U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of Washington, D.C., ruled that the EPA’s sudden mid-February asset freeze and March 11 termination of legally awarded grants came without a legally required explanation to three coalitions of grant recipients. The groups said the sudden cutoff of funds approved by Congress appeared to be arbitrary, capricious or in violation of federal law and regulations.
Bleak Monday Reads: Wherefore art thou Democracy?
Posted: March 31, 2025 Filed under: "presidential immunity", #FARTUS, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, democracy is threatened, Foreign Affairs, Hungary, Staglfation | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social, Anne Applebaum, John Buss @repeat1968, Marcy Wheeler, sadopopulism 7 Comments
“For once, I have to agree with JD” John Buss @repeat1968
Good Morning, Sky Dancers!
I’m trying to get this posted early since the Poland Avenue Rooster and the thunder have me awake, and I have another doctor’s appointment today. The weather is not good here. We have flash flood warnings. My first look at the headlines this morning made me want to go back to sleep. My first two suggested reads come from two of my favorite writers. The articles are both horrifying, but these are the times we live in. We cannot look away. Marcy Wheeler and Anne Applebaum tell it like it is. This first one is by independent journalist Marcy Wheeler, whom I have not since our days at the long-gone Fire Dog Lake, my first stop in blogdom. She writes this at her home at emptywheel. This is about how the press has been instrumental in trying to normalize a regime that is other than normal with their “hypothetical discussions” about the U.S. Constitution. I know I have a new term to add to our tags today: instrumental language. I will use Google’s AI function to give you a brief definition before Marcy applies the term.In the context of language, “instrumental” refers to language used as a tool or means to fulfill a need or achieve a goal, such as obtaining something or expressing a desireHere’s the application from a phone conversation between FARTUS and Kristin Welker on NBC’s Meet the Press. Sit down and put the cup of coffee down. You may need a deep breath. “Trump’s Threats to the Constitution Are Happening in Real Time, Not (Just) in a Third Term.”
There is no doubt in my mind that the intent of the Trump team is to retain power indefinitely, via whatever means. To fight that effectively, you should focus your action and words on the most pressing issues before us — elections on Tuesday, legal cases before appeals courts, legal US residents in detention — rather than trying to discern the means by which Trump will codify all the actions he is taking today, yesterday, last week. The actions he is taking in real time, and their goals, are utterly transparent. Which is why I think it a colossal waste of time that the punditocracy spent much of Sunday talking about Kristen Welker’s “report” that Trump says he wants a third term. You don’t say? Rather than spending the day discussing Trump’s Executive Order presuming to dictate to states how they — with the involvement of DOGE!! — must start suppressing the vote over the next months, we talked about something that might happen in 2028. Rather than spending the day talking about how Trump is already using federal funding and immigration law to silence speech protected by the First Amendment, we discussed what gimmick Trump might use in the future to evade the 22nd Amendment. Almost no one even tried to use Trump’s comments about a third term as a way to explain the end goal of assaults on civil society, speech, and voting — to connect the actions Trump took in the last week to what he says he’ll do in 2028 — something that would at least make use of Trump’s own rhetoric to educate low-information voters. Instead, they talked about Trump’s assault on democracy in the way Trump wanted it framed — distant, allegedly constitutional, and uncertain, rather than an imminent unconstitutional assault on democracy. What the fuck are we doing here, folks?
Indeed. Please go read this.
“The fact that Welker brought up this plot for a third term herself, mentioning Steve Bannon (who was presenting it on another channel), suggests that was the entire point: Trump called her, she dutifully brought it up, she got video but used almost none of it, leaving only Markwayne Mullin on camera (who should never be invited as a credible interlocutor in any case) to answer for the Administration on MTP itself. Not that it mattered; Welker was even more solicitous than usual yesterday. Trump’s genius is in managing attention: both keeping it, and directing it away and towards topics of his choosing. He has long integrated assertions about a third term into his political spiel. This is nothing new (indeed, NBC linked an earlier instance in the story). And yet NBC — along with a pack of credulous pundits — chose to focus on Trump’s third term comments all day Sunday rather on the things he did in the last week, covering up disappearances on Monday, tampering in elections on Tuesday, assaulting the independence of another law firm on Wednesday, attacking unions and whitewashing history on Thursday, compromising DC self-rule on Friday, that are obviously about a third term and beyond. How can you have lived through that week, or any of the last nine, and have doubts about the intent here? Why do you think hypothetical discussions about assaults on the Constitution will better serve fighting back than concrete discussion and organizing about specific assaults on it? This seems to be yet another instance where journalists and liberals, both of whom institutionally presume that language is transparent, misunderstand how authoritarians use language instrumentally and therefore forgo the most effective response to instrumental language.”
Human guardrails are not present in this administration. I’m not even certain you may call anyone in the administration fully human. Constitutional Guardrails are questionable even as we are not even in the first 100 days of this surreal mess. It’s no wonder former Yale History Professor Timothy Snyder and his wife have taken off for the Great White North. It appears Fascism scholars can read the writing on the wall from the capitulation of major universities on the attacks they’ve received.
Here’s The Guardian‘s take on yesterday’s advance notice on the march to dictatorship. “Donald Trump criticized for suggesting there are ‘methods’ for a third term – US politics live. President attracting criticism from some in both parties after telling NBC ‘there are methods’ in securing a third term despite constitutional barriers.”
Republican John Dean, former White House counsel to Richard Nixon as president, who was jailed for his involvement in the cover-up of Watergate and later testified to Congress as a witness for the investigation into the scandal, criticized Trump’s apparent aspiration for a third term, in an interview with CNN.
“He likes constitutional end-runs … and that’s what seems to be on his mind is how he can get around the very clear language of the 22nd amendment [to the US constitution], which precludes getting elected to more than two terms,” Dean said.
CNN asked, if there are ways to get around the law, constitutionally what could those be?
Dean said: “They would have to be written by the supreme court, that would redefine the constitution. I just describe it as a constitutional end run.”
An end run is an American football term for the ball-carrier running around the end of the defensive line in their attempt to reach the line to score a touchdown.
The key line from the 22nd amendment, forbidding anyone who has been elected president twice from being elected again. reads:
“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”
The US Congress approved the amendment in 1947, and submitted it to the state legislatures, where it was then ratified in 1951.
It’s the end-runs that worry me. He’s already got a history of back-to-back self-coups. I really don’t think most people realize how serious this is. FARTUS also has two Supreme Court justices in the tank for him; the rest of the right-wing majority is wobbly at best.
The other must-read article today comes from The Atlantic. It’s written by Anne Applebaum. “America’s Future Is Hungary. MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán. But he’s left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished.” This is a bleak picture of our economic future, given the fascination with Orbán by this administration and its crazy White Nationalist Christian wing.
Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom—which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025—puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.Tourists in central Budapest don’t see this decline. But neither, apparently, does the American right. For although he has no critical mineral wealth to give away and not much of an army, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, plays an outsize role in the American political debate. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Orbán held multiple meetings with Donald Trump. In May 2022, a pro-Orbán think tank hosted CPAC, the right-wing conference, in Budapest, and three months later, Orbán went to Texas to speak at the CPAC Dallas conference. Last year, at the third edition of CPAC Hungary, a Republican congressman described the country as “one of the most successful models as a leader for conservative principles and governance.” In a video message, Steve Bannon called Hungary “an inspiration to the world.” Notwithstanding his own institution’s analysis of Hungarian governance, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation has also described modern Hungary “not just as a model for modern statecraft, but the model.”
What is this Hungarian model they so admire? Mostly, it has nothing to do with modern statecraft. Instead it’s a very old, very familiar blueprint for autocratic takeover, one that has been deployed by right-wing and left-wing leaders alike, from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Hugo Chávez. After being elected to a second term in 2010, Orbán slowly replaced civil servants with loyalists; used economic pressure and regulation to destroy the free press; robbed universities of their independence, and shut one of them down; politicized the court system; and repeatedly changed the constitution to give himself electoral advantages. During the coronavirus pandemic he gave himself emergency powers, which he has kept ever since. He has aligned himself openly with Russia and China, serving as a mouthpiece for Russian foreign policy at EU meetings and allowing opaque Chinese investments in his country.
This autocratic takeover is precisely what Bannon, Roberts, and others admire, and are indeed seeking to carry out in the U.S. right now. The destruction of the civil service is already under way, pressure on the press and universities has begun, and thoughts of changing the Constitution are in the air. But proponents of these ideas rarely talk about what happened to the Hungarian economy, and to ordinary Hungarians, after they were implemented there. Nor do they explore the contradictions between Orbán’s rhetoric and the reality of his policies. Orbán talks a lot about blocking immigration, for example, but at one point his government issued visas to any non-EU citizen who bought 300,000 euros’ worth of government bonds from mysterious and mostly offshore companies. He rhapsodizes about family values, even though his government spends among the lowest amounts per capita on health care in the EU, controls access to IVF, and notoriously decided to pardon a man who covered up sexual abuse in children’s homes.
Remember the idea of visas for $5 million dollars? Well, now we know where that scatterbrained idea came from. Politico‘s Jack Blanchard warns us we are in for another mind-blowing week.
Get ready: We’ve got special and state-level elections happening Tuesday; Donald Trump’s latest tariff bonanza unveiled Wednesday; a budget vote-a-rama expected in the Senate Thursday and the TikTok ban deadline looming Friday night. On top of that, we’re expecting another big Trump phone call with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and potentially the first Supreme Court ruling on the president’s efforts to deport migrants using an 18th-century wartime law. And that’s just the stuff we know about.I really do not get anyone who can’t see FARTUS and his cronies as a clear and present danger to our country. This is from CNBC’s Jeff Cox. “Goldman Sachs sees Trump tariffs spiking inflation, stunting growth and raising recession risks.” Well, can’t say I didn’t tell you this would happen back in mid-November when the real agenda became evident.
