“Upon further reflection, the Rededicate 250 National Prayer thing now makes huge sense. He Is Risen!” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The one thing you can depend on every time Orange Caligula gets the reins of government is that things will always get worse, except for democracy backsliding. It’s just a matter of how shocking the next thing is. How many of us are in a constant state of being stunned that we aren’t the least bit surprised by the news, even though we still find the actions stomach-churning? Well, hang on! It’s been a week of WTF moments.
Today’s Tit-for-Tat announcement shows just how brazen the entire administration has gotten. This is from Time Magazine. It’s reported by Rebecca Schneid. What kind of monster thinks these things up?
President Donald Trump has withdrawn his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) amid reports that he struck a deal with his own Justice Department to create a $1.7 billion fund to compensate political allies who claim they were wrongly targeted by the Biden Administration.
The alleged plan, first reported by the New York Times and ABC News, would be paid for with taxpayer funds and is being fast-tracked, but has yet to be officially approved. If approved, the fund would be used to pay damages to people who say they were harmed by the Biden Administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system, including the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Court documents showed Trump withdrew his lawsuit against the IRS, a move that could herald a private deal between the president and the agency he controls, while skirting legal oversight of the deal.
In a lawsuit filed in a Miami federal court in January, Trump and other plaintiffs accused federal agencies of failing in their duty of stopping a former IRS contractor from illegally obtaining and disclosing tax returns to the New York Times, ProPublica, and “other left-wing media outlets,” between May 2019 and September 2020.
The funds would also be used to settle his request for $230 million in legal claims from the Justice Department for the 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate and investigation into alleged ties between his campaign and Russia
As part of the settlement, Trump would also reportedly ask the IRS to public1pologize for the disclosure of his personal financial records and to waive an IRS audit
According to the Times, the Justice Department would model the program after the historic $760 million settlement fund stemming from the Keepseagle v. Vilsack class-action lawsuit, settled in 2011, which alleged that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) systematically discriminated against Native American farmers and ranchers in its farm loan and loan servicing program.
We know someone who can sum this up nicely. This is how Hillary put it this morning.
Trump didn’t just pardon his followers who stormed the U.S. Capitol. He’s now set them up for payments through a slush fund he created to reward his allies—out of your tax dollars. You could not make this up.
Robert Reich had some additional thoughts and analysis. He elucidated them on his SubStackthis morning. “Has Trump’s Republican Party Become a Criminal Enterprise? Trump’s purge of all political opponents, including Senator Bill Cassidy, leaves it with no purpose other than helping Trump achieve his lawless goals.” Trump puts us in a Mafia State every time he’s elected. Grifting is his only talent, and he’s been rich and influential enough to find ambitious and greedy toadies to carry out his wishes. We’ve known this forever here.
On Saturday, Trump took revenge on Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy for Cassidy’s vote five years ago to convict Trump, in his second impeachment, for instigating an attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Cassidy thereby became the first GOP senator defeated by a Trump-endorsed candidate in a Republican primary. (Other Republican senators who have stood up to Trump — such as North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Utah’s Mitt Romney — saw the writing on the wall and didn’t seek reelection.)
Trump’s purge of Cassidy comes in the wake of Trump’s purges of House Republicans who stood up to him, such as Wyoming’s Liz Cheney.
Trump’s next Republican target in the House is Kentucky representative Thomas Massie, who had the guts to oppose U.S. military involvement in Iran, demand release of the Epstein files, and criticize Trump’s spending bills for adding to the national debt. Massie appears likely to be defeated by a Trump-backed opponent in Tuesday’s Kentucky primary.
Trump has also purged state legislators who have refused to do his bidding, such as the seven Indiana Republicans who refused to redistrict the state as Trump demanded they do, and who Trump insured were defeated in their recent primaries.
The message is clear to every current or aspiring Republican politician: Be a toady to Trump, or you’re out.
In his concession speech Friday night, Cassidy stated the obvious reference to Trump:
“Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution. And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.”
Nicely put but sadly irrelevant because Trump — who’s clearly serving himself rather than the American public — now possesses all levers of power in the official Republican Party.
As Republican senator Lindsey Graham said yesterday on Meet the Press,“There’s no room in this party to destroy [Trump’s] agenda.”
There’s more at the link. My question is, what the hell can the rest of us who don’t support him do? I voted Saturday morning, wondering which candidate I had voted for would even have a chance under the new gerrymandering. That doesn’t even consider that we couldn’t even vote for our Congressional representatives, given the Supreme Court decision and the quick fix redraw of our map to ensure maybe one black person will retain their seat. The only good news to come out of the election was that all five constitutional amendments proposed by Governor Klandry were voted down.
Will these latest bits of news set up another J-6 self-coup? There will certainly be a rabid MAGA candidate sitting in Cassidy’s seat come next January. This is from NPR. “Louisiana senator who voted to convict Trump loses Republican primary.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, one of seven Republican senators who voted to remove President Trump from office after the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, lost his bid for reelection.
Louisiana’s Senate primary on Saturday was the latest test of Trump’s hold on his party. The president recruited a challenger, Rep. Julia Letlow, and urged supporters to defeat Cassidy over his vote.
“His disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now part of legend,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post about Cassidy. “And it’s nice to see his political career is OVER.”
Cassidy finished third in a three-way race, according to the Associated Press. Letlow and another candidate, state Treasurer John Fleming, will advance to a June 27 runoff.
In conceding the race, Cassidy hinted that he would not finish his second term quietly. But in an apparent dig at Trump, he also said he wouldn’t contest his loss.
“You don’t pout, you don’t whine, you don’t claim that the election was stolen,” Cassidy told supporters on Saturday night. “You thank the voters for the privilege of representing the state or the country for as long as you’ve had that privilege. And that’s what I’m doing right now.”
Cassidy told voters they should cast their ballot based on the present and the future, not the past, a subtle discouragement from re-litigating the 2020 election six years on. But for many primary voters, Cassidy’s move to convict felt like a betrayal, and Trump’s endorsement was paramount.
“I’m the type of person, if you cross me, I probably won’t trust you anymore,” retired sheriff deputy Kevin Dupree said earlier this month. “I think his political career in Louisiana is finished.”
My friend Robert Mann, a former Journalism Professor at LSU, has something poignant to say about the loss. This is from his SubStack. “Enjoy your tarnished legacy, Bill Cassidy. You earned it.” It’s a good lesson: while all politics is local, it can be influenced by a cult of personality.
Although he pandered shamelessly to Trump and MAGA to the bitter end, Sen. Bill Cassidy could have written a different ending to his political career.
He could have left office with his head held high, proud and satisfied that he’d remained true to his principles and the Hippocratic Oath.
He could have protected our families by blocking Trump’s efforts to destroy our public health system.
He could have legislated (and campaigned) as the moderate he told me and others he truly was.
He could have put the state of Louisiana — and the nation — ahead of his desire for another U.S. Senate term.
He could have been our senator, not Donald Trump’s.
He could have done all this and more, but Cassidy lacked the courage, the imagination, and the decency to put you and me ahead of his political ambition.
What Cassidy received in return for his soul is eternal shame and a well-earned legacy of cravenness.
I hope Cassidy enjoys his earnings.
I hope he also feels the harsh judgment of history that will be reserved for a Trump critic turned shameless toady who sold out to the worst, most corrupt president in American history—and still lost.
Bill Cassidy could have written a different story for himself and his state, but he just didn’t have it in him.
Speaking of Mafia-like behavior, here’s a little something on the Don’s Greenland Grab. This is from the New York Times. “In Closed-Door Talks, U.S. Demands a Major Role in Greenland. Greenlandic officials worry about the direction of the negotiations aimed at defusing President Trump’s threats to seize their island. But they have little leverage.” The story has a number of contributing reporters.
