized the deployment of 200 troops, and Ohio said it will send 150.
Federal officers assigned to DC are focusing on beating up food delivery people. NBC4 Washington DC: Detentions of D.C. delivery drivers leave immigrant communities on edge.
Washington, D.C., resident Tyler DeSue woke up tired and craving breakfast Saturday morning, so he did what many people in that situation would do: He used Uber Eats to put in an order for burritos.
When his driver took longer than usual, DeSue checked the app and noticed something seemed wrong — the delivery driver’s GPS location had stopped short of his address. He went outside to look for him.
“I stepped into the street, I looked down and see lights in the direction, like police lights, in the direction of where my driver was,” DeSue said in an interview. “It was my driver by himself and, like, nine different officers all wearing different uniforms. … Most of them had face coverings on.”
When DeSue went to investigate, the driver — whose name appeared on the food app as “Sidi” — was being questioned, first about his vehicle’s registration and then about his immigration status, he said.
“You’re gonna come with us, you’re gonna come with us today,” a masked agent can be heard telling Sidi in video that DeSue recorded and provided to NBC News.
“Can you tell me in Arabic, please?” Sidi says, adding that he did not understand what was being said and that he was nervous.
One of the agents, wearing a vest emblazoned “POLICE HSI” — short for Homeland Security Investigations, a part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — replies that they do not have an Arabic translator. The men then cuff Sidi’s hands, waist and feet before they put him in an unmarked car. DeSue said he has since reported the incident to Uber.
There have been other such reports.
The incident is one of several arrests of delivery drivers recorded by eyewitnesses across the Washington area that have gone viral since the Trump administration took over law enforcement in the nation’s capital last week.
An Uber Eats delivery driver is arrested Saturday in Washington, D.C.Tyler DeSue
The videos, scattered across social media and shared among D.C. delivery driver chat groups, are having a chilling effect on the drivers themselves. Some of them have chosen to stop making deliveries in the city.
It has been “five days since working, looking at what to do. And, well, closed down here waiting for things to pass, because I don’t know what to do,” a D.C.-area delivery driver who did not want to be named told NBC News in a voice message in Spanish.
On Sunday afternoon, DeSue said, an area where 15 to 20 delivery drivers typically would be parked out front of his home looking at their phones for their next orders was an empty lot.
“I haven’t seen a driver anywhere in the last two days,” he said.
There’s more at the link.
Immigration, deportation, and ICE
Paul Krugman at Substack: ICEing the U.S. Economy. Mass deportations will hurt more than people realize.
Donald Trump has been able to convert Immigration and Customs Enforcement (and Customs and Border Protection, which is effectively part of the same operation) into a huge secret police force — because what are we supposed to call an organization whose masked agents, bearing no identification, simply grab people off the street? Who shoot at a family fleeing in their truck, after agents refused to identify themselves and smashed the car window, claiming – apparently falsely according to video footage – that the driver tried to harm them?
We’ve also seen both deportations to foreign gulags and the creation of a network of domestic detention centers — call it the ICE archipelago — that are overcrowded, filthy, and breeding grounds for disease. Last week a judge ordered that detainees at ICE’s Manhattan facility be given bedding mats rather than being forced to sleep on dirty concrete floors, have access to decent hygiene, and receive three meals a day. We’ll see whether this order is obeyed, but it gives you an idea of the conditions detainees are currently facing.
And the recently passed Big Beautiful Bill gives ICE $45 billion to expand its network of detention centers, making room for around 100,000 more detainees, plus $30 billion for arrest and deportation efforts, enough to hire around 10,000 more ICE agents.
I worry, as everyone should, about how a huge expansion of this deeply un-American organization may be used as a tool of presidential power and repression. Furthermore, give people power without accountability — and it’s hard to give a better example than masked, unidentified agents authorized to use force — and some of them will abuse their position. And given what ICE has already been doing, what kind of people do you think are likely to sign up as it massively expands?
Compared with these issues, concerns about the economic impact of mass deportations are definitely second-tier. But they’re still important, and a subject I know something about. So the rest of this post will be devoted to how the Trump administration is about to ICE the economy.
A bit more:
First things first: Trump officials and some of their allies have been touting numbers that appear to show 2 million native-born Americans gaining jobs over the past year. But this claim is, as Jed Kolko of the Peterson Institute says, a “multiple-count data felony.” Read Kolko for the details showing that this is a statistical artifact, not something that really happened. No, the native-born adult population didn’t suddenly jump by 4 million in a single year.
What will actually happen is a large decline in America’s foreign-born labor force. When Stephen Miller began promising to deport 3,000 immigrants a day, many people dismissed this as an idle boast. It’s true that we can’t possibly deport people anywhere near that rapidly while obeying the law and following due process. And your point is? [….]
We don’t know how many workers will eventually be incarcerated and deported. But undocumented immigrants make up around 5 percent of the U.S. work force. It seems plausible that a significant fraction of those workers will be pushed out, along with a number of legal workers snatched up based, as Trump’s border czar has said, on their physical appearance.
Losing large numbers of workers sounds as if it will be bad for the U.S. economy. In fact, it will be worse than you may think.
The reason is that immigrant workers aren’t spread evenly across the economy. They’re strongly concentrated in certain industries and occupations, where they constitute a large share, sometimes a majority, of the work force. As a result, the Trump administration’s latter-day Edict of Expulsion will be far more disruptive to the economy than the aggregate number of workers deported might suggest.
Read the rest at the link.
Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark: Fascist Secret Police Cars.
ICE has some new cars. They are cartoonishly fascist….
What is the purpose of these vehicles?
ICE has been performing its snatch-and-grab operations largely with unmarked vehicles. ICE officers in the wild seem to eschew any sort of identification: No badges, no uniforms. Most of the time they go to great lengths to conceal their identities, wearing mask, balaclavas, and ballcaps.
Fascist ICE trucks
Are these new vehicles meant for new kinds of operations, as ICE expands to a size commensurate with its funding?
Also: What is the use-case for an ICE pickup truck? Park Rangers and firefighters can use pickup trucks to haul large loads of gear. Why would ICE need pickup trucks in its fleet?
Next, let’s look at the design. You will notice that ICE employs the slogan “Defend the Homeland.” This slogan is emblazoned in multiple spots: On side panels and on hoods. On the Mustang variant—because apparently ICE operational requirements also necessitate a two-door sports coupe—the slogan appears to be plastered on the spoiler.
It is an odd slogan for a law enforcement organization. For starters, it’s not a statement of principle, like common police tag lines: “Protect and Serve,” or “Duty, Honor, Community,” or “Service Before Self.” It’s a command: DEFEND THE HOMELAND.1
This command implies a threat. The “homeland” is under assault, right now, and must be defended from some unnamed enemy. I cannot think of any LEO that uses the specter of an enemy as part of its self-projection.
Then there’s the word “homeland.” Not “America,” or “the United States.”
The Mustang variant
America and the United States are places that anyone might join, or become a part of. But the homeland is about blood and soil. It’s the patrimony of the true volk.
Finally: “Defending the homeland” isn’t even ILstice Department weaponization chief, called for the resignation of New York Attorney General Letitia James and posed for photos outside of her Brooklyn home last week – all as he is conducting investigations into her conduct.
His investigation of James, whose office brought civil fraud charges against Trump, his adult sons, and the Trump Organization resulting in a half-billion-dollar judgment last year, is one of several the Justice Department has launched into the president’s perceived enemies.
But since beginning of the investigation into James, Martin has taken several unusual steps that fall outside the norms of prosecutorial conduct. He sent a letter to James’ attorney Abbe Lowell on August 12 suggesting New York’s top law enforcement officer resign, he appeared outside of James’ home with a colleague trailed by a photographer for the New York Post, and appeared on Fox News pledging to take an expansive look into all of James’ conduct.
In video obtained by CNN, Martin can be seen posing for photos outside of James’ home.
“This is a criminal investigation, not social media,” said Elie Honig, CNN’s senior legal analyst. “A stunt like that might get clicks, but it’s patently inappropriate for a prosecutor to do and it certainly will give James and her attorney a basis to oppose any indictment, to argue it was prejudicial to the jury pool and that an indictment was brought in bad faith.”
The conduct is “outside the bounds of DOJ and ethics rules,” Lowell said in a response to Martin.
Justice Department policy generally prohibits discussing criminal investigations publicly, and attorneys are not supposed to pursue investigations for political means or to go on fishing expeditions.
Jah’han Jones at MSNBC: Trump’s ‘weaponization’ chief seems to admit to punitive fishing expeditions.
Ed Martin is going fishing. On Sunday, the lawyer and Donald Trump loyalist tapped to lead a Justice Department “weaponization” group that’s targeting the president’s perceived enemies vowed to rummage around in the lives of New York Attorney General Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., in search of what he says could be potential fraud — or … something.
Ed Martin
During his 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly targeted people who had been investigated or opposed him with thinly veiled threats of legal prosecution. Now, Martin, in his capacity as head of the so-called Weaponization Working Group at the Department of Justice, has been tasked with putting those prosecutions into action. The list of targets includes James, who led a successful mortgage fraud case against the Trump organization that resulted in a judgment of hundreds of millions of dollars; and Schiff, who served on the House Jan. 6 select committee that documented Trump’s role in fomenting insurrection in 2021.
Officials at DOJ are investigating both Schiff and James of mortgage fraud; both deny any wrongdoing and accuse the administration of political retribution. Martin, a former “Stop the Steal” organizer and attorney for Jan. 6 insurrectionists, has been assigned to oversee the cases. He’s previously said his group would be used to “shame” people it can’t charge with crimes.
In comments to Fox News this Sunday, Martin suggested his group intends to use its powers to poke around in other parts of James’ and Schiff’s lives in search of things unrelated to the mortgage allegations.
He said, “We’re gonna go to the very bottom of the facts, and if somebody did something wrong, we’re not only gonna hold them accountable, we’re also gonna look at everything else that they’ve been doing. Because when you’re a liar, you lie not just on one thing. When you’re a cheater, you cheat not just on one thing. When you’re doing corruption, you generally don’t just do it on one thing.”
The Independent: Bongino to work alongside ‘co-deputy director’ of FBI after sparring with administration over Epstein files.
The FBI has moved to appoint Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as its new “co-deputy director,” meaning its current deputy, Dan Bongino, will be expected to share his duties in the role in the future.
The appointment was made by Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel and comes after Bongino, 50, a former Secret Service agent and podcaster, reportedly clashed with Bondi over the administration’s failure to release the Jeffrey Epstein files last month.
“I am proud to announce I have accepted the role of Co-Deputy Director of the FBI,” Bailey wrote in a brief post on X. “I extend my thanks to President Donald Trump and AG Bondi for the opportunity to serve in the mission to Make America Safe Again. I will protect America and uphold the Constitution.”
Bongino responded to a journalist’s post about the appointment by writing simply, “Welcome,” accompanied by three Stars and Stripes emojis.