With decision day looming this week for President Donald Trump’s latest round of tariffs, Goldman Sachs expects aggressive duties from the White House to raise inflation and unemployment and drag economic growth to a near-standstill. The investment bank now expects that tariff rates will jump 15 percentage points, its previous “risk-case” scenario that now appears more likely when Trump announces reciprocal tariffs on Wednesday. However, Goldman did note that product and country exclusions eventually will pull that increase down to 9 percentage points. When the new trade moves are enacted, the Goldman economic team led by head of global investment research Jan Hatzius sees a broad, negative impact on the economy. In a note published on Sunday, the firm said “we continue to believe the risk from April 2 tariffs is greater than many market participants have previously assumed.” On inflation, the firm sees its preferred core measure, excluding food and energy prices, hitting 3.5% in 2025, a 0.5 percentage point increase from the prior forecast and well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal. That in turn will come with weak economic growth: Just a 0.2% annualized growth rate in the first quarter and 1% for the full year when measured from the fourth quarter of 2024 to Q4 of 2025, down 0.5 percentage point from the prior forecast. In addition, the Wall Street firm now sees unemployment reaching 4.5%, a 0.3 percentage point raise from the previous forecast. Taken together, Goldman now expects a 35% chance of recession in the next 12 months, up from 20% in the prior outlook. The forecast paints a growing chance of a stagflation economy, with low growth and high inflation. The last time the U.S. saw stagflation was in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Back then, the Paul Volcker-led Fed dramatically raised interest rates, sending the economy into recession as the central bank chose fighting inflation over supporting economic growth.
One more read from me, and it’s off to the shower. This is from Salon. It’s a commentary from Chauncey DeVega. “Sadopolitics: Why MAGA clings tighter to Trump the more his policies hurt them. Psychology helps to explain why Trump’s followers will not abandon him” H/T to BeadBear. The explanation that I like best is this one. “Donald Trump is an expert at sadopolitics “
In a 2018 conversation with historian Timothy Snyder here at Salon, he elaborated on the meaning of sadopolitics (what he terms as “sadopopulism”) and its implications for the Age of Trump and the larger democracy crisis:Hold on to the family silver. It might be more valuable than the dollar and more useful than cryptocurrency. Hold on to anything gold. That’s about to go way up. It ain’t that pretty at all out there. Remember stagflation? We really don’t need to see that again, but then, we have an incompetent Dotard with insane ideas in charge of the country. He’s got equally incompetent Dotards out there wrecking the government. Well, that’s enough of what looks like a Debbie Downer Day for me, and it’s just started. At least the thunder is letting up. What’s on your reading and blogging list today? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wwpagb-_Zk0“Sadopopulism” is the notion that you’re doing half of populism. You promise people things, but then when you get power you have no intention of even trying to implement any policy on behalf of the people. Instead, you deliberately make the suffering worse for your critical constituency. The people who got Trump into office, for example, are traditional Republican voters plus people in counties who are doing badly in terms of health care and other measures, and who need help.
Under Trump, of course, things will just get worse in terms of both the opioid addictions and in terms of wealth inequality. But that’s OK, because the logic of sadopopulism is that pain is a resource. Sadopopulist leaders like Trump use that pain to create a story about who’s actually at fault. The way politics works in that model is that government doesn’t solve your problems, it blames your problems on other people — and it creates the cycle that goes around over and over and over again. I started talking about sadopopulism because I got tired of people talking about populism.
In such a toxic relationship between the leader, the followers and the larger public, the abuse and misery actually bond them all closer together. The most loyal followers see their leader as simultaneously a source of protection and safety, even as he or she hurts them. To that point, the more Trump’s policies hurt his followers, the more likely they are to cling to him. Trump’s followers are also going to misdirect their rage, anger, blame, and other negative emotions and behavior at some “enemy.” In the Age of Trump, that enemy is Black and brown people and other nonwhites, “Woke” and “DEI, “illegal immigrants” and migrant “invaders,” the LGBTQ community and specifically transgender people, social “parasites” and “takers,” government employees, those not deemed sufficiently “patriotic” and therefore disloyal to MAGA and Trump (which here is synonymous with “Real America”), Muslims and other non-“Christians,” the Democrats, “liberals,” the news media (“fake news” and “lugenpresse”) and other targeted groups and individuals.
Wednesday Reads: Judges Push Back
Posted: March 19, 2025 Filed under: Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, SCOTUS | Tags: Alien Enemies Act, Chief Justice John Roberts, Judge Ana Reyes, Judge James Boasberg, Judge Jesse Furman, Judge Julie Rubin, Judge Maryanne Trump Berry, Judge Tanya Chutkan, Judge Theodore Chuang, Mahmoud Khlil 5 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
The Supreme Court at night
Yesterday, the courts pushed back on Trump and Musk. I’m not convinced that it will stop them, but we’ll find out soon enough. Here’s a brief summary of what happened from David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo: The Day The Federal Courts Stood Tall.
The showdown between President Trump and the federal judiciary came to a head Tuesday in a more dramatic and direct way that Morning Memo had anticipated.
With Trump dangerously but also absurdly calling for the impeachment of the federal judge who ruled against him in the Alien Enemies Act case, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts stirred from his torpor long enough to issue a rare rebuke of the president, though not by name (as Trump himself pointed out). Roberts’ decision to come to the defense of district judges who have been on the front lines of this constitutional battle keeps them from being marooned on an island while their decisions wind their way up through the lengthy appeals process.
“The Chief Justice’s statement now renders the Trump confrontation one with the entire federal judiciary, and not just the lower federal courts,” Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith observed.
What followed over the course of the day was a series of significant court rulings against the Trump administration. While the compressed timing of the rulings was mostly coincidental, the thrust of the decisions all pointed in the same direction: Two months into his second term, President Trump has wildly exceeded his constitutional authority on numerous fronts.
I wish I could say that the combination of the chief justice’s rebuke and the multiple legal setbacks suggests that the federal judiciary is girding for a fight over the rule of law and its own constitutional powers. I hope that’s the case. I want that to be the case. But we need to see appeals courts and the high court itself weighing in on the substance of these cases in the weeks and months to come before we can assess whether the judicial branch will hold the line. There’s no doubt that Trump is itching to coopt the judiciary.
It bears repeating that the courts alone can’t save us from autocracy. But losing the courts entirely would be a devastating blow that would make additional areas of American public and private life vulnerable to Trump’s rampage and would add immeasurably to the future workload of rebuilding what Trump has broken.
For one day, though, the judicial branch stood tall.
Some specifics:
The New York Times: Musk’s Role in Dismantling Aid Agency Likely Violated Constitution, Judge Finds.
Efforts by Elon Musk and his team to permanently shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development likely violated the Constitution “in multiple ways” and robbed Congress of its authority to oversee the dissolution of an agency it created, a federal judge found on Tuesday.
The ruling, by Judge Theodore D. Chuang of U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, appeared to be the first time a judge has moved to rein in Mr. Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency directly. It was based on the finding that Mr. Musk has acted as a U.S. officer without having been properly appointed to that role by President Trump.
Judge Theodore Chuang
Judge Chuang wrote that a group of unnamed aid workers who had sued to stop the demolition of U.S.A.I.D. and its programs was likely to succeed in the lawsuit. He agreed with the workers’ contention that Mr. Musk’s rapid assertion of power over executive agencies was likely in violation of the Constitution’s appointments clause.
The judge also ordered that agency operations be partially restored, though that reprieve is likely to be temporary. He ordered Mr. Musk’s team to reinstate email access to all U.S.A.I.D. employees, including those on paid leave. He also ordered the team to submit a plan for employees to reoccupy a federal office from which they were evicted last month, and he barred Mr. Musk’s team from engaging in any further work “related to the shutdown of U.S.A.I.D.”
Given that most of the agency’s work force and contracts were already terminated, it was not immediately clear what effect the judge’s ruling would have. Only a skeleton crew of workers is still employed by the agency.
And while the order barred Mr. Musk from dealing with the agency personally, it suggested that he or others could continue to do so after receiving “the express authorization of a U.S.A.I.D. official with legal authority to take or approve the action.”
A federal judge has indefinitely blocked President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender service members, dealing a major defeat to a controversial policy the president resurrected from his first term.
In a scathing ruling, US District Judge Ana Reyes said the administration cannot enforce the ban — which was set to take effect later this month.
Reyes, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, wrote that the ban “is soaked in animus and dripping with pretext. Its language is unabashedly demeaning, its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit, and its conclusions bear no relation to fact.”
Judge Ana Reyes
“Indeed, the cruel irony is that thousands of transgender servicemembers have sacrificed – some risking their lives – to ensure for others the very equal protection rights the Military Ban seeks to deny them,” she wrote.
The judge said she was pausing her preliminary injunction until Friday morning to give the administration time to appeal it to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.
The ruling came in a case brought by transgender active-duty service members and others hoping to enlist in the military who would be barred from service under the ban. Reyes said they had shown that they would likely succeed on their claim that the ban violated rights afforded to them by the Constitution.
Days after taking office, Trump signed an executive order directing the Pentagon to implement its own policies that say transgender service members are incompatible with military service. The government had argued that continuing to permit trans individuals to serve in the US would negatively affect, among other things, the military’s lethality, readiness and cohesion.
