“Tariff Man doing Tariff Man stuff..” John Buss,@repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Last night, I dreamed I had been to an amusement park where everything spun oddly and fell apart. Guess who followed me around his theme park at one point shoving his hands down my shirt to grab my tits until a nice black lady in a black suit with sun glasses on said “Sir, you really shouldn’t do that.” I pressed an elevator at one point, and some skinny, red-headed white guy in a flannel shirt on the other side of what turned out to be a duo door elevator had the ground pulled out from under him. The ground below him started dropping. All I could do was watch from the other side. There were guys everywhere with stacks of boxes, trying to sell stuff they wouldn’t let you see. All the time #FARTUS just followed me, bragging about each ride that was more dangerous than the next.
I doubt I need a Jungian psychologist to decode all that. A lot of my time was spent trying to get children to get off and get out of here before they were hurt. Oddly enough, I was more fascinated during the dream than anything else. It was a bit like a Salvador Dali show. Maybe some of the celebratory herb wafting from the 4/20 Party at the bar on the corner got into my bedroom. Who knows? I woke up thinking, “What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been.” I heard a lot of Grateful Dead on Temple’s last walk of the day.
Trump’s 100th day in office officially happens this month on the 30th. So far, not good. This headline in theWashington Post, attached to an op-ed analysis from Dana Milbank, grabbed me. And not by the you know what. “Trump is wrapping up 100 days of historic failure. America has seen ruinous periods, but never when the president was the one knowingly causing the ruin. It will be far worse if Trump tries to illegally remove Fed President Jerome Powell from his post. He’s trying to blame Powell for this mess. I’m not sure who will be dumb enough to take that bait, but I do know that Republicans won’t stand in his way of his lawlessness, as usual.
“By any reasonable measure, President Donald Trump’s first 100 days will be judged an epic failure.
He has been a legislative failure. He has signed only five bills into law, none of them major, making this the worst performance at the start of a new president’s term in more than a century.
He has been an economic failure. On his watch, growth has slowed, consumer and business confidence has cratered, and markets have plunged, along with Americans’ wealth. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday that “growth has slowed in the first quarter of this year from last year’s solid pace” and that Trump’s tariffs will result in higher inflation and slower growth.
He has been a foreign-policy failure. He said he would end wars in Gaza and Ukraine. But fighting has resumed in Gaza after the demise of the ceasefire negotiated by his predecessor, and Russia continues to brutalize Ukraine, making a mockery of Trump’s naive overtures to Vladimir Putin.
He has been a failure in the eyes of friends, having launched a trade war against Canada, Mexico, Europe and Japan; enraged Canada with talk of annexation; threatened Greenland and Panama; and cleaved the NATO alliance.
He has been a failure in the eyes of foes, as an emboldened China menaces Taiwan, punches back hard in the trade war and spreads its global influence to fill the vacuum left by Trump’s retreat from the world.
He has been a constitutional failure. His executive actions, brazen in their disregard for the law, have been slapped down more than 80 times already by judges, including those appointed by Republicans. He is flagrantly defying a unanimous Supreme Court, and his appointees are facing contempt proceedings for their abuse of the legal system.
Even his few “successes” amount to less than meets the eye. Border crossings are down from already low levels, but despite all the administration’s bravado, there’s little evidence of an increase in deportations. Hopes for cost-cutting under the U.S. DOGE Service, which Elon Musk originally projected at $1 trillion this year, have been scaled back to just $150 billion — and much of that appears to be based on made-up numbers.
But Trump, whose 100th day in office is April 30, has achieved one thing that is truly remarkable: He has introduced a level of chaos and destruction so high that historians are hard-pressed to find its equal in our history.
And yet, he persists. There’s a long list that follows. Seeing it all in print is disturbing. Zachary Basu has another take posted on AXIOS. “Trump’s United States of Emergency. ”
In his first 100 days, President Trump has declared more national emergencies — more creatively and more aggressively — than any president in modern American history.
Why it matters: Powers originally crafted to give the president flexibility in rare moments of crisis now form the backbone of Trump’s agenda, enabling him to steamroll Congress and govern by unilateral decree through his first three months in office.
Paired with his assault on the judiciary, legal scholars fear Trump is exploiting loosely written statutes to try to upend the constitutional balance of power.
How it works: The president can declare a national emergency at any time, for almost any reason, without needing to prove a specific threat or get approval from Congress.
The National Emergencies Act of 1976, which unlocks more than 120 special statutory powers, originally included a “legislative veto” that gave Congress the ability to terminate an emergency with a simple majority vote.
But in 1983, the Supreme Court ruled that legislative vetoes are unconstitutional — effectively stripping Congress of its original check, and making it far harder to rein in a president’s emergency declarations.
The big picture: Since then, presidents have largely relied on “norms” and “self-restraint” to avoid abusing emergency powers for non-crises, says Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program.
That precedent was broken in 2019, Goitein argues, when Trump declared a national emergency in order to bypass Congress and access billions of dollars in funding for a border wall.
President Biden stretched his authority as well, drawing criticism in 2022 for citing the COVID-19 national emergency to unilaterally forgive student loan debt.
But Trump’s second-term actions have plunged the U.S. firmly into uncharted territory — redrawing the limits of executive power in real time, and fueling fears of a permanent emergency state.
Zoom in: Trump’s justification for his tariffs cites the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which can be invokedonlyif the U.S. faces an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to its national security, foreign policy, or economy.
According to the White House, America’s decades-old trading relationships — including with tiny countries and uninhabited islands — qualify as such threats.
As a result, a 1977 law originally designed to target hostile foreign powers — and never before used to impose tariffs — is now being deployed to rewrite the global economic order.
There’s much to look forward to as we lurch towards the midterms. Little Marco Rubio is sure fucking up the state department. All you need to do is see a cabinet meeting. His face is telling. He looks like the only one who knows he’s going to hell. This is from NPR as reported by Graham Smith. “The State Department is changing its mind about what it calls human rights.” What fresh hell is this lil Marco?
The Trump administration is substantially scaling back the State Department’s annual reports on international human rights to remove longstanding critiques of abuses such as harsh prison conditions, government corruption and restrictions on participation in the political process, NPR has learned.
Despite decades of precedent, the reports, which are meant to inform congressional decisions on foreign aid allocations and security assistance, will no longer call governments out for such things as denying freedom of movement and peaceful assembly. They won’t condemn retaining political prisoners without due process or restrictions on “free and fair elections.”
Forcibly returning a refugee or asylum-seeker to a home country where they may face torture or persecution will no longer be highlighted, nor will serious harassment of human rights organizations.
According to an editing memo and other documents obtained by NPR, State Department employees are directed to “streamline” the reports by stripping them down to only that which is legally required. The memo says the changes aim to align the reports with current U.S. policy and “recently issued Executive Orders.”
Officially called “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,” the annual documents are required, by statute, to be a “full and complete report regarding the status of internationally recognized human rights.”
Human rights defenders say the cuts amount to an American retreat from its position as the world’s human rights watchdog.
“What this is, is a signal that the United States is no longer going to [pressure] other countries to uphold those rights that guarantee civic and political freedoms — the ability to speak, to express yourself, to gather, to protest, to organize,” said Paul O’Brien, executive director of Amnesty International, USA.
A spokesperson for the State Department declined to comment on the memo or the human rights reports. NPR confirmed the memo’s authenticity with two sources close to the process.
There is some good news on the front of Trump’s kidnapping and disappearing people to El Salvador. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) managed to get a meeting with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, as was his goal. Historian Heather Cox Richardson, writing at her Substack, gives us some perspective.
Today, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) posted a picture of himself with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whom the Trump administration says it sent to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador through “administrative error” but can’t get back, and wrote: “I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.”
While the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, apparently tried to stage a photo that would make it look as if the two men were enjoying a cocktail together, it seems clear that backing down and giving Senator Van Hollen access to Abrego Garcia is a significant shift from Bukele’s previous scorn for those trying to address the crisis of a man legally in the U.S. having been sent to prison in El Salvador without due process.
Bukele might be reassessing the distribution of power in the U.S.
