Mostly Monday Reads: Woke meets Panem et Circenses

“Deleted earlier versions of this, as I found an error that surely would have upset AI bots. Let this one rip!” John (repeat1968) Buss

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Wipipo are very confused by the Super Bowl halftime and complaining that it had no music. I still laugh at the fact that they think everything is all about them.  I didn’t watch any of it until the clips were available, but wow, the hassle and occupation down here were well worth the halftime performance. That is, if you weren’t one of the poor homeless folks who got sent to a broken-down warehouse in Gentilly. If you really want the opposite version of what really happened, it’s all over FARTUS’ social media.  That’s even more deluded than the MAGA cult themselves. It’s a Black History Month, for the records!

I have always loved to hear anything that Jon Baptiste does, but his rendition of the National Anthem made me actually enjoy listening to the song itself.  Who couldn’t love Samuel L. Jackson as Uncle Sam?  Evidently, a whole bunch of whiny wipipo who want everything to look just like them, like their version of a supreme being, always does, no matter what the evidence or history suggests. This is from the New Republic. “MAGA Has Total Meltdown Over Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show. The right is freaking out over a Super Bowl halftime show rife with American imagery.”This is written by Malcolm Ferguson.

Kendrick Lamar’s very normal Super Bowl halftime show had the MAGA faithful pearl-clutching and conspiracy theorizing.

The iconic Pulitzer Prize and 22-time Grammy winner livened up an otherwise uncompetitive game with a classic performance that centered hip-hop and Black American culture—and featured the likes of Samuel L. Jackson (dressed in American flag garb as Uncle Sam), Serena Williams, and SZA. It only makes sense that right-wingers hated everything about it.

“The halftime show you just watched is clearly the regime’s response to Trump’s historic gains with black men,” shamed former Representative Matt Gaetz wrote on X, even though Lamar was announced as the halftime show performer months before Election Day.

“Raise your hand if you survived the black nationalist Super Bowl LIX halftime show,” right-wing commentator Eric Daugherty wrote on X, even as Lamar’s stage and costume designs were rife with American flag imagery.

“Hey NFL, Trump won. We no longer let talentless mumbling pagan satanic cultists do halftime shows and pretend like people like it,” MAGA media shill Benny Johnson said. “Thanks, everyone.”

In reality, the halftime show was fine, and Kendrick Lamar is an excellent rapper. These people took issue with the show because it didn’t fit into their narrow “post-woke” vision of America—but neither does a very large chunk of this country. This isn’t the first time Kendrick Lamar has performed at the Super Bowl, and it isn’t the first time Blackness has been a major theme of the show. And yet MAGA continues to cry about it.

Let me pull some comments from my local station, WDSU.  “Kendrick Lamar Brought a GNX to His Super Bowl Halftime Show.” The Louisiana outback and Scalise burbs were restless.

A very special car made an appearance during the Super Bowl halftime show performance on Sunday night.

Kendrick Lamar’s most recent album is named after the most famous car, released in his birth year, 1987, and the sister car to the Buick Regal that his father brought him home from the hospital. Thus, it’s no surprise that he entered the Super Bowl for his halftime performance in a GNX.

The GNX becomes the symbol of a victory lap for Lamar, who won five Grammys last week for a diss track written in his ongoing battle with Canadian rapper Drake.

Now Kendrick sits atop one of the most American cars in history at America’s biggest sporting event.

That seems harmless enough. Right?  Not to these folks!

• Joe Delatte  “WORST OF THE WORST EVER.”
• Tanya Marie Lawson  “All I needed to know was how to change to another channel. It’s supposed to be entertainment…not political or an opportunity to attack your rival.”

(Evidently, Tanya sees an imaginary opponent of black culture and music in there that no one else saw.)

• Richard Thompson  Such a shame they don’t have music for the half time show anymore.
• Debbie Feigler Schexnaildre  So what about the car the performance was terrible we had no clue what he was saying!! Definitely not entertainment.

(Debbie, Debbie, Debbie!  Everything is always about Debbie but who knows how to pronounce those last names of her’s anyway?

• Kevin Romano Sr Isn’t that beef in rap music how a lot of them get assassinated.
• Adam Dawson
  It was filled with dis tracks against the rapper Drake, subliminal racism, and political innuendo, made to look like the main performers life was a video game.

  It’s sad that a teenager pointed this out to me.

  I spent time looking this up, hoping the teenager was wrong.

  The main performer sounded very monotone.

  Very poor performance. It didn’t need to be a Louisiana artist, but more family friendly and without the dis tracks, subliminal racism, and political innuendo, would have been nice.

  Weird AL Yankovic would have given a better halftime show.

  The NFL audience spans all political and ethnic backgrounds of America and the world.

(Adam had to white-mansplain everything to us! How else would we know that white men are the real victims of racism!)