Explaining the decision, Patel told The Daily Beast that the FBI “will always bring the greatest talent this country has to offer in order to accomplish the goals set forth when an overwhelming majority of American people elected President Donald J Trump again.
You have to wonder why Bongino hasn’t resigned. Maybe this is a step toward pushing him out.
The Epstein case caused controversy in early July after the FBI and Justice Department put out a statement saying that the late pedophile and sex trafficker left behind no “client list” among his possessions and died by suicide in a New York City jail cell in August 2019.
FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino will find himself sharing his official duties after Missouri Attorney General Andrew Mitchell was hired by the Trump administration
The assessment started a civil war among Trump’s MAGA movement, many of whose members had long been encouraged to suspect foul play in Epstein’s death and had hoped to see influential people brought to justice over their alleged involvement in the disgraced financier’s crimes.
The controversy raged for more than a month, with the president himself repeatedly urged to release all federal files on Epstein and to explain his past friendship with the disgraced financier, a cause of apparent frustration to him….
Even before the contested verdict on Epstein was published, Patel and Bongino, both of whom had stoked conspiracy theories on conservative media before joining the Trump administration, had drawn fire for attempting to pour cold water on the case during a May interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures.
The Epstein story is not going away, and now supposedly the DOJ will begin releasing the Epstein files to the House Oversight Committee on Friday.
CNN: House panel to make Epstein files public after redactions to protect victim identities.
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform intends to make public some files it subpoenaed related to the Jeffrey Epstein case, though it will first redact them to shield victims’ IDs and other sensitive matters, a committee spokesperson said Tuesday.
The panel is expected to start receiving materials from the Justice Department on Friday, though it appears the public release will come some time after that. The spokesperson said the committee would work with the Justice Department on the process.
“The Committee intends to make the records public after thorough review to ensure all victims’ identification and child sexual abuse material are redacted. The Committee will also consult with the DOJ to ensure any documents released do not negatively impact ongoing criminal cases and investigations,” the spokesperson said.
Democrats on the committee complained that Comer was slow walking the release of the material by allowing the Justice Department to miss the Tuesday deadline that had been set by the panel and instead turn over the materials to the committee gradually over time starting Friday. They said DOJ had already been directed by the House subpoena to redact material related to victims’ identities and child sexual abuse – questioning the need for further delay to do so.
“Releasing the Epstein files in batches just continues this White House cover-up. The American people will not accept anything short of the full, unredacted Epstein files,” said Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the panel. “In a bipartisan vote, the Committee demanded complete compliance with our subpoena. Handpicked, partial productions are wholly insufficient and potentially misleading, especially after Attorney General Bondi bragged about having the entirety of the Epstein files on her desk mere months ago.”
I hope this will really happen, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Trump and Putin
This post is already too long, but I couldn’t resist including this story from The Daily Beast: Trump’s Jaw-Dropping Ignorance Exposed During Putin Meet: Author.
Donald Trump displayed a stunning ignorance of the Cold War during last week’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to his biographer.
Author Michael Wolff told the Daily Beast podcast Inside Trump’s Head on Tuesday that, in the president’s telling of the decades-long 20th century engagement, “it would appear that the U.S. and USSR are on the same side.”
Michael Wolff
Wolff, who said his sources are “twice removed” from the principals, said Trump began the meeting with “a combination of flattery” and “a combination of things that he’s just pulled out of somewhere…observations, it’s both inconsequential and incoherent.”
When either Special Envoy Steve Witkoff or Secretary of State Marco Rubio interrupted him to lay out an agenda, Wolff said, Trump just talked over them.
“Again, we’re nowhere in this meeting. We’re probably now, you know, 20 minutes in. Nothing is clear about what anyone is doing there except that Putin is totally impassive,” he said.
When Putin did speak, Wolff said, he gave a “history lesson” about ”why [Russia] should conquer Ukraine.”
And a bit more:
“Trump, not to be outdone, as this is relayed to me, goes into his own history lesson, and this is a history of the Cold War,” he said. “And as this is described to me, in Trump’s history of the Cold War, it would appear that the U.S. and USSR are on the same side.” [….]
Trump, who has been attacking “woke” history museums for not talking about “the future,” then seemed to go along with Putin’s statement resisting a ceasefire, Wolff said.
“And Trump seems to accept this and seems to agree with this,” according to the author. “Yes, let’s just move on to the peace.”
Witkoff and Rubio, meanwhile, are “basically helpless.”
“They sit there occasionally trying to interject, but you can’t really interject because Trump just talks all the time,” he continued.
“And this is then to… Putin’s advantage, because rather than any discussion of the details of what might happen here, what territory—what are you going to give for that, what are the trade offs—I mean, that level of detail Trump is not interested in, probably not capable of following the logical sequences that would be necessary there.”
What’s important to Trump, Wolff said, “is to keep talking” and “to have people listen to him.”
Those are the stories that interested me today. There’s much more happening. What’s on your mind?
#AndrewBailey #DanBongino #DCFoodDeliveryDrivers #DOJ #EdMartin #EpsteinFiles #FascistCrackdownOnWashingtonDC #FascistSecretPoliceCars #ICEAndTheEconomy #LetitiaJames #MichaelWolff #NationalGuardTroopsInWashingtonDC #TrumpIgnorance #TrumpPutinSummit2025 #VladimirPutin
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Wednesday Reads
Good Afternoon!!
I’ve been surveying the day’s top news stories and my head is spinning. I don’t know what to focus on or where to begin, and there’s no way I can cover everything. There is too much happening, so I’ve just chosen the stories that interested me the most.
Trump’s fascist crackdown on Washington DC
The New York Times: National Guard Troops in Washington Stick to Tourist Areas.
The 800 National Guard troops sent into Washington last week will soon be augmented by hundreds more, as several states with Republican governors commit to supporting President Trump’s crackdown in the city.
But Army officials appear to be trying to keep the troops on the sidelines of the mission, despite the tough-on-crime image that Mr. Trump has sought to project.
The troops have joined an array of federal agents who appeared on city streets after Mr. Trump declared last week that the federal government was assuming law enforcement responsibility in the capital, which he has falsely claimed is essentially lawless.
The first wave of troops sent to the city all came from the D.C. National Guard, which the president can call out directly. National Guard troops from Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina and West Virginia will soon also be deployed, according to the governors of those states. National Guard officials said that there were 869 troops in Washington as of Monday night; the Republican-led states so far have pledged 1,000 more.
The Republican governors said they were providing the additional troops at the request of the Trump administration. Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio said that Army Secretary Dan Driscoll had asked for the extra troops. “When the secretary of the Army asks for backup support to our troops that are already deployed, yes, we will back up our troops,” Mr. DeWine told the Columbus Dispatch.
The number is still expected to grow. But the role of the additional troops appears vague, and the answers to even basic questions, including whether they will be armed, have shifted.
What is the purpose of this militarization of a city beyond Trump’s effort to distract from the Epstein story and his overall fascist dictatorship project?
“There is no justification for any deployment of Guard forces in D.C., let alone the deployment of hundreds of Guard forces from multiple states, which smacks of a military occupation of the district,” said Elizabeth Goitein, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school.
“Local crime is a matter to be handled by local law enforcement,” she added.
Members of the National Guard stand near D.C.’s Union Station, within view of the U.S. Capitol.
The places where the troops have been deployed so far tell part of the story. Most have been seen near the National Mall, large monuments and other tourist-heavy areas.
Army officials said that more would be sent to 10 metro stations, most of which are also near tourist and entertainment sites. They include the Foggy Bottom, Smithsonian, Eastern Market and Waterfront stations.
Near the Washington Monument over the weekend, troops posed for photos with tourists. The National Guard presence, with desert sand-colored vehicles parked near the capital’s most visited tourists spots, is now showing up regularly on social media feeds in posts by visitors to Washington.
The rules of engagement for the troops, at the moment, remain limited to supporting, but not providing, law enforcement. That means that troops are not making arrests, though Army officials acknowledged that could change if Mr. Trump decides that he wants an even more forceful presence.
CNN: National Guard troops from GOP-led states begin arriving in DC as part of Trump’s crime crackdown.
West Virginia National Guard troops have begun to arrive in Washington, DC, to assist with President Donald Trump’s crime crackdown in the nation’s capital, a defense official told CNN on Tuesday.
The troops could begin assisting the DC National Guard operationally as soon as Wednesday after they have completed their in-processing, the defense official added.
Their arrival comes after the Republican governors of six states — West Virginia, South Carolina, Ohio, Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee — announced they will send guard members to Washington, DC.
The deployment of other states’ troops marks an escalation of Trump’s efforts to amass forces in the capital. The president previously announced that he was deploying DC National Guard troops to the city, surging federal agents into the streets, and federalizing DC’s police force. The president has repeatedly complained about rising crime in DC, but overall crime numbers are lower this year than in 2024.
Servicemembers from the West Virginia and South Carolina National Guards receive an orientation brief upon their arrival at the Washington, D.C. Armory, Aug. 19, 2025
The defense official said Tuesday that while there are roughly 2,400 personnel in the DC National Guard, assistance from other states was needed because of how many troops are either undergoing training elsewhere or are on leave.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said Monday he approved about 135 National Guard troops to DC, while Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves announced he would deploy approximately 200 members.
Tennessee will send roughly 160 guard members to the city this week following a request from the Trump administration, Gov. Bill Lee’s press secretary said in a Tuesday statement to CNN.
Over the weekend, West Virginia’s governor said his state was sending 300 to 400 National Guard troops to the nation’s capital. South Carolina authorized the deployment of 200 troops, and Ohio said it will send 150.
Federal officers assigned to DC are focusing on beating up food delivery people. NBC4 Washington DC: Detentions of D.C. delivery drivers leave immigrant communities on edge.
Washington, D.C., resident Tyler DeSue woke up tired and craving breakfast Saturday morning, so he did what many people in that situation would do: He used Uber Eats to put in an order for burritos.
When his driver took longer than usual, DeSue checked the app and noticed something seemed wrong — the delivery driver’s GPS location had stopped short of his address. He went outside to look for him.
“I stepped into the street, I looked down and see lights in the direction, like police lights, in the direction of where my driver was,” DeSue said in an interview. “It was my driver by himself and, like, nine different officers all wearing different uniforms. … Most of them had face coverings on.”
When DeSue went to investigate, the driver — whose name appeared on the food app as “Sidi” — was being questioned, first about his vehicle’s registration and then about his immigration status, he said.
“You’re gonna come with us, you’re gonna come with us today,” a masked agent can be heard telling Sidi in video that DeSue recorded and provided to NBC News.
“Can you tell me in Arabic, please?” Sidi says, adding that he did not understand what was being said and that he was nervous.