The Washington Post: Judge halts Trump EPA bid to kill $14 billion Biden climate grant fund.
A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily barred President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency from clawing back at least $14 billion in grants issued by the Biden administration for climate and clean-energy projects, saying the EPA had not put forward “credible evidence” of fraud or abuse.
Judge Tanya Chutkan
Climate United Fund, Coalition for Green Capital and Power Forward Communities, which received $7 billion, $5 billion and $2 billion, respectively, sued over the funding freeze. They are among eight recipients awarded more than$20 billion under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a program established in President Joe Biden’s signature 2022 climate law more commonly known as the “green bank.”
In a 23-page opinion, Chutkan said the EPA’s actions raised “serious due process concerns” and issued a temporary restraining order barring the grant cutoffs for now. Chutkan did not release funds to the groups but ordered that the money be held as it was in their accounts at Citibank and not clawed back or reused for any other purpose by the EPA while the case moves ahead.
While the agency voiced concerns regarding “program integrity,” “programmatic fraud, waste, and abuse” and “the absence of adequate oversight,” Chutkan wrote, “vague and unsubstantiated assertions of fraud are insufficient.”
Chutkan said she was neither forcing the EPA to “undo” its termination nor making the funds unrecoverable, but ensuring that the government abides by grant laws and regulations, “which serves the public interest.”
The New York Times: Judge Orders Education Dept. to Restore Some Grants to Schools.
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Education Department to restore some federal grants that were terminated as part of the Trump administration’s purge of diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Judge Julie R. Rubin of the Federal District Court for the District of Maryland said in an opinion that the department had acted arbitrarily and illegally when it slashed $600 million in grants that helped place teachers in underserved schools. The judge also ordered the administration to cease future cuts to those grants.
Judge Julie R. Rubin
The grants fund programs that train and certify teachers to work in struggling districts that otherwise have trouble attracting talent. The programs cited goals that included training a diverse educational work force, and provided training in special education, among other areas.
The department, led by Education Secretary Linda McMahon, argued that the grants trained teachers in “social justice activism” and other “divisive ideologies” and should be eliminated.
A coalition of educator organizations sued to stop the Education Department from terminating the grants. The coalition included groups, such as the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and the National Center for Teacher Residencies, whose members depend on the grants at issue.
The judge found that the loss of the federal dollars would harm students and schools with the fewest resources.
“The harms plaintiffs identify also implicate grave effect on the public: fewer teachers for students in high-need neighborhoods, early childhood education and special education programs,” she wrote. “Moreover, even to the extent defendants assert such an interest in ending D.E.I.-based programs, they have sought to effect change by means the court finds likely violate the law.”
One more from The Guardian today: Judge denies government’s attempt to dismiss Mahmoud Khalil’s challenge to his deportation.
A federal judge has turned down a request from the Trump administration to dismiss Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil’s challenge to his deportation, and ruled his case should be heard in New Jersey rather than Louisiana, where he is now detained.
Judge Jesse Furman
In his decision, judge Jesse M Furman said that since Khalil’s attorney filed the challenge to his arrest while he was in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention in New Jersey, the case must be heard there. Government lawyers had asked that his petition be considered in Louisiana, where Khalil had been flown to after being arrested by Ice in New York City and then briefly held in New Jersey.
“Given that the District of New Jersey is the one and only district in which Khalil could have filed his Petition when he did, the statutes that govern transfer of civil cases from one federal district court to another dictate that the case be sent there, not to the Western District of Louisiana,” Furman wrote.
He added that “the Court’s March 10, 2025 Order barring the Government from removing him (to which the Government has never raised an objection and which the Government has not asked the Court to lift in the event of transfer) shall similarly remain in effect unless and until the transferee court orders otherwise.”
On the “Alien Enemies” case before Judge James Boesberg, NBC News reports: Trump administration pushes back on judge’s request for answers about deportation flights.
The Justice Department is pushing back against a federal judge’s request for more information about the deportation flights that took off over the weekend after President Donald Trump invoked the rarely used Alien Enemies Act.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg had ordered the Trump administration to submit answers to his questions about the timing of the deportation flights and custody handover of deportees, giving the government until noon Wednesday to respond.
Judge James Boasberg
The government submitted a filing Wednesday morning asking for a pause of Boasberg’s order to answer his questions.
“Continuing to beat a dead horse solely for the sake of prying from the Government legally immaterial facts and wholly within a sphere of core functions of the Executive Branch is both purposeless and frustrating to the consideration of the actual legal issues at stake in this case,” the DOJ wrote in the filing.
The judge had initially ordered the government to answer his questions surrounding the flights by noon Tuesday. The Justice Department declined to answer some of his questions, saying, “If, however, the Court nevertheless orders the Government to provide additional details, the Court should do so through an in camera and ex parte declaration, in order to protect sensitive information bearing on foreign relations.”
Boasberg agreed and directed DOJ attorneys to submit under seal the answers to his questions about the deportations that were carried out under the terms of a rarely used wartime act by noon Wednesday.
In its response Wednesday, the government blasted the judge for accepting its proposal and suggested he not take any action until an appeals court rules on its request for a stay.
“The Court has now spent more time trying to ferret out information about the Government’s flight schedules and relations with foreign countries than it did in investigating the facts before certifying the class action in this case. That observation reflects how upside-down this case has become, as digressive micromanagement has outweighed consideration of the case’s legal issues,” the DOJ filing said. “The distraction of the specific facts surrounding the movements of an airplane has derailed this case long enough and should end until the Circuit Court has had a chance to weigh in,” it added.
These Trump people are truly evil.
An interesting sidebar to the “Alien Enemies” law dispute from Forbes: Trump’s Sister Declared The Immigration Law He Used Unconstitutional.
In a historical twist, Donald Trump’s sister was the federal judge who ruled unconstitutional the immigration law the Trump administration is using to deport a pro-Palestinian protester. In 1996, U.S. District Judge Maryanne Trump Barry wrote an opinion that declared unconstitutional the part of U.S. immigration law that Donald Trump has promised to continue employing to deport protesters. The current case has captured headlines and will test the Trump administration’s immigration authority….
On March 8, 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident and pro-Palestinian protester who graduated in December from Columbia University. Controversy over the arrest surrounded the Trump administration using a provision in immigration law that allows for deportation if the Secretary of State believes an alien’s presence or activities “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
In 1995, Secretary of State Warren Christopher used the same authority when attempting to deport Ruiz Massieu to Mexico. As presented by the court documents, the circumstances in that case were quite different from the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil.
In September 1994, Ruiz Massieu’s brother, a prominent member of PRI, Mexico’s ruling party, was assassinated. As Deputy Attorney General, Ruiz Massieu investigated and identified a PRI official, Manuel Munoz Rocha, as the lead conspirator in his brother’s killing. Rocha was protected, first by official immunity and later by disappearing before an interview could be conducted. In late November 1994, Massieu resigned in a public speech and later published a book criticizing the PRI.
After Mexican officials sought his arrest, he entered the United States legally as a visitor (he owned property in Texas) and flew to Spain with a stopover at Newark Airport. In Newark, he was arrested for declaring only $18,000 of the $44,322 in cash with him. While the declaration infraction was later dropped, the Mexican government charged him with crimes “against the administration of justice” and sought his extradition.
“It was then, however, that this case took a turn toward the truly Kafkaesque,” writes U.S. District Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald Trump’s sister. She notes that the Immigration and Naturalization Service took Massieu into custody. “He was ordered to show cause as to why he should not be deported because, the Secretary of State has made a determination that . . . there is reasonable ground to believe your presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” (Emphasis added.) In 1996, the provision was Section 241(a)(4)(C)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act but it was later redesignated Section 237(a)(4)(C)(i) due to other changes in the INA. The language in both designations is identical.
More at the Forbes link.
More News links
CNN: Trump says he had ‘very good’ call with Zelensky after speaking to Putin yesterday.
AP: Zelenskyy says Putin’s vow not to hit Ukraine’s energy infrastructure is ‘at odds with reality.’
Steven Rosenberg at BBC News: Rosenberg: Trump-Putin call seen as victory in Russia.
Jonathan Lemire at The Atlantic: Trump Gets a Taste of Putin’s Tactics. (Gift link)
Jamelle Bouie at The New York Times: Trump Has Gone From Unconstitutional to Anti-Constitutional.
Politico: Hill Republicans already hated the ‘idiotic’ call to impeach judges. Then Trump jumped in.
Jennifer Rubin at The Contrarian: The Constitutional Crisis May be Upon Us.
The New York Times: DOGE Cuts Reach Key Nuclear Scientists, Bomb Engineers and Safety Experts.
The Washington Post: Trump aides prep new tariffs on imports worth trillions for ‘Liberation Day.
The New York Times: Kennedy’s Alarming Prescription for Bird Flu on Poultry Farms.
The Atlantic: The Cost of the Government’s Attack on Columbia.
Philip Bump at The Washington Post: They’re coming for immigrants first. And the Trump administration is signaling that no one else might be safe, either.
Timothy Snyder at “Thinking about…”: The evil at your door. The deportation action as regime change.
Sorry this post isn’t longer. I’m still dealing with a bad cold. I just can’t seem to shake it.
Wednesday Reads: Trump’s Endless, Boring, Lie-Filled Speech, and Other News
Posted: March 5, 2025 Filed under: Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, Elon Musk | Tags: Greenland, John Roberts, Joint speech to Congress, Medicaid, Rep. Al Green, Social Security, Stagflation, Trump lies 9 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli
Trump’s speech last night was long and full of lies. I didn’t really watch or listen to it; I had it on TV with the sound muted. I turned it on when I noticed he was lying about Social Security, and then I tuned out again. Here’s what he had to say about the popular program that for 80 years has kept old people from starving on the streets.