With the conflict in Iran still smoldering, President Trump’s obsession with Greenland seems like a forgotten sideshow.
But for the past four months, negotiators from the United States, Greenland and Denmark, which controls Greenland’s foreign affairs, have been holding confidential talks in Washington about Greenland’s future.
The talks were meant to give Mr. Trump an offramp to his threats of a military takeover of Greenland and to scale back a crisis that risked breaking apart the NATO alliance. But Greenlandic leaders are worried about what is being proposed, which is a much larger U.S. role on the Arctic island. And they fear that if the conflict with Iran winds down, the president will swing his aggression back on them.
Some Greenlandic politicians say they have even circled a date on their calendars to be wary: June 14, Mr. Trump’s birthday.
An investigation by The New York Times, based on interviews with officials in Washington, Copenhagen and Greenland, has discovered:
The United States is trying to modify a longstanding military arrangement to ensure American troops can stay in Greenland indefinitely, even if Greenland becomes independent. The notion is basically a forever clause, and Greenlanders do not like it.
The United States has pushed the talks beyond military matters and wants effective veto power over any major investment deals in Greenland to box out competitors like Russia and China. Greenlanders and Danes strongly object to this.
The United States is discussing cooperation with Greenland on natural resources. The island is loaded with oil, uranium, rare earths and other critical minerals, though much of it is buried deep beneath Greenland’s ice.
The Pentagon is rapidly moving ahead on plans for a military expansion and recently sent a Marine Corps officer to Narsarsuaq, a town in southern Greenland, to inspect the World War II-era airport, the harbor and places where American troops could be housed.
The American demands are so steep, Greenlandic officials fear, that they amount to a major imposition on their sovereignty. Despite all of the talk from Danish and American officials that Greenland’s future is up to the island’s 57,000 people, Greenlandic officials said the American demands would tie their hands for generations.
If the Americans get everything they want, said Justus Hansen, a member of Greenland’s Parliament, there will never be any “real independence.”
“We might as well raise our own flag halfway,” he said.
There’s a lot more at that gifted link. Jeer Heeter has this description of our Grifter-in-Chief in his article in The Nation. “Trump Gloats About “Making a Fortune” While Americans Suffer. As his war in Iran wreaks havoc, Trump is fixated on personal glory and enrichment.”
Donald Trump is annoyed that he can’t celebrate the massive profits oil companies are making due to the war he launched in the Middle East. Left to his own druthers, Trump would be exulting in the hundreds of billions of dollars produced by skyrocketing oil prices—if it weren’t for the pesky fact that it comes at the expense of ordinary Americans, who are now paying roughly 40 percent more every time they fill up the gas tank than they were before Trump started bombing Iran nearly three months ago.
We know this thanks to Trump’s endless dedication to saying the quiet part out loud. Speaking with Sean Hannity of Fox News on Thursday, Trump chortled that because far less oil was coming out of the Middle East, “people are finding other places to buy oil, like Texas.” Trump added, “So I don’t want to say we’re making a fortune, you understand that? Because if I say that, they’re going to say ‘oh, he forgets about the little man with the $4 gasoline.’”
The juxtaposition between “making a fortune” and the “little man” suffering at the gas station underscores just how obtuse Trump and his allies have become in their economic message. Their response to the harm caused by Trump’s policies is not to reverse those policies, or even to appear sympathetic about their effects. It’s to express their total indifference to the suffering of the American people. At the same time, Trump is obsessively focused on his real priorities: enriching himself and his family, and creating gaudy monuments to himself such as a new White House ballroom and a Triumphal Arch that will squat in the middle of Washington, DC. In response to a reporter’s query as to whom the arch would celebrate, Trump pointed to himself and said “me.”
Trump twice won the White House on a message of economic populism, promising in his 2025 inauguration that he would “bring prices down.” Today, he sings a very different tune, with a message that amounts to the apocryphal words misattributed to the French Queen Marie Antoinette: “Let them eat cake.”
Speaking to reporters last Monday, Trump said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.” He also said that concern for the financial suffering of Americans would not be a factor in making a deal with Iran “not even a little bit.”
Under normal political circumstances, the Republican Party would be wise to separate itself from Trump’s callousness. But the GOP has become a hollowed-out operation mainly concerned with tending to Trump’s cult of personality. On Saturday, Trump won a major victory against critics in the party when Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy came in third in his party’s Senate primary race, losing to a candidate Trump had supported. Cassidy’s loss underscores a lesson Trump has taught the GOP again and again over the last decade: There is no future in the party for anyone who defies his will.
So, rather than distancing themselves from Trump’s “let them eat cake” message, Republicans are embracing the president’s self-defeating rhetoric. On Thursday, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan told CNN that oil prices were “were coming down until we had to deal with this situation, but, you know, that’s life, that’s dealing with…the world we live in.”
It’s going to take hard work and a lot of voting to get rid of this monster and all the dregs of humanity he’s put in charge of the country. It appears they have all been profiting from insider news on the Iran War.
1. What I found in Trump's new 113-page financial disclosure report. It doesn't look good.
This is from Jude Legum’s SubStack. “The smoking guns in Trump’s new financial disclosure, Trump publicly praised companies the same day he bought their stock.”
On March 11, President Trump took a tour of a manufacturing facility in Reading, Ohio, owned by Thermo Fisher Scientific, a medical supply company. During the tour, Trump lavished praise on Thermo Fisher which uses the facility to manufacture prescription drugs on a contract basis. “It’s a great honor being here. It’s a great company,” Trump said, appearing alongside CEO Marc Casper. “You have done a fantastic job and I’d like to congratulate you.”
Later, Trump asked another Thermo Fisher executive to share “some great information about this incredible company.” The executive talked about how Thermo Fisher is producing drugs for Merck and others at the facility. Trump then explicitly encouraged other pharmaceutical companies to contract with Thermo Fisher to “on-shore” more jobs. He claimed that some pharmaceutical companies were building their own U.S. manufacturing facilities but said “they can get here a lot faster by using this great company.”
Trump did not mention that, the same day of the tour, March 11, he purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 of Thermo Fisher stock. (Federal disclosure rules only require filers to list their transactions in broad ranges.) Trump did not publicly disclose the purchase until May 14. It was listed on page 38 of a 113-page document cataloging Trump’s stock purchases in 2026.
Trump also purchased between $51,000 and $115,000 worth of Thermo Fisher stock about one month before his visit on February 12. He made another purchase of Thermo Fisher valued between $15,000 and $50,000 on March 2. So at the time of Trump’s effusive remarks about Thermo Fisher, he had purchased as much as $215,000 worth of the company’s stock over the previous month.
The fact that Trump visited a Thermo Fisher facility on the same day he purchased the company’s stock — and bought Thermo Fisher stock repeatedly in the weeks before his visit — has not previously been reported.
The disclosures reveal that Trump has been a highly active trader in 2026, executing thousands of transactions — many in individual stocks impacted by his administration’s policies. In response to criticism, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization claimed that the trades were completely separate from Trump’s official duties and managed by an independent outside financial advisor. “President Trump’s investment holdings are maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions,” the spokesperson said. “Trades are executed and portfolios are balanced through automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions.”
The fact that Trump purchased stock in Thermo Fisher the same day that he toured its facility undercuts this claim. Further, the March 11 purchase of Thermo Fisher stock was marked “UNSOLICITED” in the document. An “unsolicited” trade is one that is not recommended by a broker, but initiated by the customer.
At least three immigrant children were taken into custody and restrained with zip ties at the San Antonio Immigration Court. The children were between the ages of 9 and 12.www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/a…
Brookings reminds us that there are still thousands of families with children experiencing horrible detentions and deportations because of the MAGA obsession with keeping America as white as possible. “The administration has detained 400,000 immigrants: What do we know about their children?” Is this really the kind of country you want to live in and that you thought you grew up in?