According to Robert Jimison of the New York Times, who traveled to El Salvador with Senator Van Hollen, when a reporter asked President Donald Trump if he would move to return Abrego Garcia to the United States, Trump answered: “Well, I’m not involved. You’ll have to speak to the lawyers, the [Department of Justice].”
Today a federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to stop Judge Paula Xinis’s order that it “take all available steps” to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. “as soon as possible.” Conservative Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, wrote the order. Notably, it began with a compliment to Judge Xinis. “[W]e shall not micromanage the efforts of a fine district judge attempting to implement the Supreme Court’s recent decision,” he wrote.
Then Wilkinson turned his focus on the Trump administration. “It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter,” he wrote. “But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”
“The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process.” The court noted that if the government is so sure of its position, then it should be confident in presenting its facts to a court of law.
Echoing the liberal justices on the Supreme Court, Wilkinson wrote: “If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?” He noted the reports that the administration is talking about doing just that.
“And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present,” he wrote, “and the Executive’s obligation to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ would lose its meaning.”
Sen. Chris Van Hollen confirmed Thursday night that he has met with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man whom the Trump administration said it mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March.
“I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return,” Van Hollen, D-Md., wrote on X.
Images of Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garcia were first posted online by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who has rebuffed calls to return Abrego Garcia to the United States.
Bukele said on X after the meeting that Abrego Garcia will remain in El Salvador’s custody “now that he’s been confirmed healthy.”
President Donald Trump lashed out at Van Hollen Friday morning in a post on Truth Social, saying the Democratic senator “looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention.”
At an Oval Office meeting with Trump on Monday, Bukele argued that he didn’t “have the power to return him to the United States.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the same day that the United States would provide a plane for Abrego Garcia to travel back to the country should El Salvador allow his release, framing the decision as being solely in Bukele’s hands.
In a statement Thursday night, the White House called Van Hollen’s efforts in support of Abrego Garcia “disgusting” and said Trump will “continue to stand on the side of law-abiding Americans.”
Trump threats to Fed Chair Powell scare the shit out of me. I am totally with Senator Elizabeth Warren on this statement. “Markets will ‘crash’ if Trump can fire Fed’s Powell, Elizabeth Warren warns.” You can listen to her interview at this link. Nobel Prize-winning Economist Dr. Paul Krugman explains the dangers of a “Trumpified Fed” at his Substack today. “Why You Should Fear a Trumpified Fed. Don’t give an abuser power that’s easy to abuse. He even starts with the holy grail of economics charts from FRED. The Fed is a significant source of economic data. I spent hours as a new grad student in 1978 in the basement of the University of Nebraska at Omaha with a huge accounting pad and pencil in the Federal Documents area, writing down months of data to type onto punch cards with some code ordering up a graph that I had to wait hours for as I watched a huge printer spit out green bar paper. Now it’s just a few clicks of a mouse button to get the same data from FRED.
Sometimes the Federal Reserve has extraordinary power over the economy.
Consider what happened from 1982 to 1984. For most of 1982 the U.S. economy was in grim shape. Employment had plunged, especially in manufacturing. The unemployment rate hit 10.8 percent in December (it was 4.2 percent last month.) And economic pain helped Democrats make major gains in the 1982 midterms.
But everything was about to change, thanks to the Fed. In the summer of 1982 the Fed decided to ease monetary policy. Interest rates plunged, and about 6 months later the economy began a stunning rebound, growing 4.6 percent in 1983 and 7.2 percent in 1984. Ronald Reagan claimed credit for “Morning in America,” but actually it was the Fed that did it.
This episode illustrates the Fed’s power — power that must be insulated from abuse by politicians, especially politicians like Donald Trump.
Over the past few days Trump has been demanding that the Fed cut interest rates and calling for the Fed chairman’s “termination.” It’s worth looking at what he posted on Truth Social to get a sense of how, to use the technical term, batshit crazy he is on this subject:
And we really, really don’t want someone that crazy dictating monetary policy.
The reason we don’t want politicians in direct control of monetary policy is that it’s so easy to use. After all, what does it mean to “ease” monetary policy? It’s an incredibly frictionless process. Normally the Federal Open Market Committee tells the New York Fed to buy U.S. government debt from private banks, which it does with money conjured out of thin air. There’s no need to pass legislation, place bids with contractors, deal with any of the hassles usually associated with changes in government policy. Basically the Fed can create an economic boom with a phone call.
It’s obvious that this kind of power could be abused by an irresponsible leader who wants to preside over an economic boom and doesn’t want to hear about the risks. This isn’t a hypothetical scenario. Consider what happened in Turkey, whose Trump-like president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, recently arrested the leader of the opposition. When the global post-Covid inflation shock hit, Erdogan embraced crank economic theories. He forced Turkey’s central bank, its equivalent of the Fed, to cut interest rates in the belief, contrary to standard economics, that doing so would reduce, not increase inflation. You can see the results in the chart at the top of this post.
How can we guard against that kind of policy irresponsibility? After the stagflation of the 1970s many countries delegated monetary policy to technocrats at independent central banks. Can the technocrats get it wrong? Of course they can and often have. But they’re less likely to engage in wishful thinking and motivated reasoning than typical politicians, let alone politicians like Trump.
What makes Trump’s attempt to bully the Fed especially ominous is the fact that the Fed will soon have to cope with the stagflationary crisis Trump has created. Trump’s massive tariff increase will lead to a major inflationary shock:
I’ve been using that “s” word for a while now. If Krugman uses it, run for the hills.
So, this is running long, so I’ll quit with this. I hope your weekend is peaceful. We’re gearing up for Jazz Fest, so I have a few more weeks of Ugly American Tourists in the hood, and then it might get more normal since Trump is decimating the tourist industry.
U.S. tourism has dropped with visits from other countries down as much as 11% in March, while more Americans are moving outside of the country to places like Canada. NBC News’ Liz Kreutz talks to USC Hospitality and Tourism Professor Hicham Jaddoud on the drop.
Maybe those disruptive Airbnb’s will be used for the people who live here. I can only hope.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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“Well, I don’t know why I came here tonight I’ve got the feeling that something ain’t right I’m so scared in case I fall off my chair And I’m wondering how I’ll get down the stairs” John Buss, Repeat1968 with h.t t;o Stealers Wheels
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I took some time today to enjoy a friend from FDL, sushi from Lin’s at St Roch Market, and the Bywater and Marigny right up to the edge of the Quarter. The only way to explore my neighborhood is by foot or by bus. That way, you really get to know us. The stores on LA49 (better known as St. Claude Avenue) are small, locally owned, and full of surprises. I don’t think I can ever emphasize how much I love this city. It’s probably why I stay here and don’t go elsewhere anymore. I first discovered this because when I ventured around the state or country, I had dreams about not being able to find or go home, which ended immediately when I opened the front door. I really wish you this feeling. It’s amazing.
It gave me a breath from reading stuff today. So, here I go, right into the thick of it. This is from Dr. Paul Krugman’s Substack. “The Third-Worlding of America. How to destroy 80 years of credibility in less than 3 months.” Like all excellent economists, he’s got charts and numbers to prove it. I got all these degrees to help people understand financial markets and economic policy. Now, I live with knowledge; I just pray it still empowers people, even if it feels disheartening today.
Remarkably, the sanewashing continues despite the unprecedented craziness of the past 10 days. Many observers assert that Trump has backed down on tariffs and will speedily make a bunch of trade deals. The first assertion is just false, while the second is very unlikely.
In fact, savvy traders have realized that there’s no coherent economic strategy. There’s an old line about military analysis: “Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals talk about logistics.” Well, when it comes to taking the pulse of financial markets, amateurs talk about stocks, but professionals talk about bond and currency markets. That’s because bond and currency markets are generally less driven by emotion. There’s no “meme gambling investing” in bond and currency markets. And these markets are both signaling major loss of faith in America.
First, about tariffs: It’s true that for the time being Trump has scaled back some of the tariffs displayed on his big piece of cardboard last week. For example, unless we have another policy swerve, the European Union will now face a 10 percent tariff over the next three months rather than a 20 percent tariff. But the tariff on China, our third-biggest trading partner after Canada and Mexico, has gone from 34 percent to more than 130 percent. And we still have high tariffs on steel, aluminum and so on. In effect, observers who claim that tariffs have gone down are missing the biggest part of the story.