We’re also identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors, and that our seniors and people that we love rely on.
Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old. It lists 3.6 million people from ages 110 to 119. I don’t know any of them. I know some people who are rather elderly but not quite that elderly. 3.47 million people from ages 120 to 129. 3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139. 3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149. And money is being paid to many of them, and we are searching right now.
In fact, Pam, good luck. Good luck. You’re going to find it. But a lot of money is paid out to people, because it just keeps getting paid and paid and nobody does — and it really hurts Social Security, it hurts our country. 1.3 million people from ages 150 to 159, and over 130,000 people, according to the Social Security databases, are age over 160 years old. We have a healthier country than I thought, Bobby.
Including, to finish, 1,039 people between the ages of 220 and 229. One person between the age of 240 and 249 — and one person is listed at 360 years of age. More than 100 years — more than 100 years older than our country. But we’re going to find out where that money is going, and it’s not going to be pretty. By slashing all of the fraud, waste and theft we can find, we will defeat inflation, bring down mortgage rates, lower car payments and grocery prices, protect our seniors and put more money in the pockets of American families.
It seems pretty clear that Trump plans to destroy Social Security and leave millions of Americans to starve in the streets. Americans need to fight back, and force Democrats to wake up and actually see what is happening.
Rick Wilson posted a scathing review of the speech on his substack, “Rick Wilson’s Intel and Observations”: 100 Minutes Of Lies. Dear God, That Was Worse Than Even I Expected.
Well, that’s 100 minutes of our lives we’ll never get back.
Trump’s big Joint Address to Congress read as if the White House staff told ChatGPT, “Give me a State of the Union speech that’s Castro in length, Von Munchausen in facts, and Culture War Carnival Barker in style. Oh, and make it tendentious, boring, and ugly.”
What else did one expect?
Trump’s speech last night was dull yet terrifying. It was self-referential and self-aggrandizing yet vaguely desperate. It was Trump at his worst, but it also showed America that all he’s got is his base and his same tired bit, his greatest hits played over and over, louder and louder, to an audience getting older, poorer, and more vicious in its demands that their umber demigod give them that old-time religion.
It was divisive, terrible, and badly written, a speech so clunky and organizationally and rhetorically grotesque that even if Ted Sorenson, Ray Price, and William Safire rose from the grave and sat down with Peggy Noonan and Aaron Sorkin for a fortnight, they couldn’t find enough creative mayonnaise to turn that chickenshit into chicken salad. Almost every State of the Union speech ends up with a kind of freight-train problem; too many constituent groups inside the Administration need their paragraph, their nod to their importance.
This graceless bucket of rhetorical fish guts was a catalog of “Now That’s What I Call Culture War! Volume 27” tropes, riffs, and attacks on the usual Catalog of Imaginary Demons that informs MAGA belief and behavior. None of it was new or more shocking than the first 1,000 times.
But it was the stunning disregard for truth that set this speech apart.
Trump opened his lie hole and sluiced a torrent of outright lies into the willing maw of his dull-eyed, bovine audience watching at home hooked to their Fox feed of amygdala-stoking fear porn. The absurdity of his lies was rivaled only by their scope.
The rest is behind a paywall, but here are reports on the lies. (I can’t post excepts–there are just too many lies):
CNN Staff: Fact-checking Trump’s address to Congress.
Glenn Kessler at The Washington Post: Fact-checking 26 suspect claims in Trump’s address to Congress.
Here is video from CNN of fact checking by Daniel Dale:
Happenings during and after the speech:
NBC News: Democratic Rep. Al Green removed after disrupting Trump’s speech.
Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, was removed from the House chamber Tuesday night after he disrupted President Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress.
Green, who has long pushed to impeach Trump dating to his previous term in office, stood and shook his cane toward the president in the opening minutes of his speech.
Other lawmakers cheered and booed Green, causing further chaos on the House floor as Trump paused. The uproar prompted House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to read aloud from House rules.
“Members are directed to uphold and maintain decorum in the House and to cease any further disruptions,” Johnson said, an admonishment aimed at Green.
After Green refused to sit and allow Trump to continue, Johnson called for the House sergeant at arms to remove him from the chamber.
“Nah nah nah nah, goodbye,” Republicans chanted as Green was escorted from the room.
Outside the chamber, Green told NBC News that as “a person of conscience,” he believes Trump “has done things that I think we cannot allow to continue.”
What Green yelled at Trump was “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!”
Trump reiterated his desire to take over Greenland. Politico: ‘Greenland is ours’: Greenland prime minister rebukes Trump pledge to acquire the territory.
Greenland’s Prime Minister Múte Bourup Egede proclaimed that “Greenland is ours” in response to President Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress Tuesday night, where he said the U.S. will get Greenland “one way or another.”
“Americans and their leader must understand that,” Egede wrote on Facebook Wednesday, using the Greenlandic name for the island. “We are not for sale and cannot simply be taken. Our future will be decided by us in Greenland.”
Egede’s remarks follow Trump’s pledge to acquire the territory — despite emphasizing Greenland’s self-determination — during his Tuesday speech.
“We strongly support your right to determine your own future, and if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America,” Trump said, stressing that acquiring the territory would improve U.S. national and international security.
“I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it,” Trump added.
David Kurz at Talking Points Memo: Donald Trump Personally Thanks John Roberts For Keeping Him Out Of Jail: ‘I Won’t Forget It.’
It wasn’t Rep. Al Green (D-TX) being escorted out of the House chamber after his disruptive protest, and it wasn’t the long list of Trump absurdities cobbled together into an endless speech. Nope, it was Trump rubbing Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ face in their mutual corruption:
“Thank you again. Thank you again. Won’t forget it,” Trump says while shaking the hand of Supreme Court Justice John Roberts after the State of the Union.
— Anna Bower (@annabower.bsky.social) 2025-03-05T05:18:11.964Z
Let’s stipulate that we’re reasonable people who can see this for what it is: a reference to the Supreme Court’s disastrous ahistoric discovery of vast presidential immunity from criminal prosecution that saved Trump from going to jail.
Trump’s mob boss mentality has led to other moments like this, where he extravagantly highlights the moral and ethical compromises that a sycophant has made on his behalf as a way of demonstrating that they really are no better than he is and of lashing them even more firmly to his side. If they resist, he calls them out for being hypocrites, pointing to their compromised behavior and mocking their previous pretensions to ethical behavior.
But this time Trump did it to the sitting Supreme Court chief justice in public on the floor of the House. Whatever high regard John Roberts still held himself in has been directly challenged in the most excruciating and a dignity-robbing way. Trump has a way of doing that to everyone who comes in contact with him. Roberts had it coming. No pity for him.
Commentary on Trump’s horrible speech:
Jamelle Bouie at The New York Times: Trump’s Revenge Tour Finds Its True Target.
Donald Trump rambled, ranted and raved his way through the 2024 presidential campaign, but he was clear on one point. When he was elected, he would get revenge.
“I am your retribution,” Trump said to crowds of his supporters throughout the campaign.
This was not an abstraction. He had a few targets in mind.
“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” he said in 2023.
There were also the judges, prosecutors and politicians who tried to hold Trump accountable for his crimes, both the ones for which he was indicted and the ones for which he was convicted. He refused to rule out an effort to prosecute Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who prosecuted the Stormy Daniels hush-money case against him, and attacked Justice Juan Merchan, who presided over the trial, as “crooked.” Trump shared an image that called for the former Republican representative and Jan. 6 committee member Liz Cheney to be prosecuted in “televised military tribunals,” and he accused Gen. Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, of treason, calling his actions “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”To get his revenge, Trump would turn the I.R.S., the F.B.I. and other powerful parts of the federal government against his political enemies. He would hound and harass them in retaliation for their opposition to his law stretching and lawbreaking.For once in his public career, Trump wasn’t lying. As president, he has made it a priority to go after his political enemies.
You all know the things Trump has done to get revenge in his brief time in office so far. But Bouie argues that Trump’s real revenge target is the American people.
Altogether, Trump has done more to actualize his desire for retribution than he has to fulfill his campaign promise to lower the price of groceries or reduce the cost of housing. A telling sign, perhaps, of his real priorities in office.This fact of Trump’s indifference to most Americans — if not his outright hostility toward them, considering his assault on virtually every government function that helps ordinary people — suggests another dimension to his revenge tour. It is almost as if he wants to inflict pain not just on a specific set of individuals but on the entire nation.
Read the whole thing at this gift link. It’s very good.
By Mark Bryan
Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse: Let’s Be Honest About The State Of The Union.
It wasn’t necessary to watch all of Trump’s speech last night to understand where we are as a country. The state of our union, as I noted Sunday night, is compromised. And that comes as no surprise to any of us. But two moments from last night are worth noting, as markers of where we are.
The Stupid: “I have created the brand new Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Perhaps. Which is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight,” Trump said during his speech.
Only one problem. That’s not what the Justice Department has been telling judges in litigation involving the Musk-led effort to privatize government. They’ve been doing everything they can to claim Musk is not in charge of DOGE, including telling the judge that a woman named Amy Gleason, who was on vacation in Mexico when they made the representation to the court, is the Acting Administrator. It didn’t take lawyers long to point that out. Trump was barely finished when Kel McClanahan filed a “Notice of New Evidence” in Lentini v. DOGE, one of three cases that have been consolidated to hear claims about DOGE’s legality in the District of Maryland.