The Trump administration has made detention and deportation the centerpieces of its immigration policy. Around 60,000 people are being held in detention currently, and around 400,000 people have been booked into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention from an interior arrest since the administration began. Detention capacity is likely to expand, with $45 billion allocated to expanding detention facilities in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Though it is mostly adults who are detained and deported, many children are impacted by separation from their parents. However, there are no reliable data on how many detainees or deportees have children in the U.S., nor on what happens to them once their parent is taken into custody. Here we focus on detainees, about whom we have better information than deportees. Even a short separation from a parent is likely traumatic for a child, but a majority of detentions are not short-lived separations. A ProPublica study following ICE arrests of mothers of U.S. citizen children over the first seven months of the administration found that 60% had been removed and 17% remained in custody at the study’s conclusion.
To estimate the number of children affected by parental detention, we rely on demographic characteristics of detainees matched with likely unauthorized immigrants in the American Community Survey. Our analysis (detailed below) suggests that more than 145,000 U.S. citizen children have likely experienced a parent booked into detention since the administration began, with more than 22,000 of those experiencing detention of all their co-resident parents. In the accompanying interactive, we allow users to explore how the estimates change when the underlying assumptions are varied. Regardless of the assumptions used, it is clear that tens of thousands of children have faced parental detention since January 2025.
Please use the link to read the details. The time and research it took to find out all this was amazing and hard to believe.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
I can’t even explain what kind of crush I had on Cat Stevens in ninth grade. I could basically play his entire songbook. He’s an amazing songwriter and musician.
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“Kristi Noem is so thoughtful.” John Buss, @repeat1968. @johnbuss.bsky.social
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Cartoonist John Buss continues to blow me away with his renditions of all the monsters inhabiting the Trump Regime. You never know how far they will go. Incompetency and cruelty are their defining parameters. The only thing you know about this regime is that they are negatively correlated and huge. You know the negative impact on the country in a big way, but the actual actions leading to the outcomes are unimaginable. You know they’re going to a new low that will be shocking and unimaginable. I’m beginning to think that some are designed to take our eyes away from the dismantling of our government and democracy.
Today’s Featured Funny was more than I had hoped when I put this on his Facebook thread. “Hi! It’s your dark muse again. You have to do something about Kristin Noem doing a glam shot in front of all the shirtless, bearded men she likely sent to be tortured and enslaved. Abu Ghraib, but this administration has no shame!” She had paraded down here in a similar outfit during the Super Bowl, but instead of looking like a slutty ICE agent, she looked like a Slutty police officer. She just oozes psychopath, doesn’t she? She’s LARPing all those war criminals that psychologically torture whatever they capture. Just thinking about how the really bad ones torture animals first, and her poor puppy.
This is from the Washington Post (article gifted). “How Kristi Noem’s $50,000 Rolex in a Salvadoran prison became a political flash point. The high-end Swiss watch lent a striking contrast to her tour of a notoriously overcrowded mega-prison in one of Latin America’s poorest countries.” I supposed she could wear that “I don’t care, do you?” jacket, but then everyone would miss her signature whitie tightie boob shot op. She must have a closet full of those. She wore them daily during her Super Bowl tour. This is reported by Drew Harwell and Alec Dent.
When Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem visited El Salvador’s most notorious mega-prison on Wednesday, she sported an eye-catching piece on her wrist that experts have identified as an 18-karat gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona watch that sells for about $50,000.
The high-end Swiss watch lent a striking contrast to Noem’s tour of the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, where imprisoned men watched silently from a crowded cell as she recorded a video for a social media post warning undocumented immigrants not to enter the United States.
“If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face,” Noem said.
Noem’s choice of watch kicked off a race among internet sleuths to identify it and infuriated immigration advocates, who said the juxtaposition was insensitive to the harsh reality of mass imprisonment and deportation.
“You’re in front of all these people in a very poor country, who are in the bottom 10 or 20 percent of their country … and it looks like you’re just flaunting your wealth while you flaunt your freedom,” said Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group.
“This is an administration that is trying to be populist, anti-elite, appeal to the common man,” he added. Meanwhile, there’s “people stacked up like cordwood behind her.”
Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin confirmed the make of the watch in a statement, saying that “then-Governor Noem chose to use the proceeds from her New York Times best selling books to purchase an item she could wear and one day pass down to her children.”
While the #FARTUS purge of immigrants looks like an SS round-up. I fear escalation to Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen (killing squads). It is difficult to predict if they will actually go that far. We’ve already had children in cages and family separation. We also have midnight raids that have spirited away graduate students who have taken part in demonstrations or written op-eds against the bombing of Palestinian civilians in GAZA. This is from Mike Masnik from TechDirt. “Trump’s Secret Police Are Now Disappearing Students For Their Op-Eds.”
For years, we’ve been hearing breathless warnings about a “campus free speech crisis” from self-proclaimed free speech warriors. Their evidence? College students doing what college students have done for generations: protesting speakers they disagree with, challenging institutional policies, and yes, sometimes attempting to create heckler’s vetoes.
This kind of campus activism — while occasionally messy and uncomfortable — has been a feature of American higher education since the 1960s. It’s how young people learn to engage with ideas and exercise their own speech rights. Sometimes that activism is silly and sometimes it’s righteous. Often it’s somewhere in between, but it’s kind of a part of being a college student, and learning what you believe in.
But now we face an actual free speech crisis on campus that goes beyond just speech. It’s an attack on personal freedoms, due process, and liberty. The federal government isn’t just pressuring universities over speech — it’s literally disappearing students for their political expression. If you support actual free speech, now is the time to speak up.
The latest example of this authoritarian overreach is particularly chilling: Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts who was here legally on a student visa, was abducted by masked agents in broad daylight. She was disappeared without due process or explanation — only later did we learn she had been renditioned to a detention center in Louisiana.
The video of her kidnapping (because that’s what it was) is terrifying enough.
If you listen, you hear her quite understandably surprised reaction with a scream, and then she asks to call the police, only to be told “we’re the police.” None of them are in uniforms. Most of them are masked.
Her supposed crime? A year ago, she co-authored an op-ed in The Tufts Daily criticizing her university administration’s stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Not advocating violence. Not supporting terrorism. Not even criticizing the U.S. government. Just exercising core First Amendment rights by publishing criticism of her own university’s policies in a student newspaper.
The government has attempted to justify similar renditions (and there is a growing list of victims) by falsely painting targets as “terrorist supporters” — a dangerous conflation of political speech supporting Palestinian rights with support for terrorism. But even those cases typically involved people involved in public protests, which are themselves constitutionally protected activities. This case goes even further: disappearing someone over an innocuous piece of student journalism published a year ago.
Everyone should be alarmed. Everyone should be demanding that she (and others) be released and that ICE and DHS stop this horrifying and unconscionable practice. Everyone should be demanding that Trump and Marco Rubio and Kristi Noem stop this Gestapo bullshit.
Even if — especially if — you disagree with her views on Israel and Palestine. This isn’t about that. This is about the very concept of freedom. The rights everyone — even visitors — are supposed to have in this country. The right to speak your mind, even if (especially if!) it is opposed to those in power. The right to walk down a street without being kidnapped. The right to due process.
If the government genuinely believed Ozturk had violated immigration law or her visa terms (she hadn’t), there are established legal procedures to address such issues. Instead, they chose to send masked goons to disappear her without warning or due process — a chilling message to every other international student that their supposed right to express political opinions comes with the risk of rendition.
And, of course, the implied threat is that this won’t stop at international students.