Economists who have actually run the numbers, like those at the Yale Budget Lab, estimate that the April 9 tariff regime will raise consumer prices more than the April 2 regime because of the extraordinarily high tariff rate on Chinese imports. Specifically, the budget lab estimates that the latest version of Trump’s trade war will raise consumer prices by 2.9 percent. This is roughly ten times the probable impact of the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930.
It’s hard to overstate the craziness of announcing a radical tariff plan, then announcing a quite different but equally radical plan just a week later. Furthermore, the claim that the wild zigzags in policy were always part of Trump’s plan just adds to the destruction of the administration’s credibility.
But are these tariffs just an opening gambit for trade negotiations? I doubt it. Bear in mind that Trump and Peter Navarro, his tariff guru, start from the premise that other countries are cheating, that they’re taking advantage of America and treating us unfairly. In fact, however, most of them aren’t. Take the case of the European Union. The EU imposes an average tariff on U.S. goods of just 1.7%, and there aren’t any significant hidden barriers.
So what are we supposed to be negotiating about? Nations can’t promise to lower their trade barriers when there aren’t any barriers. Navarro has been claiming that value-added taxes are de facto tariffs, but they aren’t, and EU nations literally can’t afford to give them up.
I guess other countries might make fake concessions that Trump can claim as fake victories. This is what he did with China during his first term, claiming that it had made significant concessions — claims which were, in the end, false. In fact, American soybean farmers have never fully recovered the loss of market share. And remember too how Trump made minor changes to NAFTA and claimed to have negotiated a whole new trade pact.
However, Trump is now clearly high on his own supply. Even with the April 9 tariff regime, Trump is imposing high tariff rates on our three largest trading partners. Currency and bond market traders — no fools they — are certainly not acting as if we’re on a path to successful deals.
The Chinese are pranking Trump today. This is from the Washington Post. “China raises tariffs on U.S. goods to 125 percent as trade war deepens. Beijing hit back in response to the Trump administration’s move to raise tariffs on Chinese goods to 145 percent, saying it would “fight to the end.” They can afford to. They’re making deals with South Korea and Japan, among other countries. The only group this is hurting is US importers and Exporters. This includes farmers.
The response underscored China’s decision to stand firm in the face of pressure from Washington and deepened the showdown between the world’s two largest economies.
“If the U.S. insists on substantively damaging China’s interests, China will firmly retaliate and fight to the end,” China’sState Council said in a statement.
The move came after Trump increased the levies on Chinese goods to 145 percent on Wednesday, while also announcing that the tariffs he had previously imposed on more than six dozen other countries would be fixed at 10 percent during a 90-day pause.
The State Council derided Trump’s move to continue ratcheting up the levies and said it would ignore further hikes. The tariffs are a “joke” and “no longer have any economic significance,” its statement said, because the current levels make U.S. exports to China not financially viable. The new Chinese tariffs, which increased from 84 percent, are effective Saturday.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping, in a meeting with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Friday, stressed that trade wars have no winners and called for China and Europe to “jointly oppose unilateral bullying,” according to state media. European leaders also emphasized the damaging effects of uncertainty beyond the 90-day pause.
Experts in Beijing expressed concern about the latest turn in tensions with Washington. “U.S.-China trade will soon be almost nonexistent,” said Shi Yinhong, an international relations professor at China’s Renmin University. “To ease tensions, Trump must first make concessions.”
Turmoil over tariffs drove fluctuations in global markets on Friday.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 and Topix indexes dropped by5percent, before trimming their losses to under 3 percent by market close. South Korea’s Kospi and Australia’s ASX 200 fell by less than1 percent, while Taiwan’s bourse kicked off the day with a fall of under 1 percent before logging a 2.5 percent gain. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index and China’s Shanghai composite index were mostly flat, with the Hang Seng closing just over 1 per cent higher.
Major European markets fell slightly after opening on Friday, following rebounds the previous day. By 6 a.m. Eastern time, Germany’s DAX was down 1.62 percent, France’s benchmark CAC fell by 1.11 percent and London’s FTSE 100 was down around 0.3 percent.
It’s almost as if… and stay with me now… It’s almost as if Republicans aren’t as good at the economy as they claim to be! 🤷♂️
The Trump administration intends to eliminate the research arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, close all weather and climate labs and eviscerate its budget along with several other NOAA offices, according to internal documents obtained by CNN.
The documents describe the administration’s budget proposal for 2026, but indicate the administration expects the agency to enact the changes immediately.
The cuts would devastate weather and climate research as weather is becoming more erratic, extreme and costly. It would cripple the US industries — including agriculture — that depend on free, accurate weather and climate data and expert analysis. It could also halt research on deadly weather, including severe storms and tornadoes.
The administration intends to make significant cuts to education, grants, research and climate-related programs in NOAA, the plan says, which the administration believes “are misaligned with the … expressed will of the American people.”
While the phrase “climate change” refers to the manmade influence on the global climate system via planet-warming fossil fuel pollution, “climate” in NOAA parlance is simply the weather that has been observed over time.
CNN has reached out to the White House and the Department of Commerce, which houses NOAA, for comment on the plan.
Additionally, NASA is on the chopping block! Does this include all that money going to Elonia? This is from ars TECHICA‘s Eric Berger. “Trump White House budget proposal eviscerates science funding at NASA. “This would decimate American leadership in space.” #FARTUS seems dead set on sending us back to the Gilded Age. Even the best of the Modern Era is about to be erased.
This week, as part of the process to develop a budget for fiscal-year 2026, the Trump White House shared the draft version of its budget request for NASA with the space agency.
This initial version of the administration’s budget request calls for an approximately 20 percent overall cut to the agency’s budget across the board, effectively $5 billion from an overall topline of about $25 billion. However, the majority of the cuts are concentrated within the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, which oversees all planetary science, Earth science, astrophysics research, and more.
According to the “passback” documents given to NASA officials on Thursday, the space agency’s science programs would receive nearly a 50 percent cut in funding. After the agency received $7.5 billion for science in fiscal-year 2025, the Trump administration has proposed a science topline budget of just $3.9 billion for the coming fiscal year.
Among the proposals were: A two-thirds cut to astrophysics, down to $487 million; a greater than two-thirds cut to heliophysics, down to $455 million; a greater than 50 percent cut to Earth science, down to $1.033 billion; and a 30 percent cut to Planetary science, down to $1.929 billion.
Although the budget would continue support for ongoing missions such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, it would kill the much-anticipated Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, an observatory seen as on par with those two world-class instruments that is already fully assembled and on budget for a launch in two years.
We’re also unlikely to see other countries send their best and brightest to our US Universities with all this craziness. As some with with multiple degrees and ones that aren’t that easy to achieve, I would just like to say that my teachers, my students and grad assistants, and my colleagues and fellow students were consistently the best part of higher education school. I owe so much of my math chops to fellow students from India, Iran, Hong Kong, Turkey, and Taiwan. Both of my Doctorate advisors came here as students. One from India. The other is from Bangladesh. This brain drain will put us on the road to mediocrity.
Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil can be kicked out of the U.S. as a national security risk, an immigration judge in Louisiana found Friday during a hearing over the legality of deporting the activist who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
The government’s contention that Khalil’s presence in the United States posed “potentially serious foreign policy consequences” was enough to satisfy requirements for his deportation, Immigration Judge Jamee E. Comans said at the conclusion of a hearing in Jena.
Comans said the government had “established by clear and convincing evidence that he is removable.”
Lawyers for Khalil said they plan to keep fighting. The judge gave them until April 23 to seek a waiver. Meanwhile, a federal judge in New Jersey temporarily barred Khalil’s deportation.
Addressing the judge at the end of the hearing, Khalil mentioned that she said at a hearing earlier in the week that “there’s nothing more important to this court than due process rights and fundamental fairness.”
Let me just say that Jena, Louisiana, is a hell realm.
Is it a Constitutional Crisis Yet, Momma? Brad Reed has that Raw Story headline.