One of the agents, wearing a vest emblazoned “POLICE HSI” — short for Homeland Security Investigations, a part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — replies that they do not have an Arabic translator. The men then cuff Sidi’s hands, waist and feet before they put him in an unmarked car. DeSue said he has since reported the incident to Uber.
There have been other such reports.
The incident is one of several arrests of delivery drivers recorded by eyewitnesses across the Washington area that have gone viral since the Trump administration took over law enforcement in the nation’s capital last week.
An Uber Eats delivery driver is arrested Saturday in Washington, D.C.Tyler DeSue
The videos, scattered across social media and shared among D.C. delivery driver chat groups, are having a chilling effect on the drivers themselves. Some of them have chosen to stop making deliveries in the city.
It has been “five days since working, looking at what to do. And, well, closed down here waiting for things to pass, because I don’t know what to do,” a D.C.-area delivery driver who did not want to be named told NBC News in a voice message in Spanish.
On Sunday afternoon, DeSue said, an area where 15 to 20 delivery drivers typically would be parked out front of his home looking at their phones for their next orders was an empty lot.
“I haven’t seen a driver anywhere in the last two days,” he said.
There’s more at the link.
Immigration, deportation, and ICE
Paul Krugman at Substack: ICEing the U.S. Economy. Mass deportations will hurt more than people realize.
Donald Trump has been able to convert Immigration and Customs Enforcement (and Customs and Border Protection, which is effectively part of the same operation) into a huge secret police force — because what are we supposed to call an organization whose masked agents, bearing no identification, simply grab people off the street? Who shoot at a family fleeing in their truck, after agents refused to identify themselves and smashed the car window, claiming – apparently falsely according to video footage – that the driver tried to harm them?
We’ve also seen both deportations to foreign gulags and the creation of a network of domestic detention centers — call it the ICE archipelago — that are overcrowded, filthy, and breeding grounds for disease. Last week a judge ordered that detainees at ICE’s Manhattan facility be given bedding mats rather than being forced to sleep on dirty concrete floors, have access to decent hygiene, and receive three meals a day. We’ll see whether this order is obeyed, but it gives you an idea of the conditions detainees are currently facing.
And the recently passed Big Beautiful Bill gives ICE $45 billion to expand its network of detention centers, making room for around 100,000 more detainees, plus $30 billion for arrest and deportation efforts, enough to hire around 10,000 more ICE agents.
I worry, as everyone should, about how a huge expansion of this deeply un-American organization may be used as a tool of presidential power and repression. Furthermore, give people power without accountability — and it’s hard to give a better example than masked, unidentified agents authorized to use force — and some of them will abuse their position. And given what ICE has already been doing, what kind of people do you think are likely to sign up as it massively expands?
Compared with these issues, concerns about the economic impact of mass deportations are definitely second-tier. But they’re still important, and a subject I know something about. So the rest of this post will be devoted to how the Trump administration is about to ICE the economy.
A bit more:
First things first: Trump officials and some of their allies have been touting numbers that appear to show 2 million native-born Americans gaining jobs over the past year. But this claim is, as Jed Kolko of the Peterson Institute says, a “multiple-count data felony.” Read Kolko for the details showing that this is a statistical artifact, not something that really happened. No, the native-born adult population didn’t suddenly jump by 4 million in a single year.
What will actually happen is a large decline in America’s foreign-born labor force. When Stephen Miller began promising to deport 3,000 immigrants a day, many people dismissed this as an idle boast. It’s true that we can’t possibly deport people anywhere near that rapidly while obeying the law and following due process. And your point is? [….]
We don’t know how many workers will eventually be incarcerated and deported. But undocumented immigrants make up around 5 percent of the U.S. work force. It seems plausible that a significant fraction of those workers will be pushed out, along with a number of legal workers snatched up based, as Trump’s border czar has said, on their physical appearance.
Losing large numbers of workers sounds as if it will be bad for the U.S. economy. In fact, it will be worse than you may think.
The reason is that immigrant workers aren’t spread evenly across the economy. They’re strongly concentrated in certain industries and occupations, where they constitute a large share, sometimes a majority, of the work force. As a result, the Trump administration’s latter-day Edict of Expulsion will be far more disruptive to the economy than the aggregate number of workers deported might suggest.
Read the rest at the link.
Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark: Fascist Secret Police Cars.
ICE has some new cars. They are cartoonishly fascist….
What is the purpose of these vehicles?
ICE has been performing its snatch-and-grab operations largely with unmarked vehicles. ICE officers in the wild seem to eschew any sort of identification: No badges, no uniforms. Most of the time they go to great lengths to conceal their identities, wearing mask, balaclavas, and ballcaps.
Fascist ICE trucks
Are these new vehicles meant for new kinds of operations, as ICE expands to a size commensurate with its funding?
Also: What is the use-case for an ICE pickup truck? Park Rangers and firefighters can use pickup trucks to haul large loads of gear. Why would ICE need pickup trucks in its fleet?
Next, let’s look at the design. You will notice that ICE employs the slogan “Defend the Homeland.” This slogan is emblazoned in multiple spots: On side panels and on hoods. On the Mustang variant—because apparently ICE operational requirements also necessitate a two-door sports coupe—the slogan appears to be plastered on the spoiler.
It is an odd slogan for a law enforcement organization. For starters, it’s not a statement of principle, like common police tag lines: “Protect and Serve,” or “Duty, Honor, Community,” or “Service Before Self.” It’s a command: DEFEND THE HOMELAND.1
This command implies a threat. The “homeland” is under assault, right now, and must be defended from some unnamed enemy. I cannot think of any LEO that uses the specter of an enemy as part of its self-projection.
Then there’s the word “homeland.” Not “America,” or “the United States.”
The Mustang variant
America and the United States are places that anyone might join, or become a part of. But the homeland is about blood and soil. It’s the patrimony of the true volk.
Finally: “Defending the homeland” isn’t even ILstice Department weaponization chief, called for the resignation of New York Attorney General Letitia James and posed for photos outside of her Brooklyn home last week – all as he is conducting investigations into her conduct.
His investigation of James, whose office brought civil fraud charges against Trump, his adult sons, and the Trump Organization resulting in a half-billion-dollar judgment last year, is one of several the Justice Department has launched into the president’s perceived enemies.
But since beginning of the investigation into James, Martin has taken several unusual steps that fall outside the norms of prosecutorial conduct. He sent a letter to James’ attorney Abbe Lowell on August 12 suggesting New York’s top law enforcement officer resign, he appeared outside of James’ home with a colleague trailed by a photographer for the New York Post, and appeared on Fox News pledging to take an expansive look into all of James’ conduct.
In video obtained by CNN, Martin can be seen posing for photos outside of James’ home.
“This is a criminal investigation, not social media,” said Elie Honig, CNN’s senior legal analyst. “A stunt like that might get clicks, but it’s patently inappropriate for a prosecutor to do and it certainly will give James and her attorney a basis to oppose any indictment, to argue it was prejudicial to the jury pool and that an indictment was brought in bad faith.”
The conduct is “outside the bounds of DOJ and ethics rules,” Lowell said in a response to Martin.
Justice Department policy generally prohibits discussing criminal investigations publicly, and attorneys are not supposed to pursue investigations for political means or to go on fishing expeditions.
Jah’han Jones at MSNBC: Trump’s ‘weaponization’ chief seems to admit to punitive fishing expeditions.
Ed Martin is going fishing. On Sunday, the lawyer and Donald Trump loyalist tapped to lead a Justice Department “weaponization” group that’s targeting the president’s perceived enemies vowed to rummage around in the lives of New York Attorney General Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., in search of what he says could be potential fraud — or … something.
Ed Martin
During his 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly targeted people who had been investigated or opposed him with thinly veiled threats of legal prosecution. Now, Martin, in his capacity as head of the so-called Weaponization Working Group at the Department of Justice, has been tasked with putting those prosecutions into action. The list of targets includes James, who led a successful mortgage fraud case against the Trump organization that resulted in a judgment of hundreds of millions of dollars; and Schiff, who served on the House Jan. 6 select committee that documented Trump’s role in fomenting insurrection in 2021.
Officials at DOJ are investigating both Schiff and James of mortgage fraud; both deny any wrongdoing and accuse the administration of political retribution. Martin, a former “Stop the Steal” organizer and attorney for Jan. 6 insurrectionists, has been assigned to oversee the cases. He’s previously said his group would be used to “shame” people it can’t charge with crimes.
In comments to Fox News this Sunday, Martin suggested his group intends to use its powers to poke around in other parts of James’ and Schiff’s lives in search of things unrelated to the mortgage allegations.
He said, “We’re gonna go to the very bottom of the facts, and if somebody did something wrong, we’re not only gonna hold them accountable, we’re also gonna look at everything else that they’ve been doing. Because when you’re a liar, you lie not just on one thing. When you’re a cheater, you cheat not just on one thing. When you’re doing corruption, you generally don’t just do it on one thing.”
The Independent: Bongino to work alongside ‘co-deputy director’ of FBI after sparring with administration over Epstein files.
The FBI has moved to appoint Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as its new “co-deputy director,” meaning its current deputy, Dan Bongino, will be expected to share his duties in the role in the future.
The appointment was made by Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel and comes after Bongino, 50, a former Secret Service agent and podcaster, reportedly clashed with Bondi over the administration’s failure to release the Jeffrey Epstein files last month.
“I am proud to announce I have accepted the role of Co-Deputy Director of the FBI,” Bailey wrote in a brief post on X. “I extend my thanks to President Donald Trump and AG Bondi for the opportunity to serve in the mission to Make America Safe Again. I will protect America and uphold the Constitution.”
Bongino responded to a journalist’s post about the appointment by writing simply, “Welcome,” accompanied by three Stars and Stripes emojis.
Explaining the decision, Patel told The Daily Beast that the FBI “will always bring the greatest talent this country has to offer in order to accomplish the goals set forth when an overwhelming majority of American people elected President Donald J Trump again.
You have to wonder why Bongino hasn’t resigned. Maybe this is a step toward pushing him out.
The Epstein case caused controversy in early July after the FBI and Justice Department put out a statement saying that the late pedophile and sex trafficker left behind no “client list” among his possessions and died by suicide in a New York City jail cell in August 2019.
FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino will find himself sharing his official duties after Missouri Attorney General Andrew Mitchell was hired by the Trump administration
The assessment started a civil war among Trump’s MAGA movement, many of whose members had long been encouraged to suspect foul play in Epstein’s death and had hoped to see influential people brought to justice over their alleged involvement in the disgraced financier’s crimes.
The controversy raged for more than a month, with the president himself repeatedly urged to release all federal files on Epstein and to explain his past friendship with the disgraced financier, a cause of apparent frustration to him….
Even before the contested verdict on Epstein was published, Patel and Bongino, both of whom had stoked conspiracy theories on conservative media before joining the Trump administration, had drawn fire for attempting to pour cold water on the case during a May interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures.
The Epstein story is not going away, and now supposedly the DOJ will begin releasing the Epstein files to the House Oversight Committee on Friday.