I have taught university classes for decades. Finance and Economic policy are inherently political. We stick to established theory and mention policies in the past that did not work. The two big ones are Tariffs and Tax cuts for the very rich. We have data that shows they don’t work and years of published papers. I fear the Commerce and Labor Secretaries will kill the data, so we cannot teach the theory and the reality using current economic and financial data. Since I’m now technically retired and only teach as an adjunct, I worry a lot about the current faculty. The Republicans have been after tenure for years. Universities and research are a significant source of progress. The attacks on research and the inability to run graduate programs and graduate Doctoral students will mean a lack of qualified professors after we old folks retire, which will severely curtail our leadership in science and the exercise of free thought. That is their goal.
This is from Forbes Magazine. “Trump Orders Department Of Education Closure: What Happens Next.” The story is reported by Sarah Hernholm.
President Trump has issued an executive order to close the Department of Education, a move that will reshape federal education policy and affect America’s 49.5 million public school students. The order mandates redistributing the department’s functions across multiple federal agencies by the end of the year, marking a major change in how the federal government approaches education.
This decision, long championed by conservatives who believe education should remain primarily a state and local matter, has sparked disagreement about the federal government’s role in education policy, funding, and oversight.
The executive order outlines specific transitions for key education functions:
Civil rights enforcement will move to the Justice Department
Federal student loan programs will shift to the Treasury
Special education oversight will transition to Health and Human Services
These changes will affect the management of federal education funding streams totaling over $150 billion annually, including:
Educational stakeholders stress the importance of ensuring these resources continue without disruption during the transition period, particularly for disadvantaged students who rely heavily on federally funded programs.
This will hurt rural and poor urban schools that rely on the funding to offer help for disadvantaged students and students with disabilities. I’m also wondering what will happen to ESL (English as a second language) teachers, programs, school nurses, and psychologists. These things are incredibly expensive.
“The backpedaling is something to behold..” John Buss, @repeat1968. @johnbuss.bsky.social
Then there’s Pete Hegseth and his keystone cops LARPing military leadership. We got all the war moves and none of the conversation about what it means to target and bomb a civilian apartment. Hey! Hey DOJ! How many kids did they kill that day? They’re all suggesting it was successful, but really? What has all that incompetence brought us?
This is breaking news from CNN. “Officials say texts sent by Waltz, Ratcliffe in Signal chat may have damaged US’ ongoing ability to gather intel on Houthis.” Evidently, the intelligence they got from the Israelis was from an on-site agent. But of course, no heads are rolling in any of the meeting’s inept Cabinet. They’ve declared war on The Atlantic instead. This story is reported by Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen,
Current and former US officials have told CNN they believe two texts sent by national security adviser Mike Waltz and CIA Director John Ratcliffe in the now-infamous group chat involving senior US officials discussing battle plans to strike Houthi targets in Yemen, may have done long-term damage to the US’s ability to gather intelligence on the Iran-backed group going forward.
Although messages from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth detailing the sequencing, timing and weapons to be used in a March attack on the Houthis have drawn the most scrutiny because they could have endangered US servicemembers if revealed, the messages from Waltz and Ratcliffe, in the chat Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was added to, contained equally sensitive information, these sources said.
In one of the messages, Ratcliffe told other Cabinet members who were discussing whether to delay the strikes that the CIA was in the act of mobilizing assets to collect intelligence on the group, but that a delay might offer them the opportunity to “identify better starting points for coverage on Houthi leadership.”
That text, according to the current and former officials, exposed the mere fact that the US is gathering intelligence on them — bad in and of itself — but also hinted at how the agency is doing it. The language about “starting points,” these people said, suggests clearly that the CIA is using technical means like overhead surveillance to spy on their leadership. That could allow the Houthis to change their practices to better protect themselves.
Then, in a later message, Waltz offered an extremely specific after-action report of the strikes, telling the thread that the military had “positive ID” of a particular senior Houthi leader “walking into his girlfriend’s building” — offering the Houthis a clear opportunity to see who the US was surveilling and potentially figure out how, thus enabling them to avoid that surveillance in the future, the sources said.
The Houthis have “always been difficult to track,” said a former intelligence official. “Now you just highlight for them that they’re in the crosshairs.”
Trump administration officials, including both Waltz and Ratcliffe, have repeatedly insisted that no classified information was shared in the text. Ratcliffe, in his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, specifically referenced his text about “starting points.”
But current and former officials have disagreed vehemently with that assessment: The kinds of information in not just Hegseth’s texts, but Ratcliffe’s and Waltz’s, included very clear references to sources and methods. Even if it wasn’t an explicit or technical description, these people say, it is information that the US government would typically withhold because it might allow an adversary to make an educated interference about US sources and methods.
Ratcliffe’s use of the Signal app in this way is raising eyebrows inside Langley, current and former officials said.
“I think he is going to be viewed skeptically for using the app for that purpose,” one US official told CNN.
“(Ratcliffe) was basically talking as if he was in a SCIF,” said another former intelligence official, referring to a secure room hardened against electronic surveillance that is designed for discussions of classified material.
“He’s the director,” said the first former official, calling Ratcliffe’s text “irresponsible.” “He should know better.”
A CIA spokesperson told CNN, “Director Ratcliffe takes his responsibility to safeguard America’s ability to gather intelligence extremely seriously.”
“Nothing he conveyed in the chat posed any risk to any sources or methods,” the spokesperson said. “The only lasting damage is to the Houthi terrorists who have been eliminated.”
CNN has reached out to the National Security Council for comment.
The primary tool of Trump’s spokespeople is to lie and deny and protect FARTUS at all times.
Former Secretary of State penned this Op-Ed in the New York Times today. “Hillary Clinton: How Much Dumber Will This Get?” Remember, it will get worse; we just can’t forecast how because only the incompetent and cruel can come up with such batshit crazy pogroms. Throw in narcissism and sociopathy, and it’s a forecaster’s nightmare. Clinton’s name has been evoked recently because the same folks who were traumatized by her personal emails being released by their Russian buddies are taking this incredible breach of security cavalierly.
It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity. We’re all shocked — shocked! — that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws. But we knew that already. What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.
This is the latest in a string of self-inflicted wounds by the new administration that are squandering America’s strength and threatening our national security. Firing hundreds of federal workers charged with protecting our nation’s nuclear weapons is also dumb. So is shutting down efforts to fight pandemics just as a deadly Ebola outbreak is spreading in Africa. It makes no sense to purge talented generals, diplomats and spies at a time when rivals like China and Russia are trying to expand their global reach.
In a dangerous and complex world, it’s not enough to be strong. You must also be smart. As secretary of state during the Obama administration, I argued for smart power, integrating the hard power of our military with the soft power of our diplomacy, development assistance, economic might and cultural influence. None of those tools can do the job alone. Together, they make America a superpower. The Trump approach is dumb power. Instead of a strong America using all our strengths to lead the world and confront our adversaries, Mr. Trump’s America will be increasingly blind and blundering, feeble and friendless.
Let’s start with the military, because that’s what he claims to care about. Don’t let the swagger fool you. Mr. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (of group chat fame) are apparently more focused on performative fights over wokeness than preparing for real fights with America’s adversaries. Does anyone really think deleting tributes to the Tuskegee Airmen makes us more safe? The Trump Pentagon purged images of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb that ended World War II because its name is the Enola Gay. Dumb.
Instead of working with Congress to modernize the military’s budget to reflect changing threats, the president is firing top generals without credible justification. Five former secretaries of defense, Republicans and Democrats, rightly warned that this would “undermine our all-volunteer force and weaken our national security.” Mass layoffs are also hitting the intelligence agencies. As one former senior spy put it, “We’re shooting ourselves in the head, not the foot.” Not smart.
There’s more at the link, which has been gifted.
It’s hard to get through the day without the next chain of what the hell did they do now coming out to beat us senseless. They’re worried about the midterms because FARTUS sent Elise Stefanik back to Congress yesterday. The poor woman won’t get that deluxe apartment in the sky now. This is from Politico. “Stefanik’s withdrawal suggests Republicans are sweating their thin margins. Democrats insist Republicans are panicking.” Democrats shouldn’t be so complacent.