The United States Department of Justice said on Friday that it will not comply with an order from Judge Paula Xinis to reveal information on the whereabouts and status of deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
As reported by Politico’s Kyle Cheney on BlueSky, the DOJ information Judge Xinis that it would not be able to provide the information she requested on Garcia because the court set an “impracticable” deadline to do so.
Judge Xinis had originally demanded that the DOJ provide information about Garcia’s status by 9:30 a.m. on Friday after the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration needed to facilitate bringing him back from the prison in El Salvador where he had been sent improperly.
The judge extended the deadline to 11:30 a.m. on Friday morning and scheduled a court hearing on the case for 1 p.m.
So, I hope you’re trying to stay positive and calm. I’m going to go walk Temple and feed the kitties. That’s something I can do right now without feeling depressed.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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“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 desire
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 weknow about.
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.
“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.
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
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“Putin addresses the residents of his newly acquired territory.” John Buss, @repeat1968, @johnbuss.bsky.social
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I am having an ongoing debate with myself about the current administration. Is it the stupidity, the arrogance, or the meanness that most damaged our Constitutional democracy? Or is it the greed? I’m tagging all my posts here with the words Polycrisis, Kakistocracy, and Oligarchy or Broligarchy. It’s getting to be a tough search to find a few journalists who will actually tell it like it is.
This article in The Guardian early this month by Jonathan Freeland describes the current president thusly. “Donald Trump is turning America into a mafia state. The pattern is inescapable – with just one caveat: organised crime bosses occasionally display more honour.” I’ll just add a local New Orleans colloquialism. True Dat.
Behold Donald Corleone, the US president who behaves like a mafia boss – but without the principles. Of course, one hesitates to make the comparison, not least because Donald Trump would like it. And because the Godfather is an archetype of strength and macho glamour while Trump is weak, constantly handing gifts to America’s enemies and getting nothing in return. But when the world is changing so fast – when a nation that has been a friend for more than a century turns into a foe in a matter of weeks – it helps to have a guide. My colleague Luke Harding clarified the nature of Vladimir Putin’s Russia when he branded it the Mafia State. Now we need to attach the same label to the US under Putin’s most devoted admirer.
Consider the way Trump’s White House conducts itself, issuing threats and menaces that sound better in the original Sicilian. This week the president said that a deal ending Russia’s war on Ukraine “could be made very fast” but “if somebody doesn’t want to make a deal, I think that person won’t be around very long”. You didn’t need a translator to know that the somebody he had in mind was Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
On Thursday, Trump was confident that the Ukrainians would soon do his bidding “because I don’t think they have a choice”. Almost as if he had made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. Which of course he had. By ending the supply of military aid and the sharing of US intelligence, as he did this week, he had effectively put a Russian revolver to Ukraine’s temple,its imprint scarcely reduced by Trump’s declaration today that he is “strongly considering” banking sanctions and tariffs against Moscow, a move that looked a lot like a man pretending to be equally tough on the two sides, but which should fool nobody.He expects Zelenskyy to sign away a huge chunk of Ukraine’s minerals, the way Corleone’s rivals surrendered their livelihoods to save their lives.
This is how the US now operates in the world. Dispensing with the formalities during his annual address to Congress on Tuesday, Trump repeated his threat to grab Greenland: “One way or the other, we’re going to get it.” That recalled his earlier warning to Copenhagen to give him what he wants or face the consequences: “maybe things have to happen with respect to Denmark having to do with tariffs”. Nice place you got there; would be a shame if something happened to it.
It’s the same shakedown he’s performing on the US’s northern neighbour. Canada’s outgoing prime minister Justin Trudeau spelled it out this week, accusing Trump of trying to engineer “a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that will make it easier to annex us”, adding that: “We will never be the 51st state.” It’s a technique familiar in the darker corners of the New Jersey construction industry: a series of unfortunate fires that only stops when a recalcitrant competitor submits.
Both the substance and the style are pure mafia. Note the obsession with respect, demonstrated in last week’s Oval Office confrontation with Zelenskyy. Between them, JD Vance and Trump accused the Ukrainian leader three times of showing disrespect,sounding less like world leaders than touchy Tommy DeVito, the Joe Pesci character in Goodfellas.
Note too the humiliation of subordinates. In his address to Congress, the president introduced secretary of state Marco Rubio as the man charged with taking back the Panama canal. “Good luck, Marco,” said Trump, with a chuckle. “Now we know who to blame if anything goes wrong.” Cue anxious laughter from the rest of the underlings, briefly relieved that it wasn’t them.
It’s hard for aides and opponents alike to keep up because power is exercised arbitrarily and inconsistently. Tariffs are imposed, then suspended. Indeed, one reason why import taxes so appeal to Trump is that they can be enforced instantly and by presidential edict. That extends to the exemptions Trump can offer to favoured US industries. As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes observed: “This is very obviously going to be a protection racket, where Trump can at the stroke of a pen destroy or save your business depending on how compliant you are.”
This characterization of Trump is so spot on that you really should go read the rest. I’m using this description of FARTUS as a background to the absolutely appalling crap that’s going on today. It’s hard to mentally deal with how quickly he’s disassembled so many long-standing U.S. Institutions in such a short time. This is especially true because it appears that the massive amount of incompetence and ignorance that his appointments display just escalates the damage. Look at this headline in The Atlantic. It’s reported by Jeffrey Goldberg. “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans. U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.” WTAF?
The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.
I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.
This is going to require some explaining.
The story technically begins shortly after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel, in October 2023. The Houthis—an Iran-backed terrorist organization whose motto is “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam”—soon launched attacks on Israel and on international shipping, creating havoc for global trade. Throughout 2024, the Biden administration was ineffective in countering these Houthi attacks; the incoming Trump administration promised a tougher response.
This is where Pete Hegseth and I come in.
On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz. I have met him in the past, and though I didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me, I did think it somewhat unusual, given the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with journalists—and Trump’s periodic fixation on me specifically. It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me. It is not at all uncommon these days for nefarious actors to try to induce journalists to share information that could be used against them.
I accepted the connection request, hoping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter.
Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”
A message to the group, from “Michael Waltz,” read as follows: “Team – establishing a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours. My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items and will be sending that out later this evening.”
The message continued, “Pls provide the best staff POC from your team for us to coordinate with over the next couple days and over the weekend. Thx.”
The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.
Definitely go read this one. I’ve been missing reading John le Carré. I’m assuming anyone with a background in spying would have saucer eyes by this time. Trump’s love of playing checkers with the countries of the world is dangerous and immoral. He plays with everyone’s life like a mad king. This is from Oliver Darcy at Status. It’s a remarkable indictment of how the press enables his heinous policies and statements. “Gulf of Fear. When news anchors tiptoe around the name Gulf of Mexico, it’s not just semantics—it’s a glimpse at how the press starts to flinch under political pressure.”
In China, Taiwan doesn’t exist—at least not as a country. On official maps, it’s a province. The government enforces strict language about Taiwan’s status, shaping how its people—and the rest of the world—talk about it. The goal, of course, is far more significant than the name on a map. It’s not about semantics. It’s about wielding influence and asserting dominance. Controlling the language people use, particularly in relation to global geography, is a powerful capability to possess.
In the United States, that kind of top-down dictation might feel like a distant threat, the kind of thing that happens in authoritarian regimes or dystopian novels like “1984,” not in a country built on free speech safeguarded by the First Amendment. Americans tend to believe our press is too independent and and too proud to ever bow to government pressure. We assume that if a president ever tried to dictate language, the Fourth Estate would resist. We assume that we’re immune from such pressures.
But an important segment of the press—the television news media—over the past week quietly demonstrated that it is far less adversarial and far more compliant than the breathless promos these networks air hyping themselves as fearless truth-tellers. When the eyes of the world fixated on the stranded NASA astronauts being rescued and touching down back on Earth, every channel danced around what precisely to call the body of water they splashed into. A review of transcripts, courtesy of SnapStream, revealed an alarming reality: not one of the outlets could muster up the courage to simply refer to it as the Gulf of Mexico, the water feature’s name since the 16th century.