CNN: House panel to make Epstein files public after redactions to protect victim identities.
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform intends to make public some files it subpoenaed related to the Jeffrey Epstein case, though it will first redact them to shield victims’ IDs and other sensitive matters, a committee spokesperson said Tuesday.
The panel is expected to start receiving materials from the Justice Department on Friday, though it appears the public release will come some time after that. The spokesperson said the committee would work with the Justice Department on the process.
“The Committee intends to make the records public after thorough review to ensure all victims’ identification and child sexual abuse material are redacted. The Committee will also consult with the DOJ to ensure any documents released do not negatively impact ongoing criminal cases and investigations,” the spokesperson said.
Democrats on the committee complained that Comer was slow walking the release of the material by allowing the Justice Department to miss the Tuesday deadline that had been set by the panel and instead turn over the materials to the committee gradually over time starting Friday. They said DOJ had already been directed by the House subpoena to redact material related to victims’ identities and child sexual abuse – questioning the need for further delay to do so.
“Releasing the Epstein files in batches just continues this White House cover-up. The American people will not accept anything short of the full, unredacted Epstein files,” said Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the panel. “In a bipartisan vote, the Committee demanded complete compliance with our subpoena. Handpicked, partial productions are wholly insufficient and potentially misleading, especially after Attorney General Bondi bragged about having the entirety of the Epstein files on her desk mere months ago.”
I hope this will really happen, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Trump and Putin
This post is already too long, but I couldn’t resist including this story from The Daily Beast: Trump’s Jaw-Dropping Ignorance Exposed During Putin Meet: Author.
Donald Trump displayed a stunning ignorance of the Cold War during last week’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to his biographer.
Author Michael Wolff told the Daily Beast podcast Inside Trump’s Head on Tuesday that, in the president’s telling of the decades-long 20th century engagement, “it would appear that the U.S. and USSR are on the same side.”
Michael Wolff
Wolff, who said his sources are “twice removed” from the principals, said Trump began the meeting with “a combination of flattery” and “a combination of things that he’s just pulled out of somewhere…observations, it’s both inconsequential and incoherent.”
When either Special Envoy Steve Witkoff or Secretary of State Marco Rubio interrupted him to lay out an agenda, Wolff said, Trump just talked over them.
“Again, we’re nowhere in this meeting. We’re probably now, you know, 20 minutes in. Nothing is clear about what anyone is doing there except that Putin is totally impassive,” he said.
When Putin did speak, Wolff said, he gave a “history lesson” about ”why [Russia] should conquer Ukraine.”
And a bit more:
“Trump, not to be outdone, as this is relayed to me, goes into his own history lesson, and this is a history of the Cold War,” he said. “And as this is described to me, in Trump’s history of the Cold War, it would appear that the U.S. and USSR are on the same side.” [….]
Trump, who has been attacking “woke” history museums for not talking about “the future,” then seemed to go along with Putin’s statement resisting a ceasefire, Wolff said.
“And Trump seems to accept this and seems to agree with this,” according to the author. “Yes, let’s just move on to the peace.”
Witkoff and Rubio, meanwhile, are “basically helpless.”
“They sit there occasionally trying to interject, but you can’t really interject because Trump just talks all the time,” he continued.
“And this is then to… Putin’s advantage, because rather than any discussion of the details of what might happen here, what territory—what are you going to give for that, what are the trade offs—I mean, that level of detail Trump is not interested in, probably not capable of following the logical sequences that would be necessary there.”
What’s important to Trump, Wolff said, “is to keep talking” and “to have people listen to him.”
Those are the stories that interested me today. There’s much more happening. What’s on your mind?
#AndrewBailey #DanBongino #DCFoodDeliveryDrivers #DOJ #EdMartin #EpsteinFiles #FascistCrackdownOnWashingtonDC #FascistSecretPoliceCars #ICEAndTheEconomy #LetitiaJames #MichaelWolff #NationalGuardTroopsInWashingtonDC #TrumpIgnorance #TrumpPutinSummit2025 #VladimirPutin
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The Geneva Learning Foundation’s Charlotte Mbuh spoke today at the COP28 Health Pavilion in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE). Learn more…
Good afternoon. I am Charlotte Mbuh. I have worked for the health of children and families in Cameroon for over 15 years.
I am one of more than 5,500 health workers from 68 countries who have connected to share our observations of how climate is affecting the health of those we serve.
“Going back home to the community where I grew up as a child, I was shocked to see that most of the rivers we used to swim and fish in have all dried up, and those that are still there have become very shallow so that you can easily walk through a river you required a boat to cross in years past.”
These are the words of Samuel Chukwuemeka Obasi, a health worker from Nigeria.
Dr Kumbha Gopi, a health worker from India said: “The use of motor vehicles has led to an increase in air pollution and we see respiratory problems and skin diseases”.
Climate change is hurting the health of those we serve. And it is getting worse.
Few here would deny that health workers are an essential voice to listen to in order to understand climate impacts on health.
Yet, a man named Jacob on social media snapped: “Since when are health workers the authority on air pollution?”
Here are the words of Bie Lilian Mbando, a health worker from my country: “Where I live in Buea, the flood from Mount Cameroon took away all belongings of people in my neighborhood and killed a secondary school student who was playing football with his friends.”
Climate change is killing communities.
Cecilia Nabwirwa, a nurse in Nairobi, Kenya: “I remember my grand-son getting sick after eating vegetables grown along areas flooded by sewage. Since then I resolved to growing my own vegetables to ensure healthy eating.”
And yet, another man on social media, Robert, found this “ridiculous. As if my friend who sells fish at his fish stall comes as an expert on water quality.”
I wondered: why such brutal responses?
Well, unlike scientists or global agencies, we cannot be dismissed as “experts from on-high”.
What we know, we know because we are here every day.
We are part of the community.
And we know that climate change is a threat to the health of the communities we serve.
We are already having to manage the impacts of climate change on health.
We are doing the best that we can.
But we need your support.
The global community is investing in building a new scientific field around climate and health.
Massive investments are also being made in policy.
Are we making a commensurate investment in people and communities?
That should mean investing in health workers.
What will happen if this investment is neglected?
What if big global donors say: “it’s important, but it’s not part of our strategy?”
Well, in 5, 10, or 15 years, we will certainly have much improved science and, hopefully, policy.
Yet, some communities might reject better science and policy.
Will the global community then wonder: “Why don’t they know what’s good for them?”
I am an immunization worker. For over 15 years, I have worked for my country’s ministry of health.
Like my colleagues from all over the world, I know more than a little about what it takes to establish and maintain trust.
Trust in vaccination, trust in public health.
Trust that by standing together in the face of critical threats to our societies, we all stand to do better.
Local communities in the poorest countries are already bearing the brunt of climate change effects on health.
Local solutions are needed.
Health workers are trusted advisors to the communities we serve.
With every challenge, there is an opportunity.
On 28 July 2023, 4,700 health workers began learning from each other through the Geneva Learning Foundation’s platform, community, and network.
Thousands more are connecting with each other, because they choose to.
And because they want to take action.
It is our duty to support them.
In March 2024, we will hold the tenth Teach to Reach conference.
The last edition reached over 17,000 health workers from more than 80 countries.
This time, our focus will be on climate and health.
We invite global partners to join, to listen and to learn.
We invite you to consider how you, your organization, your government might support action by health workers on the frontline.
Because we will rise.
As health workers, with or without your support, we will continue to stand up with courage, compassion and commitment, working to lift up our communities.
Our perseverance calls us all to press forward towards climate justice and health equity.
I wish to challenge us, as a global community, to rise together, so that the voices of those on the frontline of climate change will be at the next Conference of Parties.
By standing together, we all stand to do better.
Thank you.
https://redasadki.me/2023/12/11/climate-and-health-health-workers-trust/
#CharlotteMbuh #climate #climateCrisis #COP28 #Dubai #health #healthWorkforce #HRH
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The Geneva Learning Foundation’s Charlotte Mbuh spoke today at the COP28 Health Pavilion in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE). Learn more…
Good afternoon. I am Charlotte Mbuh. I have worked for the health of children and families in Cameroon for over 15 years.
I am one of more than 5,500 health workers from 68 countries who have connected to share our observations of how climate is affecting the health of those we serve.
“Going back home to the community where I grew up as a child, I was shocked to see that most of the rivers we used to swim and fish in have all dried up, and those that are still there have become very shallow so that you can easily walk through a river you required a boat to cross in years past.”
These are the words of Samuel Chukwuemeka Obasi, a health worker from Nigeria.
Dr Kumbha Gopi, a health worker from India said: “The use of motor vehicles has led to an increase in air pollution and we see respiratory problems and skin diseases”.
Climate change is hurting the health of those we serve. And it is getting worse.
Few here would deny that health workers are an essential voice to listen to in order to understand climate impacts on health.
Yet, a man named Jacob on social media snapped: “Since when are health workers the authority on air pollution?”
Here are the words of Bie Lilian Mbando, a health worker from my country: “Where I live in Buea, the flood from Mount Cameroon took away all belongings of people in my neighborhood and killed a secondary school student who was playing football with his friends.”
Climate change is killing communities.
Cecilia Nabwirwa, a nurse in Nairobi, Kenya: “I remember my grand-son getting sick after eating vegetables grown along areas flooded by sewage. Since then I resolved to growing my own vegetables to ensure healthy eating.”
And yet, another man on social media, Robert, found this “ridiculous. As if my friend who sells fish at his fish stall comes as an expert on water quality.”
I wondered: why such brutal responses?
Well, unlike scientists or global agencies, we cannot be dismissed as “experts from on-high”.
What we know, we know because we are here every day.
We are part of the community.
And we know that climate change is a threat to the health of the communities we serve.
We are already having to manage the impacts of climate change on health.
We are doing the best that we can.
But we need your support.
The global community is investing in building a new scientific field around climate and health.
Massive investments are also being made in policy.
Are we making a commensurate investment in people and communities?
That should mean investing in health workers.
What will happen if this investment is neglected?
What if big global donors say: “it’s important, but it’s not part of our strategy?”
Well, in 5, 10, or 15 years, we will certainly have much improved science and, hopefully, policy.
Yet, some communities might reject better science and policy.
Will the global community then wonder: “Why don’t they know what’s good for them?”
I am an immunization worker. For over 15 years, I have worked for my country’s ministry of health.
Like my colleagues from all over the world, I know more than a little about what it takes to establish and maintain trust.
Trust in vaccination, trust in public health.
Trust that by standing together in the face of critical threats to our societies, we all stand to do better.
Local communities in the poorest countries are already bearing the brunt of climate change effects on health.
Local solutions are needed.
Health workers are trusted advisors to the communities we serve.
With every challenge, there is an opportunity.
On 28 July 2023, 4,700 health workers began learning from each other through the Geneva Learning Foundation’s platform, community, and network.