McClanahan argued that Trump’s statement about Musk “conclusively demonstrates that expedited discovery is urgently needed to ascertain the nature of the Department of Government Efficiency and its relationship to the United States DOGE Service.” The best outcome for Trump, following his epic foot in mouth, is that Judge Jia Cobb grants the motion to expedite which would make this the first case where pro-democracy lawyers would gain access to information about the inner workings of DOGE, likely a treasure trove that would further underscore the lawless manner in which Trump is acting.
The worst case is that someone gets held in contempt, either civil or criminal. That would open an entire can of worms about how the courts enforce their orders against a Trump administration that has at least suggested it might not comply with ones it doesn’t like. But that fight is, inevitably, coming, and judges don’t like it when parties lie to them, especially when it’s so explicit and when it’s the government doing it, here, rather uniquely, with the president’s involvement.
Hahaha!
Vance also comments on Trump’s behavior toward the SCOTUS justices:
The Corrupt: After his speech, Trump shook hands with people in the room, including the four active Supreme Court Justices who were present in their long black robes. Their tradition of dress is meant to ensure that no one mistakes who they are. It separates them from the political fray, even as they attend. That message, however, was lost on Trump.
The moment was captured on CSPAN. Trump thanks the Justices. He doesn’t say what for, but of course, we all know.
“Thank you very much, appreciate it,” he says to Elena Kagan, whose face is a mask in the moment. Then, he moves on to the Chief Justice. “Thank you again. Thank you again,” he says to John Roberts. Then he awkwardly slaps him on the shoulder and says, “Won’t forget it.” The moment has an almost classic mob boss feel to it in context.
Roberts, followed by Kagan, peels off and leaves without comment and immediately.
More stories to check out:
Wired: Some DOGE Staffers Are Drawing Six-Figure Government Salaries.
Some staffers at Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency are drawing robust taxpayer-funded salaries from the federal agencies they are slashing and burning, WIRED has learned.
Jeremy Lewin, one of the DOGE employees tasked with dismantling USAID, who has also played a role in DOGE’s incursions into the National Institutes of Health and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is listed as making just over $167,000 annually, WIRED has confirmed. Lewin is assigned to the Office of the Administrator within the General Services Administration.
By Mark Bryan
Kyle Schutt, a software engineer at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is listed as drawing a salary of $195,200 through GSA, where he is assigned to the Office of the Deputy Administrator. That is the maximum amount that any “General Schedule” federal employee can make annually, including bonuses. “You cannot be offered more under any circumstances,” the GSA compensation and benefits website reads.
Nate Cavanaugh, a 28-year-old tech entrepreneur who has taken a visible internal role interviewing GSA employees as part of DOGE’s work at the agency, is listed as being paid just over $120,500 per year. According to DOGE’s official website, the average GSA employee makes $128,565 and has worked at the agency for 13 years.
When Elon Musk started recruiting for DOGE in November, he described the work as “tedious” and noted that “compensation is zero.” WIRED previously reported that the DOGE recruitment effort relied in part on a team of engineers associated with Peter Thiel and was carried out on platforms like Discord.
Since Trump took office in January, DOGE has overseen aggressive layoffs within the GSA, including the recent elimination of 18F, the agency’s unit dedicated to technology efficiency. It also developed a plan to sell off more than 500 government buildings.
Although Musk has described DOGE as “maximum transparent,” it has not made its spending or salary ranges publicly available. Funding for DOGE had grown to around $40 million as of February 20, according to a recent ProPublica report. The White House did not respond to questions about the salary ranges for DOGE
Reuters: Exclusive: Judges face rise in threats as Musk blasts them over rulings.
U.S. Marshals have warned federal judges of unusually high threat levels as tech billionaire Elon Musk and other Trump administration allies ramp up efforts to discredit judges who stand in the way of White House efforts to slash federal jobs and programs, said several judges with knowledge of the warnings.
In recent weeks, Musk, congressional Republicans and other top allies of U.S. President Donald Trump have called for the impeachment of some federal judges or attacked their integrity in response to court rulings that have slowed the Trump administration’s moves to dismantle entire government agencies and fire tens of thousands of workers.
Musk, the world’s richest person, has lambasted judges in more than 30 posts since the end of January on his social media site X, calling them “corrupt,” “radical,” “evil” and deriding the “TYRANNY of the JUDICIARY” after judges blocked parts of the federal downsizing that he’s led. The Tesla CEO has also reposted nearly two dozen tweets by others attacking judges.
Reuters interviews with 11 federal judges in multiple districts revealed mounting alarm over their physical security and, in some cases, a rise in violent threats in recent weeks. Most spoke on condition of anonymity and said they did not want to further inflame the situation or make comments that could be interpreted as conflicting with their duties of impartiality. The Marshals Service declined to comment on security matters.
As Reuters documented in a series of stories last year, political pressure on federal judges and violent threats against them have been rising since the 2020 presidential election, when federal courts heard a series of highly politicized cases, including failed lawsuits filed by Trump and his backers seeking to overturn his loss. Recent rhetorical attacks on judges and the rise in threats jeopardize the judicial independence that underpins America’s democratic constitutional order, say legal experts.
This one is for Dakinikat. The Wall Street Journal: The Two-Headed Monster Stalking the Economy Has a Name: Stagflation.
Stagflation has entered the chat.
President Trump’s decision to dramatically raise tariffs on imports threatens the U.S. with an uncomfortable combination of weaker or even stagnant growth and higher prices—sometimes called “stagflation.”
The U.S. has imposed 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada, and another 10% hike on China following last month’s 10% increase. They “will be wildly disruptive to business investment plans,” said Ray Farris, chief economist at Prudential PLC. “They will be inflationary, so they will be a shock to real household income just as household income growth is slowing because of slower employment and wage gains,” he said.
It is still unclear how long Trump intends to keep the tariffs in place. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested Tuesday afternoon on Fox Business that a rollback could be in the works.
Sentiment indicators and business commentary in recent weeks point to slumping confidence over the threat of higher prices.
By Mark Bryan
China and Mexico are the top two sources of consumer electronics sold at the retailer Best Buy, Chief Executive Corie Barry told analysts Tuesday. “We expect our vendors across our entire assortment will pass along some level of tariff costs to retailers, making price increases for American consumers highly likely,” Barry said. The company’s shares plummeted 13% in the midst of a general stock-market retreat.
Brothers International Food Holdings, based in Rochester, N.Y., imports mangoes and avocados from Mexico and sells fruit juices, purées and frozen-food concentrates to food and beverage manufacturers. New tariffs are forcing the 95-person company to pass on price increases to its customers or accept lower profit margins….
Trump and his advisers have said some short-term pain might be warranted to achieve the administration’s long-term ambitions of remaking the U.S. economy. They have also said their steps to boost energy production could offset higher goods prices.
Nonetheless, tariffs are a particularly difficult economic threat for the Federal Reserve to address. Its mandate is to keep inflation low and stable while maintaining a healthy labor market. Tariffs represent a “supply shock” that both raises inflation, which calls for higher interest rates, and hurts employment, which calls for lower rates. The Fed would have to choose which threat to emphasize.
NBC News: Supreme Court rejects Trump administration’s bid to avoid paying USAID contractors.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday backed a federal judge’s power to order the Trump administration to pay $2 billion to U.S. Agency for International Development contractors but did not require immediate payment.
In doing so, the court on a 5-4 vote rejected an emergency application filed by the Justice Department after U.S. District Judge Amir Ali issued a series of rulings demanding the government unfreeze funds that President Donald Trump put on hold with an executive order.
The court delayed acting on the case for a week. In the meantime, the contractors have not been paid.
In an unsigned order, the court said that Ali’s deadline for the immediate payment had now passed and the case is already proceeding in the district court, with more rulings to come. A hearing is scheduled for Thursday.
As such, Ali “should clarify what obligations the government must fulfill” in order to comply with a temporary retraining order issued Feb. 13, the court said. Ali should consider “the feasibility of any compliance deadlines,” the court added.
Four conservative justices dissented from the denial of the application, with Justice Samuel Alito writing that Ali did not have “unchecked power to compel the government to pay out … 2 billion taxpayer dollars.”
“I am stunned,” Alito added.
The other dissenters were Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
One more on the tariffs before I wrap this up. Eric Levitz at Vox: Trump doesn’t seem to know why he launched a giant trade war.
Donald Trump just imposed a 25 percent tariff on virtually all goods produced by America’s two largest trading partners — Canada and Mexico. He simultaneously established a 20 percent across-the-board tariff on Chinese goods.
As a result, America’s average tariff level is now higher than at any time since the 1940s.
Meanwhile, China and Canada immediately retaliated against Trump’s duties, with the former imposing a 15 percent tariff on American agricultural products and the latter putting a 25 percent tariff on $30 billion of US goods. Mexico has vowed to mount retaliatory tariffs of its own.
This trade war could have far-reaching consequences. Trump’s tariffs have already triggered a stock market sell-off and cooling of manufacturing activity. And economists have estimated that the trade policy will cost the typical US household more than $1,200 a year, as the prices of myriad goods rise.
All this raises the question: Why has the US president chosen to upend trade relations on the North American continent? The stakes of this question are high, since it could determine how long Trump’s massive tariffs remain in effect. Unfortunately, the president himself does not seem to know the answer.
In recent weeks, Trump has provided five different — and contradictory — justifications for his tariffs on Mexico and Canada, none of which make much sense.
Read all about it at Vox.
That’s all I have for you today. Please take care of yourselves in this terrible time for our country.