Instead, television news organizations tied themselves in knots, performing linguistic gymnastics to stay out of Donald Trump’s crosshairs, while also tiptoeing around audiences who would have surely been incensed to see them bend the knee and call it the “Gulf of America.” On ABC News, “World News Tonight” anchor David Muir referred to “spectacular images from off the coast of Florida.” On the “NBC Nightly news,” anchor Lester Holt spoke about the astronauts “splashing down off the Florida Gulf coast.” On the “CBS Evening News,” it was referred to simply as “the Gulf.” And on CNN, anchor Jake Tapper tried to seemingly have it both ways, noting the U.S. government refers to it as the “Gulf of America,” but the rest of the world calls it the Gulf of Mexico.
In fact, I could only one find instance on a television newscast where a journalist referred to the body of water as the Gulf of Mexico. During an appearance on MSNBC, NBC News correspondent Tom Costello used the term, but then quickly corrected himself, almost as if he had realized he was forbidden from doing so. “Six hours from right now, there will be a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico,” he said, before backtracking. “Sorry, however you want to call the Gulf. It will be splashing down in the Gulf.”
Suffice to say, none of this was an accident.
We first saw the capitulation of the tech bros and their social media platforms, including Jeff Bezos, who has ruined The Washington Post. This week, the situation there is getting worse. The first thing any autocrat wants to do is to come for any vestige of a free media. This is from MEDIAITE as reported by David Gilmour. “Trump Claims Jeff Bezos Trashed the ‘Crazy People’ in His Own Newsroom: ‘They’re Out of Control’.
President Donald Trump claimed that billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos privately expressed regret over the newspaper’s editorial direction and trashed his own “out of control” newsroom for writing “bad articles” about him.
The comments came during a sit-down with OutKick’s Clay Travisaboard Air Force One on Saturday after Travis suggested “it seems” that Bezos may be attempting to make The Washington Post “more fair” in coverage towards Trump.
Trump agreed and didn’t hesitate to praise Bezos, telling Travis “I think it’s great.”
Travis later asked whether Trump had discussed how the newspaper had come after him “like crazy” in the past, AND the president replied: “At length, I talked to him about it. [Bezos is] a good guy. I didn’t really know him in the first term. I mean, it’s such a difference between now and the first time.”
Pressed on what Bezos had said he had planned for The Post’s coverage, Trump said: “Just that. He’s really trying to be more fair.”
Trump continued: “They actually did a couple of bad articles on him. He said, ‘This is crazy, I lose my fortune running this thing and they, you know, they’re out of control.’ These people are crazy. They’re crazy people. They’re out of control.”
“And he’s a actually a very good guy,” the president added. “If you look at the inauguration, look at the people that were on that stage, here was a who’s who of a world that was totally against me the first time. It’s a much different presidency. I have much more support.”
And now, we have the capitulation of top law firms. How many more legs of democracy will we lose? The Bulwark draws the line today. “Stop Making Excuses for Not Fighting Trump. The capitulations and acquiescence we’ve seen so far will only make opposition more difficult down the road.” This is written by William Kristol under the lede “No Excuse.”
Among those who might be expected to stand up against Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, the hills are alive with the sound of excuses.
You’re an elected official. The Trump administration has rounded up individuals and sent them, without any due process and with much carelessness about who’s been seized, to a mega-prison in El Salvador. The administration is boasting about what it’s done and heralding it a prelude to further actions in the same vein.
You’re thinking of condemning these truly grotesque violations of constitutional rights and human decency. Maybe I should say this isn’t right?
Whoa, Nellie! Not so fast, your political advisers hasten to instruct you. The polls on this issue aren’t great. This really isn’t the hill to die on.
You take their advice. But you tell yourself, and you assure others, that of course you will fight one day—on some other hill, on some faraway hill, some time far in the future.
But to fight now? Bad idea.That would simply play into Trump’s hands. After all, Trump and his allies are good at fighting. If you try to do something, there’s a risk they’ll turn it against you. Whereas if you say nothing, nothing can be used against you.
You might worry for a second that silence and acquiescence just plays into Trump’s hands. But you’re not a sophisticated Democratic operative. So you take their advice.
And anyway, there’s a better plan. That plan is that, eventually, Trump will become less popular. Then, the public will rise up. And then you can speak up. It all works out.
It also works out if you’re in the private sector. In fact, if you’re the head of a huge law firm, capitulation isn’t just a regrettable necessity, it’s your duty. You’re acting in the best interests of your clients. It would be wrong and irresponsible to act otherwise.
What’s more, No one in the wider world can appreciate how stressful it is to confront an executive order like this until one is directed at you.
The people in the “wider world”—those serving in the military or waiting tables or cleaning offices at Paul Weiss—they just can’t appreciate the stress that comes from occupying that corner office at 51st and 6th.
Ugh.
All of these excuses—and there are many more!—are distasteful. But what’s worse is that they make it easier and more likely that others will capitulate. They make it seem that you’re kind of a chump if you actually fight Trump’s authoritarian takeover. The excuses offered for capitulation increase the damage done by capitulation.
As usual, Shakespeare saw all. Here’s Pembroke in Act IV, Scene 2 of King John:
And oftentimes excusing of a fault Doth make the fault the worse by th’ excuse, As patches set upon a little breach Discredit more in hiding of the fault Than did the fault before it was so patched.
The excuses offered by our elites for not standing up to authoritarianism have the effect of helping the authoritarians gain further ground.
Zach Beauchamp writes at VOX, “There’s a pattern in Trump’s power grabs. The White House strategy demands we defend alleged criminals and those with unpopular views.”
After rising to power, Nazis pitched power grabs as efforts to address the alleged threat posed by menaces like “Judeo-Bolshevism,” harnessing the powers of bigotry and political polarization to get ordinary Germans on board with the demolition of their democracy.
What’s happening in America right now has chilling echoes of this old tactic. When engaging in unlawful or boundary-pushing behavior, the Trump administration has typically gone after targets who are either highly polarizing or unpopular. The idea is to politicize basic civil liberties questions — to turn a defense of the rule of law into either a defense of widely hated groups or else an ordinary matter of partisan politics.
The administration’s first known deportation of a green card holder targeted a pro-Palestinian college activist at Columbia University, the site of some of the most radical anti-Israel activity. For this reason, Columbia was also the first university it targeted for a funding cutoff. Trump has also targeted an even more unpopular cohort: The first group of American residents sent to do hard labor in a Salvadoran prison was a group of people his administration claimed without providing evidence were Tren de Aragua gang members.
Trump is counting on the twin powers of demonization and polarization to justify their various efforts to expand executive authority and assail civil liberties. They want to make the conversation less about the principle — whether what Trump is doing is legal or a threat to free speech — and more a referendum on whether the targeted group is good or bad.
There is every indication this pattern will continue. And if we as a society fail to understand how the Trump strategy works, or where it leads, the damage to democracy could be catastrophic.
This, too, is a long read that deserves a look. A lot of this goes back to White House aid Stephan Miller. This guy needs to have an entire press detail following him. I’m going to end with a few articles on economics. The first comes from Paul Krugman and will clarify what’s happening with Social Security. “Social Security: A Time for Outrage. Trump’s policies attack his own base — but who will tell them?” I often find myself in conversations with friends, and we all wonder if Trump Supporters will ever show a glimmer of intelligence.
Donald Trump is often described as a “populist.” Yet his administration is stuffed with wealthy men who are clueless about how the other 99.99 percent lives, while his policies involve undermining the working class while enabling wealthy tax cheats.
What is true is that many working-class voters supported Trump last year because they believed that he was on their side. And that disconnect between perceptions and reality ought to be at the heart of any discussion of what Democrats should do now.
Right now the central front in the assault on the working class is Social Security, which Elon Musk, unable to admit error, keeps insisting is riddled with fraud. The DOGE-bullied Social Security Administration has already announced that those applying for benefits or trying to change where their benefits are deposited will need to verify their identity either online or in person — a huge, sometimes impossible burden on the elderly, often disabled Americans who need those benefits most. And with staff cuts and massive DOGE disruption, it seems increasingly likely that some benefits just won’t arrive as scheduled.
Oh, and Leland Dudek, the acting Social Security administrator, threatened to shut the whole thing down unless DOGE was given access to personal data.