Thousands more are connecting with each other, because they choose to.
And because they want to take action.
It is our duty to support them.
In March 2024, we will hold the tenth Teach to Reach conference.
The last edition reached over 17,000 health workers from more than 80 countries.
This time, our focus will be on climate and health.
We invite global partners to join, to listen and to learn.
We invite you to consider how you, your organization, your government might support action by health workers on the frontline.
Because we will rise.
As health workers, with or without your support, we will continue to stand up with courage, compassion and commitment, working to lift up our communities.
Our perseverance calls us all to press forward towards climate justice and health equity.
I wish to challenge us, as a global community, to rise together, so that the voices of those on the frontline of climate change will be at the next Conference of Parties.
By standing together, we all stand to do better.
Thank you.
https://redasadki.me/2023/12/11/climate-and-health-health-workers-trust/
#CharlotteMbuh #climate #climateCrisis #COP28 #Dubai #health #healthWorkforce #HRH
-
Climate change is a threat to the health of the communities we serve: health workers speak out at COP28
The Geneva Learning Foundation’s Charlotte Mbuh spoke today at the COP28 Health Pavilion in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE). Watch the speech at COP28…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMTMaMBOq-E
Good afternoon. I am Charlotte Mbuh. I have worked for the health of children and families in Cameroon for over 15 years.
I am one of more than 5,500 health workers from 68 countries who have connected to share our observations of how climate is affecting the health of those we serve.
“Going back home to the community where I grew up as a child, I was shocked to see that most of the rivers we used to swim and fish in have all dried up, and those that are still there have become very shallow so that you can easily walk through a river you required a boat to cross in years past.”
These are the words of Samuel Chukwuemeka Obasi, a health worker from Nigeria.
Dr Kumbha Gopi, a health worker from India said: “The use of motor vehicles has led to an increase in air pollution and we see respiratory problems and skin diseases”.
Climate change is hurting the health of those we serve. And it is getting worse.
Few here would deny that health workers are an essential voice to listen to in order to understand climate impacts on health.
Yet, a man named Jacob on social media snapped: “Since when are health workers the authority on air pollution?”
Here are the words of Bie Lilian Mbando, a health worker from my country: “Where I live in Buea, the flood from Mount Cameroon took away all belongings of people in my neighborhood and killed a secondary school student who was playing football with his friends.”
Climate change is killing communities.
Cecilia Nabwirwa, a nurse in Nairobi, Kenya: “I remember my grand-son getting sick after eating vegetables grown along areas flooded by sewage. Since then I resolved to growing my own vegetables to ensure healthy eating.”
And yet, another man on social media, Robert, found this “ridiculous. As if my friend who sells fish at his fish stall comes as an expert on water quality.”
I wondered: why such brutal responses?
Well, unlike scientists or global agencies, we cannot be dismissed as “experts from on-high”.
What we know, we know because we are here every day.
We are part of the community.
And we know that climate change is a threat to the health of the communities we serve.
We are already having to manage the impacts of climate change on health.
We are doing the best that we can.
But we need your support.
The global community is investing in building a new scientific field around climate and health.
Massive investments are also being made in policy.
Are we making a commensurate investment in people and communities?
That should mean investing in health workers.
What will happen if this investment is neglected?
What if big global donors say: “it’s important, but it’s not part of our strategy?”
Well, in 5, 10, or 15 years, we will certainly have much improved science and, hopefully, policy.
Yet, some communities might reject better science and policy.
Will the global community then wonder: “Why don’t they know what’s good for them?”
I am an immunization worker. For over 15 years, I have worked for my country’s ministry of health.
Like my colleagues from all over the world, I know more than a little about what it takes to establish and maintain trust.
Trust in vaccination, trust in public health.
Trust that by standing together in the face of critical threats to our societies, we all stand to do better.
Local communities in the poorest countries are already bearing the brunt of climate change effects on health.
Local solutions are needed.
Health workers are trusted advisors to the communities we serve.
With every challenge, there is an opportunity.
On 28 July 2023, 4,700 health workers began learning from each other through the Geneva Learning Foundation’s platform, community, and network.
Thousands more are connecting with each other, because they choose to.
And because they want to take action.
It is our duty to support them.
In March 2024, we will hold the tenth Teach to Reach conference.
The last edition reached over 17,000 health workers from more than 80 countries.
This time, our focus will be on climate and health.
We invite global partners to join, to listen and to learn.
We invite you to consider how you, your organization, your government might support action by health workers on the frontline.
Because we will rise.
As health workers, with or without your support, we will continue to stand up with courage, compassion and commitment, working to lift up our communities.
Our perseverance calls us all to press forward towards climate justice and health equity.
I wish to challenge us, as a global community, to rise together, so that the voices of those on the frontline of climate change will be at the next Conference of Parties.
By standing together, we all stand to do better.
Thank you.
#CharlotteMbuh #climate #climateCrisis #COP28 #Dubai #health #healthWorkforce #HRH
-
Climate change is a threat to the health of the communities we serve: health workers speak out at COP28
The Geneva Learning Foundation’s Charlotte Mbuh spoke today at the COP28 Health Pavilion in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE). Watch the speech at COP28…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMTMaMBOq-E
Good afternoon. I am Charlotte Mbuh. I have worked for the health of children and families in Cameroon for over 15 years.
I am one of more than 5,500 health workers from 68 countries who have connected to share our observations of how climate is affecting the health of those we serve.
“Going back home to the community where I grew up as a child, I was shocked to see that most of the rivers we used to swim and fish in have all dried up, and those that are still there have become very shallow so that you can easily walk through a river you required a boat to cross in years past.”
These are the words of Samuel Chukwuemeka Obasi, a health worker from Nigeria.
Dr Kumbha Gopi, a health worker from India said: “The use of motor vehicles has led to an increase in air pollution and we see respiratory problems and skin diseases”.
Climate change is hurting the health of those we serve. And it is getting worse.
Few here would deny that health workers are an essential voice to listen to in order to understand climate impacts on health.
Yet, a man named Jacob on social media snapped: “Since when are health workers the authority on air pollution?”
Here are the words of Bie Lilian Mbando, a health worker from my country: “Where I live in Buea, the flood from Mount Cameroon took away all belongings of people in my neighborhood and killed a secondary school student who was playing football with his friends.”
Climate change is killing communities.
Cecilia Nabwirwa, a nurse in Nairobi, Kenya: “I remember my grand-son getting sick after eating vegetables grown along areas flooded by sewage. Since then I resolved to growing my own vegetables to ensure healthy eating.”
And yet, another man on social media, Robert, found this “ridiculous. As if my friend who sells fish at his fish stall comes as an expert on water quality.”
I wondered: why such brutal responses?
Well, unlike scientists or global agencies, we cannot be dismissed as “experts from on-high”.
What we know, we know because we are here every day.
We are part of the community.
And we know that climate change is a threat to the health of the communities we serve.
We are already having to manage the impacts of climate change on health.
We are doing the best that we can.
But we need your support.
The global community is investing in building a new scientific field around climate and health.
Massive investments are also being made in policy.
Are we making a commensurate investment in people and communities?
That should mean investing in health workers.
What will happen if this investment is neglected?
What if big global donors say: “it’s important, but it’s not part of our strategy?”
Well, in 5, 10, or 15 years, we will certainly have much improved science and, hopefully, policy.
Yet, some communities might reject better science and policy.
Will the global community then wonder: “Why don’t they know what’s good for them?”
I am an immunization worker. For over 15 years, I have worked for my country’s ministry of health.
Like my colleagues from all over the world, I know more than a little about what it takes to establish and maintain trust.
Trust in vaccination, trust in public health.
Trust that by standing together in the face of critical threats to our societies, we all stand to do better.
Local communities in the poorest countries are already bearing the brunt of climate change effects on health.
Local solutions are needed.
Health workers are trusted advisors to the communities we serve.
With every challenge, there is an opportunity.
On 28 July 2023, 4,700 health workers began learning from each other through the Geneva Learning Foundation’s platform, community, and network.
Thousands more are connecting with each other, because they choose to.
And because they want to take action.
It is our duty to support them.
In March 2024, we will hold the tenth Teach to Reach conference.
The last edition reached over 17,000 health workers from more than 80 countries.
This time, our focus will be on climate and health.
We invite global partners to join, to listen and to learn.
We invite you to consider how you, your organization, your government might support action by health workers on the frontline.
Because we will rise.
As health workers, with or without your support, we will continue to stand up with courage, compassion and commitment, working to lift up our communities.
Our perseverance calls us all to press forward towards climate justice and health equity.
I wish to challenge us, as a global community, to rise together, so that the voices of those on the frontline of climate change will be at the next Conference of Parties.
By standing together, we all stand to do better.
Thank you.
#CharlotteMbuh #climate #climateCrisis #COP28 #Dubai #health #healthWorkforce #HRH
-
Lazy Caturday Reads: Epstein, Epstein, Epstein, and More News
Good Afternoon!!
Elizabeth Taylor with her Siamese cat, 1956, photo by Sanford Roth
Epstein, Epstein, Epstein. He’s everywhere in the news. We still haven’t seen the DOJ Epstein files, but we’re already learning more about Epstein’s relationship to Trump from the recently released text messages. We don’t know yet how bad it will get when the files are released, but the extent to which Trump is publicly panicking suggests it will be very bad for him.
In Trump’s latest effort to control the Epstein story, he ordered Attorney General Bondi to investigate Democrats who had connections to the child sex trafficker.
Acceding to President Donald Trump’s demands, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Friday that she has ordered a top federal prosecutor to investigate sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to Trump political foes, including former President Bill Clinton.
Bondi posted on X that she was assigning Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton to lead the probe, capping an eventful week in which congressional Republicans released nearly 23,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate and House Democrats seized on emails mentioning Trump.
Trump, who was friends with Epstein for years, didn’t explain what supposed crimes he wanted the Justice Department to investigate. None of the men he mentioned in a social media post demanding the probe has been accused of sexual misconduct by any of Epstein’s victims.
Hours before Bondi’s announcement, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he would ask her, the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate Epstein’s “involvement and relationship” with Clinton and others, including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and LinkedIn founder and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman.
Trump, calling the matter “the Epstein Hoax, involving Democrats, not Republicans,” said the investigation should also include financial giant JPMorgan Chase, which provided banking services to Epstein, and “many other people and institutions.”
There’s no evidence that any of the people Trump is targeting were involved in sexual abuse or sex trafficking.
A JPMorgan Chase spokesperson, Patricia Wexler, said the company regretted associating with Epstein “but did not help him commit his heinous acts.”
“The government had damning information about his crimes and failed to share it with us or other banks,” she said. The company agreed previously to pay millions of dollars to Epstein’s victims, who had sued arguing that the bank ignored red flags about criminal activity.