President Donald Trump’s decision to keep Rep. Elise Stefanik in Congress is the clearest sign yet that the political environment has become so challenging for Republicans that they don’t want to risk a special election even in safe, red seats.
A pair of April elections in deep-red swaths of Florida next week was supposed to improve the GOP’s cushion in the House and clear the path for Stefanik’s departure, until Trump said he didn’t “want to take a chance on anyone else running for Elise’s seat.”
The decision to pull Stefanik’s nomination came as Republicans grew increasingly anxious about the race to fill the seat of National Security Advisor Mike Waltz on April 1. Polling in the district, which Trump carried by 30 points, had tightened, and the president himself is hosting a tele-town hall there to try and bail out Republican Randy Fine.
An internal GOP poll from late March showed Democrat Josh Weil up 3 points over Fine, 44 to 41 percent, with 10 percent undecided, according to a person familiar with the poll and granted anonymity to discuss it. Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s pollster, conducted the survey. That result spooked Republicans and spurred them to redouble efforts to ensure a comfortable win in the district, according to two people familiar with internal conversations.
Some Republican strategists said it’s not worth taking the risk of losing Stefanik’s sprawling northern New York seat, which Trump won by 20 points in 2024.
“Can they defend her seat? Absolutely. But why do you do that right now?” asked Charlie Harper, who was a top aide to former Rep. Karen Handel on her successful 2017 bid in a special election in Georgia.
Harper is not the only Republican making that calculation.
“If we’re far underperforming in seats Trump won by 30 then there’s obvious concern about having to chance special elections in seats Trump won by a lot less,” said one top GOP operative granted anonymity to speak candidly. “The juice is not worth the squeeze sweating them out.”
Whew! Yesterday was quite a day! It began with New York Attorney General Tish James announcing a 250 million lawsuit against Trump, three of his children, the Trump Organization and two of its top employees; it ended with the 11th Circuit appeals court thoroughly rebuking Judge Loose Cannon and restoring the DOJ’s access to the classified documents needed for their criminal investigation of Trump and for the intelligence assessment of the damage caused by Trump’s thievery. Meanwhile Trump went on Fox News and incriminated himself in an insane interview with Sean Hannity. Here’s a sample from that hour-long clusterfuck:
In this single clip Trump tells Hannity about his process of telekinetic declassification (not a thing) then speculates the FBI might’ve been looking for Hillary’s emails in Mar-a-Lago (he didn’t really seem to be joking). Wild stuff. pic.twitter.com/ehX8QqTnmB
Since I’m not a lawyer, it’s difficult for me to write about all this legal stuff, but I’ll do my best to post stories that explain what all this means.
Me on how the Eleventh Circuit didn’t just reject Judge Cannon’s intervention in Trump’s case; it went out of its way to pour cold water on right-wing claims that the entire investigation and search are just bad faith harassment by DOJ:https://t.co/nSALmcdJ8Y
For most people, having the Attorney General of the nation’s fourth most populous state file a sweeping new lawsuit accusing you and your family of “staggering” fraud would be a terribly ominous development.
For former President Donald Trump, it wasn’t even the worst legal news he received on Wednesday. That came later in the evening, when a unanimous three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit lifted a district court ruling that had partially blocked the Justice Department’s ongoing criminal investigation into whether Trump unlawfully retained at Mar-a-Lago (and refused to return) a large tranche of government documents.
The immediate effect of the panel ruling is to clear the way for the Justice Department to continue its work. But the broader significance of Wednesday night’s ruling — significance that, at least for now, clearly transcends the possibility of what might come of the civil suit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James — is the fact that a panel that included two Trump appointees poured very cold water on the only arguments he had left to defend against the Mar-a-Lago search.
The issue before the Eleventh Circuit was whether to freeze part of the injunction that US District Court Judge Aileen Cannon had entered on September 5 — an injunction that purported to block the Justice Department from using most of the materials it recovered from its August 8 search of Mar-a-Lago until and unless they could be reviewed by a court-appointed special master. (The special master, Judge Raymond Dearie, expressed a fair amount of skepticism toward Trump’s claims at his first hearing on Tuesday).
What the three-judge panel–including two judges appointed by Trump–said:
Across 29 pages, the three-judge Eleventh Circuit panel made quick work of Cannon’s ruling — holding that the Justice Department was almost certain to succeed in having that ruling thrown out, and so should have the ruling frozen, at least as it applied to classified materials, while the appeals process runs its course.
Among other things, the panel, which included Judges Robin Rosenbaum (appointed by President Barack Obama) and Judges Britt Grant and Andrew Brasher (appointed by Trump), highlighted the absence of any evidence that Trump had declassified any of the classified information discovered at Mar-a-Lago, and also the extent to which that entire issue is a “red herring” for the broader debate over whether those documents belong to Trump or the government….
But it was in a more subtle section of the opinion that the panel handed Trump his most significant defeat. Across two pages and a footnote that non-legal-readers could be forgiven for skipping past, the three judges rejected, in unequivocal terms, claims made by Trump and his supporters (including the State of Texas, which had filed a highly unusual friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of 10 other red states) that the investigation into the former President and search of Mar-a-Lago were all just bad faith harassment from the Biden administration….
In other words, the three-judge panel on one of the more conservative federal appeals courts in the country looked at the Mar-a-Lago search and the broader criminal and national security investigation into the former President of the United States and could not “see any evidence in the record” to support the claim that the Biden administration was using its law enforcement authorities to harass Trump — as opposed to conducting a genuine, above-the-board investigation into serious potential violations of federal criminal statutes.
You might also check out this straight news piece by Charlie Savage, et al. at The New York Times:
BREAKING: Appeals court (2 Trump appointees and 1 Obama appointee) grants DOJ request to block part of Cannon's order, restores investigators access to docs marked as classified and excludes them from special master review. w/ @alanfeuer@GlennThrushhttps://t.co/bhRfdejx4E
In a strongly worded 29-page decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit set aside key parts of an order by a Florida federal judge that has kept the department from using about 100 files with classification markings in its inquiry into whether Mr. Trump illegally retained national defense documents and obstructed repeated efforts to recover them.
The appeals court also agreed with the Justice Department that Mr. Trump’s lawyers — and an independent arbiter recently appointed to review the seized materials — need not look at the classified documents that the F.B.I. carted away from Mr. Trump’s estate, Mar-a-Lago, on Aug. 8.
The Justice Department “argues that the district court likely erred in exercising its jurisdiction to enjoin the United States’ use of the classified records in its criminal investigation and to require the United States to submit the marked classified documents to a special master for review,” a three-judge panel of the appeals court wrote. “We agree.”
The decision by the Atlanta-based court was a repudiation of the decision by Judge Aileen M. Cannon, whom Mr. Trump appointed to the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Florida, to broadly intervene in the Justice Department’s investigation. The appellate ruling will permit the arbiter, known as a special master, to review most of the more than 11,000 files seized from Mar-a-Lago, but allow prosecutors unfettered access to the smaller batch of classified records.
Charlie Savage also reposted on Twitter an earlier article on how the declassification process works.
In the last month, the array of investigations involving Donald J. Trump and many of Trump’s associates and family members has reached an intense pitch. Today another bombshell detonated—one that may prove to be the most devastating.
New York Attorney General Letitia James has announced the filing of a monumental civil enforcement action against Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, the Trump Organization and many other Trump affiliates.