Not to worry, says Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Commerce secretary. Only “fraudsters” would complain about missing a Social Security check:
Let’s say social security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.
There’s so much wrong with that statement that it’s hard to know where to start. But it’s clear that Lutnick — like many affluent people — has no idea how important Social Security is to the finances of most older Americans. According to a Social Security Administration study, half of Americans over 65 get a majority of their income from Social Security; a quarter depend almost entirely on Social Security, which supplies more than 90 percent of their income. I doubt that these people would shrug off a missed check.
Reliance on Social Security isn’t evenly distributed across the population; it’s strongly correlated with socioeconomic status. In particular, it very much depends on education, with less-educated Americans much more reliant on the program than those with more education:
That Lutnick quote cannot be repeated enough. The last read I’m sharing today comes from The Economist. “Musk Inc is under serious threat. The world’s richest man has lost focus. His competitors are taking advantage.” Well, isn’t that special?
UNTIL RECENTLY Elon Musk had little need to look over his shoulder. He once described competition for Tesla, his electric-vehicle (EV) company, as “the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day”, rather than the “small trickle” of other EV-makers. SpaceX, his rocket firm, had so undercut and outwitted the bloated aerospace incumbents that it had developed an almost invincible aura.
Yet if Mr Musk can tear himself away from the intoxication of shredding the American government, he may notice something. It is not just that the political firestorms he has whipped up this year are singeing his companies’ brands. It is that the two businesses that underpin his corporate empire—accounting for around 90% of its value and probably all its profit—are facing increasingly stiff competition. The world’s richest man has lost focus—and now has a target on his back.
Start with SpaceX. Last year it conducted five out of every six of the world’s spacecraft launches. Through its Starlink division, it owns 60% of satellites in space. In December it sold shares at a valuation of $350bn, two-thirds higher than its previous level. Starlink, its main profit engine, is on track to generate more than $11bn of revenue this year and $2bn of free cash flow, says Chris Quilty of Quilty Space, a consultancy.
Now, however, Mr Musk’s bomb-throwing interventions are alarming SpaceX customers, and at a time when rivals are growing more capable. His on-again, off-again threats to end Starlink’s support for Ukraine have raised the difficult question of trust. European politicians are pondering how reliable Mr Musk will be as a long-term provider of strategic satellite communications. The search for alternatives has helped spur a more than tripling of the share price of Eutelsat, the French owner of OneWeb, which provides satellite services to broadband companies.
No European supplier could come close to matching the 7,000 satellites Starlink has in low orbit. (Eutelsat has a mere 600.) Nor could any compete on price. As Simon Potter of BryceTech, another space consultancy, puts it, for now the concerns are “more noise than action”. Yet Starlink may soon face meaningful competition from Amazon’s Project Kuiper, which aims to put over 3,000 satellites into low orbit, creating a space-based broadband network. If it achieves that, some customers outside America may decide they have more confidence in an Amazon product than in one belonging to the mercurial Mr Musk.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, is also stepping up the pace in the launch business with Blue Origin. His rocket firm is separate from Project Kuiper, but has contracts to fly many of its satellites. In January Mr Bezos’s New Glenn rocket reached orbit on its first try. If Blue Origin manages to make repeated successful journeys with reusable rockets, it could become a meaningful competitor to SpaceX. So could Rocket Lab, SpaceX’s closest rival by number of launches, which is due to debut Neutron, a new rocket, this year.
Here comes the Rooster.
It’s like we’re in a very bad dystopian novel and can’t escape. Anyway, I’m not shutting up any time soon.
What’s on your Reading and Blogging list today?
Here’s a picture of this big boy who keeps crossing the road in front of my house. The rain just stopped, and the sun cleared up, so he’s been yelling at the sun for about an hour now. I feel like he’s some kind of omen.
Here’s an Alice in Chains song about the Vietnam War. That ought to cheer you up.
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“More Oval Office updates” John Buss, @repeat1969, @johnbuss.bsky.social
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
It’s come to the point where I don’t know where to start. There are so many alarming headlines today that it’s difficult to prioritize them. We’re barely 2 months into this regime, and we’re already seeing folks sent to gulags in El Salvador. Mislabelling people as terrorists is the latest tactic. His attacks on Veterans’ Benefits, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and funds for educational programs for disabled and disadvantaged children aren’t going over well. I think he’s decided that overplaying the terrorist card will be the red meat his KKKult needs.
So, today’s Truth Social screed is a warning to anyone picking on poor little Elon Musk and his cars with doors that fall off and engines that explode. He’s the King of “Rapid unscheduled disassembly” (RUD). Does he really think he has this kind of power? Can the courts stop this Evil Moron?
This is from the Daily Beast. “Trump Threatens to Send Tesla Vandals to Prisons in El Salvador. The president also implied attacks on cars were part of a national conspiracy against his megadonor Elon Musk.” We’re already finding his ability to disappear people on the immigration front; now, this? What has happened to Due Process? Does this include toilet papering the car lots? This is reported by Janet Brancolini.
President Donald Trump has joined the chorus of threats from his administration against anyone found guilty of vandalizing Teslas.
“People that get caught sabotaging Teslas will stand a very good chance of going to jail for up to 20 years, and that includes the funders,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform Truth Social. “WE ARE LOOKING FOR YOU!!!”
Hours later, he followed up with a second post musing that anyone who damages a Tesla could be deported to El Salvador.
“I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20-year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla,” he wrote. “Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!”
Deporting U.S. citizens is unconstitutional, the American Civil Liberties Union told NPR. Even deporting non-citizens to Salvadoran jails, as the administrative has already done, is legally suspect, given the documented human rights abuses that take place there, experts told the outlet.
A 2023 State Department report found that inmates in El Salvador have been electrocuted, tortured, and beaten to death.
The message came after Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that three defendants who had allegedly tried to use Molotov cocktails to light Teslas and charging stations on fire in Oregon, Colorado, and South Carolina were being charged with crimes that carried sentences of five to 20 years in prison.
Those arrests were actually made weeks ago, The New York Times reported, but Bondi appeared to time the announcements in response to a fresh wave of attacks this week. Arsonists in Las Vegas set a row of Teslas ablaze at a service center on Tuesday, and two Cybertrucks went up in flames at a dealership in Kansas City, Missouri, on Monday.
Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk held an impromptu company all-hands Thursday night, giving an update on the progress of a number of products while also attempting to assuage fears that the CEO is ignoring his post.
Tesla stock has been in free fall since the start of the year, with sales slipping in key regions like Europe and China and even in the US. Though the changeover to the new Model Y SUV has been seen as a drag on sales, Musk’s closeness to President Trump and embrace of right-wing politicians in Europe has seen Musk — and Tesla’s brand — suffer. Protests both in the US and abroad at Tesla showrooms are growing, as are acts of vandalism on Tesla EVs.
After delivering some opening remarks and a few quick updates on Tesla’s milestones, such as 7 million EVs produced and the new Model Y’s status, Musk addressed the elephant in the room: blowback to the Tesla brand from Musk’s foray into politics and leadership of the President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative.
“If you read the news, it feels like Armageddon. I can’t walk past a TV without seeing a Tesla on fire,” Musk said, referencing protesters setting Tesla vehicles on fire at dealerships and vandalism at Supercharger locations. “I understand if you don’t want to buy our product, but you don’t have to burn it down. That’s a bit unreasonable.”
I’m still laughing (mostly crying) that this is what Musk thinks is Armageddon, and it doesn’t include Veterans, Seniors, and kids with Special Needs not getting the help they need. So, why then does he feel taking away my Social Security that I am entitled to or doing something obscene to the remains of my Student Loans is reasonable?
I accidentally went back to X, and the account I supposedly deleted popped up while trying to read a post. But no worries! Glory of all Glories! They suspended me! Imagine this! I have the power! I have no idea what this is and didn’t bother to look. But I sure am having a delicious laughing fit over it all. Check with the President of El Salvador, Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez, if I disappear! Hey, if I didn’t have a sick, dark sense of humor, I wouldn’t have any sense of humor at all.