Finally Friday Reads: The Regime of Chaos and Death
Posted: January 31, 2025 Filed under: Broligarchy, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, kakistocracy, kleptocracy, MAGA Assholes | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, Avian Flu and Egg Prices, Cabinet of Shame, FARTUS and Elonia, federal employees, Federal Purges, idiocracy, Inside Attacks on Federal Agencies, kakistocracy 6 Comments
“State of the Union.”John (repeat1968) Buss, @johnbuss.bsky.social
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The last ten days of our country’s life have been wrought with chaos, death, and higher prices. This is what you get in a kakistocracy because no one in charge knows what they’re doing. We’ve had the first in-air collision in nearly a quarter of a century. There was already a shortage of air traffic controllers and pressure on the FAA by Congress to allow higher levels of traffic when these steps were taken by FARTUS and Elonia to dismantle the FAA and related regulations. Elonia is making the rounds at all Government Agencies, ensuring chaos and disruption abound. This is from Public Notice. “DCA crash puts Trump’s appalling unfitness on full display. When crisis hits, he makes it worse.”
Donald Trump’s first actions back in the White House included demolishing an air travel security advisory group, forcing out the head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for corrupt reasons, implementing a hiring freeze for air traffic controllers as part of a bigoted rampage against women and people of color, and sending blanket resignation offers to the remaining FAA employees.
Then tragedy struck. Nine days after Trump took office, a military helicopter collided with a passenger jet just above Reagan National Airport (DCA) airport, killing 67 people. A report indicates staffing in DCA’s air traffic control tower at the time of the collision was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic.”
It’s America’s worst aviation disaster since 2001. And it shows the danger of wantonly destroying a federal government whose functioning remains vital for, among other things, keeping air travelers safe.
Does the new president have regrets about any of this? Of course not. Instead, Trump responded to the disaster by appointing an acting FAA head a day late and a dollar short, then held a dystopian media event where he signed an order pinning blame for the crash on Biden, Obama, and the Democratic Party in general.
Actually, Axios shows the facts that Air traffic controllers and airfield operations specialists are overwhelmingly white men. I had an aunt who was an Air Traffic Controller in Boulder, Colorado, back in the 1960s. The training, testing, and demands on them were stringent, and even more so now.
President Trump rallied against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in air traffic control as having contributed to the deadly plane crash outside of D.C. Wednesday, but the data paints a different picture.
The big picture: Statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau and IPUMS show air traffic controllers and airfield operations specialists are predominately male and white.
By the numbers: 78% are men, while 22% are women, per data from the U.S. Census Bureau and IPUMS.
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71% identify as non-Hispanic white.
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The data includes air traffic controllers and airfield operations specialists working in air transportation or services incidental to transportation.
CBS News reports the latest update on the tragedy. One thing stood out given the shortage of air traffic controllers just made worse by FARTUS and Elonia.
One air traffic control worker was managing the helicopters and some planes from the Reagan National Airport tower at the time of the collision, a job normally done by two people, two sources tell CBS News.
Also, the pilots of the Black Hawk helicopters and the American Airlines jet were ALL WHITE MEN. The co-pilot of the helicopter was a woman, per The Guardian. They were all seasoned aviators.
Elonia is making serious trouble at the US Treasury. This is from WAPO. “Senior U.S. official to exit after rift with Musk allies over payment system. A top Treasury career staffer, David A. Lebryk, announced his retirement. Surrogates of Musk’s DOGE effort had sought access to sensitive payment systems.” My role at the New Orleans Fed included managing the Treasury TT&L payments and Bond Sales. My grandfather held a much bigger but same position at the Kansas City Fed during two World Wars. I am seriously familiar with the amount of protection over FedWire and the other transmittal systems. I wouldn’t want anyone outside the Fed or a long-term Treasury employee near it. You have no idea how tightly those things are monitored. A breach would seriously harm the economy and undermine the US Dollar. You also have to have security clearances. To my knowledge, Elonia hasn’t and wouldn’t be approved under the usual circumstances.
The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department is departing after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.
David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades, announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues obtained by The Washington Post. President Donald Trump named Lebryk as acting secretary upon taking office last week. Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.
Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration.
A spokeswoman for DOGE declined to comment. Lebryk could not be reached for comment late Thursday.
When Scott Bessent was confirmed as treasury secretary on Monday, Lebryk ceased to be the acting agency head.
Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.
The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy as the Trump administration nears the conclusion of its second week. Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the U.S. government, installing longtime surrogates at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages real estate. (Musk was seen on Thursday visiting GSA, according to two other people familiar with his whereabouts, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters. That visit was first reported by the New York Times.) His Department of Government Efficiency, originally conceived as a nongovernmental panel, has since replaced the U.S. Digital Service.
Yes, there are likely some places where the “bureaucracy” could be reduced, but the databases on the bank transfers should remain strictly off-limits to anyone who doesn’t have a security clearance. Meanwhile, “Trump’s FCC chair investigates NPR and PBS, urges Congress to defund them
Brendan Carr described as “Trump’s Censorship Czar” as he launches media probes.”
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has ordered an investigation into NPR and PBS in a move that Democrats described as an attempt to intimidate the media.
“I am writing to inform you that I have asked the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau to open an investigation regarding the airing of NPR and PBS programming across your broadcast member stations,” Carr wrote in a letter yesterday to the leaders of NPR and PBS.
Carr alleged that NPR and PBS are violating a federal law prohibiting noncommercial educational broadcast stations from running commercial advertisements. “I am concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing commercials,” Carr wrote. “In particular, it is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.”
Carr’s letter did not provide any specific examples of underwriting announcements that might violate the law, but said the “announcements should not promote the contributor’s products, services, or businesses, and they may not contain comparative or qualitative descriptions, price information, calls to action, or inducements to buy, sell, rent, or lease.”
I guess FARTUS can hawk merch, but Sesame Street can’t. These people are fucking insane.
Here are some other stomach-churning headlines.
- New York Times: Trump Administration Shocks Senior F.B.I. Ranks by Moving to Replace Them
- Michael Sainato /The Guardian: Independent regulators in ‘real danger’ after Trump firings, say ex-NLRB chairs
- ABC News: Federal employees told to remove pronouns from email signatures by end of day
- NBC News: Defense agency bans Black History Month and other ‘special observances’
- Biden-appointed Census Bureau director resigns midway through term — Census Bureau Director Robert Santos’ resignation will allow Trump to reshape the agency.
- Sanjana Karanth / HuffPost: New DOT Memo Directs Funds To Communities With Higher ‘Marriage And Birth Rates’
- Kate Kelly / New York Times: Official Email Urges Federal Workers to Find More Productive Jobs
- CNN: EPA workers receive emails warning their employment could be terminated
I am having a hard time not being overwhelmed at this point. This doesn’t mention the disastrous Senate Hearings for Tulsi Gabbard, RFK jr, and Kash Patel. RFK Jr looks more ready to be a California Raisin than head of HHS. And wtf is with Kash Patel’s eyes? This is from The Hill. “Top FBI officials brace for Trump shake-up.”
Top officials at the FBI are facing a shake-up by the Trump administration.
According to House Judiciary Committee Democrats, the five executive assistant directors of the bureau were notified they would be demoted.
“These changes will further jeopardize our national security, leaving the FBI with no experienced senior leadership and a partisan Trump loyalist heading up the Bureau’s response to increasing security threats from Russia, China, and other authoritarian adversaries,” the committee said in a fact sheet circulated to House Democrats.
The move targets the band of top officials who oversee the FBI’s five internal branches and are among the highest-ranking career positions in the bureau. Many report directly to the director and deputy director.
They oversee the FBI’s national security branch and criminal and cyber branch, among others.
The FBI and White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
I wouldn’t want a kidnapped child’s case in the hands of any of these people. This article is from the BBC. “Five takeaways from Gabbard and Patel’s confirmation hearings.”
Several of President Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees faced tough questioning from Republicans and Democrats alike during hours-long confirmation hearings on Thursday.
Former Democrat and military veteran Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick to be director of national intelligence, was grilled about her past remarks supporting government whistleblower Edward Snowden as well as her relationships with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syria’s former dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, a former federal prosecutor and Trump administration aide, was pressed on his prior comments praising those involved in the 6 January Capitol riots as well as his ties to the QAnon movement.
Read the analysis at the links. I want to add one more thing that’s another mark on the path of the Louisiana Governor’s attempts to sideline professors he doesn’t like. Political firing of tenured professors is another MAGA mishap. “LSU law professor sidelined for political speech sues university. Professor alleges university is violating its own policies regarding tenured faculty.” This is from the Louisiana Illuminator.
A tenured LSU law professor removed from his classes pending an investigation into alleged political comments is suing the university, saying it violated his First Amendment rights and its own policies.
Ken Levy, a professor of constitutional and criminal law, alleges he was removed from his classes earlier this month after political comments made on the first day of his Administration of Criminal Justice course were reported to Gov. Jeff Landry, which he believes led to calls to the university administration about his comments.
In his affidavit, Levy says that he brought up Landry’s comments regarding fellow law professor Nick Bryner and asked his students not to record his lectures because he didn’t want to be targeted by Landry.
“If Governor Landry were to retaliate against me, then f*** the governor and f*** that. — all of which was a joke and clearly said in a joking manner to highlight my no recording policy in class and the First Amendment,” Levy wrote in the affadavit.
Landry called on LSU to discipline Bryner last year for his comments about President Trump the day after the presidential election.
Levy argues in the affidavit that the actions taken against him stifle not only his right to free speech and academic freedom but that of other faculty members.