The sanctions sought by the New York Office of the Attorney General (the “OAG”) are sweeping and potentially devastating: disgorgement of $250 million in profits; the cancellation of business certificates for Trump’s corporate entities; appointment of an independent monitor at the Trump Organization; a 5-year ban on Trump and the Trump Organization entering into any New York commercial real estate transactions or from applying for any loans from any New York entity; permanently banning Trump and his adult children from serving as an officer or director of a New York corporation. In addition to the potential civil penalties associated with today’s complaint, AG James also announced criminal referrals to the Southern District of New York and to the IRS. Penalties resulting from those referrals could result in substantial fines, and potentially even imprisonment.
With today’s filing of this enforcement action, it is important to consider the factual and legal bases for the claims, and how it could serve as a tipping point in cases against Trump, especially in light of the many other existing federal and state investigations.
Read the rest at Just Security. Here’s John Buss’s commentary:
What about the January 6 Committee? What are they up to? Yes, more bad news for Trump–and Mark Meadows too.
First on CNN: The House January 6 committee reaches an agreement to interview Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas https://t.co/z9h6Bnk7Xn
The House select committee investigating January 6, 2021, has come to an agreement with Ginni Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to be interviewed by the panel in the coming weeks, according to a source close to the committee.
Ginni Thomas’ attorney, Mark Paoletta, confirmed the voluntary interview in a statement, saying, “As she has said from the outset, Mrs. Thomas is eager to answer the Committee’s questions to clear up any misconceptions about her work relating to the 2020 election. She looks forward to that opportunity.”
But in the months since those messages emerged, there has been little indication that compelling her to testify was a top priority for the panel despite subsequent evidence that Thomas also encouraged state lawmakers in Arizona and Wisconsin to overturn Joe Biden’s legitimate electoral win.
Thomas attended the rally that preceded the attack on the US Capitol, as she said in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon, where she stressed that her and her husband’s professional lives are kept separate. She also said that she had left the gathering before the protesters turned violent.
She has also been publicly critical of the House January 6 investigation, calling on House GOP leaders to boot from their conference the two Republicans serving on the select committee.
It’s not yet clear what changed for Thomas and her attorney to now agree to this interview. The 64 thousand dollar question is how will this affect her husband Clarence? Will John Roberts finally decide to deal with him? Probably not, but you never can tell.
In my Tuesday post, I wrote about the right wing media attacks on Hillary Clinton after Bill Barr’s handpicked special counsel (aka attack dog) John Durham made public a court filing that implied that the Clinton campaign had somehow spied on Donald Trump in 2016. I posted a NYT piece by Charlie Savage that explained why the charges were nonsensical.
John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel scrutinizing the investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference, distanced himself on Thursday from false reports by right-wing news outlets that a motion he recently filed said Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid to spy on Trump White House servers.
Citing a barrage of such reports on Fox News and elsewhere based on the prosecutor’s Feb. 11 filing, defense lawyers for a Democratic-linked cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann, have accused the special counsel of including unnecessary and misleading information in filings “plainly intended to politicize this case, inflame media coverage and taint the jury pool.”
In a filing on Thursday, Mr. Durham defended himself, saying those accusations about his intentions were “simply not true.” He said he had “valid and straightforward reasons” for including the information in the Feb. 11 filing that set off the firestorm, while disavowing responsibility for how certain news outlets had interpreted and portrayed it.
“If third parties or members of the media have overstated, understated or otherwise misinterpreted facts contained in the government’s motion, that does not in any way undermine the valid reasons for the government’s inclusion of this information,” he wrote.
But even as he did not acknowledge any problem with how he couched his filing last week, Mr. Durham said he would make future filings under seal if they contained “information that legitimately gives rise to privacy issues or other concerns that might overcome the presumption of public access to judicial documents.”
Former President Donald J. Trump has seized on the inaccurate reporting to declare that there is now “indisputable evidence” of a Clinton campaign conspiracy against him — and to suggest that there ought to be executions. Mr. Trump, Fox News hosts and others have also criticized mainstream journalists for not covering the purported revelation.
Yesterday, Clinton herself spoke out in an aside in a speech at the New York Democratic Convention.
Clinton:So now his accountants have fired him and investigations draw closer to him and right on cue, the noise machine gets turned up. Fox leads the charge with accusations against me counting on their audience to fall for it again. They’re getting awfully close to actual malice pic.twitter.com/OgSYzI6CKz
Hillary Clinton went on offense against a fusillade of attacks from Donald Trump and his defenders among rightward talk hosts and media outlets, as she took aim specifically at Fox News.
“Fox leads the charge in their accusations against me, counting on their audience to fall for it again,” Clinton said in a speech before New York state Democrats. “And as an aside, they are getting awfully close to actual malice in their attacks.”
Last week, John Durham, the special counsel who has been investigating the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, raised some new allegations in a court filing. Conservative talk hosts seized on it as a bombshell that showed that Clinton’s campaign spied on Trump. The New York Post had a cover on Tuesday with the headline “Hillary the Spy,” and a Fox News chyron read “Hillary Is The Real Insurrection” during Jesse Watters’ show.
In the Kennel, by Edvard Munch
In fact, according to multiple fact checking stories from outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, Durham’s allegations, which involve an internet security expert working for the U.S. government and a law firm that did work for Clinton’s campaign, were old news, not as significant as they seem, or potentially misleading. Yet media on the right ran with it, characterizing it as a Watergate-level scandal, or even greater.
A FoxNews.com story claimed that Durham alleged that lawyers from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016 had paid to “infiltrate” servers belonging to Trump Tower and later the White House, in order to establish an ‘inference’ and ‘narrative’ to bring to federal government agencies linking Donald Trump to Russia. The word “infiltrate,” however, comes not from Durham’s filing but from commentary from an ally to Trump, Kash Patel.
MOSCOW — At this moment of crescendo for the Ukraine crisis, it all comes down to what kind of leader President Vladimir V. Putin is.
In Moscow, many analysts remain convinced that the Russian president is essentially rational, and that the risks of invading Ukraine would be so great that his huge troop buildup makes sense only as a very convincing bluff. But some also leave the door open to the idea that he has fundamentally changed amid the pandemic, a shift that may have left him more paranoid, more aggrieved and more reckless.
The 20-foot-long table that Mr. Putin has used to socially distance himself this month from European leaders flying in for crisis talks symbolizes, to some longtime observers, his detachment from the rest of the world. For almost two years, Mr. Putin has ensconced himself in a virus-free cocoon unlike that of any Western leader, with state television showing him holding most key meetings by teleconference alone in a room and keeping even his own ministers at a distance on the rare occasions that he summons them in person.
Speculation over a leader’s mental state is always fraught, but as Mr. Putin’s momentous decision approaches, Moscow commentators puzzling over what he might do next in Ukraine are finding some degree of armchair psychology hard to avoid.
“There’s this impression of irritation, of a lack of interest, of an unwillingness to delve into anything new,” Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist and former member of Mr. Putin’s human rights council, said of the president’s recent public appearances. “The public is being shown that he has been in practical isolation, with ever fewer breaks, since the spring of 2020.”
Could Putin be nearly as crazy as Trump?
A large-scale invasion of Ukraine, many analysts point out, would be an enormous escalation compared with any of the actions that Mr. Putin has taken before. In 2014, the Kremlin’s subterfuge allowed Russian forces stripped of identifying markings to capture Crimea without firing a single shot. The proxy war that Mr. Putin fomented in Ukraine’s east allowed him to deny being a party to the conflict.
“Starting a full-scale war is completely not in Putin’s interest,” said Anastasia Likhacheva, the dean of world economy and international affairs at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. “It is very difficult for me to find any rational explanation for a desire to carry out such a campaign.”
Even if Mr. Putin were able to take control of Ukraine, she noted, such a war would accomplish the opposite of what the president says he wants: rolling back the NATO presence in Eastern Europe. In the case of a war, the NATO allies would be “more unified than ever,” Ms. Likhacheva said, and they would be likely to deploy powerful new weaponry along Russia’s western frontiers.