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I wasn’t aware the X even had integrity. Also, wtf is inauthentic activity? But the weird thing is Tesla stock is on the rise today. Well, it’s not that weird, given the Secretary of Commerce just gave a speech suggesting the KKKult buy the stock since it will never be as cheap as it is now. That White House Car Ad was filmed with the Hype Master FARTUS probably tickled the KKKult’s fancy. Wait, that wasn’t it, according to AXIOS. “Tesla falls after Commerce Secretary recommends buying stock.” This analysis is by Ben Berkowitz
Tesla shares fell early Thursday after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick used a TV appearance to urge Americans to buy stock in Elon Musk’s car company.
Why it matters: Cabinet secretaries don’t typically recommend individual stocks, much less those linked to the president’s closest adviser.
His recommendation was potentially overshadowed, though, by one of Tesla’s most fervent defenders on Wall Street calling the company’s situation a “crisis.”
What they’re saying: “I think, if you want to learn something on this show tonight, buy Tesla,” Lutnick said on Fox News Wednesday evening. “It’s unbelievable that this guy’s stock is this cheap. It’ll never be this cheap again.”
“I mean, who wouldn’t invest in Elon Musk? You gotta be kidding me.”
By the numbers: Tesla shares were down about 1.7% in premarket trading Thursday to $231.75.
The stock is down 5% in the last five days, 35% in the last month and 42% so far this year.
“We struggle to think of anything analogous in the history of the automotive industry, in which a brand has lost so much value so quickly,” JPMorgan analyst Ryan Brinkman said in a research note last week.
Between the lines: Lutnick’s comments are part of what has effectively become a Trump administration campaign to defend Tesla.
Amid a wave of “Tesla Takedown” rallies at dealerships nationwide, top administration officials have pledged to investigate protesters for domestic terrorism.
Trump said on Truth Social late Thursday, without elaborating further: “People that get caught sabotaging Teslas will stand a very good chance of going to jail for up to twenty years, and that includes the funders. WE ARE LOOKING FOR YOU!!!”
Of note: Just hours before Lutnick’s comments, Cantor Fitzgerald — the investment bank where he was previously CEO, which is now managed by his sons — upgraded Tesla’s stock.
The intrigue: Lutnick’s recommendation came as one of Wall Street’s most bullish Tesla analysts sounded the alarm on the company’s future.
“Lets call it like it is: Tesla is going through a crisis and there is one person who can fix it….Musk,” Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives wrote in a research note Wednesday night.
“As someone who is a core bull and believer in the Telsa long term growth story…..I loudly urge Musk and the Board to step up, stop being silent, and help resolve this crisis forming at Tesla,” Ives said.
Well, that ‘of note’ is certainly of note. I’d say this post today is enough to get me permanently banned from X, wouldn’t you? I just hope I get a crown, a sash, and a nice bouquet of flowers. Maybe not; let’s try some more headlines before the fat lady over there sings.
This is fromPolitico. “Elon Musk threatens Pentagon leakers after NYT report on secret China war briefing, “They will be found,” warns U.S. President Donald Trump’s billionaire adviser as White House lashes out at the media.” So, my big question is under what authority can he call out the hounds?
Donald Trump’s top adviser Elon Musk has openly threatened Pentagon employees who may have leaked information that the tech billionaire was due to get a briefing on a potential American war with China.
The story, published by the New York Times on Thursday evening U.S. time, said that — according to anonymous American officials — the Pentagon planned to brief Musk on Friday about the U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China.
After the story went live, the planned meeting was confirmed by Pentagon officials and President Trump — but both denied that the session would discuss military plans involving China.
“China will not even be mentioned or discussed,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform. “How disgraceful it is that the discredited media can make up such lies. Anyway, the story is completely untrue!!!”
Trump’s comments were then reposted on X by Musk, who called the New York Times “pure propaganda” and issued a threat, saying he looks “forward to the prosecution of those at the Pentagon who are leaking maliciously false information to NYT.”
“They will be found,” the tech billionaire warned.
The New York Times report that infuriated the White House emphasized that such a briefing by the Pentagon would expand Musk’s already wide-ranging role, and would highlight questions about potential conflicts of interest, as Musk reaches deep into the federal bureaucracy while continuing to run his companies like SpaceX, a major government contractor, and doing business in China.
It’s a tag team! Looks like Linda McMahon has taken them to school! But, wait, she’s trying to dismantle schools. Maybe they went to the woodshed instead for a little tête-à-tête. This is breaking news from the AP. “Live updates: Education Secretary says she plans to ‘unwind’ regulations of department.” Well, she’s sure not the Miss Linda from the New Orleans Romper Room!
President Donald Trumpsigned an executive order Thursday calling for the dismantling of the U.S. Education Department, advancing a campaign promise to take apart an agency that’s been a longtime target of conservatives.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon said on Friday that she is preparing to relocate the department’s core operations to other agencies and roll back federal regulations.
You may hear her describe her “visions” for the DOE at Fox News if you can stomach it. I’d rather read this article from ProPublica. “Parents Sue Trump Administration for Allegedly Sabotaging Education Department’s Civil Rights Division. The lawsuit claims that decimating the agency’s Office for Civil Rights will leave it unable to address issues of discrimination at school — violating the equal protection clause of the Fifth Amendment.” Nothing like another lawsuit to give Pam Bondage something to do.
Saying the Trump administration is sabotaging civil rights enforcement by the Department of Education, a federal lawsuit filed Friday morning seeks to stop the president and Secretary Linda McMahon from carrying out the mass firing of civil rights investigators and lawyers.
Two parents and the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a national disability rights group, jointly filed the lawsuit. It alleges that decimating the department’s Office for Civil Rights will leave the agency unable to handle the public’s complaints of discrimination at school. That, they said, would violate the equal protection clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The complaint comes three days after the Education Department notified about 1,300 employees — including the entire staff in seven of the 12 regional civil rights offices — that they are being fired, and the day after a group of 21 Democratic attorneys general sued McMahon and the president. That lawsuit alleges the Trump administration does not have the authority to circumvent Congress to effectively shutter the department.
The complaint filed on Friday argues that the “OCR has abdicated its responsibility to enforce civil rights protections” and that the administration has made a “decision to sabotage” the Education Department’s civil rights functions. That, the lawsuit alleges, overrides Congress’ authority. It names the Education Department, McMahon and the acting head of OCR, Craig Trainor.
“Through a series of press releases, policy statements, and executive orders, the administration has made clear its contempt for the civil rights of marginalized students,” the lawsuit says.
The parents’ lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It asks the court to declare the “decimation” of the OCR unlawful and seeks an injunction to compel the office to “process OCR complaints promptly and equitably.”
For once, I’m really happy that this country has way too many lawyers. So, the Democrats in Congress have announced a Whistle Blower site to encourage folks who are or have been Federal Employees to come forward with their stories about DOGE. This is from AXIOS. “Scoop: Democrats open whistleblower portal aimed at DOGE.” This is reported by Stephen Neukam.
enate Democrats are launching a new whistleblower portal for public and private workers to dish on how President Trump and DOGE are slashing the federal government.
Why it matters: Democrats hope whistleblowers will expose what they argue are the White House’s illegal moves to unilaterally dismantle federal agencies and programs.
Democrats say they want to hear from workers who are witnessing how Trump and Elon Musk have withheld funding and fired federal workers without the approval of Congress.
The portal, which launches Friday, is spearheaded by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), whose staff on the Senate Budget Committee will conduct oversight of the new tool.
The big picture: Democrats — who hold minorities in both the House and Senate — have little recourse against Trump’s efforts to downsize the federal government,
But they have launched an anti-DOGE messaging offensive, betting that a sense Trump has overreach by Trump will be unpopular with voters. Polling has shown voters — especially younger ones — are concerned by DOGE’s actions.
And all of the cuts have happened without the approval of Congress, which the Constitution entrusts with the power of the purse. Democrats see the DOGE cuts as an assault on the power of Congress.”The President is not a king, and we will make sure he is held accountable,” Merkley said in a statement.
I guess we’ll see.
Meanwhile, Trump threatens to shut down the Social Security Administration in a pique over a Judge’s decision to block Doge and Elon from going near the Agency. This is from Bloomberg News. “Social Security Says DOGE Ruling Could Force Agency to Shut Down.” Gregory Korte and Zoe Tillman have the story.