Landry spokeswoman Kate Kelly referred questions to LSU. University spokesman Todd Woodward has not yet responded to a request for comment.
Levy is asking a judge to grant a temporary restraining order that would allow him to return to teaching as well as an order prohibiting LSU from taking further action against him.
In the suit, Levy also alleges LSU also violated its own policies regarding the punishment of a tenured professor.
These actions are fascist purges. I can only tell you that I feel much worse off than I did two weeks ago. Also, I just paid $9.06 for 1/2 dozen eggs. Do we have a task force on the Avian Flu yet? They have one in Canada already. Japan has one too. Here’s a few headlines on that from a few weeks ago. No word at the moment. Just wondering how many people will die from this disease because FARTUS is an idiot.
Forbes: Why The U.S. Could Be Making The Same Mistakes With Bird Flu As It Did With COVID-19.
The first severe case of bird flu occurred last month in a Louisiana man hospitalized after having had contact with sick birds in a backyard flock. In addition, the state of California recently declared a state of emergency as the bird flu virus continues to spread among livestock in the state.
To date, there have been 66 confirmed human cases of bird flu in the United States, according to the CDC. The current public health risk remains low, as no sustained human-to-human transmission has occurred.
Some obvious questions remain- like how did the U.S. allow a patient to get severely ill from the virus? Also, are we repeating the same mistakes we made with the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020? Here are some reasons we may be repeating history.
You can read the reasons on the link. I was a little slow getting this done today. I was one the phone with doctors and vets all morning and it took longer than I thought it would. Love you all and Stay Safe!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Mostly Monday Reads: What Fresh Hell?
Posted: January 6, 2025 Filed under: 2025 What Fresh Hell?, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, democracy is threatened, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social, Adjuctated Rapist, and Traitor of the United States with total credit given to JJ), FARTUS (Felon, idiocracy, John (repeat1968) Buss, kakistocracy, kleptocracy, Lambert, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Sweet Apocalypse, Toxic Masculinity 10 Comments
“His nose is already growing!” John (repeat1968) Buss
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Today is the anniversary of the shameful January 6th treason and violence. It may seem quiet today, but the worst is yet to come. Not only is our new FARTUS (Felon, Adjudicated Rapist, and Traitor of the United States with total credit given to JJ) about to take the oath of office, but all these other traitors are about to be granted Presidential Pardons. My only solace is that I may eat King Cake now because today is also 12th night, the official start of the Mardi Gras Season.
These are degenerate times. That has a specific meaning in Buddhism. Lama Yeshe describes it like this. “It has five characteristics: short life spans, scarce means of subsistence, mental afflictions, strong wrong views, and weak sentient beings.” That’s a good enough explanation for me when thinking about what’s been going on lately.
I will rely on the columnists I read today because they make sense. Our media legacy has failed us. First up is Amanda Marcotte writing for Salon. I wrote something along these lines on Friday, but Amanda has thought more deeply. “Toxic masculinity links the New Orleans attacker and the Las Vegas bomber. Whether MAGA or ISIS, troubled men are getting sucked in by hateful online propaganda.”
As I noted in passing last week, the striking thing about the life of Shamsud-Din Jabbar is how much it reads like the boilerplate biography of any random Jan. 6 defendant or MAGA-inspired criminal. The 42-year-old who allegedly murdered 15 people at the New Year’s festivities in New Orleans appeared, on paper, to be relatively successful in his career: 8 years in the Army, a degree from Georgia State, and a $125,000 a year job for an accounting firm. But his personal life was a mess. He was thrice divorced in 10 years, and at least two of the divorces were acrimonious and required repeat court interference. His divorce lawyer even fired him. His financial mismanagement meant his healthy salary didn’t go far enough, and he had to be forced to make back payments on child support.
Like so many men facing personal troubles, Jabbar didn’t get the help he needed. Instead, he turned to radicalizing voices online, which led him to believe that he needed to double down on toxic masculinity. It’s a story we hear over and over, from so-called incels who commit mass shootings to Donald Trump fans who attack government buildings to terrorists imbibing ISIS propaganda. Rather than taking responsibility for their personal failures and striving to do better, men of all stripes turn to the internet where they’re greeted by a sea of influencers, ready to tell them that it’s other people — women, people of different races or religions, the “woke mob” — that is to blame. In some cases, as happened here, they go far enough down the rabbit hole that they talk themselves into violence.
Thankfully, no one but the bomber was badly hurt in the Las Vegas suicide bombing that happened the same night as the Bourbon St. attack, but the parallels between Jabbar and Matthew Livelsberger aren’t hard to spot. Like Jabbar, Livelsberger was a troubled man who picked a highly symbolic location, blowing up a Cybertruck in front of a Trump hotel. Both men had checkered romantic histories, and Livelsberger appears to have told multiple people he feared he suffered from PTSD. Like Jabbar, Livelsberger seems to have acted on a belief that he was going out like a hero, standing up for his far-right ideology and using his death to call on fellow MAGA believers to commit acts of terrorism.
“Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary,” he wrote in his final manifesto. He declared the U.S. is “terminally ill and headed toward collapse,” complained that people don’t believe “[m]asculinity is good and men must be leaders” and made tired Twitter jokes calling Vice President Kamala Harris a “DEI candidate” and President Joe Biden “Weekend at Bernie’s.” He concluded, “Rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and ride this wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans!”
Livelsberger defensively insisted the bombing “was not a terrorist attack.” This sentiment is belied not just by the violence of the act itself and his calls for MAGA men to use violence because “a hard reset must occur for our country.”
It’s the 12th night, which means the members of Skull and Bones Krewes get up early to remind us of our mortality.
When Cis men fall apart, they can’t just go silently into the night, get help, or do something productive. They have to injure or kill innocents while killing themselves. They destroy more than their own lives. They have to leave some formal Mansplaining document that lets us know why it’s all our fault. These are generally misogynistic, at the very least. Most of them spew more bullshit and bile than the waste from slaughterhouses.
John Pavlovitz wrote this on December 12th in his Substack, The Beautiful Mess. “America Chose the Monster.”
To have cast a vote for him with all that we have seen is to declare war on decency, on equality, on any semblance of forthrightness or goodness. It is to double-down on the bigotry which was dismissed as hyperbole during his campaign but which has already been ratified hundredfold as he assembles his Cabinet picks and broadcasts his agenda.
To witness his absolute disregard for the Constitution, his violent allergic reaction to facts, his complete lack of empathy and to not condemn it all becomes an indictment of one’s own heart. It becomes an act of aggression against humanity.
The are truths that are self-evident in the light of these days:
A viable healthcare alternative is not coming.
Taxes for the middle class are not coming down.
Project 2025 is going to be implemented.
Mexico is still not paying for the wall.
Immigrants are going to being persecuted.
Protections for those with special needs are evaporating.
The poor are getting thrown to the lions.
Public schools are being thrown under the bus.
The elderly are being left to fend for themselves.
The environment is being willfully set on fire.
The economy is going to be compromised.
The whole system is being intentionally blown-up.
The rule of Law in our Government is being trod upon.Aside from the smallest percentage of the wealthiest in this nation, no one is going to be healthier, safer, or more financially secure.
This is a nonpartisan tragedy.
We all do impulsive things when we are terrified, when it’s dark and we’re convinced there’s a monster under the bed. But eventually the light comes on and we have reality at our disposal and we get to choose to see things as they are. I can’t fathom those presently determined to stay in the dark, to pretend they’re not seeing what they’re seeing—when what they’re seeing is a danger to them too.
It’s morning here in America, friends. The brilliant light of day is illuminating every dark corner and exposing every unsavory decision from the night before.
For a myriad of reasons, America chose the monster. It chose the hatred, the fear, the nihilism, the separation. The question of why is too sprawling and nebulous to answer.
And with the coming of this Monster comes more monsters. Former Capitol Police Officer Michael Fanone reminds us about the kind of people that will be put back on the street when the mass pardon of traitors begins. This is from HuffPo. “Cowards, Liars And Jan. 6: Former Officer Michael Fanone Speaks Out As Trump’s Return Looms.
“I don’t believe we live in a democracy anymore,” says Michael Fanone, who was nearly killed by Trump supporters four years ago.”
“There’s no doubt in my mind that he got away with inciting an insurrection as well as defrauding the American people and attempting to subvert democracy,” Fanone told HuffPost during a phone interview just ahead of the fourth anniversary of the Capitol riot.“I don’t believe we live in a democracy anymore,” Fanone said. “I believe democracy in this country is dead, and it died when the Supreme Court granted the president of the United States immunity for official acts and then failed to define what the fuck official acts are.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States in July found that as long as something could be shaded as an “official” act, prosecution was off the table.
The ruling obliterated key parts of the criminal indictment brought against Trump in the Jan. 6 case by then-special counsel Jack Smith. And Trump’s victory in November means he’ll likely never face federal charges.
Shortly after the presidential election, Smith dismissed the case without prejudice ― meaning it could theoretically come back to life one day ― but Fanone’s faith in the justice system is already shattered. He called Attorney General Merrick Garland an “absolute coward.”
“Listen, people say I’m naive or I don’t know how these things work, but I was a cop for 20 years. Not only was I a cop, I was a cop in Washington, D.C. Our prosecutors were federal prosecutors. I worked with the [Department of Justice] every single day for 20 years. I know exactly how that institution and organization works. The decision not to pursue an investigation into Trump was all political,” Fanone said. “The investigation should have been launched on Jan. 7, 2021.”