For more racist takes, follow the link!  Or better yet, follow FARTUS! He spoiled the event for all sides of the fee fees.  From Lipstick Alley: ” Trump throws tantrum and leaves Superbowl early after his favorite team gets humiliated, cries salty tears that The Superbowl is ruined.”

The run up to the Superbowl was dominated by news that Donald Trump and his hangers on would make an appearance, the first for a sitting President.
Trump arrived at the stadium with Daughter – Wife Ivanka and took to the field with a mix of cheers and Boos.
Trump wandered the field as if dazed and confused but he had initially praised and predicted a Kansas City Chiefs win.
Trump is enamored with the Chiefs who were clearly the MAGA white choice especially with MAGA Mahomes and his hillbilly family being big Trump supporters.
The Philadelphia Eagles did not come to play, they came to slay and scalped the Chiefs early on, eventually winning 40-22.
Trump was not having it and got up and left after 10 mins of the second half or maybe the half time show was just too Black.
Strange that Hitler did the same thing when Jesse Owens dominated the 1936 Olympics.

Trump’s tweets today, as well as his behavior at the game, were total lessons in how to be a jerk. He was booed. However, you’d never know it if you listened to him.  He and Taylor Swift were booed by the Eagles fans.  Taylor used to be an Eagles fan. You can speculate on the other.  Here’s an interesting take from the rag The Mirror US. “Sore loser Donald Trump lashes out at Taylor Swift after fleeing Super Bowl. Donald Trump has continued his feud with Taylor Swift by sharing a video of the pop star being booed at the Super Bowl, while he was cheered by fans at the same event.”

Donald Trump couldn’t resist a swipe at Taylor Swift following the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl defeat, taking jabs even as he departed the event early. The current President hopped onto his social media haven Truth Social, posting while en route back to Florida aboard what was likely Air Force One: “The only one that had a tougher night than the Kansas City Chiefs was Taylor Swift. She got BOOED out of the Stadium. MAGA is very unforgiving! ”

On his platform, Trump uploaded several clips including glimpses of himself amid celebratory fans and another clip purportedly capturing jeers as Swift and Ice Spice appeared on the stadium’s Skycam.

His contentious post, left without commentary, fired up discussions—was Trump implying that the crowd’s applause was for him and jeers for Swift, or were the reactions intertwined at the moment? Videos circulating don’t clarify whether the President received cheers, or simply joined in on crowd acclaim.

Former first Lady and Grandson definitely were given cheers. However, the stories are still being spun as I type. The worst thing is the entire focus on these things and not the impact on New Orleans.  You may read about a lot of it in my post here.

The panem et circenses in New Orleans look and feel like a military takeover. We've been #occupied. http://www.facebook.com/reel/5999453… No one can cross Canal Street without a search. They've thrown the homeless in an overpriced warehouse dump. There are military helicopters overhead and bomb dogs

— Kat Huff aka Dakinikat (@dakinikat.bsky.social) 2025-02-08T21:44:26.415Z

Trump says he has directed the Treasury to stop minting new pennies due to cost. No mention of his $15 million Super Bowl trip or his almost daily $3 million golf excursions.

— Molly Ploofkins (@mollyploofkins.bsky.social) 2025-02-10T16:25:48.791Z

I am waiting to see the actual economic impact on the city because up until Friday night, the military and police definitely had a bigger presence than tourists.  I’m hoping my friends finally made some money to tide them over until the Big Mardi Gras Parades startup.

So, let me pop a few reads up about the Muskanator and his gang of adolescent droogies. There are a lot of lawsuits going on, that’s for certain. This is from Public Notice‘s Lisa Needham. “Trump and his lawyers embrace the logic of dictatorship. And they’re not even trying to hide it at this point.”

Donald Trump is busy seizing power through executive orders and letting Elon Musk and his gang of racist DOGE bros run amok through America’s government agencies. It’s an unprecedented upending of the separation of powers, an authoritarian reshaping of America.

While Trump and his henchmen deconstruct the administrative state, his lawyers are embracing the logic of dictatorship. The core argument emerging in their legal filings and executive orders — one without support anywhere in the Constitution or the law — is that simply by being elected, Trump has the power to do whatever he wants.

The issue is not the use of executive orders as such. The authority to issue them comes from Article II of the Constitution, which vests executive power in the president and requires him to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Executive orders are meant to tell the executive branch how to implement existing laws. However, in part because Congress is now so routinely deadlocked, every president in the 21st century has issued scores of them that attempt to implement policies outside of the legislative process.

But executive orders aren’t laws, and the authority of presidents to issue them is not absolute. They can’t contradict or overturn existing statutes. Subsequent presidents can undo executive orders just by issuing a new executive order saying so. And federal courts have routinely struck down EOs for being unconstitutional or for exceeding the scope of the president’s authority.