Clinton has acknowledged traveling on Epstein’s private jet but has said through a spokesperson that he had no knowledge of the late financier’s crimes. He also has never been accused of misconduct by Epstein’s known victims.
Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Angel Ureña posted on X Friday: “These emails prove Bill Clinton did nothing and knew nothing. The rest is noise meant to distract from election losses, backfiring shutdowns, and who knows what else.” [….]
Summers and Hoffman had nothing to do with either case, but both were friendly with Epstein and exchanged emails with him. Those messages were among the documents released this week, along with other correspondence Epstein had with friends and business associates in the years before his death.
Nothing in the messages suggested any wrongdoing on the men’s part, other than associating with someone who had been accused of sex crimes against children.
At Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson writes:
In a transparent attempt to distract from the many times his own name appears in the documents from the Epstein estate members of the House Oversight Committee released Wednesday, President Donald J. Trump asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Democrats whose names appeared in the documents. He singled out former president Bill Clinton, former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers, and Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn and who is a Democratic donor.
Marlon Brando and cat
Although the attorney general is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and is supposed to be nonpartisan in protecting the rule of law, Bondi responded that the Department of Justice “will pursue this with urgency and integrity.” Maegan Vazquez and Shayna Jacobs of the Washington Post note that reporters have already covered the relationship of Epstein with Clinton, Summers, and Hoffman for years, and that in July, Justice Department officials said an examination of the FBI files relating to Epstein—a different cache than Wednesday’s—“did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”
Meidas Touch noted: “In normal times, it would be a major scandal for the President to direct his AG to criminally investigate his political opponents to deflect from his own involvement in a major scandal—and for the AG to immediately announce she is doing it. The Epstein scandal and cover up just got even bigger.”
This scandal truly has Trump flailing. I hope this will be the one that really brings him down, but he somehow seems to wriggle out of every scandal. But he certainly is terrified of the Epstein files being released.
Politico: House plans to vote Tuesday on releasing Epstein files.
House Republican leaders are planning to hold a vote Tuesday on legislation to force the release of federal files related to Jeffrey Epstein, according to three people granted anonymity to discuss internal plans ahead of a public announcement.
The tentative scheduling decision follows a successful effort by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) to sidestep Speaker Mike Johnson and force a floor vote on their bipartisan bill to compel the Justice Department to release all of its records related to the late convicted sex offender.
President Donald Trump has made repeated attempts to kill the effort, which continued in a series of Truth Social posts Friday. But Johnson said Wednesday he intends to move quickly to hold the vote and put the matter to bed.
Under the current GOP plan, the House Rules Committee would approve a procedural measure Monday night to advance eight bills for floor consideration, including language to tee up the Epstein legislation. If that measure is approved on the floor, likely early Tuesday afternoon, debate and a final vote on the Epstein bill could immediately follow. GOP leaders are considering whether to postpone the Epstein vote until Tuesday evening….
The four Republicans who signed on to the discharge petition forcing the vote — Massie, plus Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Nancy Mace of South Carolina — are likely to examine Johnson’s moves very closely. They could together block any procedural measure that would undercut the Epstein legislation, postpone it or otherwise alter it.
One more story on the Epstein texts from Jason Wilson at The Guardian: Steve Bannon advised Jeffrey Epstein for years on how to rehab his reputation, texts show.
Hundreds of texts over almost a year show Maga influencer Steve Bannon and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein workshopping legal and media strategies to protect Epstein from the legal and publicity quagmire that enveloped him in the last year of his life.
The texts, released by the House oversight committee on Wednesday, show that as early as June 2018, the pair were devising responses to the gathering storm of public outrage about Epstein’s criminal history, his favorable treatment by the justice system, and his friendships with powerful figures in business, politics and academia.
Bannon conspiratorially described the renewed scrutiny of Epstein as a “sophisticated op”, and over time he counseled Epstein in his adversarial responses to media outlets, the justice system and his victims.
All the while, both men were also strategizing how best to promote Bannon’s rightwing populist agenda, and the political fortunes of its standard bearer, Donald Trump.
In all of Epstein’s messages, the identity of his correspondent is redacted. But Bannon’s identity in the threads cited in this reporting is clear from contextual clues including his documented activities at the time, details of his business and media pursuits, and other disclosures. In one document, the sender’s phone number is not redacted – and it is the same number linked to Bannon in a legal case against Trump adviser Roger Stone.
Read the rest at The Guardian.
Trump is also beginning to panic about the economy and the negative effects of his insane tariffs.
David J. Lynch at The Washington Post: Trump goes on defense over tariffs as prices on everyday items keep rising.
President Donald Trump’s bid Friday to sootheconsumers by dropping tariffs on a wide array of groceries, including coffee, beef, bananas and tomatoes — contradicting his repeated claims that the levies were not affecting retail prices — shows he is on the defensive over his signature policy initiative.
Public opposition, eroding support on Capitol Hill and a potentially lethal challenge before the Supreme Court have Trump scrambling to defend his economic strategy even as the administration notches diplomatic agreements that are cementing its high-tariff approach to rebalancing global trade.
Sophia Loren with her cat, 1959
Public opinion is the immediate worry, following recent Democratic electoral victories in Virginia and New Jersey that were fueled by Americans’ ire over the cost of living. By a nearly 2-to-1 margin, registered voters disapproved of the president’s tariffs in a recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, a finding that has been consistent all year and could imperil Republican candidates in next year’s congressional elections.
The president on Friday issued an executive order rolling back import taxes on many foods, his most significant retreat on the emergency tariffs he imposed in April, which were billed at the time as loophole-free. In September, the White House had signaled that some products that are not generally produced in the United States could be spared tariffs once nations where they originate reached trade deals with the United States. But Friday’s exemptions apply to products from any nation, even those that have not agreed on trade terms.
“They know that they shouldn’t have imposed a lot of these tariffs and that they’re hurting affordability for consumers. Now they’re looking for a way to justify lowering them. And that’s fine. But did we really need to go through all this in the first place?” said Christopher Padilla, senior adviser to the Brunswick Group and a former trade official in the George W. Bush administration….
This week’s tariff cuts appear aimed at responding to public concern over high prices. Inflation overall is running at an annual rate of 3 percent, above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target for price stability but well down from the mid-2022 peak of 9.1 percent.
Prices on many everyday items, however, continue to soar. Through September, the most recent data available, coffee prices were up 19 percent over the previous 12 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bananas were up 7 percent.
Elizabeth Buchwald at CNN: Trump’s latest tariff TACO probably won’t make your life more affordable.
Americans could soon see some goods get cheaper after President Donald Trump exempted certain agricultural imports from a set of tariffs on Friday. But any price drops likely won’t be enough to make life feel more affordable any time soon.
The executive order exempted products like coffee, beef and some fruit from Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs, which began rolling out in April.
The new exemptions are part of what traders have dubbed TACO, or Trump Always Chickens Out, to describe times when the president backs off a policy after unintended consequences pop up. In the case of tariffs, Trump has already reversed a number of his measures, a sign that the administration is reshaping his signature economic tool.
The latest TACO comes after voters, worried about affordability, gave Republicans a drubbing in recent off-year elections.
Why this likely won’t help consumers much:
Nevertheless, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the new exemptions generally won’t help improve affordability.
“It depends on what the importers do with the tariff,” he said in a CNBC interview on Friday. “So when you look at the overall price trend, it hasn’t been because of tariffs. It’s been because of these other events going on and just supply and demand.”
Steve Martin and cat
But in cases where tariffs have been passed along to consumers, prices could drop, Greer said.
One potential example: bananas. American consumers are paying about 8% more for bananas than before Trump’s second term began.
The US largely imports bananas from South American countries. With bananas exempt from “reciprocal” tariffs that started at 10%, prices could go back to where they were earlier this year, said Sarah House, senior economist at Wells Fargo. But it’s unlikely to be something most consumers notice unless they’re buying bananas often, she added.
But not everyone is convinced it will even do that much.
“It is not clear that lowering tariffs will lower prices — it depends on what retailers think they can get away with. The import price of bananas has fallen since tariffs were imposed, but the US consumer price has risen,” Paul Donovan, chief economist at UBS global wealth management, said in a note last week. (The United States tracks import prices before accounting for tariffs. In some cases, import prices have fallen as exporters lower what they charge as a way to share in the tariff expense importers pay.)
More analysis at the CNN link.
Another flop: Trump’s soybean deal with China may have just been a mirage. AP: USDA data casts doubt on China’s soybean purchase promises touted by Trump.
New data the Agriculture Department released Friday created serious doubts about whether China will really buy millions of bushels of American soybeans like the Trump administration touted last month after a high-stakes meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
The USDA report released after the government reopened showed only two Chinese purchases of American soybeans since the summit in South Korea that totaled 332,000 metric tons. That’s well short of the 12 million metric tons that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said China agreed to purchase by January and nowhere near the 25 million metric tons she said they would buy in each of the next three years.
American farmers were hopeful that their biggest customer would resume buying their crops. But CoBank’s Tanner Ehmke, who is its lead economist for grains and oilseed, said there isn’t much incentive for China to buy from America right now because they have plenty of soybeans on hand that they have bought from Brazil and other South American countries this year, and the remaining tariffs ensure that U.S. soybeans remain more expensive than Brazilian beans.
“We are still not even close to what has been advertised from the U.S. in terms of what the agreement would have been,” Ehmke said.
Beijing has yet to confirm any detailed soybean purchase agreement but only that the two sides have reached “consensus” on expanding trade in farm products. Ehmke said that even if China did promise to buy American soybeans it may have only agreed to buy them if the price was attractive.
Will Trump try to distract from the Epstein files and his failures on the economy by taking us to war with Venezuela?
David E. Sanger, Eric Schmit, Tyler Pager, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs at The New York Times (gift link): Trump Escalates Pressure on Venezuela, but Endgame Is Unclear.
The Trump administration is rapidly escalating its pressure campaign against Venezuela, with America’s largest aircraft carrier, the Ford, about to take up a position within striking distance of the country, even as President Trump’s aides provide conflicting accounts of what, exactly, they are seeking to achieve.
Mr. Trump held back-to-back days of meetings at the White House over the past two days, reviewing military options, including the use of Special Operations forces and direct action inside Venezuela.
Marlyn Monroe with her cat
It is still not clear whether Mr. Trump has made a decision about what kind of action to authorize, if any. On Friday, he told reporters on Air Force One that “I sort of made up my mind.” “I can’t tell you what it is,” he said, “but we made a lot of progress with Venezuela in terms of stopping drugs from pouring in.”
It is possible Mr. Trump is relying on the arrival of so much firepower to intimidate the government of Nicolás Maduro, who the United States and many of its allies say is not Venezuela’s legitimate president. Mr. Maduro has put his forces on high alert, leaving the two countries with their weapons cocked and ready for war.
There were signs that the administration was moving into a new and more aggressive posture. Shortly after a meeting on Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on social media that the mission in the Caribbean now had a name — “Southern Spear.” He described its goal in expansive terms, saying the operation “removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere.”