Fanone was Trump-friendly before the J6 Insurrection and voted for him in 2016.
Senator John Thune from South Dakota is the new bad guy in charge of the Senate. We’re already getting some idea of how bad it’s going to be since he appears to be whipping the caucus for the gross number of idiots Trump wants in his cabinet. This is from The Hill. “Thune says it’s unclear whether all Trump Cabinet picks will be confirmed.” Some of the most worrying of them have to deal with National Security.
John Thune on Trump possibly pardoning J6 insurrectionists who assaulted police officers: "That's ultimately gonna be a decision that President Trump is gonna have to make. What I'm focused on is the future."
Thune joined NBC News’s “Meet the Press” for an interview that aired Sunday, as he took the lead of the upper chamber at the start of the 119th Congress.
“What I’ve promised them is a fair process,” Thune said of Trump’s picks. “And so, these nominees are going to go through a committee where they’re going to have to answer questions. There will be some hard questions posed.”
Thune highlighted the desire to provide Trump with the Cabinet he wants but noted that the Senate has a role to “advise and consent,” particularly regarding his national security choices.
“We have a lot of our senators who take that role very seriously,” he said. “And so, we will make sure that these nominees have a process, a fair process, in which they have an opportunity to make their cases not only to the members of the committee and ultimately to the full Senate but also to the American people.”
Thune wouldn’t confirm whether he would vote for or against any of Trump’s nominees, including some particularly controversial choices like Kash Patel to lead the FBI, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii) for director of national intelligence and Pete Hegseth for Department of Defense.
Thune said he’s met with some of Trump’s nominees, and there are “some” that he has been “really, really impressed” by.
This bit popped up over the weekend and is disturbing. This was reported by CBS. “Thune has privately told Trump that Hegseth has the votes to be confirmed as Defense Secretary, sources say.” Thune has so many toxic male issues combined with a lack of experience and knowledge of the job that anyone connected to the military has spoken out against him.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune has privately told President-elect Donald Trump that he believes Pete Hegseth will have the votes to be confirmed as Secretary of Defense, according to three sources.
When asked for comment, a spokesman for Thune would only tell CBS News, “Two things we don’t discuss publicly: Whip counts and private conversations with the president.”
The new Senate Majority Leader in an interview with “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” promised a fair process but expressed more caution.
“I think these are nominees who are new enough, they’ve been going around and conducting their meetings, which I think, frankly, have gone very well, but they still have to make their case in front of the committee. And, you know, we don’t know all the information about some of these nominees.”
Hegseth’s confirmation hearing is scheduled for Jan. 14, according to Senate Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker.
Just so you know, future FBI Director Kash Patel is still making the rounds in the Senate Building. “Kash Patel Believes the FBI Planned Jan. 6th. His embrace of this wild conspiracy theory should disqualify him from leading the bureau.” This is from The Bulwark.
“WHAT WAS THE FBI DOING PLANNING January 6th for a year?”
Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as FBI director, asked that question during a November 25, 2022 episode of his Kash’s Corner podcast for the Epoch Times. It was no slip of the tongue. As the title of that episode suggested—“What Did the FBI Know Before Jan. 6?”—Patel spent considerable time trying to cast the FBI as a villain responsible for January 6th. Patel noted that FBI Director Christopher Wray had “testified that the FBI never instigated or helped the January 6th protesters commit crimes.” But citing a report that the FBI had confidential human sources in the crowd, Patel asserted: “Okay, well, that was in planning for at least a year.”
Our review of Patel’s public appearances over the past four years reveals that he has repeatedly insinuated or argued that the FBI used its confidential human sources or employees to instigate the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol and entrap Trump’s supporters. Patel has claimed (as in the podcast episode above) that what he calls the “FBI’s Confidential Human Source Corruption Coverup Network” was somehow involved with January 6th. That is not only an insult to the memory of that day; it should be disqualifying for him to helm the bureau.
During the September 30, 2022 episode of Kash’s Corner, for instance, Patel said: “The question that has to be answered is, when did the FBI put those guys in, and where? And did those confidential human sources engage people who are not going to conduct criminal activity and convince them to do so?” Patel claimed that “is the definition of entrapment, which is illegal, and you can’t charge someone who’s been entrapped.” And he wondered who “was running this confidential human source network” and reporting it to FBI Director Chris Wray.
Patel added he would “venture a guess” that “once we see the documentation from January 6th, you will see the FBI’s confidential human source corruption coverup network on blast.” And he accused the FBI of inserting these human sources “into these matters.” Patel asked rhetorically: “Why? Why would you say January 6th? Because they wanted a political target, a political prosecution, not one based on law and fact.”
The man who could lead Trump’s FBI has failed to substantiate these wild accusations, which are contradicted by other evidence and by common sense. Regardless, he has frequently advanced this conspiracy theory, using his background as a former federal prosecutor and public defender—key credentials used to buttress his nomination—to provide it with a veneer of credibility.
An extensive amount of documentation is provided in the article. It’s not a fun read.
ProPublica has published another astounding piece of journalism. This is long and shocking. It gets to the heart of Trump’s rabid base. Again, this is the heart of Toxic Masculinity. “The Militia and the MoleOutraged by the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell family or friends. The one person he told was a ProPublica reporter.”
So I pored over his files, tens of thousands of them. They included dozens of hours of conversations he secretly recorded and years of private militia chatlogs and videos. I was able to authenticate those through other sources, in and out of the movement. I also talked to dozens of people, from Williams’ friends to other members of his militias. I dug into his tumultuous past and discovered records online he hadn’t pointed me to that supported his account.
The files give a unique window, at once expansive and intimate, into one of the most consequential and volatile social movements of our time. Williams penetrated a new generation of paramilitary leaders, which included doctors, career cops and government attorneys. Sometimes they were frightening, sometimes bumbling, always heavily armed. It was a world where a man would propose assassinating politicians, only to spark a debate about logistics.
Federal prosecutors have convicted more than 1,000 people for their role in Jan. 6. Key militia captains were sent to prison for a decade or more. But that did not quash the allure that militias hold for a broad swath of Americans.
Now President-elect Donald Trump has promised to pardon Jan. 6 rioters when he returns to the White House. Experts warn that such a move could trigger a renaissance for militant extremists, sending them an unprecedented message of protection and support — and making it all the more urgent to understand them.
(Unless otherwise noted, none of the militia members mentioned in this story responded to requests for comment.)
Williams is part of a larger cold war, radical vs. radical, that’s stayed mostly in the shadows. A left-wing activist told me he personally knows about 30 people who’ve gone undercover in militias or white supremacist groups. They did not coordinate with law enforcement, instead taking the surveillance of one of the most intractable features of American politics into their own hands.
Skeptical of authorities, militias have sought to reshape the country through armed action. Williams sought to do it through betrayals and lies, which sat with him uneasily. “I couldn’t have been as successful at this if I wasn’t one of them in some respects,” he once told me. “I couldn’t have done it so long unless they recognized something in me.”
The last thing I want to post about is the Washington Post. The newspaper is hemorrhaging reporters, and Pulitzer Prize-Winning Political Cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit because Bezos axed her submission. The raw sketch is featured on the right. It’s also begun layoffs. This happens when greedy Tech Bros take over things they know nothing about. This is from Oliver Darcy’s Status. “Paper Cuts. The Washington Post is expected to lay off dozens of staffers this week, Status has learned.”
Layoffs are expected to rock The Washington Post this week, according to people familiar with the matter.
The layoffs are slated to hit the Jeff Bezos-owned and Will Lewis-led newspaper’s business division, I’m told. One person familiar with the matter said that the cuts will be deep, impacting many dozens of employees.
The layoffs will surely deplete morale further inside the beleaguered newspaper, which has suffered a talent exodus over the last several weeks. As I reported earlier, star reporter Josh Dawsey will exit The Post for a job at The Wall Street Journal. His departure comes on the heels of other top staffers fleeing, including Matea Gold, Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, Charles Lane, Tyler Pager, and Amanda Katz.
A spokesperson for The Post didn’t have an immediate comment. But The Post has been in poor financial shape in recent years, a fact that management has not hidden from employees. Those financial problems were exacerbated when Bezos blocked The Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris ahead of the November election, a move that led to more than 250,000 readers canceling their subscriptions.
I’ve been a bit on the gratuitous Buddhism-sharing thing today, which I try not to overdo, but this quote from Chamtral Rinpoche hit me hard last night.
The biggest threat to our world are not human beings per se. The biggest threat is each individual person’s level of greed. One extremely greedy person can harm our world more than a million people who practice contentment.
Drinking salt water will never quench your thirst. The more you drink, the thirstier you will become. Likewise, greed will never bring you satisfaction, as it will cause an endless pursuit of material wealth to the detriment of our world and all of the beings who inhabit it.
Always remember that the greedier you are, the more you and others will suffer, and the poorer you will become inside. But the more contentment that you have, the more you and others will benefit, and the richer you will become inside.
We will have to cultivate inner peace to get through all of this. I’ve already cut down on my TV News viewing. I have a mature meditation practice (since the 1970s), so I have that. Of course, the furbabies and the Zoom calls from the Granddaughters put a smile on my face. I’m just trying to stay in the moment. I hope you can find a way to cope with this all. I’ve been listening to a lot of modern classic piano. This piece by Lambert comes from an album called “Sweet Apocalypse.” It’s beautiful and relaxing, and the name is appropriate for the times; it was recorded in 2017 during this first stint of anguish.
Talk to me about how you’re coping with this blast of kleptocracy, kakistocracy, and idiocracy?
What’s on your reading and blogging list?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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