The Ukrainian government and Russian state-controlled media on Friday exchanged fresh accusations of cease-fire violations near the country’s eastern border.
Andre Utter and his dog, by Suzanne Valadon, 1932
In a statement on Facebook, the Ukrainian Joint Forces Operation said 45 cease-fire violations had been recorded in eastern Ukraine on Friday as of 2 p.m. local time. The JFO alleged that 34 of those violations included the use of weapons prohibited by the Minsk agreements, which Russia, Ukraine and pro-Moscow separatists signed in 2014 and 2015 to prevent a war in eastern Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Russian state-controlled media agency RIA claimed on Friday that Ukrainian government forces had launched three shelling strikes against Russian-backed separatists.
CNBC was unable to verify either report.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on Thursday said its mission in Ukraine had reported almost 600 cease-fire violations in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, substantially higher than the 153 violations reported during the previous period.
Kyiv — Ukrainian forces and the pro-Russian separatists they’re fighting in the country’s east reported a second day of increased shelling on Friday, as the leaders of the rebels’ self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics accused the Ukrainian government of planning an imminent attack. The rebel administrations in the two breakaway regions announced plans to evacuate thousands of civilians into neighboring Russia.
Western leaders say an escalation in the fighting in Ukraine‘s Donbas region — which has simmered for almost eight years — could be part of Russian efforts to create a “false-flag” pretext to invade.
“Ukraine is not your enemy, but those who want to defend you against Ukraine are. Do not heed rumours about some offensive operation,” Ukraine’s defense minister said in a speech Friday. “We have no intentions to conduct any force actions towards the ORDLO (Donbas) or the Crimea. At all. We will move by the political and diplomatic way. Because there are our citizens and we will not put them in danger.”
The Ukrainian government’s reassurance didn’t appear to be calming nerves in the rebel-held region, however, with social media photos purporting to show people lining up to take money out of banks.
MOSCOW/KYIV, Feb 18 (Reuters) – Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine said on Friday they planned to evacuate their breakaway region’s residents to Russia, a shock turn in a conflict the West believes Moscow plans to use to justify an all-out invasion of its neighbour.
Announcing the move on social media, Denis Pushilin, head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, said Russia had agreed to provide accommodation for those who leave. Women, children and the elderly should be evacuated first. The other self-proclaimed region, Luhansk, made a similar announcement.
Millions of civilians are believed to live in the two rebel-held regions of eastern Ukraine; most are Russian speakers and many have already been granted Russian citizenship.
The eastern Ukraine conflict zone saw the most intense artillery bombardment for years on Friday, with the Kyiv government and the separatists trading blame. Western countries have said they think the shelling, which began on Thursday and intensified in its second day, is part of a pretext to invade.
Washington said Russia – which says it started drawing down troops near Ukraine this week – had instead done the opposite: ramping up the force menacing its neighbour to between 169,000 and 190,000 troops, from 100,000 at the end of January.
“This is the most significant military mobilisation in Europe since the Second World War,” U.S. ambassador Michael Carpenter told a meeting at the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
The United States has obtained intelligence that Russia may target prominent political opponents, anti-corruption activists, and Belarusian and Russian dissidents living in exile should it move forward with plans to invade Ukraine, as U.S. President Joe Biden warned on Thursday that the threat of a renewed Russian invasion of the country remains “very high” and could take place within the next several days.
Four people familiar with U.S. intelligence said that Russia has drafted lists of Ukrainian political figures and other prominent individuals to be targeted for either arrest or assassination in the event of a Russian assault on Ukraine.
Cape Cod Evening, Edward Hopper
A fifth person, a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the United States has been downgrading its intelligence classification regarding threats to specific groups within Ukraine to share this information with Ukrainian government officials and other partners in the region positioned to help….
“As we’ve seen in the past, we expect Russia will try to force cooperation through intimidation and repression,” said a U.S. official who spoke on background on condition of anonymity.
“These acts, which in past Russian operations have included targeted killings, kidnappings/forced disappearances, detentions, and the use of torture, would likely target those who oppose Russian actions, including Russian and Belarusian dissidents in exile in Ukraine, journalists and anti-corruption activists, and vulnerable populations such as religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQI+ persons,” the official said.
The Biden administration has also been startled by how formalized the lists are, which appear to target anyone who could challenge the Russian agenda. Five Eyes intelligence partners have also tracked Russian intelligence agencies, such as the FSB and GRU, building up target and kill lists. One congressional aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the moves were typical of Russian doctrine, using armed forces to seize military objectives, while special operators shape the conflict and intelligence operators come into the country to get rid of opposition elements.
I expect there will be more developments in the Ukraine story today and over the weekend.
What are your thoughts? What other stories are you following?
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But Clinton received a rapturous response Saturday when she and her daughter Chelsea spoke at a sold-out event at St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans about “The Book of Gutsy Women — Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience.”
The 450-page book by both mother and daughter profiles more than 100 women, in politics (Shirley Chisholm and Ann Richards), athletics (Abby Wambach and Venus and Serena Williams), medicine (Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton) and other fields, including Ruby Bridges, who integrated an all-white elementary school in New Orleans in 1960.
The 900 people who filled the Uptown church heard stories about famous and little-known women for $45, which included a copy of the book from Octavia Books, which sponsored the event.
“I’ve been a fan of hers for my entire life,” said Jennifer Greene, a New Orleans attorney originally from Little Rock. “I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.”
Neither Clinton mentioned President Donald Trump by name.
The closest came when Chelsea answered a question about the rise of bullying in the United States.
“The bullies are often quoting the president, particularly when girls are being bullied,” Chelsea said. “It’s just so painful to me that his demeaning treatment of women broadly but specifically with my mom and Speaker (Nancy) Pelosi and others is clearly being watched by kids across the country and often has given further motivation to the meanness already there.”
It really was just a conversation about how Chelsea and Hillary had picked the women for the book. Chelsea told us that that it had been significantly downsized given the original number of essays they had written. Some of the women were historical and some still lived or had lived recently so there some quite personal stories too. It was nice to be around nice people talking primarily about nice things. I long for the days when we could discuss things more politely and civilly.
When I was a little girl, my family subscribed to Life magazine, which came to our house every week on Friday. When I came home from school, I’d eagerly grab it and lie down on the floor in our living room to read it before I had to set the table for dinner. It was in those pages that I first encountered Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who was the first example I ever remember seeing of a woman elected official. Following her career—from the campaigns that led to her becoming the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress to her history-making candidacy for president of the United States in 1964—shaped my understanding of politics and public service. She embodied the thrill of breaking barriers—and the challenges that come with being “the first.”
Born and raised in Maine, Margaret discovered a passion for politics when her husband, Clyde Harold Smith, was elected to Congress. She campaigned for him and, after he was elected, joined him in Washington. During his first term, he became gravely ill, and Margaret stepped in to fill as many of his obligations as she could. She traveled back and forth between Washington and Maine, appearing at events on behalf of her husband. With Margaret’s help, Clyde was reelected in 1938. His health, however, declined quickly. In the spring of 1940, he put out a statement urging his friends and supporters to stand behind Margaret if he could not run in the upcoming election. “I know of no one who has the full knowledge of my ideas and plans or is as well qualified as she is, to carry on these ideas and my unfinished work for my district.” He died the next day.
Margaret easily won the special election to serve out her husband’s unexpired term. At the time, most of the few women who served in office had been elected or appointed to fill a seat vacated by a husband or father. It was so common it even had a name: “the widow’s mandate.” Though she had never planned on it, Margaret was now the state’s first woman member of Congress. (“Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington,” read one headline.)
Oh, and the Clintons stopped by Melba’s which is probably the most unique restaurant/literacy center/laundromat you’d ever want to see! And, did I mention the food? MMMMMMmmm …
This morning in New Orleans: @HillaryClinton, @BillClinton and @ChelseaClinton stopped by a local Clinton Foundation partner to see our laundry and literacy work in action.