When executive orders are challenged in court, government attorneys typically point to the underlying laws that give the president the authority to issue the order. Trump seems to have dispensed with that requirement, however.

Trump’s imperial ambitions have made for some laughably thin legal theories. As Just Security noted, the government’s argument in defense of Trump’s birthright citizenship EO does not reference any citizenship statutes nor point to any authority that would give Trump the right to undo birthright citizenship via the stroke of a pen. Instead, after quoting the relevant part of the Fourteenth Amendment — ”All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” — the EO just goes on to state that it “has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”

The problem for Trump is that the Fourteenth Amendment has absolutely historically been interpreted to do just that. The EO attempts to say that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are magic words that have always excluded people whose parents were not citizens when they were born, but that’s nothing but a recent crackpot theory from election denier attorney John Eastman.

This is from Bloomberg. “DOGE-Backed Halt at CFPB Comes Amid Musk’s Plans for ‘X’ Digital Wallet.  Government-efficiency team’s initial ‘read-only’ access expanded quickly to encompass closely guarded data, internal emails say.”  This is reported by  Jason Leopold and Evan Weinberger.  I told you they were trying to tank the dollar and replace it with their cryptocurrency grift.

In another weekend takeover of a federal agency’s operations, staffers from an efficiency initiative led by billionaire Elon Musk helped to effectively shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — as they gained access to an array of the bureau’s protected information.

The actions began last Thursday, when four young staffers working under Musk for the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, showed up at CFPB’s Washington headquarters. At first, they had what was described as read-only access to a limited array of documents, including the agency’s internal personnel files, procurement records and budgeting and financial data, according to an email shared among CFPB officials.

Then, late Friday night, the DOGE staffers were granted access to all the CFPB’s data systems, including sensitive bank examination and enforcement records, according to five people familiar with the matter and emails seen by Bloomberg News. The people asked not to be identified, citing concerns over potential retribution. By Sunday, the agency was a skeleton, with its funding limited and activities suspended.

Musk, whose social-media platform X has recently begun firming up plans to enter the online payments industry, had already predicted the demise of the consumer-watchdog agency. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The weekend’s events came after Russell Vought, who heads the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, ordered wider access for DOGE, according to an email to CFPB officials that was seen by Bloomberg. Vought sent the email Friday evening, about 90 minutes before news broke that he’d also been named acting director of the financial-enforcement agency.

Vought is an architect of the Heritage Foundation’s influential and controversial government-overhaul plan called Project 2025, which appears to have guided DOGE’s attempts to dismantle portions of the federal bureaucracy. Earlier this month, the team played a key role in the administration’s effort to shut down the US Agency for International Development, another longstanding conservative bête noire.

Bloomberg News sought comment from Musk, Vought, the DOGE team members and the White House. None responded.

It just gets worse, and there’s no accountability because the Republicans have gone all squishy.  And as usual, women and minorities are being deleted from American History and the recognition they deserve. This is from Popular Information and is written by Jude Legum and Rebecca Crosby. “The NSA’s “Big Delete'”

Today, the National Security Agency (NSA) is planning a “Big Delete” of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including “privilege,” “bias,” and “inclusion.” The “Big Delete,” according to an NSA source and internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information, is creating unintended consequences. Although the websites and other content are purportedly being deleted to comply with President Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion, or “DEI,” the dragnet is taking down “mission-related” work. According to the NSA source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, the process is “very chaotic,” but is plowing ahead anyway.

A memo distributed by NSA leadership to its staff says that on February 10, all NSA websites and internal network pages that contain banned words will be deleted. This is the list of 27 banned words distributed to NSA staff:

Anti-Racism
Racism
Allyship
Bias
DEI
Diversity
Diverse
Confirmation Bias
Equity
Equitableness
Feminism
Gender
Gender Identity
Inclusion
Inclusive
All-Inclusive
Inclusivity
Injustice
Intersectionality
Prejudice
Privilege
Racial Identity
Sexuality
Stereotypes
Pronouns
Transgender
Equality

The memo acknowledges that the list includes many terms that are used by the NSA in contexts that have nothing to do with DEI. For example, the term “privilege” is used by the NSA in the context of “privilege escalation.” In the intelligence world, privilege escalation refers to “techniques that adversaries use to gain higher-level permissions on a system or network.”

The purge extends beyond public-facing websites to pages on the NSA’s internal network, including project management software like Jira and Confluence.

I am really not sure I can take much more of this.

Anyway, I’d like to thank JJ for filling in for me with my various hospital appointments and the time I spent with Keely as she exited the Earthly Door. It has been a rough few weeks. Actually, this entire year has sucked big time.

I hope the courts stand firm and we figure out what to do if FARTUS ignores them.  Perhaps there are a few good men and women left in the Republican part of Congress.  I certainly hope that there are a few appointees to SCOTUS that do not want the country to go down in flames.

Take care y’all!

Be safe!