The Trump administration is threatening to all but shut down the Social Security Administration in response to a judge’s ruling blocking activities by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — an action that could delay payments to millions of beneficiaries caught in the middle of the legal battle.
Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek said the temporary restraining order issued Thursday is so broad in blocking access to data by “DOGE affiliates” that it could apply to any Social Security employee.
“My anti-fraud team would be DOGE affiliates. My IT staff would be DOGE affiliates,” Dudek said. “As it stands, I will follow it exactly and terminate access by all SSA employees to our IT systems.”
He said he would ask the judge to immediately clarify her order. “Really, I want to turn it off and let the courts figure out how they want to run a federal agency,” he said.
The judge concluded that the unions and the retiree-advocacy group that sued were likely to succeed in arguing that DOGE access to the agency’s systems violated US laws meant to safeguard sensitive information.
The standoff represents a new escalation in the multifront battle between President Donald Trump and the judiciary, potentially putting 73 million Americans who receive old-age or disability benefits in the crossfire.
‘All Legal Remedies’
The White House said Trump would “continue to seek all legal remedies available to ensure the will of the American people goes into effect.”
“In an 134-page decision, a radical leftist-judge ordered Social Security Administration employees not to implement the President’s government-efficiency agenda,” said White House deputy press secretary Harrison Fields. “This is yet another activist judge abusing the judicial system to try and sabotage the President’s attempts to rid the government of waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Courts have previously restricted access by DOGE staffers to sensitive Treasury payment systems until they certify that they’ve received proper clearance and training. But Thursday’s order by US District Judge Ellen Hollander goes even further, forbidding access to any non-anonymized data. She also ordered DOGE staff to delete or purge any Social Security Administration data that it already had in its possession.
“The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion,” Hollander wrote. “It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.”
DOGE is still looking for dead people. If you want to read more about that, you may at the Indian Times. The SSA is more worried about people being erroneously removed. They’ve put up information on their site to help all who may have been prematurely marked by Doge as Dead. CBS Newshas more information here. Kate Gibson has the information. “What Social Security says to do if you’re incorrectly listed as dead.”
More than 3 million deaths are reported to the Social Security Administration each year. Among them, a small portion — less than 10,000 — are erroneous and need to be corrected, according to the agency.
“Our records are highly accurate,” the SSA stated Monday in a blog post following up on an update released Sunday by the SSA on its death record. Of the millions of death reports received by Social Security each year, less than one-third of 1% are incorrect and need to be fixed, it stated.
Still, a person wrongly reported as deceased “can be devastating to the individual, spouse and dependent children,” as benefits are stopped and the process of restoring them can be long and challenging, according to SSA.
The agency’s statements come nearly a month after the new SSA head contradicted claims that tens of millions of dead people over the age of 100 were receiving checks.
Instead, those individuals “are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record,” said Lee Dudek, the new acting Social Security Administration commissioner who was placed in the role by President Trump, in a Feb. 19 statement. “These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits,” he said.
So that’s it for me today. I think that’s about all I can stomach.
What’s on your Reading and Blogging list today?Get Over It! An Eagles Shout out to Elon!
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Trump’s 100th day in office officially happens this month on the 30th. So far, not good. 
And yet, he persists. There’s a long list that follows. Seeing it all in print is disturbing. Zachary Basu has another take posted on 
There’s much to look forward to as we lurch towards the midterms. Little Marco Rubio is sure fucking up the state department. All you need to do is see a cabinet meeting. His face is telling. He looks like the only one who knows he’s going to hell. This is from NPR as reported by Graham Smith. 
There is some good news on the front of Trump’s kidnapping and disappearing people to El Salvador. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) managed to get a meeting with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, as was his goal. Historian Heather Cox Richardson, writing at her 
Trump threats to Fed Chair Powell scare the shit out of me. I am totally with Senator Elizabeth Warren on this statement. 
The Chinese are pranking Trump today. This is from the
Turmoil over tariffs drove fluctuations in global markets on Friday.
CNN has this headline today for a story written by Ella Nilsen.
Additionally, NASA is on the chopping block! Does this include all that money going to Elonia? This is from
We’re also unlikely to see other countries send their best and brightest to our US Universities with all this craziness. As some with with multiple degrees and ones that aren’t that easy to achieve, I would just like to say that my teachers, my students and grad assistants, and my colleagues and fellow students were consistently the best part of higher education school. I owe so much of my math chops to fellow students from India, Iran, Hong Kong, Turkey, and Taiwan. Both of my Doctorate advisors came here as students. One from India. The other is from Bangladesh. This brain drain will put us on the road to mediocrity.
Indeed. Please go read this.
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
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 
Remember the idea of visas for $5 million dollars? Well, now we know where that scatterbrained idea came from. 
One more read from me, and it’s off to the shower. 
This characterization of Trump is so spot on that you really should go read the rest. I’m using this description of FARTUS as a background to the absolutely appalling crap that’s going on today. It’s hard to mentally deal with how quickly he’s disassembled so many long-standing U.S. Institutions in such a short time. This is especially true because it appears that the massive amount of incompetence and ignorance that his appointments display just escalates the damage. Look at this headline in 
Definitely go read this one. I’ve been missing reading John le Carré. I’m assuming anyone with a background in spying would have saucer eyes by this time. Trump’s love of playing checkers with the countries of the world is dangerous and immoral. 
We first saw the capitulation of the tech bros and their social media platforms, including Jeff Bezos, who has ruined The Washington Post. This week, the situation there is getting worse. The first thing any autocrat wants to do is to come for any vestige of a free media. This is from 
And now, we have the capitulation of top law firms. How many more legs of democracy will we lose? 
Zach Beauchamp
This, too, is a long read that deserves a look. A lot of this goes back to White House aid Stephan Miller. This guy needs to have an entire press detail following him. I’m going to end with a few articles on economics. The first comes from Paul Krugman and will clarify what’s happening with 
That Lutnick quote cannot be repeated enough. The last read I’m sharing today comes from 
This is from the
I guess our new AG is a Bondage girl. Owners 
I’m still laughing (mostly crying) that this is what Musk thinks is Armageddon, and it doesn’t include Veterans, Seniors, and kids with Special Needs not getting the help they need. So, why then does he feel taking away my Social Security that I am entitled to or doing something obscene to the remains of my Student Loans is reasonable?
I accidentally went back to X, and the account I supposedly deleted popped up while trying to read a post. But no worries! Glory of all Glories! They suspended me! Imagine this! I have the power! I have no idea what this is and didn’t bother to look. But I sure am having a delicious laughing fit over it all. Check with the President of El Salvador, Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez, if I disappear! Hey, if I didn’t have a sick, dark sense of humor, I wouldn’t have any sense of humor at all.
I wasn’t aware the X even had integrity. Also, wtf is inauthentic activity? But the weird thing is Tesla stock is on the rise today. Well, it’s not that weird, given the Secretary of Commerce just gave a speech suggesting the KKKult buy the stock since it will never be as cheap as it is now. That White House Car Ad was filmed with the Hype Master FARTUS probably tickled the KKKult’s fancy. Wait, that wasn’t it, according to 
Well, that ‘of note’ is certainly of note. I’d say this post today is enough to get me permanently banned from X, wouldn’t you? I just hope I get a crown, a sash, and a nice bouquet of flowers. Maybe not; let’s try some more headlines before the fat lady over there sings.
This is from
It’s a tag team! Looks like Linda McMahon has taken them to school! But, wait, she’s trying to dismantle schools. Maybe they went to the woodshed instead for a little tête-à-tête. This is breaking news from 
For once, I’m really happy that this country has way too many lawyers. So, the Democrats in Congress have announced a Whistle Blower site to encourage folks who are or have been Federal Employees to come forward with their stories about DOGE. This is from 
I guess we’ll see.
Meanwhile, Trump threatens to shut down the Social Security Administration in a pique over a Judge’s decision to block Doge and Elon from going near the Agency. This is from 
DOGE is still looking for dead people. If you want to read more about that, you may at the 
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