“The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood,” he wrote, “and we will protect it.” With the arrival of the Ford and three accompanying missile-firing Navy destroyers, there are now 15,000 troops in the region, more than there have been at any time in decades.
The only thing missing is a strategic explanation from the Trump administration that would clarify why the United States is amassing such a large force. Mr. Hegseth’s posting on X was only the latest in a series of statements from administration officials that, at best, are in tension with one another. Some are outright contradictory.
Mr. Trump has been the most consistent, saying it is all about drugs. But that would not explain why the Ford was rushed from the eastern Mediterranean Sea to the Caribbean region, adding to an American force that has now reached 15,000 soldiers and sailors, to attack small boats that until early September had been intercepted by the Coast Guard. Nor would it explain why Colombia or Mexico — Mexico being the main conduit for fentanyl — are not in the Navy’s sights.
Dan Lamothe, Tara Copp, Michael Birnbaum, and Noah Robertson: Trump weighs Venezuela strikes as U.S. forces prepare for attack order.
President Donald Trump said Friday night that he has “sort of made up my mind” about how he will proceed with the possibility of military action in Venezuela, following a second consecutive day of deliberations at the White House that included top national security advisers.
Trump’s vague remarks aboard Air Force One were delivered as he traveled for the weekend to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, and included no additional new details. The comments came as U.S. forces in the region awaited possible attack orders and after days of high-level discussions about whether — and how — to strike in Venezuela, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter is highly sensitive. Joining Trump in deliberations Friday were Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, these people said.
Robert Redford with his cat
Earlier in the day, an administration official said “a host of options” had been presented to the president. Trump is “very good at maintaining strategic ambiguity, and something he does very well is he does not dictate or broadcast to our adversaries what he wants to do next,” the official said.
Any strike on Venezuelan territory would upend the president’s frequent promises of avoiding new conflicts and betray promises made to Congress in recent weeks that no active preparations were underway for such an attack. It also would further complicate U.S. cooperation with other Latin American countries, and deepen suspicions — there and in Washington — over whether Trump’s endgame is the forced removal of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, whom Trump has accused of sending drugs and violent criminals to the United States.
Maduro, a socialist strongman, came to power in Caracas in 2013 and increasingly has become a fixation for Trump.
In August, U.S. officials increased the reward for information leading to his arrest and conviction from $25 million to $50 million, citing alleged ties to drug cartels and U.S. beliefs dating back to the Biden administration that he lost Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election and refused to step down.
“The United States is very plugged into what’s going on in Venezuela, the chatter among Maduro’s people and the highest levels of his regime,” the administration official said. “Maduro is very scared, and he should be scared. The president has options on the table that are very bad for Maduro and his illegitimate regime. … We view this regime as illegitimate, and it’s not serving the Western Hemisphere well.”
President Donald Trump has said he believes Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s days are numbered, and that land strikes inside Venezuela are possible.
Experts say that the US doesn’t currently have the military assets in place to launch a largescale operation to remove Maduro from power, though Trump has approved covert action within Venezuela, CNN has reported.
Bette Davis with cat
But if Trump did order strikes inside Venezuela aimed at ousting Maduro, he could face serious challenges with fractured opposition elements and a military poised for insurgency, according to experts, as well as political backlash at home for a president who promised to avoid costly entanglements overseas.
CNN reported that Trump received a briefing earlier this week to review updated options for military action inside Venezuela, a concept the White House has been weighing. The administration had not made a decision on whether to launch strikes, CNN reported, though the US military has moved more than a dozen warships and 15,000 troops into the region as part of what the Pentagon branded Operation Southern Spear in an announcement Thursday.
The concentration of military assets and threats of further attacks beyond the ongoing drug boat campaign have served to increase pressure on Maduro, with administration officials saying he needs to leave office while arguing that he’s closely tied to the Tren de Aragua gang and leading drug trafficking efforts.
But if Maduro does flee Venezuela or is killed out in a targeted strike, experts worry about a military takeover of the country or the boosting of another dictator similar to Maduro.
Read the rest at CNN.
Those are my recommended reads. I’ll add a few more links in the comment thread. What stories are you interested in today?
#BillClinton #catArt #caturday #ChinaSoybeanPurchases #DonaldTrump #EpsteinFiles #JeffreyEpstein #LarrySummers #NicolasMaduro #PamBondi #ReidHoffman #SteveBannon #TACOTrump #TrumpTariffs #Venezuela
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Lazy Caturday Reads: Epstein, Epstein, Epstein, and More News
Good Afternoon!!
Elizabeth Taylor with her Siamese cat, 1956, photo by Sanford Roth
Epstein, Epstein, Epstein. He’s everywhere in the news. We still haven’t seen the DOJ Epstein files, but we’re already learning more about Epstein’s relationship to Trump from the recently released text messages. We don’t know yet how bad it will get when the files are released, but the extent to which Trump is publicly panicking suggests it will be very bad for him.
In Trump’s latest effort to control the Epstein story, he ordered Attorney General Bondi to investigate Democrats who had connections to the child sex trafficker.
Acceding to President Donald Trump’s demands, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Friday that she has ordered a top federal prosecutor to investigate sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to Trump political foes, including former President Bill Clinton.
Bondi posted on X that she was assigning Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton to lead the probe, capping an eventful week in which congressional Republicans released nearly 23,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate and House Democrats seized on emails mentioning Trump.
Trump, who was friends with Epstein for years, didn’t explain what supposed crimes he wanted the Justice Department to investigate. None of the men he mentioned in a social media post demanding the probe has been accused of sexual misconduct by any of Epstein’s victims.
Hours before Bondi’s announcement, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he would ask her, the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate Epstein’s “involvement and relationship” with Clinton and others, including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and LinkedIn founder and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman.
Trump, calling the matter “the Epstein Hoax, involving Democrats, not Republicans,” said the investigation should also include financial giant JPMorgan Chase, which provided banking services to Epstein, and “many other people and institutions.”
There’s no evidence that any of the people Trump is targeting were involved in sexual abuse or sex trafficking.
A JPMorgan Chase spokesperson, Patricia Wexler, said the company regretted associating with Epstein “but did not help him commit his heinous acts.”
“The government had damning information about his crimes and failed to share it with us or other banks,” she said. The company agreed previously to pay millions of dollars to Epstein’s victims, who had sued arguing that the bank ignored red flags about criminal activity.
Clinton has acknowledged traveling on Epstein’s private jet but has said through a spokesperson that he had no knowledge of the late financier’s crimes. He also has never been accused of misconduct by Epstein’s known victims.
Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Angel Ureña posted on X Friday: “These emails prove Bill Clinton did nothing and knew nothing. The rest is noise meant to distract from election losses, backfiring shutdowns, and who knows what else.” [….]
Summers and Hoffman had nothing to do with either case, but both were friendly with Epstein and exchanged emails with him. Those messages were among the documents released this week, along with other correspondence Epstein had with friends and business associates in the years before his death.
Nothing in the messages suggested any wrongdoing on the men’s part, other than associating with someone who had been accused of sex crimes against children.
At Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson writes:
In a transparent attempt to distract from the many times his own name appears in the documents from the Epstein estate members of the House Oversight Committee released Wednesday, President Donald J. Trump asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Democrats whose names appeared in the documents. He singled out former president Bill Clinton, former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers, and Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn and who is a Democratic donor.
Marlon Brando and cat
Although the attorney general is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and is supposed to be nonpartisan in protecting the rule of law, Bondi responded that the Department of Justice “will pursue this with urgency and integrity.” Maegan Vazquez and Shayna Jacobs of the Washington Post note that reporters have already covered the relationship of Epstein with Clinton, Summers, and Hoffman for years, and that in July, Justice Department officials said an examination of the FBI files relating to Epstein—a different cache than Wednesday’s—“did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”
Meidas Touch noted: “In normal times, it would be a major scandal for the President to direct his AG to criminally investigate his political opponents to deflect from his own involvement in a major scandal—and for the AG to immediately announce she is doing it. The Epstein scandal and cover up just got even bigger.”
This scandal truly has Trump flailing. I hope this will be the one that really brings him down, but he somehow seems to wriggle out of every scandal. But he certainly is terrified of the Epstein files being released.
Politico: House plans to vote Tuesday on releasing Epstein files.
House Republican leaders are planning to hold a vote Tuesday on legislation to force the release of federal files related to Jeffrey Epstein, according to three people granted anonymity to discuss internal plans ahead of a public announcement.
The tentative scheduling decision follows a successful effort by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) to sidestep Speaker Mike Johnson and force a floor vote on their bipartisan bill to compel the Justice Department to release all of its records related to the late convicted sex offender.
President Donald Trump has made repeated attempts to kill the effort, which continued in a series of Truth Social posts Friday. But Johnson said Wednesday he intends to move quickly to hold the vote and put the matter to bed.
Under the current GOP plan, the House Rules Committee would approve a procedural measure Monday night to advance eight bills for floor consideration, including language to tee up the Epstein legislation. If that measure is approved on the floor, likely early Tuesday afternoon, debate and a final vote on the Epstein bill could immediately follow. GOP leaders are considering whether to postpone the Epstein vote until Tuesday evening….
The four Republicans who signed on to the discharge petition forcing the vote — Massie, plus Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Nancy Mace of South Carolina — are likely to examine Johnson’s moves very closely. They could together block any procedural measure that would undercut the Epstein legislation, postpone it or otherwise alter it.
One more story on the Epstein texts from Jason Wilson at The Guardian: Steve Bannon advised Jeffrey Epstein for years on how to rehab his reputation, texts show.
Hundreds of texts over almost a year show Maga influencer Steve Bannon and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein workshopping legal and media strategies to protect Epstein from the legal and publicity quagmire that enveloped him in the last year of his life.
The texts, released by the House oversight committee on Wednesday, show that as early as June 2018, the pair were devising responses to the gathering storm of public outrage about Epstein’s criminal history, his favorable treatment by the justice system, and his friendships with powerful figures in business, politics and academia.
Bannon conspiratorially described the renewed scrutiny of Epstein as a “sophisticated op”, and over time he counseled Epstein in his adversarial responses to media outlets, the justice system and his victims.
All the while, both men were also strategizing how best to promote Bannon’s rightwing populist agenda, and the political fortunes of its standard bearer, Donald Trump.
In all of Epstein’s messages, the identity of his correspondent is redacted. But Bannon’s identity in the threads cited in this reporting is clear from contextual clues including his documented activities at the time, details of his business and media pursuits, and other disclosures. In one document, the sender’s phone number is not redacted – and it is the same number linked to Bannon in a legal case against Trump adviser Roger Stone.
Read the rest at The Guardian.
Trump is also beginning to panic about the economy and the negative effects of his insane tariffs.
David J. Lynch at The Washington Post: Trump goes on defense over tariffs as prices on everyday items keep rising.