On Saturday morning the Creole gumbo was simmering, the daiquiri machines were churning and the dryers were spinning at Melba’s and Wash World, the connected po-boy shop and laundry at Elysian Fields Avenue in New Orleans.
Then the sleek black SUVs pulled up and out stepped former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, former president Bill Clinton and their daughter Chelsea Clinton.
The political power family was not here to talk politics.
Instead, they were visiting the unique literacy program and family learning initiative that has taken root at Melba’s and Wash World with the support of their foundation. It’s a program they plan to bring nationwide in the months ahead.
Melba’s and Wash World together present a kaleidoscope of local art and New Orleans emblems around the business of doing some laundry and grabbing a quick bite.
Earlier this year, it also debuted its latest feature, the Family Read & Play Space. A colorful niche by the washers and dryers has kid-sized furniture, toys, coloring materials and a collection of books for a wide range of young readers. The aim is to turn the time families spend together on a laundry errand into an investment in a child’s future, strengthening early literacy and engaging their curiosity.
“We’re thrilled with what they’ve done here,” said Hillary Rodham Clinton.
But back to to the book event! They took two questions from the audience. Both were from little girls. One of the little girls just wrote you are my president. The other asked about bullying. Chelsea had some great stories and advice. She’s really a most articulate and impressive young woman.
The event’s most personal moment happened when a 9-year-old child in the audience asked the Clintons how they stand up to mean comments. Chelsea said she has gotten used to getting hate all her life because of who her parents were. People told her when she was 8 years old that they wished she had been aborted. When Bill Clinton was in the White House, everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Saturday Night Live made fun of teenage Chelsea’s appearance.
As painful as that experience was, she’s grateful because it’s left her better able to handle the abuse that many famous women have to deal with in the social media age. Today, she said, the most hateful comments come anti-abortion commenters, because of her pro-choice stance, and anti-vaccination activists, because she’s a professor of public health.
“I’m really thankful that that happened at a young age, because I think that has served me well, particularly in this moment we’re living through when there’s lots, sadly, of ugliness,” Chelsea Clinton said.
Hillary Clinton praised her daughter for always responding with politeness and “cheerful shade.” She said there will always be hate in society; what’s important is that “leaders in a democracy like ours are supposed to be trying to bring people together. They’re certainly not supposed to be fomenting bullying and hatred.”
She quoted what her husband Bill Clinton said in his recent eulogy for U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings: “Freedom cannot last if half of us are supposed to hate the other half about everything.”
Secretary Clinton never explicitly mentioned Donald Trump, the man she lost the 2016 election to, but he lingered as the elephant in the room.
At one point the moderator, Susan Larson, asked her to talk about “the role of anger as a motivating force for women.” Clinton gave a sighing, drawn-out, “OK …” and the entire room burst into laughter and applause.
“I think what’s important here is that the anger that you’re talking about is anger at injustice,” Clinton continued. “It’s anger at inequality… It’s that kind of anger that can motivate the movement into courage and into taking action.”
So, for me, today is a day where I just may continue to leave the TV off. Between watching the service for Elijah Cummings and listening to our last president’s words and then spending Saturday awash with tales of Gutsy Women by Gutsy Women I really want to stay in the bubble today and maybe for awhile longer.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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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.
There’s more at the link. My question is, what the hell can the rest of us who don’t support him do? I voted Saturday morning, wondering which candidate I had voted for would even have a chance under the new gerrymandering. That doesn’t even consider that we couldn’t even vote for our Congressional representatives, given the Supreme Court decision and the quick fix redraw of our map to ensure maybe one black person will retain their seat. The only good news to come out of the election was that all five constitutional amendments proposed by Governor Klandry were voted down.
My friend Robert Mann, a former Journalism Professor at LSU, has something poignant to say about the loss. This is from his SubStack. “Enjoy your tarnished legacy, Bill Cassidy. You earned it.” It’s a good lesson: while all politics is local, it can be influenced by a cult of personality.
Speaking of Mafia-like behavior, here’s a little something on the Don’s Greenland Grab. This is from the New York Times. “In Closed-Door Talks, U.S. Demands a Major Role in Greenland. Greenlandic officials worry about the direction of the negotiations aimed at defusing President Trump’s threats to seize their island. But they have little leverage.” The story has a number of contributing reporters.
There’s a lot more at that gifted link. Jeer Heeter has this description of our Grifter-in-Chief in his article in The Nation. “Trump Gloats About “Making a Fortune” While Americans Suffer. As his war in Iran wreaks havoc, Trump is fixated on personal glory and enrichment.”
While the #FARTUS purge of immigrants looks like an SS round-up. I fear escalation to Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen (killing squads). It is difficult to predict if they will actually go that far. We’ve already had children in cages and family separation. We also have midnight raids that have spirited away graduate students who have taken part in demonstrations or written op-eds against the bombing of Palestinian civilians in GAZA. This is from Mike Masnik from TechDirt. “Trump’s Secret Police Are Now Disappearing Students For Their Op-Eds.”
I have taught university classes for decades. Finance and Economic policy are inherently political. We stick to established theory and mention policies in the past that did not work. The two big ones are Tariffs and Tax cuts for the very rich. We have data that shows they don’t work and years of published papers. I fear the Commerce and Labor Secretaries will kill the data, so we cannot teach the theory and the reality using current economic and financial data. Since I’m now technically retired and only teach as an adjunct, I worry a lot about the current faculty. The Republicans have been after tenure for years. Universities and research are a significant source of progress. The attacks on research and the inability to run graduate programs and graduate Doctoral students will mean a lack of qualified professors after we old folks retire, which will severely curtail our leadership in science and the exercise of free thought. That is their goal.
This is from Forbes Magazine. “Trump Orders Department Of Education Closure: What Happens Next.” The story is reported by Sarah Hernholm.
The executive order outlines specific transitions for key education functions:
Former Secretary of State penned this Op-Ed in the New York Times today. “Hillary Clinton: How Much Dumber Will This Get?” Remember, it will get worse; we just can’t forecast how because only the incompetent and cruel can come up with such batshit crazy pogroms. Throw in narcissism and sociopathy, and it’s a forecaster’s nightmare. Clinton’s name has been evoked recently because the same folks who were traumatized by her personal emails being released by their Russian buddies are taking this incredible breach of security cavalierly.
It’s hard to get through the day without the next chain of what the hell did they do now coming out to beat us senseless. They’re worried about the midterms because FARTUS sent Elise Stefanik back to Congress yesterday. The poor woman won’t get that deluxe apartment in the sky now. This is from Politico. “Stefanik’s withdrawal suggests Republicans are sweating their thin margins. Democrats insist Republicans are panicking.” Democrats shouldn’t be so complacent.
The 20-foot-long table that Mr. Putin has used to socially distance himself this month from European leaders flying in for crisis talks symbolizes, to some longtime observers, his detachment from the rest of the world. For almost two years, Mr. Putin has ensconced himself in a virus-free cocoon unlike that of any Western leader, with state television showing him holding most key meetings by teleconference alone in a room and keeping even his own ministers at a distance on the rare occasions that he summons them in person.
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
It really was just a conversation about how Chelsea and Hillary had picked the women for the book. Chelsea told us that that it had been significantly downsized given the original number of essays they had written. Some of the women were historical and some still lived or had lived recently so there some quite personal stories too. It was nice to be around nice people talking primarily about nice things. I long for the days when we could discuss things more politely and civilly.
But back to to the book event! They took two questions from the audience. Both were from little girls. One of the little girls just wrote you are my president. The other asked about bullying. Chelsea had some great stories and advice. She’s really a most articulate and impressive young woman.
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