President Donald Trump’s bid Friday to sootheconsumers by dropping tariffs on a wide array of groceries, including coffee, beef, bananas and tomatoes — contradicting his repeated claims that the levies were not affecting retail prices — shows he is on the defensive over his signature policy initiative.
Public opposition, eroding support on Capitol Hill and a potentially lethal challenge before the Supreme Court have Trump scrambling to defend his economic strategy even as the administration notches diplomatic agreements that are cementing its high-tariff approach to rebalancing global trade.
Sophia Loren with her cat, 1959
Public opinion is the immediate worry, following recent Democratic electoral victories in Virginia and New Jersey that were fueled by Americans’ ire over the cost of living. By a nearly 2-to-1 margin, registered voters disapproved of the president’s tariffs in a recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, a finding that has been consistent all year and could imperil Republican candidates in next year’s congressional elections.
The president on Friday issued an executive order rolling back import taxes on many foods, his most significant retreat on the emergency tariffs he imposed in April, which were billed at the time as loophole-free. In September, the White House had signaled that some products that are not generally produced in the United States could be spared tariffs once nations where they originate reached trade deals with the United States. But Friday’s exemptions apply to products from any nation, even those that have not agreed on trade terms.
“They know that they shouldn’t have imposed a lot of these tariffs and that they’re hurting affordability for consumers. Now they’re looking for a way to justify lowering them. And that’s fine. But did we really need to go through all this in the first place?” said Christopher Padilla, senior adviser to the Brunswick Group and a former trade official in the George W. Bush administration….
This week’s tariff cuts appear aimed at responding to public concern over high prices. Inflation overall is running at an annual rate of 3 percent, above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target for price stability but well down from the mid-2022 peak of 9.1 percent.
Prices on many everyday items, however, continue to soar. Through September, the most recent data available, coffee prices were up 19 percent over the previous 12 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bananas were up 7 percent.
Elizabeth Buchwald at CNN: Trump’s latest tariff TACO probably won’t make your life more affordable.
Americans could soon see some goods get cheaper after President Donald Trump exempted certain agricultural imports from a set of tariffs on Friday. But any price drops likely won’t be enough to make life feel more affordable any time soon.
The executive order exempted products like coffee, beef and some fruit from Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs, which began rolling out in April.
The new exemptions are part of what traders have dubbed TACO, or Trump Always Chickens Out, to describe times when the president backs off a policy after unintended consequences pop up. In the case of tariffs, Trump has already reversed a number of his measures, a sign that the administration is reshaping his signature economic tool.
The latest TACO comes after voters, worried about affordability, gave Republicans a drubbing in recent off-year elections.
Why this likely won’t help consumers much:
Nevertheless, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the new exemptions generally won’t help improve affordability.
“It depends on what the importers do with the tariff,” he said in a CNBC interview on Friday. “So when you look at the overall price trend, it hasn’t been because of tariffs. It’s been because of these other events going on and just supply and demand.”
Steve Martin and cat
But in cases where tariffs have been passed along to consumers, prices could drop, Greer said.
One potential example: bananas. American consumers are paying about 8% more for bananas than before Trump’s second term began.
The US largely imports bananas from South American countries. With bananas exempt from “reciprocal” tariffs that started at 10%, prices could go back to where they were earlier this year, said Sarah House, senior economist at Wells Fargo. But it’s unlikely to be something most consumers notice unless they’re buying bananas often, she added.
But not everyone is convinced it will even do that much.
“It is not clear that lowering tariffs will lower prices — it depends on what retailers think they can get away with. The import price of bananas has fallen since tariffs were imposed, but the US consumer price has risen,” Paul Donovan, chief economist at UBS global wealth management, said in a note last week. (The United States tracks import prices before accounting for tariffs. In some cases, import prices have fallen as exporters lower what they charge as a way to share in the tariff expense importers pay.)
More analysis at the CNN link.
Another flop: Trump’s soybean deal with China may have just been a mirage. AP: USDA data casts doubt on China’s soybean purchase promises touted by Trump.
New data the Agriculture Department released Friday created serious doubts about whether China will really buy millions of bushels of American soybeans like the Trump administration touted last month after a high-stakes meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
The USDA report released after the government reopened showed only two Chinese purchases of American soybeans since the summit in South Korea that totaled 332,000 metric tons. That’s well short of the 12 million metric tons that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said China agreed to purchase by January and nowhere near the 25 million metric tons she said they would buy in each of the next three years.
American farmers were hopeful that their biggest customer would resume buying their crops. But CoBank’s Tanner Ehmke, who is its lead economist for grains and oilseed, said there isn’t much incentive for China to buy from America right now because they have plenty of soybeans on hand that they have bought from Brazil and other South American countries this year, and the remaining tariffs ensure that U.S. soybeans remain more expensive than Brazilian beans.
“We are still not even close to what has been advertised from the U.S. in terms of what the agreement would have been,” Ehmke said.
Beijing has yet to confirm any detailed soybean purchase agreement but only that the two sides have reached “consensus” on expanding trade in farm products. Ehmke said that even if China did promise to buy American soybeans it may have only agreed to buy them if the price was attractive.
Will Trump try to distract from the Epstein files and his failures on the economy by taking use to war with Venezuela?
David E. Sanger, Eric Schmit, tTyler Pager, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs at The New York Times (gift link): Trump Escalates Pressure on Venezuela, but Endgame Is Unclear.
The Trump administration is rapidly escalating its pressure campaign against Venezuela, with America’s largest aircraft carrier, the Ford, about to take up a position within striking distance of the country, even as President Trump’s aides provide conflicting accounts of what, exactly, they are seeking to achieve.
Mr. Trump held back-to-back days of meetings at the White House over the past two days, reviewing military options, including the use of Special Operations forces and direct action inside Venezuela.
Marlyn Monroe with her cat
It is still not clear whether Mr. Trump has made a decision about what kind of action to authorize, if any. On Friday, he told reporters on Air Force One that “I sort of made up my mind.” “I can’t tell you what it is,” he said, “but we made a lot of progress with Venezuela in terms of stopping drugs from pouring in.”
It is possible Mr. Trump is relying on the arrival of so much firepower to intimidate the government of Nicolás Maduro, who the United States and many of its allies say is not Venezuela’s legitimate president. Mr. Maduro has put his forces on high alert, leaving the two countries with their weapons cocked and ready for war.
There were signs that the administration was moving into a new and more aggressive posture. Shortly after a meeting on Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on social media that the mission in the Caribbean now had a name — “Southern Spear.” He described its goal in expansive terms, saying the operation “removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere.”
“The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood,” he wrote, “and we will protect it.” With the arrival of the Ford and three accompanying missile-firing Navy destroyers, there are now 15,000 troops in the region, more than there have been at any time in decades.
The only thing missing is a strategic explanation from the Trump administration that would clarify why the United States is amassing such a large force. Mr. Hegseth’s posting on X was only the latest in a series of statements from administration officials that, at best, are in tension with one another. Some are outright contradictory.
Mr. Trump has been the most consistent, saying it is all about drugs. But that would not explain why the Ford was rushed from the eastern Mediterranean Sea to the Caribbean region, adding to an American force that has now reached 15,000 soldiers and sailors, to attack small boats that until early September had been intercepted by the Coast Guard. Nor would it explain why Colombia or Mexico — Mexico being the main conduit for fentanyl — are not in the Navy’s sights.
Dan Lamothe, Tara Copp, Michael Birnbaum, and Noah Robertson: Trump weighs Venezuela strikes as U.S. forces prepare for attack order.
President Donald Trump said Friday night that he has “sort of made up my mind” about how he will proceed with the possibility of military action in Venezuela, following a second consecutive day of deliberations at the White House that included top national security advisers.
Trump’s vague remarks aboard Air Force One were delivered as he traveled for the weekend to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, and included no additional new details. The comments came as U.S. forces in the region awaited possible attack orders and after days of high-level discussions about whether — and how — to strike in Venezuela, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter is highly sensitive. Joining Trump in deliberations Friday were Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, these people said.
Robert Redford with his cat
Earlier in the day, an administration official said “a host of options” had been presented to the president. Trump is “very good at maintaining strategic ambiguity, and something he does very well is he does not dictate or broadcast to our adversaries what he wants to do next,” the official said.
Any strike on Venezuelan territory would upend the president’s frequent promises of avoiding new conflicts and betray promises made to Congress in recent weeks that no active preparations were underway for such an attack. It also would further complicate U.S. cooperation with other Latin American countries, and deepen suspicions — there and in Washington — over whether Trump’s endgame is the forced removal of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, whom Trump has accused of sending drugs and violent criminals to the United States.
Maduro, a socialist strongman, came to power in Caracas in 2013 and increasingly has become a fixation for Trump.
In August, U.S. officials increased the reward for information leading to his arrest and conviction from $25 million to $50 million, citing alleged ties to drug cartels and U.S. beliefs dating back to the Biden administration that he lost Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election and refused to step down.
“The United States is very plugged into what’s going on in Venezuela, the chatter among Maduro’s people and the highest levels of his regime,” the administration official said. “Maduro is very scared, and he should be scared. The president has options on the table that are very bad for Maduro and his illegitimate regime. … We view this regime as illegitimate, and it’s not serving the Western Hemisphere well.”
President Donald Trump has said he believes Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s days are numbered, and that land strikes inside Venezuela are possible.
Experts say that the US doesn’t currently have the military assets in place to launch a largescale operation to remove Maduro from power, though Trump has approved covert action within Venezuela, CNN has reported.
Bette Davis with cat
But if Trump did order strikes inside Venezuela aimed at ousting Maduro, he could face serious challenges with fractured opposition elements and a military poised for insurgency, according to experts, as well as political backlash at home for a president who promised to avoid costly entanglements overseas.
CNN reported that Trump received a briefing earlier this week to review updated options for military action inside Venezuela, a concept the White House has been weighing. The administration had not made a decision on whether to launch strikes, CNN reported, though the US military has moved more than a dozen warships and 15,000 troops into the region as part of what the Pentagon branded Operation Southern Spear in an announcement Thursday.
The concentration of military assets and threats of further attacks beyond the ongoing drug boat campaign have served to increase pressure on Maduro, with administration officials saying he needs to leave office while arguing that he’s closely tied to the Tren de Aragua gang and leading drug trafficking efforts.
But if Maduro does flee Venezuela or is killed out in a targeted strike, experts worry about a military takeover of the country or the boosting of another dictator similar to Maduro.
Read the rest at CNN.
Those are my recommended reads. I’ll add a few more links in the comment thread. What stories are you interested in today?
#BillClinton #catArt #caturday #ChinaSoybeanPurchases #DonaldTrump #EpsteinFiles #JeffreyEpstein #LarrySummers #NicolasMaduro #PamBondi #ReidHoffman #SteveBannon #TACOTrump #TrumpTariffs #Venezuela